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Scams are indeed malicious attempts to influence people and can take many forms, including online scams. With the increasing availability of technology, scammers have more tools at their disposal to create convincing and sophisticated communications that appear to come from legitimate sources, such as emails, text messages or social media posts. These scams can be designed to trick individuals into clicking on malicious links, downloading malware or ransomware or providing sensitive information such as login information, financial information or personal details. Scammers often use social engineering techniques to persuade their targets to take specific actions, such as creating a sense of urgency, offering a reward or prize or posing as a trusted authority. These tactics can be highly effective, particularly if the target is unaware of the warning signs of a scam or is unfamiliar with how to protect themselves from online fraud. This paper aims to explore the extent and nature of this problem and evokes the concern that the general public is vulnerable and susceptible to scams if they are not resilient and aware. This paper also explores why victims fall for online scams and uncovers preventive measures to enable a direction in tacitly strategizing ways to create more impactful and effective awareness campaigns.

This study explores these aspects through a holistic qualitative approach. Using in-depth interview techniques with six victims, six non-victims, four law enforcement officers, four scammers and seven stakeholders from various agencies such as banks, telecommunication agencies and the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission involved in combating the issue of scams.

The findings generally revealed that participants who were victims of scams felt Malaysians were susceptible to scams, easily fooled and had a nonchalant attitude. Most participants also highlighted that public safety is important for ensuring a high quality of life for citizens that should work closely between the government and non-government agencies, including effective law enforcement and crime prevention strategies.

The uniqueness of this study is the feedback from scammers themselves and their input towards authority and victims. Overall, the respondents provide their views drawing strength from the ever-changing technological background as well as the susceptibility of security features and vulnerability of human engagement.

This paper aims to examine the experience of gaining research independence by becoming a principal investigator (PI) – an aspiration for many post-PhD researchers about whom little is known. It provides insight into this experience by using a qualitative narrative approach to document how 60 PIs from a range of disciplines in one European and two UK universities experienced working towards and achieving this significant goal.

Within the context of a semi-structured interview, individuals drew and elaborated a map representing the emotional high and low experiences of the journey from PhD graduation to first PI grant, and completed a biographic questionnaire.

Regardless of the length of the journey from PhD graduation to first PI grant, more than a third noted the role that luck played in getting the grant. Luck was also perceived to have an influence in other aspects of academic work. This influence made it even more important for these individuals to sustain a belief in themselves and be agentive and persistent in managing the challenges of the journey.

The study, unusual in its cross-national perspective, and its mixed mode data collection, offers a nuanced perspective on the interaction between agency and an environment where the “randomness factor” plays a role in success. The function of luck as a support for sustained agency and resilience is explored.

Information on the impact of flooding is fundamental to mitigating flood risk in residential property. This paper aims to provide insight into the seller disclosure of flood risk and buyer behaviour in the absence of mandated seller disclosure.

This paper adopts a case study approach to critically evaluate the matrix of flood information available for buyers purchasing residential property in Brisbane, Queensland. This paper uses big data analytic techniques to extract and analyse internet data from online seller agents and buyer platforms to gain an understanding of buyer awareness and consideration of flood risk in the residential property market.

Analysis of property marketing data demonstrates that seller agents voluntarily disclose flood impact only in periods where a flooding event is anticipated and is limited to asserting a property is free of flood risk. Analysis of buyer commentary demonstrates that buyers are either unaware of flood information or are discounting the risk of flood in favour of other property and locational attributes when selecting residential property.

This research suggests that improved and accessible government-provided flood mapping tools are not enhancing buyers’ understanding and awareness of flood risk. Accordingly, it is recommended that mandatory disclosure be introduced in Queensland so that buyers are more able to manage risk and investment decisions before the purchase of residential property.

This paper contributes to existing literature on raising community awareness and understanding of natural disaster risks and makes a further contribution in identifying mandatory disclosure as a mechanism to highlight the risk of flooding and inform residential property purchasers.

Analyses the notion and value of managing diversity to establish its current theoretical positioning and potential organisational significance. Focuses on a recent case study examination of equality at work in a major, national public sector organisation. Affords an insight into an organisational shift towards managing diversity, through the lens of key organisational stakeholders. Within this case, proposes three emergent practical implications of managing diversity which may have resonance for other public sector organisations.

The COVID-19 pandemic and its related economic meltdown and social unrest severely challenged most countries, their societies, economies, organizations, and individual citizens. Focusing on both more and less successful country-specific initiatives to fight the pandemic and its multitude of related consequences, this chapter explores implications for leadership and effective action at the individual, organizational, and societal levels. As international management scholars and consultants, the authors document actions taken and their wide-ranging consequences in a diverse set of countries, including countries that have been more or less successful in fighting the pandemic, are geographically larger and smaller, are located in each region of the world, are economically advanced and economically developing, and that chose unique strategies versus strategies more similar to those of their neighbors. Cultural influences on leadership, strategy, and outcomes are described for 19 countries. Informed by a cross-cultural lens, the authors explore such urgent questions as: What is most important for leaders, scholars, and organizations to learn from critical, life-threatening, society-encompassing crises and grand challenges? How do leaders build and maintain trust? What types of communication are most effective at various stages of a crisis? How can we accelerate learning processes globally? How does cultural resilience emerge within rapidly changing environments of fear, shifting cultural norms, and profound challenges to core identity and meaning? This chapter invites readers and authors alike to learn from each other and to begin to discover novel and more successful approaches to tackling grand challenges. It is not definitive; we are all still learning.

This paper aims to present an interpretation of freehand drawings produced by a sample of final year degree level learners in response to the question: “What is civic engagement”? The aim in using this approach, with final year degree learners from different countries, but pursuing the same degree, was to compare and contrast their understanding of civic engagement.

Learners completed their drawings and then discussed their drawings in small groups. All of their drawings were initially examined quantitatively before a sample of six drawings were selected for in-depth qualitative examination.

Using learner-generated drawings enables learners convey visually what can be challenging to verbalise. After the exercise, some learners discovered that they had a good basic appreciation of civic engagement.

Describing civic engagement pictorially forced participants to think about what the essence of civic engagement was for them.

This study shows how a collaborative learning experience, rather than a competitive comparison of performance, facilitates learners readily demonstrating their level of understanding and appreciation for civic engagement.

The mental and physical health of those residing in Australian rural and remote communities is poorer compared to major cities. Physical health comorbidities contribute to almost 80% of premature mortality for people living with mental illness. Leisure time physical activity (LTPA) is a well-established intervention to improve physical and mental health. To address the physical and mental health of rural and remote communities through LTPA, the community’s level of readiness should be first determined. This study aims to use the community readiness model (CRM) to explore community readiness in a remote Australian community to address mental health through LTPA.

Individual semi-structured interviews were conducted using the CRM on LTPA to address mental health. Quantitative outcomes scored the community’s stage of readiness for LTPA programmes to address mental health using the CRM categories of one (no awareness) to nine (high level of community ownership). Qualitative outcomes were thematically analysed, guided by Braun and Clark.

The community scored six (initiation) for community efforts and knowledge of LTPA programmes and seven (stabilisation) for leadership. The community’s attitude towards LTPA and resources for programmes scored four (pre-planning), and knowledge of LTPA scored three (vague awareness).

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first Australian study to use CRM to examine community readiness to use LTPA to improve mental health in a remote community. The CRM was shown to be a useful tool to identify factors for intervention design that might optimise community empowerment in using LTPA to improve mental health at the community level.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the role of one particular online discussion forum as a potentially authoritative health information source for its users. The concept of cognitive authority is used as a starting point for understanding information evaluation in this context. The focus is placed on the types of information users seek for from this forum, the ways they assess the credibility of information obtained, and their views on the impact of this information.

The empirical data were collected with a questionnaire survey from the users of a Finnish online forum for girls and young women (n=290). The data were analyzed qualitatively with content analytic techniques and quantitatively by using descriptive analysis.

The forum was found to offer girls and young women the possibility to receive health information from peers. It was viewed as an appropriate source for experiential rather than factual health information and used to find information on sexuality, bodily functions and diets, for example. Author-related cues, argumentation and tone, veracity and verification were recognized as means to evaluate information credibility. Credibility evaluation was found to be linked with conceptions of the forum and the type of information sought. A share of the respondents recognized the information obtained to have influence on their thinking or behavior.

Based on the findings, it can be argued that the members of the online forum – individually or collectively – can act as cognitive authorities for other users. The findings cannot be generalized beyond this online forum, to Finnish girls or young women, or even the users of the online forum. However, they provide insights into the ways young people evaluate user-generated information in a particular online setting and domain of knowledge and as such contribute to research on cognitive authority, credibility evaluation and information literacy.

State leaders’ decision-making calculus is often attributed to external factors. The political arena, international community pressure and a country’s military stance all take centre stage in the analysis of national security decisions. Little weight is given to personal aspects of a leader’s psyche in explaining these decisions; this is true to the bulk of the research regarding this topic. This study theorizes and tests a positive link between Israeli leaders’ combat military experience and their propensity to enter into ‘peacemaking’ decisions namely, peace talks, cease fires and unilateral withdrawals. This research uses a new database comprising all peacemaking decision points in Israel’s history, looking at the pressure put on a leader from outside factors and his military experience to explain the decision taken. It finds a strong significant link between combat experience and the tendency to enter in a peacemaking decision with little regard to ideological affiliation, shedding a new light on Israeli politicians from both sides of the aisle.

Higher education institutions (HEIs) have multiple roles including teaching, research and more recently projects for the benefit of local communities. From a management and leadership perspective, the formation and implementation of strategic plans and the collaboration with stakeholders have traditionally been based on formal agreements based on existing operational organizations and structures. Their strategic plans and collaborations with stakeholders are now evolving to become more organic and collaborative. They have become essential participants of the innovation and learning ecosystems and knowledge intensive communities as shown here in the case of Finland and Australia. New businesses and regions, especially in Europe and non-European Union countries such as Australia, are encouraged to identify and develop their own competitive advantages by analyzing their strengths and strategic potential growth areas.

This so-called Smart Specialization (RIS3) strategy brings HEIs together with the local authorities, business companies and civil society to co-operate in order to prioritize research and development (R&D) investment in the region. The need for Smart Specialization also challenges HEIs to rethink their visions and renew the present siloed and closed-ended practices.

This chapter examines and compares the management and leadership of the HEIs as actions are undertaken to effectively lead the Finnish and Australian HEIs toward their visions. These case studies demonstrate approaches which influence good institutional governance and management. It describes how LAB-ammattikorkeakoulu (LAB University of Applied Sciences) in Finland, and Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in Australia have implemented a RIS3 strategy, notably in health and well-being and agricultural (R&D) projects. These enhance the scope of accountability and participation of stakeholders. The chapter provides practice-based evidence to policy makers in higher education regarding HEIs’ responsible contribution to society.