Search Results (1,156)

Knowledge management platforms are increasingly important for strengthening governance, scientific collaboration, and evidence-based decision making in complex regional networks. This study analyses the prospective intention to adopt two strategic digital mechanisms of the Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization (OCTA): the Amazon Regional Observatory (ORA) and the Network of Amazonian Research Centres (REDCIA). Adapting the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT) to a pre-implementation context, the study focuses on performance expectancy, social influence, and facilitating conditions, while operationalizing these constructs through a Knowledge, Attitudes, and Practices (KAP) survey. Using a quantitative, non-experimental, cross-sectional design, penalized ordinal logistic regression models were estimated from 162 responses collected from institutional actors and experts across eight Amazonian jurisdictions. The results show that social influence is the only statistically significant predictor of intention to use in both mechanisms, whereas performance expectancy and facilitating conditions are not significant in the estimated models. These findings suggest that, in the Amazonian cooperation context, adoption is driven less by individual evaluations of utility or technical feasibility than by institutional legitimacy, peer expectations, and collaborative norms. The study contributes to the information systems literature by providing an ex ante analytical approach for assessing technology acceptance in the absence of an operational artefact. It also offers practical guidance for OCTA by highlighting the importance of change management, political endorsement, and network-based incentives to support future implementation. Full article

This paper analyses seven project deliverables from the Interreg Euro-MED “MAST” project to examine its sustainability protocol as a sociotechnical boundary object facilitating ISO 21401:2018 adoption among Mediterranean tourism SMEs. Using Science and Technology Studies (STS) and boundary object theory, we conducted qualitative content analysis (QCA) to map how the protocol translates global standards into SME roadmaps addressing implementation costs, skill gaps, and legitimacy barriers. Results reveal a tension between managerial scripting (actionable tables and KPIs) and relational openings (peer learning and stakeholder prompts). While enabling SME access to certification, the protocol risks “smart compliance” by prioritising formal verification over substantive transformation. Universities emerge as key boundary brokers, potentially translating technical standards into entrepreneurial competencies and curricula. Limited to pre-implementation project documents, the analysis identifies discursive conditions under which standardised tools could support regenerative governance. Findings suggest university–SME partnerships as promising mechanisms for aligning certification with Mediterranean socio-ecological priorities, warranting empirical testing through SME implementation studies. Full article

Contemporary political crises have exposed the limitations of traditional political marketing instruments for building and sustaining legitimacy, particularly in contexts of widespread citizen rejection and low emotional identification with political leaders. Within platform-mediated communication environments—especially digitally mediated ecosystems such as TikTok—this article argues that a new mechanism has emerged: affective transfer as a form of mediated affective circulation. This mechanism operates when positive affect is not generated by political leaders themselves but by external, non-institutional mediators, and subsequently circulated and reinforced through platform logics of visibility, virality, and engagement. Adopting a qualitative and interpretive case study approach, the article examines how the circulation of a non-institutional humorous performance on TikTok may have contributed to processes of public acceptance for a sitting president in a context of acute institutional crisis. The findings suggest that the repeated circulation of such content stabilises recognizable affective codes and enables their symbolic association with presidential leadership, potentially facilitating indirect forms of legitimation without direct affective production by the leader. The article contributes by (1) conceptualizing affective transfer as a distinct interpretive mechanism within platformed communication environments; (2) differentiating it from charisma, populism, and traditional persuasion; and (3) demonstrating its implications for rethinking political legitimacy as a process that may be shaped by distributed affect within digitally mediated environments. Full article

This study investigates how teacher-education undergraduates in Greece use, evaluate, and trust Artificial Intelligence (AI) in higher education, with particular attention to the gap between widespread adoption and limited epistemic trust. The topic is important because generative AI is rapidly entering universities, reshaping learning practices, academic integrity, and the legitimacy of knowledge, while learners often rely on systems whose outputs are not easily verifiable. The study focuses on future teachers because they are both current users of AI in higher education and likely future mediators of its use in school settings. Addressing this problem, the study contributes empirical evidence on how AI adoption relates to epistemic authority and institutional legitimacy within teacher education rather than across university students in general. A mixed-methods design was employed using a structured questionnaire completed by 363 teacher-education undergraduates from the University of Patras and the University of Ioannina in Greece; the sample was predominantly women (86.0%) and first-year students (92.6%). Quantitative responses were analyzed statistically, open-ended answers were examined thematically, and factor analysis was used to identify latent attitudinal dimensions. The findings indicate very high AI use in everyday life (92.6%) and study practices (81.3%), but only moderate trust: 1.4% reported complete trust and 12.1% generally trusted AI-generated answers. Six dimensions explained 61.73% of total variance, pointing to a layered attitudinal structure within this teacher-education population, consistent with an adoption–trust paradox and with the need for transparent, verifiable, human-supervised educational AI. The observed verification-based trust calibration may partly reflect an emerging pedagogical orientation toward source checking and responsibility for knowledge mediation, but given the strong concentration of first-year students, this should be interpreted as characteristic of early-stage teacher education rather than of university students more broadly. Full article

The efficacy of healthcare performance evaluation systems depends on their design and implementation, as well as on their perceived value and integration into daily practice. This study explores the acceptability of a healthcare performance evaluation system, used by health and administrative professionals in four rural healthcare settings in Ethiopia, Tanzania, and Uganda, three years after its implementation. In-depth semi-structured interviews were conducted, either in person or via video conference, with 17 professionals involved in system design and implementation. The analysis of qualitative data drew on Sekhon’s Theoretical Framework of Acceptability, using content analysis to identify themes across seven dimensions of acceptability. Key findings show that participants’ perceptions of acceptability of the performance evaluation system are influenced by data disclosure and reputational effect, the system’s understandability, alignment with their mission to improve quality of care, perceived usefulness, experienced opportunity costs, and intervention burden. The key features of the performance evaluation system are the most critical factors contributing to its acceptability, but the administrative burden, which includes professionals’ need to invest more time and change work habits to use the new system, poses some challenges and may hinder the medium- to long-term effectiveness of the intervention. Full article

Human–AI systems often involve repeated interaction among users, organizations, and AI components rather than isolated model outputs. In such settings, cooperation can be pursued either by changing agent incentives or by adding an explicit accountability layer. We formalize the Institutional Monitoring and Ledger (IML) framework, which augments a Markov game with monitoring, evidence logging, delayed settlement, and review while leaving the base dynamics unchanged. We derive conservative incentive checks that clarify how detection quality, review accuracy, settlement delay, and sanction size jointly shape deterrence and wrongful-penalty risk. We then provide pilot evidence in two canonical sequential social dilemmas, Harvest and Cleanup, using five agents, PPO training, five training seeds per condition, and comparisons against PPO, inequity aversion, social influence, and IML ablations. In these settings, IML avoided some of the optimization instability observed in the representative internalization baselines tested here, made monitoring error directly visible through ledger records, and showed how false positives can accumulate into a persistent welfare cost. Agent-level analyses in these symmetric environments found nearly uniform measured enforcement burden, while temporal analyses showed that late-stage enforcement is increasingly dominated by residual false positives. These results do not establish legitimacy in human-facing settings or deployment readiness. They instead position IML as a framework with pilot evidence for studying accountability mechanisms in cooperative human–AI systems and highlight measurement error, review design, and due process as central design constraints. Full article

This study analyzes the closure, decommissioning, and abandonment (CDA) of a fuel storage and distribution facility in southern Quito, Ecuador, conceptualizing the process as a socio-technical urban transition embedded within territorial governance dynamics. While infrastructure decommissioning is commonly addressed from a predominantly technical perspective, limited research integrates reverse logistics design, stakeholder influence structures, and territorial development into a unified analytical framework, particularly in Latin American metropolitan contexts. Using a mixed-methods case study approach, the research combines documentary analysis, operational data, and 34 semi-structured interviews with public authorities, engineers, fuel marketers, business owners, and community representatives. A thematic analysis was applied to reconstruct the decommissioning logistics chain and to develop a stakeholder mapping and influence matrix assessing actor positions, economic interdependencies, and legitimacy claims. The findings show that decommissioning operates as a structured reverse logistics system embedded within asymmetric governance configurations, where economic dependency, risk perception, and urban redevelopment expectations generate competing territorial imaginaries. Technical feasibility alone proves insufficient to guide decision-making; instead, legitimacy emerges through the alignment of engineering planning, institutional coordination, and community-level expectations. The study advances an integrated socio-technical framework that articulates Engineering Management, Social Management, and Territorial Development, positioning decommissioning as a governance-driven transition rather than a purely technical operation. The results contribute to sustainability and infrastructure transition scholarship while offering practical guidance for managing urban hydrocarbon infrastructure closure in socially vulnerable territories. Full article

Attention has become a central resource of contemporary political communication, yet existing accounts do not fully explain how visibility acquires social credibility and political force under platformised conditions. This article addresses that problem through the ritual model of communication and media rituals. It develops a theory-building framework linking attention, recognition, legitimacy, and participation within a platformised ritual circuit. Methodologically, it proceeds through conceptual synthesis and illustrative analytical reconstruction rather than causal testing. It reconstructs three public episode types centred on witnessing, conflict, and commemoration, using public artefacts, trace-based evidence, platform affordances, and reporting. The analysis argues that attention-based politics is a ritualised struggle over socially recognised salience. Visibility becomes politically consequential when publicly ratified through legible participation and when recognition traces are narrativised as claims to legitimacy. The article proposes a provisional comparative vocabulary for distinguishing dominant configurations of online political media rituals across concentrated witnessing, cyclical antagonism, and prolonged commemorative alignment. It concludes that platforms do not simply amplify visibility or host participation. They organise the recurring social forms through which visibility becomes usable in legitimacy claims. Full article

Everyday public parenting encounters may influence immediate stress-relevant appraisal processes. Guided by interactionist and narcissistic self-regulation frameworks, the present study examined how recognition-based versus status-challenging norm framing in a standardized playground interaction influences young parents’ immediate responses, and whether narcissistic admiration and rivalry shape these processes. A community sample of 776 Israeli parents aged 25 to 41 was randomly assigned to view one of two ultra-realistic video vignettes depicting an identical turn-taking situation framed either in recognition-based terms that emphasized fairness, shared legitimacy, and respectful coordination, or in status-challenging terms that emphasized priority claims, non-negotiability, and implied hierarchy. Participants responded from the perspective of the focal parent (i.e., a parent from the family being spoken to in the interaction). Narcissistic admiration and rivalry were assessed using the Narcissistic Admiration and Rivalry Questionnaire. Parallel moderated mediation analyses revealed that condition was strongly associated with both perceived recognition and perceived freedom threat. These appraisals, in turn, predicted state reactance, negative affect, evaluations of the initiating parent, and behavioral preferences. Recognition-based framing indirectly reduced reactance and negative affect and increased favorable evaluations through higher perceived recognition and lower perceived freedom threat. Contrary to moderated mediation predictions, narcissistic admiration and rivalry did not moderate the indirect effects. However, narcissistic rivalry, and to a lesser extent narcissistic admiration, showed consistent direct associations with reactance-related and entitlement-oriented responding. These findings identify proximal appraisal mechanisms linking subtle norm framing in public parenting contexts to immediate affective, evaluative, and behavioral reactions. More broadly, the results highlight an immediate appraisal-based process that may inform future longitudinal and intervention-focused research on parenting stress in shared community settings. Full article

Against the policy backdrop of high-quality development and the “Dual Carbon” goals, corporate environmental responsibility and green governance have emerged as core drivers of corporate value creation and resource allocation in capital markets. However, in practice, corporate environmental disclosure has increasingly degenerated into an impression management tool. Using a sample of China’s A-share listed companies from 2011 to 2024, this paper combines text analysis of annual reports with green patent data to systematically examine the impact of performance feedback on corporate strategic environmental decoupling, drawing upon the behavioral theory of the firm and legitimacy theory. The findings are as follows: First, negative performance feedback significantly increases corporate greenwashing propensity, whereas positive performance feedback significantly strengthens corporate brownwashing behavior. Second, government regulation amplifies the costs of falsifying environmental information, significantly suppressing the positive impact of negative performance feedback on greenwashing, but exacerbating the positive impact of positive performance feedback on brownwashing. Conversely, media attention amplifies the benefits of corporate green performances, significantly strengthening the catalytic effect of negative performance feedback on greenwashing, while effectively suppressing the positive impact of positive performance feedback on brownwashing. Third, heterogeneity analysis reveals that the impact of performance feedback on corporate strategic decoupling in environmental disclosure is more pronounced among non-state-owned enterprises, firms facing high industry competitive pressure, and those in heavily polluting industries. By integrating greenwashing and brownwashing into a unified analytical framework, this study expands the research boundaries of corporate environmental disclosure and strategic behaviors. Furthermore, it deepens the application contexts of the behavioral theory of the firm within non-financial disclosure, deconstructs the myth of homogeneous governance effects under legitimacy pressure, and provides vital implications for investors, policymakers, and fund managers. Full article

Tough-on-crime policies, including mandatory minimum laws, three-strikes statutes, and habitual offender laws, have contributed to prison overcrowding and the growth of aging prison populations. As incarceration costs for prisoners increase, policymakers have increasingly considered early release policies for older incarcerated adults who pose a low risk of recidivism. This paper reviews recent trends in late-life incarceration and evaluates the policy logic and practical conditions under which early release may serve as a response to aging incarceration. Drawing on existing legal scholarship and prior research, we argue that early release of aging inmates likely represents a feasible and cost-effective strategy for addressing prison overcrowding without compromising public safety. The analysis further identifies the legal, institutional, and policy conditions under which early release programs for older prisoners are most likely to gain legitimacy and political support. By situating aging-related release within broader debates on punishment, proportionality, and public safety, this study contributes to ongoing discussions of sustainable and normatively grounded responses to mass incarceration. Full article

While national agencies increasingly adopt ‘sustainable’ rhetoric, their policies frequently prioritize bureaucratic legitimacy over local landscape realities. This research examines how Thailand’s development policies shape water and spatial governance in riverine landscapes, focusing on Chiang Mai Province and the Phaya-Kham irrigation system. Despite ambitious sustainable development objectives, implementation is marked by institutional silos, overlapping mandates, and scalar misalignments, resulting in fragmented governance that favors short-term economic gains over long-term ecological health. These dynamics undermine water resource management and exacerbate socio-ecological inequalities. Drawing on archival reviews, policy analysis, mapping, and interviews, the study employs political ecology perspectives and David Mosse’s framework of policy performance to investigate the disjuncture between policy intentions and on-the-ground realities. The Phaya-Kham system illustrates how modernization pressures, urban expansion, and agricultural intensification destabilize community-based water governance. Findings underscore that governance challenges in Chiang Mai are fundamentally political, rooted in struggles over authority and resource control rather than technical shortcomings. Sustainability-oriented policy frameworks may reproduce socio-ecological degradation. Achieving fairer water and landscape governance requires confronting these dynamics, integrating local knowledge, and fostering inter-agency cooperation. By recognizing context-based hydrosocial territories, policies can move toward more socio-environmentally healthy frameworks supporting local riverine communities and landscape realities. Full article

Green Total Factor Productivity (GTFP) serves as a pivotal indicator for balancing high-quality economic growth with increasingly stringent environmental regulations. However, empirical evidence regarding whether and how firm-level GTFP is associated with enhanced Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) performance in emerging markets remains limited. This study addresses this gap by examining the GTFP–ESG nexus within the macro-context of China’s “Dual-Carbon” goals (aiming for peak carbon emissions by 2030 and carbon neutrality by 2060). Utilizing an unbalanced panel dataset of Chinese A-share listed companies strictly covering the period from 2011 to 2022 (with 2010 data exclusively used for one-period lagged variables), we construct firm-level GTFP metrics using a non-radial SBM-DDF global Malmquist–Luenberger index—incorporating both desirable economic outputs and undesirable environmental emissions—and link them with Huazheng ESG ratings. To ensure robust empirical identification, we employ two-way fixed-effects models with lagged variables, propensity score matching (PSM), and an instrumental variable two-stage least squares (IV-2SLS) approach utilizing the leave-one-out provincial average GTFP as an instrument. The results indicate a significant positive association between GTFP and overall ESG performance, as well as its three sub-pillars. Specifically, a one-standard-deviation increase in GTFP corresponds to a 0.15-standard-deviation increase in the ESG score, a marginal effect of profound economic significance, providing robust associational insights via the IV estimates. Mechanism analyses reframe traditional mediation as descriptive associational pathways, revealing that digital transformation, green innovation, and information transparency serve as significant channels, theoretically demonstrating how resource efficiency translates into social legitimacy. Heterogeneity tests show that this association is more pronounced for non-state-owned enterprises, firms in eastern China, and those with lower financing constraints. These findings unpack the “black box” between technical efficiency and sustainability, providing empirical support for policymakers to align corporate productivity with international disclosure standards (such as the EU’s CSRD). Full article

Background: Oral cavity cancer remains a major public health challenge because many cases are diagnosed at advanced stages, when treatment is more complex and outcomes are poorer. Although oral cancer screening involves a simple, non-invasive examination, its implementation remains inconsistent across settings. This review examines barriers to oral cancer screening through a biosocial lens, with attention being paid to clinical, social, and policy factors shaping access. Materials and Methods: This study was conducted as a structured narrative review of peer-reviewed literature and policy documents. Targeted searches of PubMed and Google Scholar were taken from database from 2000 to May 2024 using MeSH terms and free-text terms related to oral cancer screening, disparities, social determinants, access, guidelines, and policy. Eligible sources included English-language studies and guidance documents addressing oral cancer screening practices, barriers, disparities, or recommendations. Findings were synthesized thematically and interpreted using a biosocial framework informed by social medicine theory. Results: The review finds that oral cancer screening is limited by variation in guideline recommendations, uneven integration across healthcare settings, and persistent disparities in access among high-risk populations. Patients with the greatest burden of risk often face the greatest barriers to early detection because of structural disadvantage, fragmented service delivery, and weak policy support. The literature also suggests that narrow evidentiary standards and cost-effectiveness debates may limit the legitimacy and uptake of screening initiatives. Conclusions: This review does not propose a wholly new model of screening; rather, it offers a biosocial interpretation of existing evidence to explain why screening inequities persist. More equitable oral cancer screening will require not only clinical attention to high-risk populations but also reforms in guideline development, service organization, and health policy to better address structural barriers to access. Full article

Against the backdrop of climate change and rapid urbanization, urban water resource management faces increasing complexity. Based on the OECD’s Twelve Principles of Water Governance, this paper aims to clarify the interaction relationships and relative priorities among dimensions and indicators, providing a structured basis for decision-making in urban water governance. The DANP method is applied to construct an analytical framework encompassing three major dimensions: effectiveness, efficiency, and trust and participation, together with twelve indicators. This study moves the OECD framework from a static structure toward a causal network. By identifying causal relationships and calculating local and global weights, the analysis reveals the driving structure and evaluation focus of governance elements. The results indicate that, from a causal perspective, efficiency (D₂) and effectiveness (D₁) are the primary driving dimensions of the governance system, while trust and participation (D₃) is primarily an outcome dimension. Weight analysis reveals that trust and participation have the highest weight, at 35.28%, reflecting the strong emphasis placed on transparency, public participation, and accountability in urban water governance evaluations. At the indicator level, Monitoring and Evaluation (C₁₂) ranks highest with a global weight of 9.44%. Overall, the study offers theoretical and practical insights for coordinating institutional efficiency and governance legitimacy in climate adaptation contexts. Full article