Digital Commons Network^™

Orchestrating Customer Value Networks: Relationship-Centered Platforms As Sustainable Solutions To Subscription Fatigue, Hesham O. Dinana, Hoda El Kolaly

Faculty Journal Articles

Purpose

This study examines how digital platform organizations can overcome subscription fatigue by transforming transactional relationships into value co-creation systems that enhance customer lifetime value and competitive advantage.

Design/methodology/approach

The study employs a multi-source comparative analysis integrating financial performance data from 28 global digital media organizations, leading consultancy insights, and 12 case studies across North America, Europe and Asia-Pacific. Exploratory and theory-building rather than hypothesis-testing, it relies exclusively on secondary and case-based evidence, supplemented by insights from Egypt’s digital media market.

Findings

Relationship-centered platforms outperform transactional subscription models, generating stronger customer commitment, trust and participatory engagement. Organizations integrating relationship marketing, …

Eliciting Information About Teacher Applicants Using Open-Ended Questions, Joseph Aguilar-Bohorquez, Dan Goldhaber, Cyrus Grout, Elton Mykerezi, Prayash Pathak, Aaron Sojourner

Upjohn Institute Working Papers

Employers commonly use open-ended questions in hiring, but usually responses aren’t recorded, and knowledge about the usefulness of such responses is limited. This study investigates properties of written responses to open-ended questions collected over many years via an application tracking platform that school districts use to hire teachers. We develop a scalable process to discover topics within the corpus of responses to each question and then to classify each response with respect to the topics while preserving interpretability and transparency. It adapts a traditional qualitative topic modeling approach, Inductive Thematic Analysis, to best combine the strengths of researcher judgment and …

A Philosophy Of Travel: Lonergan's Transcendental Method Applied To The Experience Of Not Belonging, Andrew Brei

San Jose - Lonergan Chair in Catholic Philosophy

Travel can be an exhausting thing, offering little time for reflection. Often, traveling involves a dizzying assortment of steps: we book flights, pack bags, find accommodations, and move through unfamiliar streets in search of “the sights.” Less often do we stop to ask what we are actually doing when we do this—what cognitive and existential work travel involves. This essay takes up that question by borrowing the structure of Bernard Lonergan’s transcendental method, the four-level account of human cognition and action that runs from experience through understanding and judgment to decision. Lonergan’s method is not a set of external rules …

Mentorship As A Catalyst For Change Readiness: A Qualitative Study Of How Effective Mentoring Mitigates Burnout And Turnover During Organizational Transformation, Jeffery M. Camp

Journal of Online Mentoring

This qualitative study examined how effective mentorship mitigates burnout and attenuates turnover intention during organizational change, foregrounding the perspectives of experienced mentors. Drawing on Biggs’s presage–process–product (PPP) model, data were collected through semi-structured interviews (n = 12) and two focus group discussions (n = 6 each), engaging 18 unique mentors employed in organizations with 1,000 or more employees. Thematic analysis following Braun and Clarke’s six-phase protocol yielded four themes: (1) mentorship as strategic facilitation of organizational change; (2) mentorship as provision of emotional and psychological support; (3) empowering mentees through relationship-building; and (4) applying adaptive and reflective strategies. …

When Does Global Search Pay For Itself? A Measured Exploration Cost And Energy Break-Even Analysis Of A Metaheuristic Search Controller In Solar Energy Systems, Mohamed Ali Muammar Ezgour

Communications of the IIMA

Autonomous energy systems increasingly delegate the choice of operating point to embedded search algorithms, trading a fast local optimizer that can settle on a wrong point against a slower global search that guarantees the right one at a measurable cost. This paper reframes maximum power point tracking under partial shading as that decision and measures its economics on a fixed photovoltaic plant in MATLAB/Simulink. A Hippopotamus Optimization global search handed over to incremental conductance is compared with incremental conductance alone across seventeen initial duty cycles and thirty random seeds. The hybrid reached the global peak in all thirty seeds, whereas …

Advancing Blood Production And Distribution: Leveraging Ai In The Expeditionary Care Environment, Andrew Hall, Michael Carrillo, Garrion Jackson, Jennifer Hall, Ryan Comes

Joint Force Quarterly

It is a whole of government effort to ensure there is sufficient blood supply during times of crisis and conflict. The interagency is responsible for the blood production, delivery and ultimately utilizes blood across the world to treat hemorrhaging patients. Blood is an individually donated resource that saves lives in the expeditionary environment. The ideal blood supply chain maximizes production, utilization, and remaining shelf life of blood products where it is needed across the world. Optimized production and delivery of blood maximizes lifesaving while minimizing wastage. The advancement in artificial intelligence represents an opportunity to apply technology to this critical …

Bitseat: Reimagining The Financing For Airliners Using Nonfungible Tokens (Blockchain Technology), Edwin S. Ongola

Journal of Aviation Technology and Engineering

This essay describes how blockchain technology, particularly nonfungible tokens, can be used to raise funding for airliners. The essay begins with a brief overview on the costs, categories, and acquisition methods of airliners. After that, the essay introduces concepts on blockchain technology, tokens, and smart contracts. The essay then touches on how nonfungible tokens can be used to facilitate fractional ownership of airliners. From there, the essay discusses Bitseat, a conceptual nonfungible token for fractional ownership of airliners, covering its overall design, appeal, marketplace alternatives, and challenges. Finally, in the discussion, the essay summarizes the overall concept and outlines its …

The Nine-Block Pyramid: A Structural Framework For Cultivating An Ai Adoption Mindset Culture At Enterprise Scale, Ahmad Masri

Communications of the IIMA

Enterprise artificial intelligence (AI) adoption is nearly universal in name but shallow in practice: a large majority of organizations now use AI in at least one business function, yet only a small minority have scaled it enterprise-wide, and leadership commitment rather than technology is repeatedly cited as the binding constraint. This conceptual paper argues that AI adoption is fundamentally a mindset-culture problem, not a tooling problem, and proposes a nine-block pyramid as a practical framework describing a sequencing heuristic, anchored in established organizational-behavior theory, for the cultural conditions an enterprise should build to sustain an AI adoption mindset: (1) Enterprise …

Ai Slop In The Generative Ai Era: Uncovering Hidden Costs For Information Quality, Trust, And Human-Centered Systems, Blenda G. Mutuma

Communications of the IIMA

The rapid proliferation of generative AI tools has fundamentally altered the volume, velocity, and perceived quality of information produced across academic and professional settings (Bommasani et al., 2021; Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence [HAI], 2025). Yet this expansion has introduced a critical and underexamined threat to sustainable information ecosystems: what this paper formally terms AI slop ; defined as AI-generated content that achieves surface-level plausibility while offering limited substantive value, accuracy, or contextual depth. At scale, AI slop degrades information quality and erodes institutional trust (Bender et al., 2021; Weidinger et al., 2021). More critically, it generates what this …

People Orientation And Thing Orientation In Business Majors: Implications For Assessing The Impacts Of Cross-Functional Business Program Curricula, Todd J. Hostager, David A. Christopher, Kristy J. Lauver, Christopher Knowles

International Journal for Business Education

Background/Introduction/Purpose:  Prior research documented significant differences in people orientation and thing orientation (PTO) based on type of major and sex.  This study examines a set of measures for helping business programs to assess whether they are producing graduates equipped to consider both people and things when making decisions, regardless of their major or sex.

Methods/Design:  Students in a strategic management capstone course spent a single 75-minute session responding to a brief new venture pitch by identifying what types of additional information they would need to decide whether to invest in the business.  Three Likert-scaled options gauged the extent to participant …

Teaching Communication And Teamwork Under Pressure: An Experiential Activity Using Keep Talking And Nobody Explodes, Bryan L. Rogers, Cody Logan Chullen, Brian Waterwall

International Journal for Business Education

Background/Introduction/Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to present an experiential classroom activity designed to help students develop communication and teamwork skills under conditions of time pressure and information asymmetry.

Methods/Design: This paper presents a teaching activity rather than an empirical study; no research design, sample, instruments, or analytic procedures are reported. The paper describes and contextualizes an experiential learning activity using the cooperative video game Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes. Drawing on research in experiential learning, cooperative learning, and simulation-based instruction, the paper outlines learning objectives, materials, implementation procedures, observer roles, and structured debriefing strategies suitable for undergraduate and …

Hospitality And Tourism Students’ Perceptions Of Well-Being, Belonging, And Engagement In Their Academic Endeavors And Extracurricular Activities, Cynthia S. Deale, Seung Hyun Lee

International Journal for Business Education

Background/Introduction/Purpose: This study examined hospitality and tourism college/university students’ views of their engagement, well-being, and sense of belonging in academic and extracurricular activities, based on 130 responses from students in the United States.

Methods: Descriptive analysis, analysis of variance, confirmatory factor analysis, and structural equation modeling were used to analyze the responses. Qualitative comments were also obtained.

Results:  Respondents felt positive overall about their engagement, and many participated in extracurricular activities. The relationships between class engagement and sense of belonging, and between campus engagement and sense of belonging were significant, and the sense of belonging significantly influenced student subjective …

Developing A Deep Learning-Based Artificial Intelligence System For Detecting Scientific Misinformation On Digital Platforms, Shorouq Al-Awawdeh, Ayah Al- Jafari

Middle East Journal of Communication Studies

Objectives: This study develops and evaluates an Arabic scientific misinformation detection system by fine-tuning AraBERT-base-v2. It examines the effects of early stopping and input sequence length on model performance, interprets selected linguistic characteristics associated with misleading content, and discusses the limitations of using machine-translated data.

Methodology: The study adopted a mixed-methods design, employing a systematic integration of quantitative and qualitative approaches, supported by an interpretive qualitative reading. The initial database consisted of 23,546 records, including 123 Arabic articles collected from the Akeed, Sheek, and Taqeen platforms, and 23,423 foreign-language records drawn from the GossipCop and PolitiFact collections within FakeNewsNet. After …

From Data To Decision-Making: The Role Of Local Digital Twins In Cross-Domain Management Within Municipalities – A Research-In-Progress Study In Veenendaal, Diana M.E. Boekman, Koen Smit, Guido Ongena, Rob Peters

Communications of the IIMA

Municipalities are facing increasingly complex, interconnected challenges in areas like housing, climate adaptation, mobility, and social policy. Local Digital Twins (LDTs) are seen as a promising tool to make this complexity more understandable and support decision-making. At the same time, both literature and practice show that few initiatives get past the pilot phase, even though getting through that phase is essential for successful long-term adoption.

This paper presents a research-in-progress study on the development and application of an implementation method for LDT technology within the municipality of Veenendaal, based on human values rather than driven by technological possibilities. Based on …

A Novel Entropy Based Maintainability Measurement Algorithm For Java Source Code., Remi M. Yusuf Mr, Md Shadab Mashuk, Julian Bass

Communications of the IIMA

Software metrics play a central role in assessing and managing the quality of software systems providing quantitative insights into attributes such as complexity, reliability, rigidity, modifiability and maintainability. Among these, maintainability is particularly critical, as it directly influences the ease of system evolution, long-term sustainability, and overall cost effectiveness. Despite the widespread use of metric-based maintainability measurement algorithms, capturing a value that reflects the maintainability situation of software source code remains a challenging task, especially in the presence of design deficiencies such as code smells. To measure changes in maintainability, this study experimentaly characterises the relationship between code smells and …

Spiritual Wanderings In ‘The Garden Of The Virgin Mary’ - Mount Athos, Dimitrios Mylonopoulos, Polyxeni Moira, Kyriakos Tselegidis

International Journal of Religious Tourism and Pilgrimage

Religious-cultural tourism is a form of alternative tourism associated with trips taken by individual travellers or organised groups to areas, sites or monuments with a strong religious character. Simultaneously, pilgrimage is manifested in these places as the totality of activities carried out by individuals or groups in areas, spaces, sites, and monuments of religious significance, with the predominant motivation being spiritual ascent from earth to heaven, i.e., communication with the Divine, fulfilling vows, or substantial participation in religious ceremonies and events (as part of one’s religion). A significant site with intense visitation and a large number of pilgrims is the …

Religious Night Tourism During Ramadan In Mashhad, Iran: Lived Experiences Of Pilgrims, Neda Zarandian, Razieh Rabani, Daniel H. Olsen

International Journal of Religious Tourism and Pilgrimage

Mashhad, located in northeastern Iran, is one of the most significant pilgrimage destinations in the Islamic world, attracting millions of visitors annually to the Imam Reza Shrine (The eighth Imam of Shia Muslims). During Ramadan, the city transforms into a vibrant spiritual and social space where nocturnal religious practices and social gatherings shape distinctive emotional and temporal experiences for both pilgrims and tourists. Understanding these lived nighttime experiences is essential for developing culturally sensitive and spiritually meaningful tourism approaches. Despite the growing attention to religious tourism, the temporal, emotional, and sensory dimensions of night tourism in pilgrimage contexts remain unexplored. …

The Effect Of Religious Belief On Spiritual Tourism Intention: A Case Study Of Vietnamese Tourists To Thailand, Huong Thi Quynh Nguyen, Ngan Thi Huyen Nguyen

International Journal of Religious Tourism and Pilgrimage

In this paper, religious belief was integrated into the Goal-Directed Behaviour Model, to clarify the behaviour of tourists towards spiritual tourism. Data from 516 Vietnamese tourists visiting Thailand was used for PLS-SEM analysis. The research results indicated positive relationships of religious belief to the original elements of the MGB, including attitude, subjective norm, perceived behavioural control, emotion, and spiritual tourism intention. Desire was shown to be a key predictor of intention, mediating the effects of attitude, subjective norm, behavioural control, and emotion on the tourists’ intention to engage in spiritual tourism.

Lgbtq+ People On The Camino De Santiago, Xose Santos, . Wisulanbou

International Journal of Religious Tourism and Pilgrimage

In the many published works on the Camino de Santiago, LGBTQ+ people have never been considered as an subject of study. The widespread idea that the Camino is for everyone serves to invisibilise this group of people. The problems and accusations we have had to face in our fieldwork are proof of how uncomfortable it is for some persons to talk about gender, sexuality and non-heteronormative identities on the Camino. Regardless of the variety of motivations for pilgrimage to Santiago, religion continues to have a very strong presence on this itinerary which generates tensions with sexualities, especially those that are …

Religious Tourism And Local Development In Rural Areas: Analysis Of The Social And Economic Impact Of Holy Week Celebrations In Osuna, Spain, Elena Garcia-De-Soto-Camacho, Miguel A. Garcia-Gordillo Dr., Antonio Montaño-Valle, Carlos Chavarría-Ortiz, Rosa María Vaca-Acosta

International Journal of Religious Tourism and Pilgrimage

This study explores the role of religious tourism in promoting rural development through the case of Holy Week in Osuna, Spain. By applying a quantitative methodology with fieldwork conducted during the 2022 celebration, the research analyses the social and economic impacts derived from the influx of visitors. The study segments tourists based on their motivations, demographic profiles, levels of satisfaction, spending behaviour, and future intentions. Through cluster analysis, three distinct visitor profiles were identified, reflecting varying degrees of religious and cultural interest. The findings confirm that Holy Week tourism generates significant economic benefits for the locality through direct, indirect, and …

Possible Contestation Between Pilgrimage And Tourism: A Spatial Analysis Of The Shrine Of Shahjalal, Zarin Tasnim Rashid

International Journal of Religious Tourism and Pilgrimage

This paper aims to examine the contestation between pilgrimage and tourism by conducting a spatial analysis on the shrine of Shahjalal, a prominent pilgrimage site in Bangladesh. It analyses particular components of this site through the lens of Kim Knott’s (2009) concept of a spatial approach based on four essential characteristics that connect a location to the larger whole of space. This paper followed a qualitative research method and more specifically content analysis. Being a prominent pilgrimage site in Bangladesh, the Shrine of Shahjalal, turns into a centre of contestation due to the presence of tourists and other existing stakeholders. …

Religious Visitors’ Spiritual Values And Their Relative Importance: Evidence From Chinese Buddhist Tourism Contexts, Zhiqing Wang, Keji Huang, Jiankang Zhang, Yunyun Fan, Ge Zhang

International Journal of Religious Tourism and Pilgrimage

Spiritual values are affected by diverse factors with different roles and influence daily life in various ways. Using Mount Jiuhua and Mount Putuo, two mountains in Mainland China with great importance in Buddhism, as examples, this study explores the specific dimensions of religious visitors’ spiritual values. Through a survey study, five factors of these spiritual values were extracted and their relative importance was measured. The identified factors were transcendence, general connectedness, inner balance, positive life direction and special religious feelings. According to factor importance analysis, these spiritual values can be categorised into three levels: fundamental, reflective and surpassing. This study …

Hajj Pilgrimage And Spatial Behaviour In Sacred Space, Zuhriddin Juraev, Young-Jin Ahn, Ji-Yeong Gu

International Journal of Religious Tourism and Pilgrimage

This study examines the behavioural and spatial dynamics of the Hajj pilgrimage through the conceptual lens of behavioural geography, focusing on how sacred space, ritual choreography, and communal experiences shape religious engagement. Centred on the Kaaba and surrounding pilgrimage sites, this study explores how ritual practices such as Tawaf, Sa’i, and standing at Arafat construct immersive and affective experiences for pilgrims. Drawing on an interpretive analysis of visual and textual sources, the study argues that sacred space operates not only as a physical setting but also as a symbolic framework that mediates spiritual transformation and social cohesion. It also highlights …

Shrine Tourism: Fiction And Fact Through An Islamic Lens, Md. Soleman Mollik, Muslima Akter, Mohammad Mominul Islam

International Journal of Religious Tourism and Pilgrimage

Shrine tourism is highly prevalent in developing countries. Despite this, the volume of research in this field is quite limited. This study makes a novel contribution to shrine tourism from an Islamic lens. It aims to explore the fiction (the beliefs of the pilgrims) held by shrine devotees and the facts (the religious doctrine of Islam) based on Islamic principles, including the noble Quran and the Sunnah (Prophetic tradition), to showcase the facts against the fiction.  The study conducted in-depth interviews with 30 devotees from Bangladesh’s most renowned shrines or mazars between January and November 2023. Later, the data were …

The Role Of Women In A Da’Wah: Mitigating The Bio-Psycho-Socio Problems Of Elderly Pilgrims Who Cancel Hajj, Hasyim Hasanah, Lukmanul Hakim

International Journal of Religious Tourism and Pilgrimage

The Hajj pilgrimage is the most sacred da’wah ritual and has resilience against global crises and the impact of COVID-19. The cancellation of the 2020-2021 Hajj pilgrimage has implications for the length of the waiting list and the bio-psycho-social conditions of elderly Hajj pilgrims. This study aims to identify the role of female Hajj pilgrims who failed to depart in overcoming bio-psycho-social problems. This study is a field study with a socio-psychological da’wah approach. Data were collected through a Google Form questionnaire, in-depth interviews, and documentation studies of 203 elderly Hajj pilgrims who failed to depart from the Semarang area. …

The Reasons And Motivations For Unsafe Pilgrimage During Covid-19: Analysis Of Shiite Experiences Of Pilgrimage In The Last Days Of Safar In Iran, Hamdollah Sojasi Qeidari, Fahimeh Jafari

International Journal of Religious Tourism and Pilgrimage

Unsafe pilgrimage is defined a religious journey that may have life risks. From the outbreak of COVID-19, for instance, many people were infected and died, but despite the severe conditions all over the world including Iran, one of the most famous and biggest pilgrimage events was held in Mashhad, Iran. This study tries to explore the causes and motivations of unsafe pilgrimage over the period when COVID-19 was a threat. To do the research, ethnographic method for collecting the data and Colaizzi’s interpretive phenomenological method for analysing the experience of 38 pilgrims doing foot-pilgrimage were used. The results show that …

Invited Editorial: Scandinavian Pilgrimage Reinvented, Jane Widtfeldt Meged Mrs, Andreas Skriver Hansen Mr

International Journal of Religious Tourism and Pilgrimage

This editorial offers initial thoughts about how Scandinavian pilgrimage possibly is being re-invented after 500 years of intermission. Although the church has been involved in all three Scandinavian countries, it is argued that pilgrimage to some degree is developing and being practiced along different lines in the three countries. In Denmark, pilgrimage can be said to often fall under an entrepreneurial, tourism start-up category. In Sweden, the church in some ways has appropriated pilgrimage as leverage in connection with the separation of church from the Swedish state. In Norway, pilgrimage has mainly been used by public authorities as valorisation of …

From Dissertation To Deployment: A Unified Software Platform Operationalizing Clinical-Prediction And Sequential-Security Ai For Healthcare, Olsi Shehu, Damiana Teliti, Jasmin Kevrić, Bekir Karlik

Communications of the IIMA

Advances in machine learning for healthcare are abundant, yet most validated models remain confined to research notebooks and never reach secure, usable clinical software. This paper addresses that deployment gap by presenting a unified, security-hardened software platform that operationalizes two complementary streams of doctoral research inside a single, role-based hospital information system. The first stream contributes a clinical-prediction capability: an ultra-hybrid ensemble that couples a quantum-inspired feature transformation, particle-swarm feature selection, and calibrated soft voting for cancer-outcome prediction (96.41% accuracy, AUC-ROC 0.983 on TCGA-BRCA), survival stratification, multi-cancer generalization, and pharmacogenomic drug-response classification (89.31% mean accuracy across 25 compounds). The second …

Attitudes And Norms About Intimate Partner Violence: What Makes Women More Impressionable?, Gaurav Dhamija, Mehreen Mookerjee, Manini Ojha, Sanket Roy

All Works

This article evaluates the causal impact of average neighborhood attitudes justifying intimate partner violence (IPV) on own attitudes using nationally representative data from the fifth wave of the National Family Health Survey of India. The study utilizes exogenous variation in average exposure of neighborhood women to their parental IPV in a leave-one-out instrumental variable strategy to address endogeneity concerns in estimating peer influences. The study finds robust evidence that a 1 standard deviation increase in a woman’s average neighborhood attitudes justifying IPV leads to a 0.36 standard deviation increase in her attitudes justifying the same. The article establishes the importance …

A Theory Of Hard And Soft Information, Jeremy Bertomeu, Ivan Marinovic

Olin Business School Faculty Research

This paper studies a model of optimal disclosure via two comp eting communi- cation channels, hard information whose value has been veri fied and soft disclo- sures (e.g., forecasts, unaudited statements, press relea ses). We show that certain soft disclosures may contain as much information as hard dis closures and establish that: (a) exclusive reliance on soft disclosures tends to co nvey bad news, (b) cred- ibility is greater when unfavorable information is reporte d and (c) misreporting is more likely when soft information is issued jointly with har d information. We also show that a soft report that is …