Blockchain-Empowered Halal Fashion Traceability System in Indonesia

Incorporating blockchain into Halal traceability systems is developing in nature; the research aspires to examine the participation intent in blockchain-empowered Halal fashion traceability (BHFT) system via a joint framework that includes diffusion of innovation theory, institutional theory, and Halal-oriented approach. The study uses a simple random sampling method to collect the data from 165 Indonesian Halal fashion manufacturing companies. PLS-SEM is employed to examine the conceptual framework. Findings show that Halal-oriented approach significantly affects institutional pressures, while institutional pressures significantly affects perceived desirability, and perceived desirability significantly affects the participation intent. The companies operating an inclusive Halal-oriented approach will be more aware of the institutional pressures that expect them to partake in a BHFT. The paper enhances the existing literature in Halal supply chains, blockchain, operation management, and information systems via a cohesive framework and empirical insight.

Analysing Plant Representation in Children’s Literature: The Phyto-Analysis Map

Recent biological research (Trewavas, 2003; Mancuso & Viola, 2013; Gagliano, 2018) has (re)demonstrated the variety and complexity of the adaptive behaviour of plants. In parallel with these findings, and in acknowledgement of the important role played by plants in the biosphere and climate of the planet, the representation of plants in philosophy, arts and literature has become an object of study within the environmental humanities. In response to the rapidly developing field of critical plant studies, the representation of plants in literatures for children and young adults are now accumulating. Even as the number of studies is increasing, there is as yet no cohesive framework for the analysis of plant representation in children’s literature. This article addresses this gap. Inspired by the Nature-in-Culture Matrix, an analytical figure that provides an overarching schema for ecocritical analysis of children’s texts and cultures (see Goga et al., 2018), this article presents an analytical framework for plant-oriented analysis, the Phyto-Analysis Map. This map has been developed with reference to central concepts from the field of critical plant studies, and its usefulness is elucidated through literary examples. Developed with children’s fiction in mind, the map also has potential application with children’s non-fiction, which often employs fictional textual techniques.

CONSUMERS’ RESPONSE TO REALLY NEW PRODUCTS: A COHESIVE SYNTHESIS OF CURRENT RESEARCH AND FUTURE RESEARCH DIRECTIONS

The past decades have witnessed an abundance of research on how consumers learn about, evaluate, and adopt really new products (RNPs)—products that are hard to define using existing product categories and require behavioural changes. Yet, every year, RNPs fail to garner consumer enthusiasm despite promising interesting new features and benefits. The goal of this research is to synthesise extant RNP knowledge with a focus on consumer behaviour and identify future research opportunities. To that end, we screened 587 papers published in marketing journals related to new products and focused on all those that specifically examine consumers’ reaction to new products (53 core papers). We build their findings into a cohesive framework illuminating how consumers learn about RNPs and evaluate their novel benefits considering the uncertainty surrounding these benefits. We also derive recommendations for managers to communicate the utility of a RNP more effectively. We conclude by identifying under-researched aspects and offering suggestions for future research.

The prediction-error hypothesis of schizophrenia: new data point to circuit-specific changes in dopamine activity

Schizophrenia is a severe psychiatric disorder affecting 21 million people worldwide. People with schizophrenia suffer from symptoms including psychosis and delusions, apathy, anhedonia, and cognitive deficits. Strikingly, schizophrenia is characterised by a learning paradox involving difficulties learning from rewarding events, whilst simultaneously ‘overlearning’ about irrelevant or neutral information. While dysfunction in dopaminergic signalling has long been linked to the pathophysiology of schizophrenia, a cohesive framework that accounts for this learning paradox remains elusive. Recently, there has been an explosion of new research investigating how dopamine contributes to reinforcement learning, which illustrates that midbrain dopamine contributes in complex ways to reinforcement learning, not previously envisioned. This new data brings new possibilities for how dopamine signalling contributes to the symptomatology of schizophrenia. Building on recent work, we present a new neural framework for how we might envision specific dopamine circuits contributing to this learning paradox in schizophrenia in the context of models of reinforcement learning. Further, we discuss avenues of preclinical research with the use of cutting-edge neuroscience techniques where aspects of this model may be tested. Ultimately, it is hoped that this review will spur to action more research utilising specific reinforcement learning paradigms in preclinical models of schizophrenia, to reconcile seemingly disparate symptomatology and develop more efficient therapeutics.

A Decolonial Theory of Religion: Race, Coloniality, and Secularity in the Americas

This article offers a transatlantic, decolonial theory (or method for the study) of religion by insisting on the need to resituate the Americas and the transatlantic historical experience as primary sites for theorizing modern religion. Despite the surging interest in decolonial theory, its concrete connection with key topics and issues in the field of religious studies has not been systematically theorized, while decolonial theorists working outside the field of religious studies show little or no interest in the formative role of religion in the constitution of the system of modernity/coloniality. This article seeks to build a cohesive framework for a decolonial theory of religion in conversation with various decolonial, anti-racist thinkers writing from Latin American, Caribbean, and US contexts. By pointing at secularity as a key element of modernity/coloniality, the medium through which religion enacts coloniality, it raises critical questions regarding method and theory in the study of Latin American/Caribbean religions.

On Formalizing Theoretical Expectations: Bayesian Testing of Central Structures in Psychological Networks

Network theory has emerged as a popular framework for conceptualizing psychological constructs and mental disorders. Initially, network analysis was motivated in part by the thought that it can be used for hypothesis generation. Although the customary approach for network modeling is inherently exploratory, we argue that there is untapped potential for confirmatory hypothesis testing. In this work, we bring to fruition the potential of Gaussian graphical models for generating testable hypotheses. This is accomplished by merging exploratory and confirmatory analyses into a cohesive framework built around Bayesian hypothesis testing of partial correlations. We first present a motivating example based on a customary, exploratory analysis, where it is made clear how information encoded by the conditional (in)dependence structure can be used to formulate hypotheses. Building upon this foundation, we then provide several empirical examples that unify exploratory and confirmatory testing in psychopathology symptom networks. In particular, we (1) estimate exploratory graphs; (2) derive hypotheses based on the most central structures; and (3) test those hypotheses in a confirmatory setting. Our confirmatory results uncovered an intricate web of relations, including an order to edge weights within comorbidity networks. This illuminates the rich and informative inferences that can be drawn with the proposed approach. We conclude with recommendations for applied researchers, in addition to discussing how our methodology answers recent calls to begin developing formal models related to the conditional (in)dependence structure of psychological networks.

Developing digital audience frameworks for Oxford’s GLAM

Purpose In order to develop a common framework for strategic planning and evaluation, the Gardens, Libraries and Museums (GLAM) of Oxford undertook a process for defining digital audiences, undertaking user research to inform a new audience framework, which, in turn, is feeding a new approach and the application of the research across the Libraries’ web redevelopment. The paper aims to discuss this issue. Design/methodology/approach GLAM used qualitative and quantitative techniques to understand how visitors engaged with GLAM digitally: visitor shadowing, exit interviews, diary studies, remote interviews, social media and data evaluation. From these, GLAM focussed on motivational archetypes that apply to visitors across the institutions as well as pen portraits to support those archetypes, and a template for creating new portraits. Findings The framework helped GLAM develop digital priorities and outline how digital output met the needs of all audiences from a bottom-up user perspective, rather than only through top-down institutional decision making. Most relevant here, learning from the user research hugely informed the Bodleian Libraries’ website redevelopment. The Bodleian Libraries’ work within that framework shows that such a body of research is not solely high level; it can be applied on an institutional and project level to great effect. Originality/value Focussing on motivations rather than demographics is a less common way to approach digital audiences. Developing such a cohesive framework for digital audiences before undertaking strategic planning and specific development projects proved a valuable piece of work from which other institutions can learn.

Promoting Critical Thinking as a Social Practice: Shaping Students’ Voice, Agency and Inter-Subjectivity in a Cohesive Framework

Strict outcome-bound approaches and text-books-based instructional practices, prevalent in the pedagogy of most of the colleges and universities in English as an International Language (EIL) contexts, involve language activities, tasks, and tests that predominantly require one right answer or response. Pedagogical practices and related quality assurance mechanisms regulated by such approaches limit students’ ability to be original and skeptical in reflecting upon various issues of importance and concern based on their own thinking and experiences. Such a focus, in Sivasubramaniam’s (2015) and Nunn and Sivasubramaniam’s (2011) view, has entirely centered on bureaucratic efficiency aimed at having a uniform curriculum for the majority of the students and a scheme of research and evaluation based on recalls, think-alouds, cloze tests and multiple-choice questions in standardized texts. In line with the socially-aligned view of competence much needed spontaneity, flexibility, and diversity accrues only through a process-centered pedagogy of voice, agency and response. In the backdrop of this as a premise, this paper aims to demonstrate how Critical Thinking (CT) can be promoted in EIL classrooms as a discursive practice that could shape students’ voice, agency and inter-subjectivity in a cohesive framework. The paper shares both theoretical and practical ideas about CT and its importance in facilitating a meaningful education and aims to demonstrate some innovative tasks and activities that could be exploited to shape student’s voice and agency and develop their higher order CT skills. The paper culminates in evolving a practically viable prototype pedagogical framework for promoting CT as a social practice in EIL classrooms that is capable of making Wilga River’s (1983) notions of ‘skill-getting’ and ‘skill-using’ a reality. Such a model will be useful for EIL practitioners in designing similar lessons with innovative tasks and activities and make the EIL class atmosphere stimulating and pedagogically more fruitful.