Digital Commons Network^™

How Does An Advanced Educator Utilize Digital Language Teaching And Learning By Integrating Linguistic, Cultural, And Business Life Perspectives?, Hely Westerholm, Pirjo Takanen-Körperich, Ph.D.

International Journal for Business Education

This paper explores advanced educators’ digital working capabilities in online language teaching, with a particular focus on sharing Finnish language and culture in a foreign context. Cultural and linguistic knowledge play a significant role in enhancing students’ motivation to study foreign languages. In today’s educational environment, digitalisation and globalisation exert an increasing influence on foreign language teaching and learning.

The digital learning environment has brought about a paradigm shift in foreign language didactics. Digital language learning is both challenging and holistic in nature. Continued foreign language learning is simultaneously an individual and a social process, as digital learning cultures impose …

Are Hotels Ready For Flooding? Improving Employee Preparedness, Ahmin Kwon, Marketa Kubickova, Swechchha Subedi

ICHRIE Research Reports

Focusing on the experiences of 500 current hotel employees in the United States, this report evaluates current levels of flood preparedness and the role of organizational support in shaping employee proactive response. Findings indicate that most employees have experience with flooding and rely on multiple information sources, yet trust in government response remains moderate. Clear disparities emerge across hotel segments, with significantly higher preparedness commitment and proactive behavior among employees in luxury hotels and those with longer tenure. Importantly, prior experience does not necessarily translate into effective preparedness. Although many respondents perceive existing information as sufficient, there is a continued …

Exploring Hotel Sustainability Through A Service Design Lens: An Espoused Theory Vs. Theory-In-Use Perspective, Cindy Yoonjoung Heo, Jaehyun Park, Sanqi Yang, Chen Ni, Lei Tang, Lei Yu, Julneth Rogenhofer, Geraldine Assen

ICHRIE Research Reports

Sustainability is now widely embedded in hotel strategies, but it is often assessed through what hotels communicate rather than what guests actually experience. This study examines that disconnect by drawing on Argyris and Schön’s distinction between espoused theory and theory-in-use, combined with a service design perspective. Using document analysis alongside in-situ observations at the front desk and in guest rooms, the study looks at how sustainability appears across service touchpoints and whether it is likely to be noticed and understood by guests. The findings suggest that many initiatives are operationally in place but remain largely out of sight during the …

Robot Ready, Deploying Semi-Autonomous Food Delivery Robots, Betsy Bender Stringam, Somang Min, Jennifer Martinez

ICHRIE Research Reports

Semiautonomous food delivery robots are expanding rapidly across college campuses, healthcare facilities, office complexes, and other food delivery settings. The semiautonomous food delivery robot market grew to about $800 million in 2025 and is expected to exceed $3.24 billion by 2030.

This report draws on research studies conducted at a university contract foodservice beta deployment site, involving in-depth interviews with employees and managers who worked directly with semiautonomous food delivery robots during and after implementation, triangulated with field notes and observations by the research team. The report highlights key findings and develops an original practitioner framework around these findings, called …

Contemporary Cybersecurity Challenges In Emerging Technologies: A Systematic Literature Analysis, Faztudo Languisse Prof

Journal of Cybersecurity Education, Research and Practice

The accelerating convergence of artificial intelligence (AI), the Internet of Things (IoT), cloud computing, blockchain, and quantum computing has fundamentally transformed the global threat landscape, introducing cybersecurity challenges of unprecedented complexity and scale. This systematic literature review synthesizes findings from peer-reviewed publications, institutional reports, and regulatory documents published primarily between 2020 and 2025 to provide an integrated analysis of contemporary cybersecurity challenges across five key emerging technology domains. The review identifies critical vulnerabilities inherent to each domain, documents the evolution of threat actors and attack methodologies — including AI-powered ransomware, adversarial machine learning, and harvest-now-decrypt-later quantum attacks — and evaluates …

Cybersecurity Governance Of Industrial Iot In Sub-Saharan Africa: Policy Gaps, Threat Landscape, And Lessons From Comparative African Contexts, Faztudo Languisse Eng.

Journal of Cybersecurity Education, Research and Practice

The rapid deployment of Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) systems across Sub-Saharan Africa's extractive, energy, logistics, and agro-industrial sectors has introduced a cybersecurity challenge of growing urgency: industrial networks that were designed for operational efficiency are increasingly exposed to cyber threats for which neither the organizations nor the regulatory frameworks are adequately prepared. This article examines the cybersecurity governance of IIoT systems in a developing African economy, using Mozambique as a primary case study and drawing comparative lessons from South Africa, Rwanda, and Kenya. Through an integrative literature review and documentary analysis of national digital, cybersecurity, and industrial policies, the …

Firms In The Flood: Is Fema Failing Small Businesses?, Lauryn Charles

Electronic Theses and Dissertations 2020 - Present

When faced with a natural disaster, small businesses remain largely outside the direct reach of federal assistance. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) estimates that up to 65% of small businesses close within two years of direct impact by a hazard event. Despite this vulnerability, existing research has focused primarily on infrastructure and household recovery, leaving the small business sector underexamined. This study is the first to link county-level IRS income data, FEMA mitigation grants, and SBA disaster records to empirically evaluate whether federal pre-disaster mitigation spending and community social resilience moderate the relationship between disasters and small business recovery …

Fred Luthans, Unl Business Management, Positive Organizational Behavior, Mark Griep, Fred Luthans

UNL ORCA Interview Series

Fred Luthans was awarded the ORCA in 2008. He was born in Clinton, Iowa in 1939. He earned three degrees from the University of Iowa in Iowa City, located only a few miles from Clinton. His bachelor's was in mathematics in 1961, a Master’s of Business Administration in ‘62, PhD in Management and Psychology in 1965. After serving two years as a captain in the Army at West Point, where he taught psychology and leadership, he joined the University of Nebraska-Lincoln as an Associate Professor of Management. He's had a remarkable career, but I'll only mention three major distinctions. His …

Human-Driven, Autonomous, Or Hybrid? The Optimal Fleet Configurations For Ride-Hailing Platforms, Wenjing Li, Yali Zhang, Jun Sun, Zhaojun Yang

Information Systems Faculty Publications

The growing commercialization of autonomous vehicles (AVs) is reshaping consumer service preferences and prompting ride-hailing platforms to redesign fleet structures that accommodate the coexistence of human-driven vehicles (HVs) and AVs. This article develops a queueing game framework that incorporates vehicle heterogeneity and consumer preference differences to systematically compare three fleet configuration strategies: the pure HV (PHV) strategy (HVs only), the pure AV (PAV) strategy (AVs only), and the hybrid strategy (both HVs and AVs). The analysis highlights how consumer mismatch losses, AV operating costs, and service rates jointly shape equilibrium outcomes. Results show that when consumer mismatch losses are moderate, …

Building The Next Cybersecurity Workforce: A Grades 7–12 Curriculum To Close The Cyber Talent Gap, Mohammed A. Salam, Iqbal Shareef, Rich P. Manprisio

Journal of Cybersecurity Education, Research and Practice

In today’s rapidly evolving technological landscape, cyberattacks pose increasing threats, yet a global shortage of cybersecurity and digital forensics professionals leaves industries vulnerable, similar to having too few law enforcement officers in a densely populated city. The judicial system faces rising digital crimes and fraud cases, further strained by the lack of experts to analyze and extract digital evidence. Despite high demand, millions of positions remain unfilled. This paper identifies the root causes of the cybersecurity workforce shortage and proposes a targeted solution: a curriculum for Grades 7–12 designed to foster cybersecurity awareness and interest. The methodology included a comprehensive …

Auditor Trust In Artificial Intelligence, Michael L. Decker

Electronic Theses and Dissertations 2020 - Present

Accounting firms are investing in, and advocating for, the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in audit procedures. This dissertation attempts to determine what factors may lead to auditors trusting an AI system. Established models of trust show that traits of the individual user, the system, and the situation all have effects on trust. Prior accounting research also indicates that professional skepticism is an important trait in auditors. This dissertation adds professional skepticism into an established trust model and uses Structural Equation Modeling to investigate auditor trust in audit evidence prepared by an AI system. My results indicate that the most …

Signal And Substance: Why Methodological Sophistication Fails To Guarantee Inference, Aamir Rashid, Rizwana Rasheed

Publications and Research

Despite increasing analytical sophistication, empirical research in organization studies continues to suffer from fragile inference, uneven theoretical accumulation, and contested credibility. This paper seeks to explain why these problems persist by shifting attention from authors’ methodological choices to the evaluative dynamics of peer review. Adopting a conceptual and theory-analytic approach, the paper theorizes peer review as an inferential gatekeeping system. Drawing on research design, theory evaluation, and philosophy-of-science literatures, this study develops an analytical framework to examine how evaluative routines shape what constitutes empirical rigor during the review process. The analysis identifies five recurring reviewer blind spots: inferential scope inflation, …

Can Ungrading Make Sport Management Education More Practical And Engaging?, Michael A. Odio

The COSMA Journal

In this essay I take on the subject of grades in sport management education. While grades are used as a measure of success across higher education, they are an imperfect measure of achievement and learning and have major limitations in terms of student employability. The ungrading movement brings attention to the ways grades can harm learning by shifting attention away from students’ development, and instructor or peer feedback, and intrinsic motivation, while incentivizing compliance and risk-aversion. These harms directly affect what are arguably some of the most important aspects of sport management education, as when grades are the main incentive, …

Marketing Strategies To Increase Student Enrollment To Generate Revenue, Jermaine R. Mccain

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Declining student enrollment can reduce district revenue and limit a public school’s ability to sustain educational programs, staffing, and overall organizational effectiveness. Public school business leaders who lack effective marketing strategies to increase student enrollment may experience financial instability, limiting their organization’s capacity to maintain long-term operational sustainability. Grounded in consumer choice theory, the purpose of this qualitative pragmatic inquiry was to identify and explore effective marketing strategies public school business leaders use to increase student enrollment to generate district revenue. Participants were six public school business leaders in the southeastern United States. Data were collected through semistructured interviews and …

Security Architecture Decision Framework For Endpoint Protection In Resource-Constrained K-12 Environments, Jason Folker

Journal of Cybersecurity Education, Research and Practice

K-12 educational institutions face an ongoing challenge in protecting endpoints when budgets and staffing prevent the implementation of standard security best practices. Technology directors routinely make difficult decisions about administrative rights, software controls, and security tooling, but they lack frameworks designed for the constraints and priorities specific to educational environments. This paper develops a security architecture decision framework tailored for K-12 endpoint protection. The framework integrates five weighting dimensions to help technology directors evaluate competing architectural choices. These dimensions include educational impact, security risk reduction, resource requirements, compliance obligations, and operational feasibility. The framework creates structured documentation that helps decision-makers …

Sustaining Purpose In Organizations: Leadership Insights From The Psalms, Hershey H. Friedman, Xianfang Zeng

The Journal of Values-Based Leadership

This conceptual paper examines how the Book of Psalms offers an integrative moral framework that enriches contemporary purpose-driven leadership theory. Although modern management scholarship increasingly emphasizes purpose, stakeholder orientation, and meaningful work, it often focuses on strategic articulation rather than the ethical and relational practices that sustain purpose over time. Drawing on selected Psalms as a historically influential corpus of leadership reflection, this study identifies key leadership principles and situates them within established management literature. Purpose-driven leadership rooted in ancient values builds psychologically safe environments. In these spaces, employees view their work as a meaningful calling instead of a simple …

Irish-Americans Audie Murphy And William Donovan: A Celebrity And A Statesman, Ritch Eich

The Journal of Values-Based Leadership

In the long annals of Irish history, many leaders have distinguished themselves as warriors in battle or as civilian heroes, or both. Lieutenant Colonel Robert Blain “Paddy” Mayne, a founding member of the Special Air Service and a highly decorated World War II British Army officer from Northern Ireland, is one. Monsignor Hugh O’Flaherty, an Irish Catholic priest whose rescue network helped over 6,500, escaped Allied POWs, Jews, and other fugitives at risk of Nazi persecution evade capture by the Germans during World War II, is another.1 But, not all heroes of Irish descent are remembered equally. Take, for example, …

A Person For All Seasons: The Remarkable Leadership Of Mother Cabrini And Why It Matters Today, Emilio F. Iodice

The Journal of Values-Based Leadership

The history of organizational management is often written in the bold, sweeping strokes of industrial barons or the calculated maneuvers of political statesmen. Yet at the turn of the twentieth century, one of the most sophisticated examples of global institutional scaling was orchestrated by a woman who stood barely five feet tall, held no formal political title, and suffered from debilitating physical frailty. Frances Xavier Cabrini (1850–1917) did not merely practice charity; she engineered a global revolution of care. Over a twenty-eight-year executive career, she founded sixty-seven schools, orphanages, and hospitals across three continents, thereby transforming the social landscape of …

The Philosophical Aspect Of Spirituality And Entrepreneurial Leadership In The Indian Knowledge System, Nidhi Kaushal

The Journal of Values-Based Leadership

Entrepreneurs have an obligation to conserve their literature, art, and culture in any format because it helps to fortify their cultural heritage and memories. In the context of entrepreneurship, a useful and insightful examination of the ancient Indian knowledge framework has proposed the growth of culture-based enterprises, which reflects the magnificent integration of human values with traditional wisdom-based work ethics. The nature of today's modern entrepreneurship is an adjusted specification based on innovative context, which is different from the ancient fundamental policies and practices. This study introduces cultural entrepreneurship and its originality through the traditional and indigenous art and skill …

Moral Identity, Joseph P. Hester

The Journal of Values-Based Leadership

Foundationally, our communal awareness offers a complexity of meaning, but don’t be deterred, it also provides an avenue for understanding ethics, suggesting a definition of “humanity” as “community.”

The Character Fractal: A Theory Of Virtue Replication In Organizations, Kevin Davis, Scott Kozlak, Matthew M. Orlowsky, David Levy

The Journal of Values-Based Leadership

Organizational ethics has long been treated as an individual problem requiring individual solutions: the right traits, the right training, the right people in the right roles. This paper argues that framing is fundamentally insufficient. While character and virtue ultimately reside in persons, character development within organizations emerges through recursive ethical interactions shaped by incentives, narratives, feedback loops, and habituation structures cultivated by systems leaders. It replicates, or fails to, across every scale of human interaction, from the unobserved micro-decision of a single employee to the macro-level architecture of executive leadership. Drawing on Mandelbrot's fractal geometry, Lorenz's chaos theory, Kauffman's complexity …

From Betrayal To Blessing: Leadership Lessons From The Joseph Narrative, Hershey H. Friedman, Nakato Hirakubo

The Journal of Values-Based Leadership

This paper examines the enduring relevance of the biblical Joseph narrative as a study of human nature and leadership. Key themes include the transformative power of forgiveness and the intricate interplay between family dynamics and divine providence. While Joseph's moral integrity remains a central focus, the narrative also offers a sobering lesson in governance: his consolidation of land and wealth under Pharaoh created the very centralized power structure that eventually enabled the enslavement of his descendants. The narrative demonstrates how emotional vulnerability and tears serve as catalysts for healing, while Judah's transformation from complicity in betrayal to courageous advocacy exemplifies …

The Culture Metaphor: A Simple Guide To Creating Healthier Organizations, Matthew I. Horner, T. Daniel White, Rylan M. Charlton, Daphne Ds Deporres

The Journal of Values-Based Leadership

In this paper, culture is conceptualized as a living system where every organizational decision and interpersonal interaction is a source of nourishment. Employing this metaphor, a leader’s visible actions, such as policy and resource decisions, serve as macronutrients, while exchanges between organizational members, such as email correspondence and meeting behavior, act as micronutrients that feed culture. An organization’s cultural health, therefore, depends on a balanced diet in which behaviors align with stated values. Leaders, as chief dietitians, identify and resolve deficiencies to build trust, enhance well-being, and improve performance. Actionable strategies for diagnosing and feeding culture are provided to help …

Ethics: The Connective Tissue Of Human Life, Joseph P. Hester

The Journal of Values-Based Leadership

America needs to take a deep breath and reconsider the purposes of democracy, but more, infuse some modicum of commonsense into political decision-making. How many unnecessary wars and homeland killings must we endure and how many lies must we listen to as Trump filibusters his way onto the world’s stage? Seeking lucidity in Trump’s actions may be a stretch and even many of his supporters are asking for explanations, values’ consistency, and Constitutional clarity. I could go on, but this comment sets the tone for this editorial comment.

Summer/Fall 2026

The Journal of Values-Based Leadership

No abstract provided.

Mental Health Self-Perceptions And Resource Utilization In Undergraduate Students At Binghamton University, Nicole J. Dreznin, Sarah Marcus

Binghamton University Undergraduate Journal

Undergraduate students face increasing rates of mental health challenges, however discrepancies in mental health literacy and utilization of resources may exist across student populations. This study examined the perceptions of mental health in undergraduate students at Binghamton University and if they differed among STEM vs non-STEM, man vs. women, and first-generation vs. continuing generation undergraduate students. A 20-question survey, containing 5 demographic questions and 15 mental health related questions was distributed through Qualtrics to 9 undergraduate classes. The available response choices were based on the Likert scale. A total of 1266 students participated.  Chi square tests of independence were done …

Socio-Demographic Correlates Of Consumers’ Readiness To Use Ai In Financial Decision-Making, Michał Buszko, Tomasz Szopiński

Journal of Banking and Financial Economics

This study investigates the socio-demographic factors associated with readiness to use AI-driven tools in financial decision-making. It uses data from a representative survey of Poles and conceptualises an AI readiness index. It then estimates the relationships between socio-demographic characteristics and this index using an ordinary least squares (OLS) regression model. Additionally, robustness checks are conducted with heteroskedasticityrobust standard errors and multiple imputation. The OLS results were supplemented by one-way Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) with Tukey’s Honestly Significant Difference (HSD) post hoc tests to identify groups’ differences. The results demonstrate that gender, age, education, and income are significantly associated with consumers’ …

Transformative Phygital Service Research (Tpsr): An Agenda For Future Research, Saadia Shabnam, Sanjit K. Roy, Yonathan Silvain Roten, Gaganpreet Singh, Taewon Suh, Hairong Li

Research outputs 2022 to 2026

Purpose – This paper aims to develop a transformative phygital service research (TPSR) framework to explain how hybrid physical-digital service systems shape consumer well-being, autonomy, dignity and inclusion. While prior phygital service research (PSR) advances understanding of hybrid experiences and human-centred ecosystems, key ambiguities persist around agency, governance and interpretive labour in algorithmically mediated interactions. Existing frameworks address value co-creation but lack clarity on how digitally enforced rules and redistributed labour drive transformation. TPSR addresses this gap by theorising contradiction-driven processes through which human–AI arrangements and socio-technical dynamics produce both empowering and erosive outcomes in phygital service environments. Design/methodology/approach – …

Mental Health Challenges Associated With Social Media Use And Effective Management Strategies: A Systematic Literature Review, Ebrahim Timol, Kebashnee Moodley

The African Journal of Information Systems

This study conducts a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) to investigate the mental health challenges associated with increasing social media (SM) usage. The review compares these effects across youth and adult age groups and explores how mental health issues related to SM use have evolved before, during, and after the COVID-19 pandemic. Through a comprehensive search of databases including ProQuest, Scopus, JSTOR, and Google Scholar, 43 relevant articles were analyzed using thematic analysis. The findings reveal that social media usage exacerbates mental health issues such as depression, anxiety, fear of missing out (FOMO), social and financial comparisons. The COVID-19 pandemic notably …

Learning About Gujarati: Cultural Identity And Family Language, Vritti Sodha

Florida Atlantic Undergraduate Research Journal

Language loss is a prevalent problem that is occurring in immigrant families in the United States. Since regional languages such as Gujarati are not used outside of households and community gatherings, it is not given much importance to learn. In order to combat this problem, community centers hold Gujarati classes for students of all ages to help preserve the language, but the lack of motivation to learn the language still remains. This is because a student needs to have a connection to the language to be motivated to learn it, which can be made through active learning. This study examines …