The isomorphism of educational providers in the New Zealand tertiary market

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to explain how aspects of institutional theory can be used to explain how tertiary educational providers must necessarily adopt the same features while competing in the market for students. Using new institutional sociology (NIS), the authors seek to explain this phenomena and how such diverse private providers have borrowed from the polytechnics and universities to share the same institutional features.Design/methodology/approachThis paper employs NIS to explain how tertiary educational providers must necessarily adopt the same features while competing in the market for students. In the last few decades, the Auckland tertiary market for overseas students has enjoyed strong growth before Covid-19.FindingsDecoupling provides a link between NIS and legitimacy theory in that it explains how symbolic strategies are aimed at some kind of legitimization rather than directed at technical efficiencies. It is argued that the public tertiary providers are more prone to decoupling than PTEPs because they are less attentive to costs due to their more monopolistic position in the market.Originality/valueOriginally, the market was dominated by the local universities and polytechnics with few private providers. Currently, private providers cater for a large share of the certificate and diploma market and have a growing stake in the degree market. As these changes came about so, more diverse private providers entered the market. This paper explains how these diverse entrants came to share the same organizational features.

Rural community stress: a review of the literature

Rural communities experience substantial levels of stress. Although these communities show remarkable resilience, rural stress is an important, understudied area for research, especially during COVID-19, which will have lasting effects on communities under stress. The purpose of this paper is to review the literature on rural community stress to identify areas for future research. We reviewed the literature using the PsychInfo, Social Services s, and PubMed databases and included US articles that were published since 2008 and identified rural stress at a community level. We included 50 sources. The stress experienced by diverse rural communities can be understood by examining the interactions among the economic, built/natural, and sociocultural environments of each community. Leveraging rural community-level strengths like social cohesion (e.g., support networks, community centers, places of worship) and the natural environment (e.g., parks, trails, outdoor physical activity) can prevent and reduce community stress by building resilience. Research on community protective factors is key to alleviating stress and building capacity for resilience;however, it is largely absent from the rural literature. Efforts should be made to understand which strengths and capacities are most conducive to alleviating stress in individual rural communities. Community-level stress will be a lasting concern for rural communities, particularly since the emergence of COVID-19. Rural communities can prevent community-level stressors and mitigate harmful effects by bolstering resilience and using trauma-informed approaches where needed. Policy and structural changes are needed to rectify longstanding inequities that perpetuate rural community stress.

New wine tourism strategies during the Covid19 crisis - a comparison in five different countries

To compensate for loss of business during the COVID-19 crisis, wineries in the tourism industry had to apply new strategies. In order to collect and compare these newly developed sustainable strategies, a cross-cultural study has been conducted in 2021. This study is based on a qualitative survey with key decision-makers of 70 wineries from the U.S., Australia, Germany, Hungary and Romania. The aim was to identify new and sustainable initiatives and resilience strategies implemented to deal with the disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, noting cultural differences in each country's response, and to analyse the perspectives of wine tourism in the future. The findings highlight the wineries' focus on creativity and flexibility while also bringing attention to cultural differences. We can conclude that the most important initiatives were in the areas of CRM database management, promoting direct-to-consumer sales and digitalisation, holding virtual events and tastings, and offering new product delivery methods, albeit to a very different degree. The findings provide initial suggestions for best practice strategies that wine tourism companies can incorporate into their future business planning.

Business Opportunities and Challenges Amid Covid-19- Indian Perspective

The discovery and the spread of COVID-19 have forced countries to implement measures such as lockdown, resulting in economic slumps. These epidemic outbreaks always challenged humans, but we didn't fail to find opportunities in the midst of them and COVID-19 is also not an exception. Based on the SDGs Goal 9 (Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure), this study attempts to analyze the current external environment such as the political, economic, socio-cultural, and technological environment in the Indian perspective. The business opportunities and challenges arising from these environmental factors are discussed. Earlier pandemic and war outbreaks and the positive outcomes of these outbreaks are also discussed in this paper. © The Electrochemical Society