Journal of Information and Organizational Sciences

271-281

Authors: Xhelil Bekteshi, Sevdie Alshiqi

Kosovo’s private sector business is led by small and medium enterprises and shows a crucial role in the economic development and promoting the growth of this sector. Due to the lack of studies in Kosova, related to marketing strategy and export performance, the research aims to explore growth determinants of SMEs in Kosovo by emphasizing exports, revealing the importance of marketing strategy related to the performance of SMEs. Since exporting is becoming more important, it is necessary to understand all the factors that are involved in this booming trade. This research analyses explore the literature dealing with small and medium enterprises' performance to inspect the traditional and modern academic standpoints on estimating the impact of export performance, based on secondary data of five hundred small and medium enterprises, as trade, manufacturing, and services sectors in Kosovo. The data were analysed using both descriptive statistics and inferential techniques, such as logistic regression analysis, and probit model using the SPSS software. Results show a significant linkage of marketing strategy and export performance; managers and policymakers can take some action to improve export performance. On the other hand, the results measure the impact of price, production, promotion and place in export performance incorporate expected future performance. It is argued that enterprises in Kosovo must pay more attention to strategies, and attempt to design and implement better strategies that will be beneficial for developing international trade, especially exports, as one way of trading by SMEs.

305-331

Authors: Tamara Šmaguc, Ksenija Vuković

The paper examines traditional knowledge about the role of financial and physical resources in entrepreneurship. Based on Bourdieu's theory, we search for an answer to the question of which forms of economic capital are used by Croatian entrepreneurs in the computer programming industry and what their value in the context of accessing other forms of capital is. The study is based on a qualitative methodological approach. In-depth interview technique accompanied by unstructured observations was used in data collection. In addition to primary data, research includes the use of qualitative and quantitative secondary data. Research suggests that in the computer programming industry, economic capital is just one tool in the conversion game of entrepreneurial capital. Moreover, the interviewed entrepreneurs attach the least importance to it in business, favoring the value of intangible resources such as specialized knowledge, business connections and personal acquaintances. The company's start-up phase is characterized by the entrepreneur's reliance on personal savings, which is replaced by financing based on retained earnings in the later stages of business. Other forms of growth financing, such as bank loans and recapitalization of external investors, are used by a minority of larger companies, with a good base of symbolic capital. The results on capital conversions indicate relatively easy conversion of economic capital into cultural capital and symbolic capital, and less frequent use of economic capital to create social capital. Fresh insights into the entrepreneurs' perceptions provided by the study expand existing knowledge about entrepreneurship within the computer programming industry, suggesting that it is an industry with huge potential for young talents without a personal financial base that is commonly considered a precondition for entering entrepreneurship.

355-373

Authors: Norzaidi Mohd Daud

This study examines the impact of transformation in higher education, in particular on the introduction of new technology to students in Malaysia. This study is unique as it focuses on usage and technology resistance. Another uniqueness of the study is that technology resistance is measured by non-technology and post-technology antecedents, which have yet to be discovered by existing studies. These factors could potentially influence students to refrain from using technology in their studies, as many previous studies only focus on usage. Furthermore, prior research should have classified different types of resistance that cause significant knowledge gaps in technology education. A survey of 156 respondents concluded that antecedents of non-technology usage do lead to resistance. Post-technology usage, similarly, does influence resistance. As expected, the usage of technology influenced students' performances. Finally, resistance to technology did not affect students' performance. This is likely the first study to examine the impact of transformation in education and classify the antecedents of technology resistance into two categories: non-technology usage and post-technology usage. This research will help policymakers understand how students react to educational transformations. Adding technology could improve how well students do in university, but it could also hurt how well they do in university.

387-400

Authors: Tomáš Červinka

Strategic management of SMEs is perceived as crucial backbone of their business, as it impacts their business models and internal processes all the way up to digital innovation measured by the level of digital maturity. How do the strategic management factors influence the digital maturity? Through quantitative analysis of 76 respondents representing SMEs in the Czech Republic, the research data was collected and statistically tested. Results imply that strategic management factors affect the level of digital maturity. This paper contributes to prior literature by practical implementation of modified digital maturity model and by addressing the correlation of strategic management factors and the level of digital maturity. Limitations springing from sample site and environment are addressed and discussion on the results is conducted. Author proposes a conclusion that strategic management factors can be perceived as a driver of digital transformation, emphasizing the need for future research and practical discussion.

423-443

Authors: Amine El Hadi, Youness Madani, Rachid El Ayachi, Mohamed Erritali

Search engines are now the main source for information retrieval due to the huge expansion of data on the internet over the last ten years. Providing users with the most relevant results for their queries poses a significant challenge for search engines. Semantic search engines, which go beyond traditional keyword-based searches, have appeared as advanced information retrieval systems to address this problem. These search engines produce more precise and pertinent search results because they understand the meanings of words and their relationships. They play a pivotal role in managing the vast amount of internet data, with a primary aim of enhancing search precision and user satisfaction. However, improving search precision remains as an important goal for natural language processing researchers. The main objective of our research is to improve the search engine results. We present a novel approach for measuring the similarity between a user’s query and a list of documents within a search engine. This approach provides a new fuzzy recommendation system using a syntactic and semantic similarity. Our results indicate that our method outperforms several existing approaches from the literature, achieving a high level of accuracy.

473-490

Authors: Mawloud Mosbah

In this scholar, we compare three metrics for machine translation, from English to French and vice versa, and we give some combination formulas based on some schemes, algorithms, and machine learning tools. As an experimental dataset, we consider 10 English and French theses abstracts published in the web with four free in charge machine translation systems. Five combinations, with the same implicit weights, are considered namely: (BLEU+NIST), (BLEU+ (1-WER)), (NIST+(1-WER)), (BLEU+NIST+(1-WER)), and (FR(BLEU)+FR(NIST)+FR(WER)). These combinations are also considered differently through generating weights parameters on the basis of regression. The results of 12 formulas are computed and compared then in total. According to the obtained results, average regression combinations based on machine learning step are the best, especially with the three basic metrics, followed by average WER metric in the case of English to French. For French to English, (FR(BLEU)+FR(NIST)+FR(WER)) combination is the best followed respectively by the average regression combination with both first parameters (Reg(α,β)) and average BLEU basic metric. Another performance criterion is considered here, in the second position, namely: the number of times, over the 10 abstracts, where the formula is the best. Based on the obtained results, combination with regression based on the first and the last parameters (Reg(α,γ)) outperforms the others, in the case of English to French, with 3 times followed by Reg(β,γ), Reg(α,β,γ), NIST+(1-WER), and the basic metrics (BLEU, NIST, and WER) with 2 times for each of them. For French to English, the basic WER metric outperforms the others with three times followed by BLEU, (BLEU+ (1-WER)), (FR(BLEU)+FR(NIST)+FR(WER)), and Reg(α,γ) with 2 times for each of them. To note that there is a room of improvement for the combinations with1.0914 in the case of English to French and 1.01 in the case of French to English.

21-37

Authors: Behrouz Liravinia, Mahmoud Modiri, Kiamars Fathi Hafshjani

Proper risk assessment and management are considered important issues in design improvement. This tendency has been due to the continuing uncertainty of the global economy and the advancement of information technology. Despite the most important and valuable benefits, developed design topics are more vulnerable and can expose the organization to higher levels of risk. Achieving sustainability is recognized as a growing and effective strategy to meet today's global design challenges. Design in the oil, gas and petrochemical industry is important due to its characteristics and high risk in different countries, especially Iran, due to its different effects on the environmental dimension. The issue of identifying and evaluating design risks has also been neglected in recent research. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to identify and evaluate design risks in Iran’s oil, gas and petrochemical industry. The present research is descriptive-survey and is qualitative and quantitative in terms of technique and data used. Based on the literature review, 13 risk factors affecting the design were identified, in two stages, in-depth interviews were conducted with the opinions of experts, and by collecting opinions through a questionnaire, and 10 key risk factors were finally confirmed. In the first stage, the validity of the questionnaire was finally confirmed based on the opinions of 5 experts and in the second stage, using the opinions of 8 experts in this industry. Cronbach's alpha coefficient of the risk questionnaire is higher than 0.7, which indicates the reliability of the research tool. According to the research findings, two factors such as weak technology / knowledge sustainability and environmental pollution, compared to other risk factors, have a higher priority in design projects in Iran's oil, gas and petrochemical industry. It is suggested that industry owners take serious and continuous measures in the field of "improving the level of process knowledge".

65-82

Authors: Lakshmi Shree K, Ranganath Ashok Kumar

One of the research issues that researchers are interested in is unbalanced data classification techniques. Boosting approaches like Wang's Boosting and Modified Boosted SVM (MBSVM) have been demonstrated to be more effective for unbalanced data. Our proposal The Modified Boosted Random Forest (MBRF) classifier is a Random Forest classifier that uses the Boosting approach. The main motivation of the study is to analyze sentiment of geotagged tweets understanding the state of mind of people at FIFA and Olympics datasets. Tree based model Random Forest algorithm using boosting approach classifies the tweets to build a recommendation system with an idea of providing commercial suggestions to participants, recommending local places to visit or perform activities. MBRF employs various strategies: i) a distance-based weight-update method based on K-Medoids ii) a sign-based classifier elimination technique. We have equally partitioned the datasets as 70% of data allocated for training and the remaining 30% data as test data. Our imbalanced data ratio measured 3.1666 and 4.6 for FIFA and Olympics datasets. We looked at accuracy, precision, recall and ROC curves for each event. The average AUC achieved by MBRF on FIFA dataset is 0.96 and Olympics is 0.97. A comparison of MBRF and Decision tree model using 'Entropy' proved MBRF better.

109-131

Authors: Dunja Dobrinić, Neven Vrček

The subject of this research is to determine the level of digital technology acceptance in micro and small organizations. There is a lack of research in the existing literature that would move away from existing models and theories and explain the reasons for digital technology acceptance by micro and small organizations. It was noticed that research on the intention to accept digital technologies in micro and small organizations needs to focus on moderating factors, the influence of which has been neglected in existing research. For this reason, a model for digital technology acceptance by micro and small organizations was created, which explored the effect of moderating factors and encompassed the key characteristics of micro and small organizations. The effect of perceived financial risk, perceived security risk, perceived loss of time, perceived government pressure, and the level of knowledge of decision-makers on the intention to accept digital technologies are examined. As well the relationship between external pressure (market participants' pressure and crisis circumstances) and the level of knowledge of decision-makers in organizations was explored. The focus of the research is to explore the moderating effect of the organization's digital maturity and competitive priorities on the relationship of factors (perceived security risk, perceived loss of time, perceived government pressure) and intent to accept digital technologies. The moderating effect of the decision-makers decision-making style on the relationship between external pressure (market participants' pressure and crisis circumstances) and the level of knowledge of decision-makers are explored as well.

153-165

Authors: Arief Ramadhan, Satrio Pradono Suryodiningrat, Irfan Mahendra

The word metaverse is resurfacing and becoming viral after Facebook changed its company name to Meta. A lot of opportunities are offered by the rise of metaverse concept. For example, a library can be presented in the form of metaverse so that visitors do not need to come physically. Metaverse means beyond the universe or in this case beyond our universe. Companies around the world including Microsoft, Facebook, Epic Games, Apple, and Nvidia already invested in the metaverse as a business opportunity, and the top 3 business sectors are technology, education, and finance. Most companies also believe there are many benefits of the metaverse that can overcome the current obstacles om this universe, such as removing the physical limitation to do various activities. This paper will give a fundamental understanding of the metaverse and the opportunity of the metaverse in practice and research in the future. The result of this paper can be a guide for any scholars and practitioners to understand the metaverse starting from the definition to the things that are related to the metaverse.

179-187

Authors: Albina S. Lolaeva

This study is aimed at solving such a fundamental task as the use of modern information technologies in the development of electronic or digital democracy in Russia, as the main direction of the strategy for supporting democratic institutions and democratic processes and spreading democratic values. E-democracy is the basic foundation of the information society, accumulating a number of traditional and innovative tools that are successfully used in the democratic institutions of the modern state in the regulation of socially significant relations. The development of modern democratic processes is based not so much on public authorities, but on civil society, which is gradually transforming into a digital society. For this reason, the issue of searching for and actively implementing mechanisms that contribute to the development of information technology infrastructures, communication systems, and increasing the information literacy of the population seems to be relevant.

203-222

Authors: Damián Varga, Slavomír Šimoňák

Within this work we analyze and compare ten Petri net supporting tools for system modeling and analysis. A short summary of several available overviews of Petri net tools is performed before the tools analysis itself to evaluate the current state in this field. Principal parts of the paper are focused on analysis and evaluation of the selected tools. We provide detailed and practical description of selection of up to date tools, their evaluation based on various criteria, and recommendations for several use cases.

293-304

Authors: Paweł Baranowski, Adrian Stepniak

Deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) became an industry standard in image processing. However, in order to keep their high efficiency, a large annotated sample is required in the case of supervised learning. In this paper we apply the techniques specific for relatively small sample to a court files dataset. Specifically, we propose transfer learning and semisupervised learning to classify scanned page as having a table or not. We use four CNNs architectures established in the literature and find that transfer learning improves the classification performance, compared to the fully supervised learning. This result is especially evident in the scenarios where only a part of convolutioanl layers are transferred. The gains from semisupervised learning are ambiguous, as the results vary over CNNs architectures. Overall, our results show that office documents classification can achieve high accuracy when transferring initial convolutional layers is applied.

323-344

Authors: Aakansha Singh, Harminder Kaur Gujral

The present research aims to study the relation between emotional intelligence and organizational culture during the Covid-19 pandemic. Emotional intelligence is an individual's ability to understand and manage their own and others' emotions. This ability can be instrumental in driving the culture of universities and colleges. During this crucial time of Covid-19, there is a sudden shift from traditional/ face-to-face teaching to online/hybrid education; it is vital to provide a congenial environment and culture to teachers and students to promote a smooth and amiable teaching/learning experience. The data was collected from a sample of 10 colleges of higher education from NCR. The respondents included academicians of different academic ranks. 232 questionnaires were received, out of which 213 respondent's data was usable. Convenience sampling was used in this research to collect data from the colleges. According to the findings, there is a strong relation between emotional intelligence and organizational culture. The organizational culture and its dimensions are strongly affected by emotional intelligence. The most robust relationship exists between managing emotions and managing change in the organization.

361-375

Authors: Blaženka Divjak, Darko Grabar, Barbi Svetec, Petra Vondra

We present a comprehensive learning design (LD) concept and tool, motivated by the needs identified by higher education (HE) practitioners. The concept and tool aim at implementing contemporary research findings and theory to support balanced LD planning (BDP). The student-centered BDP concept and tool provide innovation to LD planning by strongly focusing on learning outcomes (LOs) and student workload, aligning study program and course level LOs, ensuring constructive alignment and assessment validity, enhancing LD by using learning analytics, and enabling flexible use in different contexts and pedagogical approaches. The ongoing work has been done according to design science methodology, with positive first feedback from HE practitioners. We identify areas for further research and improvement, including testing the BDP tool in real-world HE contexts and its integration with learning management systems. This could help close the gap between intended (often innovative) LDs and their implementation in real teching and learning environments.

391-420

Authors: Eda Sultan Arar, Serap Şahin

The aim of the research is to examine the work ethics perceptions of academics from different generations and the relationship between these perceptions and workplace deviation behaviors. In line with the purpose, the questionnaire prepared by using 5 questions with demographic variables, academic ethical values scale and workplace deviation behavior scale were applied to 472 academicians working at state universities in Ankara and the nearby provinces. The results revealed moderately negative relationship between academic ethical values and one of its sub-dimensions which is the values for the institution and workplace deviation behaviors. Moreover, weak and strong negative relationships were found between academic ethical values and other sub-factors of workplace deviation behaviors. Intergenerational differences were found between academic ethical values and academic ethical values towards the teaching process and serious workplace deviation towards the organization, and between academic ethical values towards colleagues and deviant behaviors towards the organization.

433-451

Authors: Manish Mohan, Anil Jadhav

No industry can thrive without customers and with customers comes the chances of customer churn. Since customer churn have direct-impact on the revenue, all the industries are focusing in understanding the factors influencing churn and are developing methods to predict the customer churn effectively. Today, never as before, customers have wide variety of options to choose between any service or product. In addition, nowadays customers enjoy multiple subscriptions of service providers across sectors. In this study we aim to identify: i) Factors influencing customer churn on OTT platform, and ii) Predict customer churn on OTT platform. The data for this study is collected from 317 respondents, using questionnaire method, who have multiple OTT platform subscription. The questionnaire data contains 19 items which includes demographic features, usage of OTG platform, and user contentment factors about OTT service. We have identified factors influencing customer churn in Over-The-Top (OTT) platform by combining Recursive Feature Elimination (RFE), Linear Regression, and Ridge Regression feature ranking methods. We have used Hierarchical Logistic Regression, to understand impact of two newly introduced factors namely 'Multiple Subscription' and 'Switching Frequency' on the overall performance of the customer churn prediction. Finally, customer churn prediction is done using Decision Tree, Random Forest, AdaBoost, and Gradient boosting techniques. We found that random forest method gives better prediction results.

473-489

Authors: Farouk Ouatik, Mohammed Erritali, Fahd Ouatik, Mostafa Jourhmane

The process of traditional school guidance is carried out by specialists. They make a study of the student files based on the marks of the first year and the second year of the baccalaureate. Considering the progressive number of students and also the lack of time to make the decision, as the selection of the specialty has a great effect on the academic course of the students, we have realized a system of specialty recommendation, to computerize the orientation process and save time. But the major problem is that the students do not care about this process and pay no attention to it despite its importance. As well as the software which makes the orientation is chargeable. To order these specialties to take the best specialty. We have arrived at a problem of multi-criteria which makes it impossible to make a decision with these criteria. Because these criteria do not have the same importance and also are not compatible, as there are criteria that must be maximum and other criteria must be minimal. To solve this problem, two systems of orientation and academic reorientation of students have been implemented. In both systems, the SMOTE method has been used to balance the learning data in the preprocessing phase. Then in the treatment phase, we sorted the specialties using in the first system, a hybridization of TOPSIS method and the information gain to find the weights of the criteria used, and in the second system, we used a hybridization of the AHP method and information gain. The results obtained indicate that before balancing data using the SMOTE method, the total accuracy of TOPSIS (84.20%) is higher than the total accuracy of AHP (83.71%). After applying balancing data using the SMOTE method, the total accuracy has increased. The total accuracy of TOPSIS (91.35%) is also higher than the total accuracy of AHP (90.83%). For the complexity of the two methods, it is related to the number of criteria and the number of alternatives. If the number of criteria is more than 10 criteria, the complexity of TOPSIS is less than the complexity of AHP, and vice versa. The complexity of the two methods also depends on the number of alternatives, if the number of alternatives exceeds 10, the TOPSIS method becomes more complex than the AHP method. In general, the system based on TOPSIS method and the information gain is more precise than the system based on the AHP method and the information gain. But the complexity of the AHP method is less than the complexity of the TOPSIS method.

15-40

Authors: Ali Asghar Sadabadi; Saeed Ramezani; Kiarash Fartash

Scientometrics is one of the most important scales for evaluating scientific outputs. Co-word and social network analysis (SNA) were used to investigate relationships in the field of social accounting researches indexed on Scopus. The findings of the study indicate that the most frequent topics and vocabulary in this area is economic analysis, economic and social effects. Moreover, the most valuable subject areas were identified: based on closeness, they are water resources, tourism economics and structural adjustment. Based on centrality, economic impact, economic analysis, environmental economics and income distribution. The results of the study indicate that many important social and environmental issues can be assessed through social accounting. Co-authorship analysis revealed that the co-authorship network in this domain was discrete and with low density. By utilizing the co-occurrence map, researchers and policymakers can make policy making more effective through being aware of the research trends and hot topics in social accounting.

63-77

Authors: Amir Najafi; Sedigeh Soleimanpur; Zoheir Morady

Information Technology is a key factor in eliminating the limitations posed by time and location and gives a much better and a faster access to informaition. In other words, technology has revolutionized work methods as a result of which, the paper which was used as a substrate for writing the work upon it has now been replaced by an electronic substrate. The changes created by technology include the use of Blockchain, IoT (Internet of Things), Cloud Accounting and Big Data to do accounting in automated form.The statistical sample of this study is given on the basis of the 171 person Cochran formulae consisting of financial managers, accountants and auditors of the Tehran city. Empirical results show that the use of Information Technology has a very significant role on the quality of Accounting Information and all these factors are influential in the quality of accounting system.

103-127

Authors: Andrew Arim; Joseph Wamema

One of the predominant challenges facing banks in low resource countries is the management of Digital Financial Services (DFS) risks. Many banks are making worthwhile efforts to boost the factors that make them come on top of the challenges, unfortunately they have fallen short. This article sought to develop an e-risk management framework for DFS in Ugandan banks. Design Science Research paradigm, a mono-method qualitative research method and a case study research strategy was adopted. Questionnaires, interviews and document review were the main data collection methods. Findings from this study indicate that banks in Uganda use a handful of DFS business models and face a number of DFS risks including; talent for DFS, technology, strategy, governance, product, client acquisition, crime/fraud, regulation, and agent management among others. Notwithstanding, Ugandan banks should carefully balance IT spend across customer expectations, improve cybersecurity and internal process and regularly check its IT security.

141-156

Authors: Mahdi Hoseinpour; Sanjar Salajghe; Mohammad Jalal Kamali

This study aims to investigate the organizational factors affecting knowledge concealment in scientific contexts. This study has taken a mixed approach to identify these factors, so what makes it unique is the pluralism of data collection methods. Also, using the "Delphi" method, a conceptual model of organizational factors affecting knowledge concealment in scientific contexts is presented. The statistical sample included 314 employees of the Islamic Azad University of Khorasan Razavi who were selected through the random sampling method. They filled knowledge concealment questionnaire by Demirkasimoglu (2016) and a scholar-made questionnaire. Data were analyzed using the structural equation method (SEM) in AMOS software. Findings revealed that the coefficient correlation of organizational culture, reward system, organizational structure, organizational support, organizational justice, quality of work-life, and leadership style with knowledge concealment was -0.62, -0.27, -0.49, -1.30, -0.77, -0.39, and -0.88, respectively. The results indicate that organizational factors have an inverse and significant relationship with knowledge concealment.

173-195

Authors: Blaženka Divjak; Petra Vondra; Katarina Pažur Aničić

This paper elaborates the design of a National Learning Analytics (LA) and Educational Data Mining System for pre-tertiary education in Croatia. The described approach consists of the following five phases: 1) objectives setting, 2) user needs analysis, 3) data availability analysis, 4) dashboards pre-design and 5) validation of functionalities. There is an evident research gap, as well as the lack of practical examples about the development of a Learning Analytics System (LAS) for pre-tertiary education on the national and/or regional level. Therefore, this research aims to make a scientific contribution by filling the recognized gap, but also contribute to solving the practical issues of national schools’ LAS development. To increase the usability of an LAS, the involvement of all end users is essential. In the described case, six main user groups were identified: 10-18 years old students, teachers, school management and support staff, regional and national authorities responsible for education, strategic bodies and researchers and, finally, project partners that work on system development. For each of them, separate dashboard functionalities have been designed through several rounds of consultations. Consultations with users started with focus groups and panels, to brainstorm the most important issues they would like to answer in order to enhance learning and teaching. Between the two rounds of consultation, there was an evaluation phase of the relevance of the gathered questions. Finally, targeted users provided feedback on the pre-production functionalities of each dashboard and validated them. In this process, several challenges were detected, including data gathering and protection, ethical issues and interpretation of results for students who are underage, and continuous adjustments to the users’ needs.

213-236

Authors: Bernard Ijesunor Akhigbe; Oladele J. Ososanya; Emmanuel Ajayi Olajubu

This paper presents a formulated mobile-based location-awareness model that was implemented into a Location-awareness System (L-aS hereafter) for finding the pharmacy location where prescribed drugs and their prices are available for sale. The scenario that inspired the model formulation was formalized using the unified modeling language. The model was implemented within the android studio integrated development environment with the L-aS database created through SQL lite database. The system was tested using user experience based testing technique. Based on core system performance testing, the system demonstrated a normal response time, resource utilization (i.e. storage and memory usage), and data use potentials of 414.6ms, 4.964mb and 1.9116 kb/secs, and 3.0296mb respectively. Therefore, the system performed well under ordinary conditions as an android application running on small memory devices. The study concluded that the developed mobile based pharmacy store location-aware system was useful to provide information to purchase prescribed drugs especially in perplexed situation(s).

255-266

Authors: Krishna Priya; Jansi Rani T.

Work life balance is the relationship between, how much time and effort someone spends to work and how much time and effort spend to other elements of their life, such as family, children, friends etc., HR policies are the organization’s continuing guidelines for managing its employees. As in this study, it mainly focuses on what are all roles played by the human resource department on balancing work and life in the Information Technology sector of women professionals. For this research, descriptive research was done with a sample of 200 women professionals from selected IT companies in Chennai using simple random sampling technique. The questionnaire was created using the independent variable of HR policies on work life balance and mediator of continuance commitment with a dependent variable of work life balance. The statistical tools used in this study are CFA, Discriminant validity and Composite reliability with the assistance of SPSS and AMOS software. The research found that, all the item used in the study are reflect a good measure of the variables.

375-397

Authors: Cidália Oliveira; Carmem Leal; António Pinho

This paper aims to confirm the importance of BSC (Balanced Scorecard) in SMEs’ organizational performance. To perform the empirical study of this investigation, a field study, namely a qualitative approach, Multi Case Study was selected and developed in two small and medium organizations (SMEs) in the wine sector. One of the organizations, had the Balanced Scorecard (BSC) implemented while the other did not, which made it possible to ascertain the existing differences among SMEs that apply and those that do not apply BSC. The results showed that BSC has impact on business success. SMEs benefit from the implementation of BSC, consequently SMEs were encouraged to adopt it based on the benefits in terms of performance and measurement of strategic objectives. This study reflects that BSC has been a discussion and research topic over the last few years as it leverages business. Managers seek appropriate BSC tools to implement indicators and monitor these in accordance with the global organizational strategy. Besides BSC provides managers with relevant information to take decisions, define action plans and achieve the whole organizational control.

411-434

Authors: Armen E. Petrosyan

By means of theoretical analysis based on the results of previous research, and the relevant historical and factual material, the author outlines a new theory of formation, transformation, and fission of organizational culture. The mechanism that consolidates organizational culture (selection of “right” persons; adjustment to the common cause; and people’s accommodation with each other), the toolkit for renewing it (involvement of the key bearers of the culture to be introduced; elimination of those inconsistent with it; and translation of the proclaimed values to the “pliant mass” ready to get engaged in changes) as well as the nature of cultural ruptures in organizations and the ways out are brought into relief. The paper promotes a better understanding of the dynamics of organizational culture and gives an access to more efficient instruments to manage it.

451-471

Authors: Maria Jakovljevic; Nkopodi Nkopodi

Educationists are urged to investigate the effect of social networks control. There is a lack of multidisciplinary studies with a focus on coercive social network control in the higher education sector. This exploratory and descriptive study presents a theoretical contemplation of social network control based on ten key elements that influence teaching and learning in higher educational environments. The paper provides a critical analysis of the impact of an economic model on social networks control and examines social engineering through the tenets of digital presence, psychological strategies and tactics. Insights into user-generated content and the learning process of manipulative assimilation that influence current ways of thinking in higher educational contexts are offered through the lens of social networks control mechanisms. A framework for social network control was derived, signifying the flow and dynamics between key elements which might impact on various aspects of social network security and its applications in Higher Education.

495-511

Authors: Kiril Kirilov

Image classification and face recognition has been a popular subject matter for the last several decades. Images are usually handled as transformed as vectors which makes their classification a dimensionality reduction task. Some of the well-known algorithms in the area, such as the Sparsity Preserving Projection (SPP), create new theoretical concepts families, while other successfully modify or combine useful properties of the former ones. Compiled algorithms like Sparse Discriminant Preserving Projections (SDPP) employ the properties of the Sparse Representation (SR) as in their objective functions they include a supervised modification of the sparse weight matrix that considers the intra-class relations. By examining the construction of the SDPP algorithm and by providing some arguments on the supervised SR, in this paper we propose a new subspace learning algorithm, called Inverted Sparse Discriminant Preserving Projection (ISDPP). Likewise SDPP, ISDPP integrates supervised SR with the Fisher’s criterion. In contrast to SDPP, ISDPP incorporates a between-class SR with the Fischer’s within-class scatter matrix. A preliminary round of experiments support the initiative and provide an expectation for possible superior performance of the proposed ISDPP that is confirmed in the next round of empirical examinations.

535-551

Authors: Desabandhu Parasuraman; Sathiyamoorthy Elumalai

Recommender systems have become a vital entity to the business world in form of software tools to make decisions. It estimates the overloaded information and provides the suitable decisions in any kind of business work through online. Especially in the area of e-commerce, recommender systems provide suggestions to users on the items that are likely based upon user’s true interest. Collaborative Filtering and Content Based Filtering are the main techniques of recommender systems. Collaborative Filtering is considered to be the best in all domains and always outperforms Content Based filtering. But, both the techniques have some limitations like data sparsity, cold start, gray sheep and scalability issues. To overcome these limitations, Hybrid Recommender Systems are used by combining Collaborative Filtering and Content Based Filtering. This paper proposes such kind of hybrid system by combining Collaborative Filtering and Content Based Filtering using time variance and machine learning algorithm.

567-578

Authors: Mahsa Fidanboy; Kerim Ozcan; Cemalettin Ocal Fidanboy

The aim of this paper is to develop a scale for measuring organizational adaptation and investigating its relationship with R&D performance. For this purpose, the items were developed in accordance with the dimensions of organization design, and the scale was tested first in a pilot study, and after making revisions and modifications, it was employed in the main study on two different samples, one for exploratory factor analysis (EFA), and the other for confirmatory factor analysis (CFA). The final scale consists of 17 items categorized under 4 dimensions labeled as contextual factors, tasks and roles, labor and labor division, and rules and regulations. The results indicate that except for rules and regulations, all dimensions of organizational adaptation bear higher values in high R&D performance cluster. The organizations who enforce adaptation in all the other three dimensions yield more innovation which will help them in their decisions regarding their adaptive responses.

601-638

Authors: Robertina Zdjelar; Nikolina Žajdela Hrustek

The issue of e-Inclusion has become an important topic and increasingly gains significance if one takes into account the global trend of digital transformation in the development of the information society and that the digital divide is still present. The reason more for taking the e-Inclusion of all social groups as a challenge has recently been the Covid-19 pandemic and natural disasters (earthquakes, floods) that change the norms of social behavior, require adaptation and create new rules. Users’ ability to use digital services and goods as well as open data provided by public and private organizations which ultimately results in greater access to relevant information as well as improved quality of life and are a key factor for the effectiveness of digital transformation and the economic justification of investing in advanced digital technologies, goods and services. The digital divide manifests itself on certain social groups, which is a social problem. However, despite these initiatives, there are still limitations that prevent certain population groups from becoming e-inclusive members of the information society. This paper presents an overview of the analysis results of the research perspective in which scientific and professional papers consider the concepts of e-Inclusion and digital divide as a challenge. The multiperspectiveness and multidimensionality of the concept of e-Inclusion indicates its significant role in the development of the information society.