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Mathematics education in the twenty-first century faces new challenges that necessitate updates to mathematics curricula. This chapter analyses the updates made to Hong Kong’s mathematics curriculum in 2017 by using the curricular spider web (van den Akker, 2003), which consists of 10 curriculum components, namely the rationale behind the curriculum, aims and objectives, content, learning activities, teacher role, materials and resources, grouping, location, time, and assessment. The findings of this analysis suggest that Hong Kong’s mathematics curriculum has been developed in line with the changing trends of international mathematics curricula, which are influenced by globalisation and internationalisation. Future research could compare the mathematics curriculum in Hong Kong with those in other parts of the world.

This study investigates the effect of honesty reminders on budgetary slack. Based on self-concept maintenance theory, the authors posit that honesty reminders can reduce budgetary slack by making people more aware of their own standards of honesty, resulting in more honest behavior. Using an experimental research design, the authors find evidence that honesty reminders reduce budgetary slack. The authors also find that although penalties can similarly reduce budgetary slack, they tend to cause distrust and resentment from subordinates. Therefore, honesty reminders may be a less costly method than penalties for reducing budgetary slack.

Published studies of the relationships between personality, affect, and organizational change have been overwhelmingly quantitative, while clinical and psychodynamic approaches have seldom dealt with the context of organizational change. We used semistructured interviews to explore the “middle ground”, by researching how participants in change believed aspects of their personalities contributed to their responses, particularly on an affective level. We found that traits such as openness to experience, resilience, pragmatism, change self-efficacy, and locus of control influenced participants' perceptions of how they reacted to organizational change. The findings point to the important role that qualitative research into personality can play in improving understanding of emotional responses to organizational change.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of board diversity on the extent to which firms invest in R & D.

Based on data collected about the composition of the board of directors, the authors determine statistically if the characteristics of directors predicts the extent to which firms invest more in R & D.

The authors find, unexpectedly, that tenure diversity lead firms to invest less in R & D, while education diversity and gender diversity makes firms invest more. Gender diversity positively moderates education diversity as well, strengthening the effect found.

The sample of firms the authors include in the paper is restricted due to the overwhelming difficulty in collecting data about the composition of boards of directors, and their backgrounds.

The paper offers insights into how boards of directors might need to be composed in order to try have firms invest more in R & D.

Innovative firms are more competitive and more sustainable. Knowing what contributes to a firm’s investment in R & D is thus of great social value.

The authors include a much larger set of diversity measures than any previously published study, and provide counter-intuitive findings that have implications for practice, society, as well as theory about team composition.

Just as a rotten apple makes other apples around it begin to decay, so too can people influence others within their vicinity, particularly in terms of destructive emotions and behaviors. Trevino and Youngblood (1990) adopted the term ‘bad apples’ to describe individuals who engage in unethical behaviors and who also influence others to behave in a similar manner. In this chapter, the ‘bad apple’ metaphor is adopted to describe the employee whose actions and interactions create and maintain destructive faultlines and unethical exclusion behaviors that negatively impact the emotional well-being and effective and ethical performance of the team. In particular, the chapter examines the way in which ‘bad apples’ use destructive emotion management skills through the manipulation of emotional levers of others, what motivates them to do so and the implications it may have on management.

The purpose of this paper is to explore relationships among the university students’ educational variables and their educational variables concerning educational, cultural and social dimensions.

A questionnaire was developed and validated for analyzing the relationship between the amount of time spent for using social networks and different dimensions of educational quality. The sample participants in this study included 400 students who were selected from a total of 3,500 students in Eastern and Western Azerbaijan provinces at north-west of Iran in 2017. Finally, 342 of 400 questionnaires were considered for analyzing. The Pearson and Spearman correlation coefficients and multiple regression were used to analyze data.

The results proved that the highest correlation coefficient was related to social networks and education quality and the lowest correlation was related to social networks and cultural quality. The result of applying multiple regression proved that there is a linear relationship between the roles of using social networks in predicting students’ educational quality.

The role of academic and general social media in studying students’ educational quality at universities is still under researched. This situation provides a significant potential to explore on the effect of academic and general virtual social media in creating educational and cultural awareness among university’s students. The findings of the current study add to the existing literature by contributing to a better awareness of university student and applying appropriate strategies to conduct the education of students.

Leafy vegetables may get contaminated with pathogens through the use of irrigation water during open field cultivation. The main control option to prevent this contamination is the use of disinfection technologies that will reduce the pathogenic load of the irrigation water. Several technologies, either chemical or physical, are available for disinfection, which were gathered from the literature and European Union (EU) projects. The purpose of this paper is to prioritise these technologies.

A feasibility study was performed to identify the most promising disinfection technology considering 12 different criteria. A two-tier approach was used in which the technologies were first evaluated based on three criteria: legal status, effectiveness and technology readiness level (TRL). Only the technologies that reached pre-set thresholds for these three criteria were then evaluated in the second tier.

The evaluation showed that the most promising technologies after the tier-2 evaluation were ultrasound, microfiltration, ultraviolet and ozone. The study showed that the followed approach enabled prioritising disinfection technologies allowing for selecting the most promising technologies that can be tested further on a possible application during primary production to prevent possible food safety issues in leafy vegetables.

The overview is not an exhaustive list of disinfection technologies available rather only those technologies that seemed promising for application in horticulture were addressed. Some technologies may, thus, have been missed. Nevertheless, a total of 12 single and seven combined technologies were evaluated.

This is the first study that uses a structured approach to prioritise a broad range of possible water disinfection technologies for use at primary production.

I think it would be fair to say that explaining the geography of multinational enterprise (MNE) activity has never been a major part of Alan Rugman's scholarly research and writings. Nevertheless, over the last 25 years, he has provided us with several useful nuggets of understanding and empirical evidence about the territorial expansion of firms, and its impact on their global competitiveness.