As China’s four-decade long demographic dividend is coming to an end, the country is actively seeking to seize new economic opportunities in higher-value-added productive activities. Could Africa be the big winner of this economic restructuring?

China’s growing outbound investment ambitions could be as transformative for today’s poor countries as inbound investment was for China. This will depend upon how recipient developing economies, in particular in Africa, utilise China’s investor interest for their own sustainable development.

This paper explores some management concepts and how applying these concepts from business to higher education can be problematic, let alone incompatible, particularly in relation to measuring quality in higher education. A number of compelling reasons for this are explored. It discusses that the current bases for perceiving quality such as meeting customer expectations, satisfying the customer, ensuring quality control, meeting standards and assessing the costs associated with poor quality are in disagreement with the principal aims and measures of quality in higher education. Some considerations for understanding quality in higher education are proposed such as when thinking about quality of teaching, quality of programs and quality of the student experience. These considerations aim to refocus education to centre on the student as a learner and an active participant in the learning process.

This study investigates all available literature related to critical thinking in business education in a survey of publications in the field produced from 1990–2019. It conducts a thematic analysis of 787 articles found in Web of Science and Google Scholar, including a specific focus on 55 highly-cited articles. The aim is to investigate the importance of critical thinking in business education, how it is conceptualised in business education research, the business contexts in which critical thinking is situated, and the key and more marginal themes related to critical thinking outlined in the business and business education literature. The paper outlines six key areas and topics associated with those areas. It suggests future directions for further scholarly work in the area of critical thinking in business education.

This paper analyzes the core international business (IB) areas covered by ten IB-focused journals to date using 13,937 documents reflecting more than 300 years of combined publication history. Using bibliometric and citation analysis, it provides a systematic understanding of the current IB landscape, explicates the relevance of the future of IB research and depicts trends in this research field with emerging prevalent themes identified. The strongest themes across IB journals are performance, perspective and emerging economies/MNEs, shared strongly across UK/Europe, US and Asia-based journals. Our findings report on the prevalent research field, economy and geography, the latter analyzing the impact of author numbers and distribution, and thus, scale effects. Within this context, sole authorships are largely replaced by co-authorships, yet often on national level. We further limited the study to IB policy and found the focus centers on key themes of foreign business attraction, transnational governance and IB promotion.

Around 1980 China adopted a reformist economic agenda and a restrictive population policy. China's consequential ‘getting old before rich’ discourse is herein advanced into the ‘economic demography transition’ and economic demography matrix (EDM). EDM transition analysis of 182 economies from 1996 to 2016 identifies: i) China to be one of many ‘poor‐old’ economies; and ii) a majority of countries recently entering the high‐income group were first old. These results question China's 1980 s‐based fears that early demographic transition would stall development and also call for enhanced nuance in understanding economic and demographic change links.

In anticipation of the journal’s centenary in 2027 this paper provides a citation network analysis of all available citation and publication data of the Australasian Journal of Philosophy (1923–2017). A total of 2,353 academic articles containing 21,772 references were collated and analyzed. This includes 175 articles that contained author-submitted keywords, 415 publisher-tagged keywords and 519 articles that had abstracts. Results initially focused on finding the most published authors, most cited articles and most cited authors within the journal, followed by most discussed topics and emerging patterns using keywords and abstracts. The analysis then proceeded to apply social network analysis using Kumu© – a visualization platform for mapping systems and relationships using large datasets. Analysis reveals topic clusters both unique to the journal, and inclusive of the journal’s history. Results from this analysis reaffirm the journal’s continuing focus on topics in traditional analytic philosophy such as morality, epistemology and knowledge, whilst also featuring topics associated with logic and paradox. This paper presents a new approach to analysing and understanding the historic and emerging topics of interest to the journal, and its readership. This has never previously been done for single philosophy journal. This is historically important given the journal’s forthcoming centenary.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact and contribution of the Journal of Behavioral Finance (JBF). Design/methodology/approach It uses the metadata from 328 journal articles (2004–2017) extracted from Scopus and Web of Science. The data included 2,602 author-submitted keywords, 1,825 index keywords and 310 abstracts. Findings Results indicate that JBF is still a young journal with 196 academic articles cited by 372 documents. Most citations come from JBF itself and the Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Finance. Mesly and Seiler are the most published, University of Gothenberg has more contributions than any other institution while the USA, Australia and UK represent nearly half of those citations. Investment policy is the most used author keyword next to behavioural finance, while risk is the most used index keyword. The most commonly used words in abstracts are investor or investors. The implications of and for JBF are discussed. Originality/value It is a unique and novel approach to analysing almost the entire publication history of the journal by using citation analysis.

Using data from a business school in a large research-intensive university in Australia, this study analyzes proposed teaching and learning changes with a focus on ‘closing the loop.’ Aspects of teaching and learning submitted by academic staff following assurance of learning (i.e. curriculum improvements) were analyzed using content analysis, spanning 382 program learning outcomes, 25 different degree programs, 117 subjects and 5828 pieces of individual student assessment (2009–2017). Analysis revealed six learning outcome themes, with ‘use, application and evaluation of relevant theories, methods concepts, ideas or models’ as most prominent. Suggested actions on each of the themes relate to various curricula changes, particularly (1) the move from teaching students ‘what to think’ to ‘how to think,’ (2) from developing fundamental to complex skills, and (3) providing more opportunities for feedback. Broader implications for teaching practice are discussed.

This paper analyses the entire publication history of the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science (JAMS) by analyzing 1747 documents from 1973 to June 2018. Citation networks were examined from available metadata such as author and index keywords, and institutional affiliations, and abstracts were analyzed using network analysis and text mining techniques. The analysis is supported by the use of data visualization tools and community detection algorithms. Results suggest three main communities addressed throughout JAMS’ publication history (firm capability and performance, brand and value co-creation and customer service) and nine main themes (brands’ strategic value, firms’ strategy and financial performance, customer service, sales, marketing communications, retailing, distribution channel, global markets, and corporate social responsibility). Although empirical quantitative studies account the larger type of research published by JAMS, results also highlight JAMS’ contribution to marketing theory building and methodological issues in the shape of both conceptual/theoretical papers and scale development papers.

Mindfulness, meditation, and other practices that form contemplative interventions are increasingly offered in workplaces to support employee mental health. Studies have reported benefits across various populations, yet researchers have expressed concerns that adoption of such interventions has outpaced scientific evidence. We reappraise the extant literature by meta‐analytically testing the efficacy of contemplative interventions in reducing psychological distress in employees (meta‐analyzed set: k = 119; N = 6,044). Complementing other reviews, we also examine a range of moderators and the impact of biases that could artificially inflate effect sizes. Results suggested interventions were generally effective in reducing employee distress, yielding small to moderate effects that were sustained at last follow‐up. Effects were moderated by the type of contemplative intervention offered and the type of control group utilized. We also found evidence of publication bias, which is likely inflating estimated effects. Uncontrolled single sample studies were more affected by bias than large or randomized controlled trial studies. Adjustments for publication bias lowered overall effects. Overall, our review supports the effectiveness of contemplative interventions in reducing employee distress, but there is a need for proactive strategies to mitigate artificially inflated effect sizes and thus avoid the misapplication of contemplative interventions in work settings.

The authors present a conceptual framework to guide the participation of students in an online instructional design program. The online program has socio-cultural influencing factors that confound the already diverse nature of the offering. The framework intends to encourage a value system for students that can be used to guide their knowledge and performance as they pursue the tenets of the field of instructional design. Elmore's mode of leadership, Bourdieu's theory of habitus and Hofstede's cultural dimensions theory are used to create a foundation for the framework whilst acknowledging the complexities of the diverse environment. The framework supports and acknowledges the knowledge expected of novice instructional designers through the use of guides whilst acknowledging the systemic and systematic individualistic change processes that will occur.