Digital Commons Network^™

Words And Places That Shape Behavior, Nicole J. Olynk Widmar,, Michael L. Smith, Erin Robinson

Purdue University Press Books

Words and Places That Shape Behavior, the sixth installment in the Consumer Corner series, brings the concept of place to the forefront, connecting what people say to where they actually go. By combining insights from online and social media conversations with real-world foot traffic data, the book reveals how consumers’ stated preferences align with—or diverge from—their actions..

From the rhythms of back-to-school shopping and childcare to the draw of state fairs, lakes, and local landmarks, this book explores how everyday choices shape the places where people gather and spend their time. It examines seasonal shopping and dining trends, what …

A Qualitative Content Analysis Of The Personal Branding Practices Of Forbes 30 Under 30 Honorees, Hannah Naylor Regitz

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

This qualitative study examines the personal branding practices of 10 honorees from the Forbes 2025 North American 30 Under 30 list. Through a thematic content analysis of Instagram, the honorees’ posts, captions, and the conversation climate of their comments from October 2025 were analyzed to determine patterns and similarities in their personal branding practices. Grounded in cultivation theory, this study explored how repeated exposure to curated content of these high-achieving young professionals shapes their personal brand perception. Additionally, it explored their interaction with commenters and the types of comments they engaged with. The analysis revealed seven themes that were present …

Interpreting Visibility: Leadership And Employee Perspectives On Performance, Trust, And Commitment In Hierarchical Organizations, Joshua A. Hart

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

The purpose of this qualitative multiple-case study was to examine how leaders and employees interpreted workplace visibility and presence within hierarchical organizations. The researcher conducted semistructured interviews with 30 participants, including 15 leaders and 15 employees, across nongovernmental, civilian government, and military cases. The researcher organized 43 codes into seven themes. Participants described workplace visibility as selective access to employee activity rather than complete evidence of performance, commitment, reliability, motivation, or engagement. They described attendance, responsiveness, communication, and visible output as more perceptible aspects of work, while preparation, technical reasoning, informal coordination, and internal experience were less apparent. Participants depicted …

Modelling The Financial Viability Of Offshore Aquaculture Using A Case Study Of A Sea Bass Farm In The Bay Of Lion, France, Jeremy Van Dyken, Houshang Habibniya, Suzan Dsouza, Tyler Sclodnick

Journal of Ocean and Coastal Economics

The extension of net pen aquaculture to open ocean sites provides many advantages to the industry including opportunity for expansion, utilization of high energy sites, and better resilience to certain near shore or surface-associated stressors. The industry has been slow to develop due to high perceived risks and a lack of operating farms to provide financial information for open ocean farm operations. A model was developed to evaluate the economic viability of a hypothetical sea bass aquaculture venture in the open French Mediterranean Sea that utilizes open ocean submersible farming systems. Advanced open ocean equipment, including submersible net pens, environmental …

The Digital Responsibility Index: Quantifying Perceived Multi-Layered Responsibility In Cybersecurity, Mircea Ţălu

Journal of Cybersecurity Education, Research and Practice

In the evolving digital landscape, cybersecurity responsibility extends beyond technical safeguards to include individual behavior, organizational governance, and societal impact. This study introduces the Digital Responsibility Index (DRI), a novel metric that quantifies multi-layered accountability across four domains: technical, individual, organizational, and societal. Data were collected through scenario-based Likert-scale surveys with 120 cybersecurity professionals, supplemented by semi-structured interviews with senior leaders. Results reveal that while technical and organizational responsibilities are consistently prioritized, individual and societal accountability remain under-recognized. Leadership engagement significantly enhances responsibility scores across all layers. The proposed DRI framework provides a measurable and potentially actionable basis for assessing …

Ai-Generated Phishing Attacks: Emerging Threats And Detection Strategies For Security Operations Centers, Bahzad Khalid

Journal of Cybersecurity Education, Research and Practice

Artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming cybersecurity by strengthening defensive capabilities while simultaneously enabling more sophisticated phishing attacks. AI generated phishing emails increasingly evade traditional detection methods through improved grammar, contextual relevance and realistic communication styles creating significant challenges for Security Operations Centers (SOCs). This study investigates the effectiveness of current email security systems in detecting AI generated phishing emails compared with traditional phishing emails. A mixed method experimental approach was employed using controlled Gmail and Outlook environments to evaluate the detection and classification of multiple phishing scenarios. The results demonstrate that several AI generated phishing emails successfully bypassed initial security …

Muscle Shoals: A Plan For The Use Of The United States Properties On The Tennessee Power By Private Industry For Of "The Manufacture Of Fertilizers And Other Useful Products", Muscle Shoals Commission, United States Government Printing Office Washington: 1931

Documents

A plan created by the Muscle Shoals commission for instituting a series of fertilizer production operations in the Tennessee Valley area. In addition to written analysis, the document contains multiple images, illustrations, charts, graphs, and maps of the area to illustrate the reasoning of the plan.

Although the plan was never fully brought to fruition, it represents a crucial piece of agricultural and infrastructural history in the Shoals, Alabama alongside existent history on the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) and the development of the nitrate plants.

A Narrative-Driven, Socratic Instructional Framework For Teaching Adversarial Cognition In Cybersecurity, Joshua K. Goossen

Journal of Cybersecurity Education, Research and Practice

The Socratic method has demonstrated, in studies across law, medicine, and nursing, that dialectic structured questioning improves expert reasoning. Cybersecurity currently teaches tools and techniques but lacks Socratic dialogic leaving graduates underprepared for novel scenarios requiring cross-domain reasoning. Because law, medicine and nursing cultivate similar reasoning as security there is principled reason to expect reasoning benefits could transfer to security students. This paper argues that the correspondence warrants investigation. Investigation requires a named, teachable reasoning target analogous to clinical reasoning and we specify that target as adversarial cognition, a framework integrating adversary features, system architecture, implementation logic, governance structure, human …

Brand Gravity And Instant Adoption: Consumer Visitation, Loyalty, And Trip Chaining Following The Entry Of A New National Coffee Chain, Mark J. Sciuchetti Jr., Jianping Huang

Atlantic Marketing Journal

This study examines how consumers adopt a strong national brand immediately after its entry into a small regional market. Using anonymized mobile location data from the first twenty-nine weeks of a new Starbucks location in Anniston, Alabama, the analysis evaluates weekly visitation, repeat behavior, visitor origin distance, trip chaining, and temporal demand. The store opened above its subsequent steady state, indicating activation of preexisting demand rather than a gradual diffusion process. Repeat visitors generated 82.6% of visits within the observation window, showing rapid movement from trial to habitual use. The entrant also exhibited a flatter distance decay gradient than adjacent …

Complementary Global–Local Feature Fusion And Ensemble Refinement For Facial-Expression Recognition On Fer2013, H. M. Shahzad, Hassan A. Ahmed

Business Faculty Publications

Facial-expression recognition (FER) on FER2013 remains challenging because of low-resolution images, class imbalance, and label ambiguity. This study presents a global–local feature-fusion framework that integrates complementary representations with validation-based ensemble refinement. A frozen DINOv2 ViT-Base captures global facial semantics, while EfficientNetB3 extracts complementary local texture features. Their fused representation is used for seven-class facial-expression classification. The classification head is first trained with targeted feature-space SMOTE, and the EfficientNetB3 branch is then partially fine-tuned. Five-view test-time augmentation (TTA) is further incorporated at inference, together with an independently trained ConvNeXt-Tiny branch to provide additional architectural diversity. Ensemble weights are selected using a …

Designing For Who Actually Shows Up: A Signal Framework For Online Adult Learners In Cybersecurity And Information Technology, Chad Whistle, Mayyada Al-Hammoshi

Journal of Cybersecurity Education, Research and Practice

Online adult learners pursuing cybersecurity and information technology credentials represent one of the fastest-growing student populations in American higher education, yet the frameworks institutions use to support their success were not designed for them. This population, disproportionately drawn from the 41.9 million Americans who hold some college credit but no credential, arrives workforce-embedded, time-constrained, and skeptical of institutional systems that previously failed to serve them. Existing persistence models grounded in traditional student integration theory inadequately account for the behavioral patterns, motivational structures, and credential expectations that define this learner. This paper proposes the SIGNAL Framework (Skills-based credential architecture, Integrated AI-informed …

Determining The Optimal Ratio Of Foreign Currency In Commercial Banks: An Analytical Study Of Exchange Rates, Abbas Ebd Al-Khudair Al-Shalan

Muthanna Journal of Administrative and Economics Sciences

The research aimed to help commercial banks avoid losses resulting from currency differences between the Iraqi Dinar and the US Dollar in their banking transactions and to estimate the optimal ratio for dealing in dollars. The research proved the impact of exchange rate fluctuations on local inflation rates and demonstrated the possibility of determining the optimal ratio for commercial banks' transactions in foreign currency, which avoids currency difference losses in their commitments and investments, as well as liquidity reduction risks. The research was conducted on a set of data on exchange rate fluctuations and inflation rates during the period (2005-2024). …

Human Capital Quality, Innovation And Economic Growth In Emerging Economies, Sajjad Karim Al-Juthaier

Muthanna Journal of Administrative and Economics Sciences

Objective: This study aims to uncover the long-term relationship and dynamics between local innovation, economic growth, and human capital quality in emerging markets and developing economies.
Methodology: The study employed Panel Distributed Lag Autoregressive (ARDL) and Nonlinear Autoregressive (NARDL) model frameworks for data analysis. The Human Capital Quality Index (HCQI) was developed over time (from 2015 to the present) for 52 countries, demonstrating a long-term and short-term asymmetric cointegration relationship between these data, exhibiting both symmetrical and asymmetrical patterns across different periods and within their respective sample intervals.
Results: The results revealed explanatory threshold effects, indicating that the optimization benefits …

The Importance Of A Gay Or Lesbian Community When Job Seeking – Psychological And Demographic Factors, Mark X. James, Zhimin Hu

Journal of Business, Industry, and Economics

In this study, sexual orientation disclosure, impression management, neuroticism, education, and age are statistically significant predictors of the importance of a gay and lesbian community when seeking a job in a new city. Internal locus of control was not a statistically significant predictor of the importance of a gay and lesbian community when seeking a job in a new city. This research potentially offers insights into other minority or stigmatized groups, suggesting that when those individuals are seeking jobs in a new city, a supportive community may be an important decision factor. From a human resource perspective, diversity and a …

Beyond Forecast Accuracy: A Responsible Ai Framework For Provenance-Aware Fine Jewelry Retail Planning, Katayoun Kiarsi, James Hutson

Faculty Scholarship

Fine jewelry retailers must reconcile uncertain demand, high-value inventory, complex material histories, and expectations of responsible sourcing. This article develops a responsible artificial intelligence framework that connects demand forecasting, provenance evidence, and governance within retail planning. A conceptual framework-development approach informed by design-science research combines a targeted literature update through October 9, 2026, with descriptive analysis of published market statistics and an external retail forecasting benchmark. The analysis distinguishes original design propositions from empirical findings reported by other researchers; no retailer-level experiment or environmental impact assessment was conducted. Three sourced bar charts illustrate changing gold jewelry consumption and the methodological …

Building Motivation Through A Christian-Based Vocational Sports Academy, Elasha E. Naylor-Cooper

Doctor of Strategic Leadership (DSL) Capstone Abstracts

Project Type: Business Proposal Capstone

Project Overview: CTA Academy - Christian Technology and Athletics Academy - is a proposed private Christian school designed to provide 6-12 grade students with an alternative educational pathway that integrates academic achievement, Christian formation, career preparation, athletics, wellness, and leadership development. The project responds to concerns surrounding student engagement, motivation, academic performance, limited access to affordable private education, and the separation of academic, vocational, spiritual, and athletic development within traditional educational models. CTA Academy proposes a diversified funding model, including scholarship-supported funds, college and business partnerships, donors, sponsors, and fundraisers. This model seeks to make …

George C. Roberts Award Recipients

Midwest Social Sciences Journal

No abstract provided.

The Survival Of Sugar In Post-Emancipation British Guiana: East Indian Indentured Immigration And The Cheapening Of Labor, Wazir Mohamed

Midwest Social Sciences Journal

This Paper revisits the post-emancipation changes in the labor market of British Guiana. British Guiana, Mauritius, Trinidad and Tobago, Fiji, and several other locations were spaces where East Indian Indentured Immigrants from Idia became pivotal in the economy.[1] In the decade after emancipation (1838-1848), the rise of global free trade in sugar spurred by the equalization of duties in sugar factored in the search for a cheaper and the importation of a more pliable labor force to keep the wheels of sugar turning in British Guiana. With this background in mind this paper focuses on indentured immigration of East …

Leadership Dynamics, Transparency, & Governance During Crisis In Religious Organizations: Discussing The Roman Catholic Church’S Centralized Authority, John D. Rudnick Jr, Raymond L. Enzweiler, Srecko Koralija

Interdisciplinary Journal of Leadership Studies

Abstract
This article considers two high-profile crises inside the Roman Catholic Church. The rejection of the Vatican audit in 2015 and the financial loss from a large investment in London real estate exemplify tension and balance between centralized, hierarchical leadership and institutional accountability. These cases examine leadership patterns relative to transparency, communication, and governance, evaluating the efficacy of centralized power under financial distress. The discussion is organized across pre-crisis, active crisis, and post-crisis phases by integrating insights from transactional, transformational, servant, and adaptive leadership style models. Performance improvement (PI) tools such as Before Action Reviews (BARs), After Action Reviews (AARs), …

Eating Disorders & Meat Consumption: A Meta-Analytic Review, Urska Dobersek, Laurel Standiford-Reyes, Tyler Robinson, Alex Antony Edwin, Sarah Siebers

Midwest Social Sciences Journal

In this meta-analytic review, we examined the current evidence on eating disorders in relation to meat consumption and meat abstention. We systematically searched six online databases in December 2025 for primary research on eating disorder-related variables in meat consumers and meat abstainers. Fifty-one studies with 55,984 participants (n_{meat consumers} = 44,282, n_{meat abstainers} = 9,751) met the inclusion/exclusion criteria. The outcomes were eating disorders and orthorexia nervosa. Meat consumption was associated with lower eating disorder (g = 0.20, 95% CI [0.08, 0.32], p = .001) and orthorexia nervosa symptomology (g = 0.47, 95% CI [0.33, …

Risk Management In Financial Intermediaries (Assignment), Jyothsna G. Harithsa Ph.D.

School of Business

This assignment was developed by SUNY Geneseo Professor Jyothsna G. Harithsa for the fall 2026 semester.

Learning Objectives

• Students will strengthen their knowledge in accounting and finance topics, based on what they learn in the classroom.
• Students will learn how to use data analysis tools, learn to work with large amounts of data, be exposed to data extraction and data enhancement techniques, and will apply intuition to explain results.
• In alignment with NACE competencies, students will sharpen their intuitive reasoning skills, exhibit professional behavior, learn the tools and techniques that could help them in the workplace (using Excel, report writing, …

Data Storytelling Team Project, Byeong-Hak Choe Ph.D.

School of Business

This team project was developed by SUNY Geneseo Professor Byeong-Hak Choe for the fall 2026 semester.

Learning Objectives

• Develop a focused and researchable question that can be answered with data.
• Import, clean, filter, summarize, and reshape data in ways that support a clear analytical purpose.
• Use descriptive statistics and visualizations to identify patterns, trends, comparisons, or anomalies.
• Create a coherent data story that connects the question, evidence, and takeaways for an audience.
• Design readable, visually effective slides using color-blind-friendly figures and clear annotations.
• Work productively as a team by dividing tasks, coordinating decisions, and contributing equitably.
• Deliver a concise professional …

Scalable Growth In High-Contact, On-Site Service Firms: Ambidextrous Competitive Logics And A Dual-Governance Mechanism Of Replication Quality, Wei Han

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

This dissertation examines how high-contact, on-site service firms scale up. The central challenge is the stable reproduction of a recognizable service template across dispersed branches under customer heterogeneity, frontline discretion, relationship continuity, and local capacity pressure. Replication quality is defined as the branch-level stability of the service promise, execution rhythm, and exception-handling logic. It is measured directly through retention outcomes and service-failure outcomes, which capture continued acceptance of the service promise and visible breakdowns in service delivery.

The theoretical argument centers on two ambidextrous competitive logics. Local responsiveness requires branches to adapt service timing, provider matching, communication, and recovery work …

Spend-Down To Scale Up: Limited-Life Giving In The Climate Crisis, Madeleine C. Mckinnon, Samuel Rogers, David Gunsberg, Emma Mcintosh

The Foundation Review

This article shares first-hand experiences of a charitable foundation operating under a spend-down model, illustrating how a fixed time horizon shapes philanthropic and programmatic behavior. The authors discuss three conditions that a spend-down horizon reliably forces: the imperative to fund quickly, collaboratively, and boldly on shared goals; the discipline to concentrate capital with strategic focus; and the emphasis on learning and collaboration as both a means to optimize for impact now and to sustain and scale impact over the long term.

Authors explore the influence of these conditions in a series of case studies working towards a clean energy transition …

From Innovation To Impact: Evaluation Of The Shape Accelerator Cohort, Iryna V. Lendel, Chloe Wieber

Upjohn Institute Technical Reports

The Solutions Hub for an Alternative Packaging Ecosystem (SHAPE), a Michigan-Ohio partnership operated by the Michigan State University Research Foundation as part of a National Science Foundation Regional Innovation Engine, co-funded a special cohort of the NextCycle Accelerator focused on sustainable packaging and circular economy ventures. This report evaluates how the accelerator contributed to firm-level advancement and ecosystem-level change, drawing on program data and interviews with participating companies, program facilitators, stakeholders, and SHAPE management.  Participants most consistently credited coaching, network connections, and the Pitch Showcase with meaningfully impacting their business trajectory, gaining market traction, advancing technology readiness, and gaining access …

Service Robots With Low Anthropomorphism In Restaurants: Consumer Reactions And Implications, Ferhat Eren, Volkan Genc

Journal of Global Hospitality and Tourism

This study investigates consumer responses to low-anthropomorphic service robots in restaurant front of-house roles using the AIDUA (Artificially Intelligent Device Use Acceptance). Data from 1,268  participants were analysed using PLS-SEM. The results revealed that social impact and  anthropomorphism significantly influenced both performance and effort expectancy, while hedonic  motivation influenced only performance expectancy. Performance expectancy strongly influenced  emotions, which in turn significantly influenced both the willingness to use service robots and objections  to their use. However, effort expectancy did not significantly influence emotions. The findings validate the  AIDUA model in this context and offer practical insights for robot design and implementation.

Cultural Humility In The Workplace: A Causal-Comparative Study Of Foreign And Local Hire Employees In International Education, Natalie A. Ortiz

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Cultural humility is recognized as a framework for fostering respectful relationships in culturally diverse workplaces. However, limited research has examined cultural humility within international education in regard to workplace dynamics and power imbalances that may exist between foreign and local hire educators. The purpose of this quantitative causal-comparative study was to examine differences in perceived cultural humility levels between foreign and local hire employees in PreK-12^th grade private international schools in Central Asia and Eastern Europe. The study also examined whether years of international educational experience and the number of international educational assignments influenced perceived cultural humility levels. Data …

The Role Of Hardiness On Leadership In Big-Box Retail Managers, Cari Alvarez

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Retail managers face constant customer demands, unpredictable staffing, and high-pressure performance expectations, yet little research has examined how these leaders sustain effectiveness under such conditions. This qualitative descriptive study explored how big-box retail managers in the United States described their development and use of hardiness across the constructs of control, commitment, and challenge to lead in a complex retail environment, an area not previously examined in the literature. Hardiness theory served as the theoretical framework for the study. Data were collected through 12 semistructured interviews with retail managers and an online questionnaire completed by 45 qualifying respondents. Interview data were …

Bridging The Intention-Behavior Gap In Adopting Zero-Waste Grocery Retail Store, Elizabeth Jacob, Salil Sahadevan

Asia Marketing Journal

Growing interest in sustainability within marketing has renewed attention to zero-waste retail, yet it remains largely niche. This study investigates the challenges limiting zero-waste retail adoption and explores consumer expectations through key stakeholder interviews and a large-scale consumer survey in India. Building on earlier work that focused primarily on individual barriers, it incorporates structural factors and the interconnected nature of these obstacles. Adoption of zero-waste shopping practices is constrained by emotional labor, cognitive overload, and systemic friction. Cultural norms favoring convenience and hygiene reinforce disposability, and the lack of conventional packaging creates logistical hurdles. In this connection, the study identifies …

Bright Shadows, Fresh Appeal: How Shadow Brightness Shapes Perceptions Of Fresh Products, Jonghee Kum, Hyewon Cho, Hyejin Lee

Asia Marketing Journal

This study examines how shadow brightness (light vs. dark) influences consumer responses to fresh products across four studies. Studies 1a and 1b demonstrate that consumers evaluate fresh products with light shadows more favorably compared to those with dark shadows. Study 2 identifies the underlying mechanism, showing that light shadows increase perceived wholesomeness, which positively affects consumer responses. Study 3 tests a boundary condition, revealing that the positive impact of light (vs. dark) shadows is pronounced for uncooked products but reduced for cooked products. These findings contribute to a better understanding of the influential role of visual elements in shaping consumer …