Journals
2026 EN
Harkins David L. · O’Neil Deborah A.
This case study explores the formation, embedding, and sustainability of collective empathy at [Healing Arts for Children; HAC], a pseudonym for small arts-focused nonprofit serving pediatric patients. The 20-year-old organization utilizes art and music to alleviate anxiety and enhance positive health care experiences for critically and chronically ill children and their families. While the existing literature primarily focuses on individual-level empathy in the workplace, this study focuses on the underexplored aspects of system-level empathy applications, which may be essential to determining how empathy forms, embeds, and sustains within an organization. Collective empathy, the shared capacity of organization members to recognize, understand, and respond to both internal and external emotional experiences in coordinated ways, is crucial for organizations serving vulnerable populations as it enhances service quality, staff resilience, and client outcomes. This research contributes to social work practice by examining how collective empathy shapes service delivery and therapeutic relationships in human service organizations. Drawing on established frameworks that examine the emotional demands inherent in social work practice and the role of organizational culture in human services organizations, this study illuminates how organizational factors influence collective empathic practices. The findings suggest that a positive workplace culture stems from mission-aligned employees significantly shaping organizational culture, highlighting the importance of emotional connections and caring communities.
Journals
2026 EN
Su Tie · Hong Rui · Fang Yuanpeng
+2 more
For the dynamic characteristics of the lift-type reentry initial descent stage, this paper proposes three guidance methods which apply to different mission scenarios. The first is the fixed bank angle method, which combines the coordinated work of orbit control and the optimal selection of the reentry initial conditions to complete the task. The second is an offline design online look-up method, which obtains the optimal bank angle command by interpolating according to the speed and track inclination signal at the entry initial point. The third is an online search for the bank angle method, which quickly solves the dynamics equation online and searches for the optimal initial descent flight bank angle that matches the reentry condition as a guidance command. The perturbation adaptability and mission adaptability of the three methods are simulated and verified. The results show that the three methods have certain applicable scenarios of the initial descent stage guidance task.
Journals
2026 EN
Najera-Ruiz Tonatiuh · Juarez-Barco Ivone
Micro enterprises are often treated as smaller versions of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), overlooking their distinct logics and heterogeneity. This paper develops a typology based on growth orientation and ownership structure, identifying four archetypes: Livelihood Sustainers, Community Anchors, Aspirational Startups, and Hybrid Social Ventures. Drawing on the Resource-Based View (RBV), Institutional Theory, Contingency Theory, Socioemotional Wealth (SEW), and Stewardship Theory, the study presents a conceptual framework that explains how alignment across resources, governance, institutional engagement, mission, and strategic fit shapes performance and resilience. The framework offers a structured, empirically observable classification system to advance understanding of micro enterprise diversity. Implications for research, policy, and practice highlight the need for context-sensitive approaches that recognize the distinct needs of different micro enterprise types.
Journals
2026 EN
Halouani Nihel
This study examines how board gender diversity (BGD), critical mass and market power shape earnings management (EM) in African microfinance institutions (MFIs). Using a panel of 3,419 MFI-year observations from 311 institutions across nine African countries during 2012–2022, financial reporting quality is proxied by accrual-based earnings management measures. Employing panel fixed-effects models supported by an instrumental-variables robustness design, the findings indicate that higher female representation on boards is associated with significantly lower earnings management. This relationship strengthens once women hold at least 30% of board seats, consistent with critical mass theory. Furthermore, market power, measured by the Lerner Index, conditions this governance effect gender-diverse boards exert stronger oversight in MFIs operating under weaker competitive pressure, where short-term performance constraints are less dominant. These results suggest that board gender diversity functions as an effective governance mechanism when supported by sufficient representation and enabling market conditions. From a policy perspective, the findings support the adoption of competence-based targets for female board representation in MFIs, particularly in institutions facing intense informational asymmetries and limited external monitoring. The study contributes to governance research in emerging markets by clarifying when and under what conditions gender-diverse boards enhance financial reporting quality in mission-driven financial institutions.
Resource
2026 EN
Bassole Augustin
This study examines the interrelation between Catholic faith and Burkinabè culture through the phenomenon of “mixed practice,” defined as the blending of Christian rituals with traditional religious customs. Drawing on a survey of 307 participants divided into three groups—those engaged in mixed practice, those who abandoned Catholic faith, and Catholics considered exemplary—the research highlights the tensions between inculturation, syncretism, and defection. A combined quantitative and qualitative methodology reveals three major tendencies: an emphasis on cultural values, an emphasis on Catholic faith, and a unifying perspective that seeks integration of both. Building on these findings, the article proposes a model of integrative transcultural communication, rooted in the concept of transculturality. This model emphasizes mutual respect between local culture and Catholic faith, while identifying obstacles such as inadequate translation, faith transplantation, and hostility toward traditional religion. The proposed approach suggests that authentic evangelization in Burkina Faso requires acknowledging community solidarity, non-aggression toward other religions, and the universal principle of cultural purification through the Gospel. Ultimately, the study argues that transcultural integration enables faith and culture to enrich one another, fostering deeper rootedness of Catholicism and reducing risks of syncretism or abandonment.
Journals
2026 EN
Rai Mridu
This article explores Hindu nationalism’s long historical engagement with Kashmiri Muslims. Beginning with a brief background tracing the establishment of a Hindu state in Muslim-majority Jammu and Kashmir, this paper focuses on the mid-twentieth century: from the late 1930s to approximately 1965. These decades opened with a political challenge by the state’s Muslim subjects to the Hindu rule imposed on them since 1846 followed by a period, after 1947, when Kashmiri Muslims exerted relatively untrammelled political control in Jammu and Kashmir. In this broader context, both the Dogra-Hindu maharaja Hari Singh and his son, Karan Singh, sought to secure their flagging dominance by turning to Hindu majoritarian ideologies. Conversely, the Dogra rulers were tapped as buttresses for Hindu nationalism’s political mission. This essay examines the different ways in which these various proponents of Hindu sovereignty sought to claim Kashmir, despite its Muslim majority population, and, interrelatedly, to contain Kashmiri Muslim assertion of power by impeaching its legitimacy. This study ends in the period around 1965, by when even the tenuous autonomy of the state of Jammu and Kashmir – increasingly faintly symbolised by Article 370 of the Indian Constitution – had been practically nullified, and Kashmiri Muslim politics deemed successfully tamed.
Journals
2026 EN
Chai Xiaofei · Coit David W. · Zhao Xian
+1 more
Numerous modern mission-critical systems, comprising multiple units executing missions consecutively, require careful determination of the redundancy allocation structure to improve system reliability by maximizing the utilization of standby units. Because these units deteriorate over time due to internal degradation and external environmental factors and the deterioration rate of each unit is typically dependent on its workload, adjusting load levels based on the inspected healthy condition of the system is critical. Thereby, we introduce the utilization of condition information in the decision-making process for load level adjustment in working units. This study is the first to focus on the integrated optimization of redundancy allocation and condition-based load level adjustment policies for parallel systems with mixed standby units. We further extend the tradeoff between full mission completion and system survival during mission duration by introducing the impact of degradation on mission performance quality. We utilize an event-transition based recursive method to obtain the main performance metrics of mission completion and system survival. We further conduct a numerical example to demonstrate the proposed policy. The benefits of condition-based load level adjustment are demonstrated through policy comparison.
Resource
2026 EN
McGarrigle Alicja
The Three Seas Initiative (TSI), established in 2016 by Eastern European leaders, aims to foster cooperation among countries between the Adriatic, Baltic, and Black Seas. Scholars pointed out that the main idea of the cooperation was rooted in Józef Piłsudski’s Intermarium plan, which sought regional unification along the lines of the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The paper argues that Polish foreign policy debates frequently reference the Intermarium concept, highlighting Poland’s unique Slavic heritage and mission. This symbolism functions as a political myth that sacralizes and ritualizes meaning. Content and thematic analyses reveal three main discourses – Regional Hegemony, Bridge, and New Paradigm – each using the Intermarium myth differently to promote, legitimize, naturalize, or depoliticize various aspects of foreign policy.
Journals
2026 EN
Raudla Ringa · Douglas James W.
While experimental governance approaches are growing in popularity across the globe, there has been only limited scholarly discussion about the use of experiments in tax policy. Our article addresses this gap with an empirical study of Finland and Estonia. We compared the experiences of these two countries with tax policy experimentation to shed light on the factors that foster and hinder it. Our study shows that although tax policy experiments could potentially serve as a useful instrument for policymakers to address the challenge of adjusting tax policies in a complex and rapidly evolving context, in practice, tax policy experiments face various challenges arising from political motivations, including concerns with horizontal equity and electoral timeframes. Furthermore, limited capacities and resources and the existing features of the tax system can hinder the use of experiments in tax policy design. While experiments in tax policy can be politically challenging, they are not impossible, as evidenced by multiple experiments carried out by the Finnish government over the past decades. Our empirical study highlights that tax policy experimentation is likely to be more feasible if experiments are conducted with tax benefits, concern corporate taxes, are legitimized by sound legal framing, and avoid randomization.
Journals
2026 EN
Kajihara Takanori · Reneau Andrea Mack · Otani Courtney
+3 more
This study explores data-driven anomaly detection methods for analyzing sensor failures in the Advanced Gas Reactor (AGR) nuclear fuel irradiation experiments. Specifically, we examine failures pertaining to thermocouples (TCs), which are critical for monitoring and controlling in-reactor temperatures during reactor operation. Failures were primarily observed during abrupt power transitions and manifested as sensor drop-outs, drifts, or unexplained behavior. We applied three time-series analysis techniques—rolling mean (RM), matrix profile (MP), and vector auto-regression (VAR)—to detect anomalies in TC data prior to failure events. The RM method effectively highlighted deviations aligned with reported failures, while the MP method provided partial early warning. VAR shows potential for capturing multivariate dependencies, but requires further calibration for identifying minor failure precursors. Our findings demonstrate that conventional statistical tools can aid in anomaly detection but have limited predictive power for subtle precursors to anomalies, which may require a multivariate approach with richer training data. We propose future directions, including synthetic data generation, real-time surrogate modeling, and multi-modal feature integration. This work provides a foundation for applying robust anomaly detection frameworks to mission-critical sensor systems in experimental settings.