University of Central Lancashire Cyprus
UniversityLarnaca, Larnaka, Cyprus
Research output, citation impact, and the most-cited recent papers from University of Central Lancashire Cyprus (Cyprus). Aggregated across the NobleBlocks index of 300M+ scholarly works.
Top-cited papers from University of Central Lancashire Cyprus
The competing claims of two explanations of sex differences in social behavior, social role theory, and evolutionary psychology are examined. The origin and scope of research on sex differences in social behavior are outlined, and the application of social role theory is discussed. Research that is based on modern sexual selection theory is described, and whether its findings can be explained by social role theory is considered. Findings associated with social role theory are weighed against evolutionary explanations. It is concluded that evolutionary theory accounts much better for the overall pattern of sex differences and for their origins. A coevolutionary approach is proposed to explain cross-cultural consistency in socialization patterns.
Science is crucial for evidence-based decision-making. Public trust in scientists can help decision makers act on the basis of the best available evidence, especially during crises. However, in recent years the epistemic authority of science has been challenged, causing concerns about low public trust in scientists. We interrogated these concerns with a preregistered 68-country survey of 71,922 respondents and found that in most countries, most people trust scientists and agree that scientists should engage more in society and policymaking. We found variations between and within countries, which we explain with individual- and country-level variables, including political orientation. While there is no widespread lack of trust in scientists, we cannot discount the concern that lack of trust in scientists by even a small minority may affect considerations of scientific evidence in policymaking. These findings have implications for scientists and policymakers seeking to maintain and increase trust in scientists.
Purpose Amidst the COVID-19 outbreak, service organizations rushed to deploy robots to serve people in quarantine, again igniting the ongoing dispute regarding robots in tourism. This study aims to investigate tourists’ perceptions regarding the use of robots and, more specifically, anthropomorphic robots in the tourism domain. Design/methodology/approach A qualitative inquiry was used to delve deep into the issue of tourists’ perceptions regarding the usage of anthropomorphic robots in tourism, with a total number of 78 interviews with tourists being retained in the study. Findings The findings reveal that tourists favor the use of anthropomorphic robots over any other type of robot. The use of anthropomorphic robots in tourism may result in an overall enhanced experiential value. Even so, informants also expressed frustration, sadness and disappointment vis-à-vis the use of robots in a human-driven industry. Research limitations/implications A conceptual continuum of tourists’ perceptions and concerns over the use of robots is presented that can guide future studies. Tourism stakeholders may look at the possibility of incorporating carefully designed anthropomorphic robots in key service positions, but should not give the impression that robots are replacing the human face of the organization. Practical implications Tourism stakeholders may look at the possibility of incorporating carefully designed anthropomorphic robots in key service positions, but should not give the impression that robots are replacing the human face of the organization. Originality/value Tourism organizations that make use of robots run the risk of being perceived as nonanthropocentric. This leads to the conclusion that anthropomorphism could be used but should not replace the sector’s anthropocentrism. The study conveys tourists’ concerns over technological (robot) determinism.
The technical and economic benefits of artificial intelligence (AI) are counterbalanced by legal, social and ethical issues. It is challenging to conceptually capture and empirically measure both benefits and downsides. We therefore provide an account of the findings and implications of a multi-dimensional study of AI, comprising 10 case studies, five scenarios, an ethical impact analysis of AI, a human rights analysis of AI and a technical analysis of known and potential threats and vulnerabilities. Based on our findings, we separate AI ethics discourse into three streams: (1) specific issues related to the application of machine learning, (2) social and political questions arising in a digitally enabled society and (3) metaphysical questions about the nature of reality and humanity. Human rights principles and legislation have a key role to play in addressing the ethics of AI. This work helps to steer AI to contribute to human flourishing.
This article reports the findings of a study, conducted among 227 foreign tourists who visited Cyprus, that aimed to identify the relationships between the Big Five personality dimensions and tourists’ environmentalism. Structural equation modeling revealed that Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, and Neuroticism are positively associated with pro-environmental tourist behavior. In contrast, no significant relationship was observed between Openness and ecological action.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is producing highly beneficial impacts in many domains, from transport to healthcare, from energy distribution to marketing, but it also raises concerns about undesirable ethical and social consequences. AI impact assessments (AI-IAs) are a way of identifying positive and negative impacts early on to safeguard AI's benefits and avoid its downsides. This article describes the first systematic review of these AI-IAs. Working with a population of 181 documents, the authors identified 38 actual AI-IAs and subjected them to a rigorous qualitative analysis with regard to their purpose, scope, organisational context, expected issues, timeframe, process and methods, transparency and challenges. The review demonstrates some convergence between AI-IAs. It also shows that the field is not yet at the point of full agreement on content, structure and implementation. The article suggests that AI-IAs are best understood as means to stimulate reflection and discussion concerning the social and ethical consequences of AI ecosystems. Based on the analysis of existing AI-IAs, the authors describe a baseline process of implementing AI-IAs that can be implemented by AI developers and vendors and that can be used as a critical yardstick by regulators and external observers to evaluate organisations' approaches to AI.
Abstract The ethics of artificial intelligence (AI) is a widely discussed topic. There are numerous initiatives that aim to develop the principles and guidance to ensure that the development, deployment and use of AI are ethically acceptable. What is generally unclear is how organisations that make use of AI understand and address these ethical issues in practice. While there is an abundance of conceptual work on AI ethics, empirical insights are rare and often anecdotal. This paper fills the gap in our current understanding of how organisations deal with AI ethics by presenting empirical findings collected using a set of ten case studies and providing an account of the cross-case analysis. The paper reviews the discussion of ethical issues of AI as well as mitigation strategies that have been proposed in the literature. Using this background, the cross-case analysis categorises the organisational responses that were observed in practice. The discussion shows that organisations are highly aware of the AI ethics debate and keen to engage with ethical issues proactively. However, they make use of only a relatively small subsection of the mitigation strategies proposed in the literature. These insights are of importance to organisations deploying or using AI, to the academic AI ethics debate, but maybe most valuable to policymakers involved in the current debate about suitable policy developments to address the ethical issues raised by AI.
ABSTRACT The purpose of the present study was the examination of the longitudinal effect of parental style on short‐term changes in conventional and cyber forms of bullying/victimization, and the investigation of the mediating role of peer attachment relationships on this effect. The participants were 861 children and adolescents (52% girls, M age = 11.72 years) attending Cyprus public institutions. Students provided information during three measurement points. There was a six and a 12 week interval among the three measurement points, respectively. The findings of the study indicated that parenting seems to be a significant predictor of all forms of bullying/victimization, conventional and cyber, in early adolescents, even when accounting for bullying/victimization levels eighteen weeks back. More importantly, results showed that the effect of parental style on bullying forms was mediated by peer attachment relationships. Results are discussed in the light of theoretical and practical implications.
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to advance the conceptualisation of dark tourism by evaluating both the supply‐side drivers for dark tourism development and the demand‐side motivations for visiting two dark heritage sites in Cyprus. Design/methodology/approach An exploratory research approach was adopted whereby 12 semi‐structured interviews were conducted with supply‐side stakeholders and two focus groups were conducted with local and foreign visitors. Findings Production and consumption of dark tourism is continuous and interrelated as demand appears to be supply‐driven and attraction‐based. Tourist interpretations of dark tourism are influenced by tourists' personal factors, the passage of “time” and the way the dark site is projected by the supply‐side. A refined marketing segmentation strategy is proposed taking into consideration the purpose of visit, the relevance of the dark heritage site to the tourist and the depth of the dark element. Originality/value The study's focus is narrow but the findings provide theoretical and practical insights into the conceptualisation dark tourism by considering supply and demand aspects and the related influencing factors. In doing so understanding of the phenomenon is enhanced.
Social networks serve as effective platforms in which users’ ideas can be spread in an easy and efficient manner. However, those ideas can be hateful and harmful, some of which may even amount to hate speech. YouTube, Facebook and Twitter have internal regulatory policies in relation to hate speech and have signed a Code of Conduct on the regulation of illegal hate speech with the European Commission. This paper looks at the issue of tackling hate speech on social networks and argues that, notwithstanding the weaknesses of internal policies and their implementation, their existence, as facilitated by the Code of Conduct, serves as a light at the end of the Internet hate tunnel where issues of multiple jurisdictions as well as technological realities, such as mirror sites and more, have resulted in the task of online regulation being more than a daunting one.
Abstract This study investigates whether university students’ epistemic beliefs and prior knowledge about controversial socioscientific issues (SSIs) can predict the different types of arguments that students construct. Two hundred forty‐three university students were asked to construct different types of supportive arguments—social, ethical, economic, scientific, ecological—as well as counterarguments and rebuttals after they had read a scenario on a SSI. Participants’ epistemic beliefs and prior knowledge were assessed separately. Results showed that students’ epistemic beliefs and prior knowledge predicted the quantity, quality, and diversity of the different types of arguments the students constructed. In particular, students who held sophisticated epistemic beliefs about the structure of knowledge and exhibited relatively more robust prior knowledge scores, produced arguments of greater quantity, better quality, and higher diversity than students with less sophisticated epistemic beliefs and low prior knowledge scores. Educational implications are discussed.
Indoor localization has recently and significantly attracted the interest of the research community mainly due to the fact that Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSSs) typically fail in indoor environments. In the last couple of decades, there have been several works reported in the literature that attempt to tackle the indoor localization problem. However, most of this work is focused solely on two-dimensional (2D) localization, while very few papers consider three dimensions (3D). There is also a noticeable lack of survey papers focusing on 3D indoor localization; hence, in this paper, we aim to carry out a survey and provide a detailed critical review of the current state of the art concerning 3D indoor localization including geometric approaches such as angle of arrival (AoA), time of arrival (ToA), time difference of arrival (TDoA), fingerprinting approaches based on Received Signal Strength (RSS), Channel State Information (CSI), Magnetic Field (MF) and Fine Time Measurement (FTM), as well as fusion-based and hybrid-positioning techniques. We provide a variety of technologies, with a focus on wireless technologies that may be utilized for 3D indoor localization such as WiFi, Bluetooth, UWB, mmWave, visible light and sound-based technologies. We critically analyze the advantages and disadvantages of each approach/technology in 3D localization.
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to provide practical and future research implications for the field of governance and corporate social responsibility (CSR) in sports to strengthen the depth of knowledge in this area. Design/methodology/approach – This paper reviews parts of the existing international literature and draws on literature from general business, management and governance to widen the scope and open spaces of opportunities for interested researchers. Findings – The authors find six themes that are of particular relevance and cluster them along context, content and process to map out critical and promising aspects that we believe will progress our understanding of and contribution to CSR and governance in sport: features and idiosyncrasies of sport in relation to governance and CSR; the relevance and impact of regional and cultural context; reflections on “content” of CSR in sport in difference to CSR through sport; the quest for the business case for CSR in sport and consumer reactions; the potential for interdisciplinary, multilevel and longitudinal research; and finding a critical voice and relating research (back) to industry and practice. Originality/value – The paper reviews and interlinks the topic of CSR and governance in sport in new ways and with an established, wider body of knowledge, and provides new inspiration and starting points for research from both a broader management angle and a sport-specific angle.
Death is universal, yet dying is not. Consequently, within contemporary secularised society, the process of dying has largely been relocated from the familiar environs of the family and community to a back region of medical and death industry professionals. It is argued that this institutional sequestration of death has made modern dying ‘bad’ against a romantic portrayal of a death with dignity, or a ‘good’ death. Moreover, the structural analysis of death reveals issues of ontological security and mortality meaning for the Self. This paper, therefore, adds to that analysis, and specifically examines the construction of mortality meaning within the context of dark tourism – that is, the act of travel to sites of death, disaster or the seemingly macabre. Particularly, the research interrogates the Body Worlds exhibition – a touring attraction of real human corpses – as a reflective space to mediate mortality. In doing so, this paper concludes that dark tourism is a new mediating institution that allows the Self to construct contemporary ontological meanings of mortality and to contemplate both life and death through consumption of the Significant Other Dead.
Effective governance has been identified as one of the most important factors in sustainable tourism implementation. As governance structures are increasingly becoming network-based, attention needs to be diverted to the effectiveness of partnerships in achieving sustainability in tourism. Evaluating the effectiveness of regional tourism governance in Cyprus by considering regional tourism organisations’ (RTOs) public–private network involved exploratory research whereby semi-structured interviews with key tourism stakeholders were performed. Findings reveal that network governance-related challenges interact with region-specific characteristics, inhibiting the effectiveness of regional tourism governance in implementing sustainable tourism. Specifically, RTOs represent a weak form of governance and their effectiveness in implementing sustainable tourism is limited by the continuing dependence on foreign tour operators, a system of mutual favours which complexifies the nature of tourism planning and a growing emphasis on economic interests further fuelled by recent austerity measures imposed in Cyprus. The paper concludes that network governance cannot be considered separately from the socio-cultural, economic and environmental factors of the context in which it is studied and proposes that further research reflects the horizontal relations across regional, national and global networks.
Background/objective: The holistic concept of physical literacy (PL) embraces different person-centered qualities (physical, cognitive, affective/psychological) necessary to lead physically active lifestyles. PL has recently gained increasing attention globally and Europe is no exception. However, scientific endeavors summarizing the current state of PL in Europe are lacking. Therefore, the goal of this study was to comprehensively assess and compare the implementation of PL in research, policy, and practice across the continent. Methods: We assembled a panel of experts representing 25 European countries. Employing a complementary mixed-methods design, the experts first prepared reviews about the current state of PL in their countries (categories: research, practice/policy). The reviews underwent comparative document analysis, ensuring a transnational four-eyes principle. For re-validation purposes, the representatives completed a quantitative survey with questions reflecting the inductive themes from the document analysis. Results: The document analysis resulted in ten disjunct themes (related to "concept", "research", "practice/policy", "future/prospect") and yielded a heterogenous PL situation in Europe. The implementation state was strongly linked to conceptual discussions (e.g., existence of competing approaches), linguistic issues (e.g., translations), and country-specific traditions. Despite growing scholarly attention, PL hesitantly permeates practice and policy in most countries. Nevertheless, the experts largely anticipate increasing popularity of PL for the future. Conclusion: Despite the heterogeneous situation across Europe, the analysis has uncovered similarities among the countries, such as the presence of established yet not identical concepts. Research should intensify academic activities (conceptual-linguistic elaborations, empirical work) before PL may gain further access into practical and political spheres in the long term.
Information security has been an area of research and teaching within various computing disciplines in higher education almost since the beginnings of modern computers. The need for security in computing curricula has steadily grown over this period. Recently, with an emerging global crisis, because of the limitations of security within the nascent information technology infrastructure, the field of "cybersecurity" is emerging with international interest and support. Recent evolution of cybersecurity shows that it has begun to take shape as a true academic perspective, as opposed to simply being a training domain for certain specialized jobs. This report starts from the premise that cybersecurity is a "meta-discipline." That is, cybersecurity is used as an aggregate label for a wide variety of similar disciplines, much in the same way that the terms "engineering" and "computing" are commonly used. Thus, cybersecurity should be formally interpreted as a meta-discipline with a variety of disciplinary variants, also characterized through a generic competency model. The intention is that this simple organizational concept will improve the clarity with which the field matures, resulting in improved standards and goals for many different types of cybersecurity programs.
Purpose The purpose of this study is to systematically collate and scrutinize the state of the art on consumer cosmopolitanism (CCOS) from an international marketing perspective and to provide a foundation for future research on the subject matter to proliferate and prosper. Design/methodology/approach A systematic review of the extant literature was conducted focusing on peer-reviewed journal articles published in major marketing, international business and management journals. Findings A systematic analysis of 44 journal articles shows that CCOS research is a rapidly growing research stream in the international marketing field. However, at the same time, the results reveal a lack of coherent and consistent conceptual underpinning, conflicting empirical findings regarding the profile and behavior of cosmopolitan consumers, persisting knowledge gaps, as well as methodological and contextual weaknesses. Originality/value This paper is the first to consolidate the pertinent literature on CCOS. In doing so, it provides a roadmap for future research with reference to theory, context and methodology based on the research inconsistencies and knowledge gaps identified, contributing toward the development of this research area.
Despite the increasing number and significance of charitable foundations in various business sectors, their role in cocreating corporate social responsibility (CSR) value remains unclear. This paper identifies CSR value cocreation in professional team sport organizations (PTSOs) and answers three key research questions: (a) Why have PTSOs developed charitable foundations as their means toward CSR value cocreation? (b) What CSR-related resources do PTSOs and their charitable foundations integrate? and (c) How do they manage, share, and transfer such resources to cocreate CSR value? Drawing theoretical insights from service dominant logic and consumer culture theory—and using empirical data from 47 semistructured interviews of UK-based professional football (soccer) clubs—this study develops a communicating vessels framework to illustrate the role of charitable foundations in the CSR value cocreation process. Through four tentative CSR value cocreation levels of relationship (bolt-on, cooperative, controlled, and strategic) the study suggests several internal strategies that can enhance the level of collaboration between founders and foundations. These include information sharing through customer relationship management (CRM) systems and social media platforms; staff sharing or flexible movement across the organizations; quality assurance agreements; flexible team cooperation; partnership protocols with social, media, cultural, and commercial stakeholders; and cotraining of personnel.
AIM: This paper is a report of a study to determine the transferability of the Management of Aggression and Violence Attitude Scale to European mental health inpatient settings. BACKGROUND: Incidents of patient aggression and violence are common in psychiatric in-patient facilities, and nurses' attitudes may play a part in how they are managed. METHODS: Nursing staff from acute psychiatric in-patient units in Switzerland and the United Kingdom completed the Management of Aggression and Violence Attitude Scale. Data were collected in the UK in 2001 and Switzerland in 2003. The Swiss sample comprised 75 respondents: 45 female, mean age 36.24, mean experience 7.35 years, 60 Registered Nurses. The United Kingdom sample was 75 respondents: 58 female, mean age 32, mean experience 5.25 years, 48 Registered Nurses. T-tests identified differences between the groups in their responses to each Management of Aggression and Violence Attitude Scale statement. RESULTS: There was 66% concordance of views between the groups. Swiss nurses were, however, more likely to regard factors internal to the patient as contributory to aggression while United Kingdom nurses perceived environmental factors to be more important. Both groups endorsed physical means of aggression management, Swiss nurses more so. CONCLUSION: There are both commonalities and differences between the attitudes of Swiss and United Kingdom nursing staff regarding patient aggression. Differences may relate to rates of aggression, variations in management approaches, training and policy. The Management of Aggression and Violence Attitude Scale is a potentially effective tool for making comparisons about perspectives on patient aggression.