The following paper, "An analysis of the ethical frameworks and financial outcomes of corporate social responsibility and business press reporting of US pharmaceutical companies" (International Journal of Business Governance and Ethics 15(3) 2021), is freely available for download as an open access article.
It can be downloaded via the full-text link available here.
What has been the role of the COVID-19 pandemic in the digitalisation of the hospitality industry? Domenico Morrone, Nicola Raimo, Annunziata Tarulli, and Filippo Vitolla of the Department of Management, Finance and Technology at LUM University, in Casamassima, Bari, Italy, hope to answer that question in the International Journal Digital Culture and Electronic Tourism.
The pandemic has pushed many normal activities into the online realm in unprecedented ways leading to the notion of e-tourism or smart tourism. However, the way in which hotels have been affected by the pandemic has not been investigated in detail in terms of the drivers for digitalisation until now. The team hopes to fill this gap through a case study investigation of hotel structures. Digitalisation in other realms might involve the use of information and communications technology (ICT) not only in communication and marketing areas but also in production, sales, customer relations, and beyond.
The researchers have found that the motivation is mainly concerned with a desire to improve the quality of the hotel structures, to adapt to competitors, and increase financial performance. Digitalisation has had a series of positive effects related to boosting revenues and reducing costs as well as improving corporate image. COVID-19 has significantly accelerated the digitalisation processes, the team writes.
The team suggests that digitalisation is perhaps the only way forward for hotels during the pandemic and perhaps beyond. “Through digitalisation, in fact, it is possible to guarantee and certify the sanitation of the structures, maintain social distancing, guest traceability and other measures, making people free to enjoy hotel holidays,” they write. This implementation will allow tourists to be relatively safe in hotels, allow hoteliers to resume many of their normal activities. Digitalisation will also give the hotel industry a way to face possible future crises with more security.
Morrone, D., Raimo, N., Tarulli, A. and Vitolla, F. (2021) ‘Digitalisation in the hospitality industry: motivations, effects and role of Covid-19’, Int. J. Digital Culture and Electronic Tourism, Vol. 3, Nos. 3/4, pp.257–270.
International Journal of Digital Culture and Electronic Tourism 3(3/4) 2021
A lot of entirely unwarranted anti-Asian sentiment in the USA and elsewhere has emerged on social media since the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic, which had its original source in Wuhan, China, but is a global problem we all must face. Researchers from China and the USA have investigated how this xenophobia can be classified on one particularly prominent social media platform, Twitter, with a view to understanding how it might best be addressed.
Writing in the International Journal of Society Systems Science, Peng Zhao and Xin Wang of the Big Data and AI Lab, IntelligentRabbit LLC, New Jersey and Xi Chen of the School of Humanity and Law, Beijing University of Civil Engineering and Architecture, suggest that deep learning can be used to investigate public sentiment regarding political opinion and geographical diversity.
The team has developed a new method to classify those Twitter users posting updates with pandemic-related anti-Asian sentiment. They used a novel dataset for tracking users based on 10 million tweets. It was possible to home utilise known sentiment surrounding the US elections and geolocations. “The empirical result indicates that the political sentiments and the county-level election results make significant contributions to the model building,” the team writes. They trained a deep neural network (DNN) model with data from more than 190,000 Twitter users and were able to classify their Twitter activity as “hate” or “non-hate” with 61% accuracy, the team reports.
Such a classification should be sufficient to guide other classification systems and manual intervention to determine those users expressing xenophobic sentiment. This could then be used to decide whether any given user should be liable for further investigation, suspension, or education. The team points out that anti-Asian sentiment is not confined to the Twitter platform nor is it confined to the USA, it is seen on all platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and others with comments and posts from around the world. As such, the team adds that extracting features from the other platforms – images, voices, and videos will also be helpful in providing a multidimensional understanding of anti-Asian xenophobia and hate online in the COVID-19 context at the global level.
Zhao, P., Chen, X. and Wang, X. (2021) ‘Classifying COVID-19-related hate Twitter users using deep neural networks with sentiment-based features and geopolitical factors’, Int. J. Society Systems Science, Vol. 13, No. 2, pp.125–139.
International Journal of Vehicle Autonomous Systems 15(3/4) 2020
International Journal of Automation and Control 15(4/5) 2021
International Journal of Public Sector Performance Management 7(4) 2021
International Journal of Business Performance Management 22(2/3) 2021
Research published in the International Journal of Product Lifecycle Management has looked at the concept of obsolescence. A. Sánchez-Carralero and C. Armenta-Déu of the Universidad Complutense de Madrid in Spain explain how they have developed a model to simulate the obsolescence process that leads to the need to replace durable goods.
The team shows how the benefits of replacement eventually outweigh the various costs of maintaining the original item nudging the user towards replacing the aging item. The model takes into account servicing as well as an irreparable failure that is the end-point of obsolescence in one sense.
“Prediction of obsolescence is difficult since many factors intervene in the process,” the researchers explain, “some depend not on technology or market aspects but on user perception.” They add that it is possible to model the obsolescence process and predict when an item may become unusable and so need replacing using sophisticated statistical models such as Bayesian analysis. Such analyses might even be used to optimise the manufacturing process itself. Of course, in a modern, capitalist society, consumerism is key to growth and so obsolescence is necessary if a company is hoping to have repeat sales from users once they and their competitors have saturated the market.
As such, the much-derided, and the perhaps unethical notion of “planned obsolescence” is prevalent. In this, the manufacturers design their durable goods to essentially have a lifespan limited by factors they might control rather than the lifespan being governed by the way in which a user uses the item. There is an amusing and universal tale of the broom one’s grandparent used the same broom throughout their lives bought with their first home, used daily and only having had 6 replacement heads and 7 replacement shanks!
Obsolescence is essentially entropy, the tendency of a system to move towards disorder and chaos. Understanding the obsolescence process of more sophisticated systems than a broom can help in the marketing of new products as well as perhaps allowing manufacturers and sellers to predict their future profits based on a model of obsolescence for their products and the reliability and replaceabilty of those products. Brooms wear out and have to be replaced, even Grandma will admit that.
Sánchez-Carralero, A. and Armenta-Déu, C. (2021) ‘Modelling and characterisation of the obsolescence process’, Int. J. Product Lifecycle Management, Vol. 13, No. 2, pp.140–158.
The following paper, "The manifesto of money (the neutrality of money)" (International Journal of Critical Accounting 12(3) 2021), is freely available for download as an open access article.
It can be downloaded via the full-text link available here.
There are numerous malware detection and antivirus apps for mobile devices running the Android operating system. However, a team in China introduces a new approach that can detect malicious activity at the source code level. They provide details in the International Journal of Information and Computer Security.
Junaid Akram, Majid Mumtaz, Gul Jabeen, and Ping Luo of The Key State Laboratory of Information Security at Tsinghua University, explain how their approach is not only scalable but offers self-optimisation of the signature set as it detects malicious apps by reading their source code. The team has developed a prototype of their software, DroidMD. They have tested it against almost 30000 applications of which 3,670 are already identified as malware. It is reliable because it analyses only the code and has a high detection accuracy of 95.5%. The team points out that one of the unique characteristics of their software is that it can detect malware that is a clone or “near-miss” of known viruses and malware. Conventional antivirus and malware detection often fails to detect such malware where the software signature may well be only marginally different from the original virus.
Given that there are millions of users downloading thousands of apps every day, it is imperative that an effective and reliable approach to controlling malware be found to slow the assimilation of devices into bot nets and other malicious networks and reduce the risk of user data and privacy being compromised by malware.
“In our future work, we will make DroidMD more resilient for minimising the obfuscation and improving its run time. Meanwhile, we will extend it for other programming languages to detect malware or malicious code fragments from source code to overcome security threats,” the team writes.
Akram, J., Mumtaz, M., Jabeen, G. and Luo, P. (2021) ‘DroidMD: an efficient and scalable Android malware detection approach at source code level‘, Int. J. Information and Computer Security, Vol. 15, Nos. 2/3, pp.299-321.
International Journal of Economics and Business Research 22(2/3) 2021
The following paper, "Financial analysis method based on astrology, Fibonacci, and Astronacci to find a date of direction inversion: JCI and future gold prices (empirical study of the JCI-IDX and gold prices, period of 2008-2017)" (International Journal of Economics and Business Research 22(2/3) 2021), is freely available for download as an open access article.
It can be downloaded via the full-text link available here.
The industrialised world has responded in disparate ways to the emergence of the novel coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, and the ensuing pandemic it caused, COVID-19. Technology was repursosed to track and monitor the disease and research and development focused on the development of vaccines and investigated pharmaceutical and physical interventions to treat the disease.
New research published in the International Journal of Technological Learning, Innovation and Development has looked at the response from a developing nation, Nigeria. This nation has, not unlike many others with fewer resources and less money to spare, not yet contributed in a significant way to R&D into the coronavirus and our response to the pandemic. Through a case study, the team has gleaned lessons that might be applied to lessen the crisis in Nigeria of the next pandemic.
Morolake Bolaji, John O. Adeoti, and Joshua Adeyemi Afolabi of the Innovation and Technology Policy Department at the Nigerian Institute of Social and Economic Research (NISER), in Ojoo, Ibadan, Nigeria, explain that Nigeria may have the capability but has remained a “laggard in R&D spending as well as R&D activities, particularly in the health sector.” One might suggest that the term “developing nation” can only be applied if that country is active in the areas that lead to development.
The COVID-19 pandemic has, the team suggests, reinforced “the imperative for Nigeria to significantly and urgently increase its R&D spending not only to combat subsequent health challenges but also to facilitate rapid structural transformation and economic development.” A country that fails to rise to such crises and challenges by boosting its Sciencebase will inevitably continue to suffer the worst consequences of such a pandemic.
The team has five recommendations. The first is that the government must increase the nation’s R&D budget. Secondly, health infrastructure needs considerable improvement. The third recommendation is that public R&D needs to integrate more effectively with the private sector to improve technological results. Fourthly, the government must improve the transfer of the currently limited R&D “outputs” to the end-users. Finally, education in science and technology must be given a boost through governmental scholarships that focus on problem-solving rather than promotion.
Bolaji, M., Adeoti, J.O. and Afolabi, J.A. (2021) ‘The imperative of research and development in Nigeria: lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic’, Int. J. Technological Learning, Innovation and Development, Vol. 13, No. 2, pp.168–189.
International Journal of Business Continuity and Risk Management 11(2/3) 2021
The COVID-19 pandemic continues to distort our perceptions of normal as the days and weeks and months go by. The occupational welfare of those caring for the elderly in residential carehomes has been an important aspect of the new-normal as those not-for-profit organisations that offer those services must look after their carers to ensure consistent care of their customers.
New research in the International Journal of Managerial and Financial Accounting, has looked at how we might rethink occupational welfare in the long term by adopting an organisational ethics approach.
Giorgio Mion, Angelo Bonfanti, and Francesca Simeoni of the University of Verona, Italy, and Cristian Loza Adaui of the Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany, have used the Fondazione Monsignor Alessandro Marangoni as a case study to examine the ethical questions of the new-normal. This NPO organisation adopted occupational welfare policies, enabling it to manage the early COVID-19 outbreak without negative consequences, the team writes.
The team points out that many NPOs offering care services to the elderly have suffered badly in the wake of the pandemic because their customers were particularly susceptible to infection with the causative coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, and the ensuing disease COVID-19, which had a high mortality rate in this cohort. This was especially so prior to the development of working vaccines and efficacious therapies for the disease. The team adds that long-term care (LTC) organisations needed to implement strategic and operational policies to safeguard the health of employees and residents, the team writes, these policies concern both healthcare and managerial/organisational aspects. This was especially true in the north of Italy where the negative impact of the unfolding pandemic in the first few weeks of 2020 was relentless.
Many NPOs in this sector reorganised their internal spaces, adopted flexible working, as well as engaging in effective communication with stakeholders and family members, all at the same time as endeavouring to comply with new lockdown and other laws aimed at halting the spread of the disease and reducing hospitalisations and deaths.
The team has highlighted the positive outcomes obtained by the Marangoni Foundation in its management of the pandemic emergency through the implementation of extraordinary occupational welfare policies. “The activities implemented were related to the ethical dimensions of management in terms of their effects on individuals, managers, the organisation and society,” the team explains. These were “decisive for meeting the most urgent needs particularly during periods of crisis,” the team adds. The researchers point out that it was the empowerment of workers that was critical for enhancing organisational performance during the pandemic especially given that safety protocols often limited some voluntary activities.
Mion, G., Bonfanti, A., Simeoni, F. and Loza Adaui, C.R. (2021) ‘Rethinking occupational welfare policies in long-term care organisations during the COVID-19 pandemic: an organisational ethics approach’, Int. J. Managerial and Financial Accounting, Vol. 13, No. 1, pp.48–63.
