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The 1954 rulings in the United States Supreme Court cases of "Brown v Board of Education" was a landmark event in civil rights history. As momentous as the rulings were, they were not embraced by many Southern politicians. This was especially true in Virginia where Harry F. Byrd, Sr., U. S. Senator from Virginia, embarked on a campaign to massively resist court ordered school desegregation. Over the course of the next several years, Virginia's leaders would pass laws specifically designed to undermine the "Brown" rulings. These laws, known as massive resistance would, among other things, grant the governor the power to close any school or school district attempting to comply with "Brown." The results of implementation of these laws had catastrophic results socially, economically, educationally and on Virginia's national reputation. By 1959 massive resistance laws were declared unconstitutional by both state and federal courts, allowing Virginia the chance to undo this self-inflicted damage. An unintended consequence of massive resistance was the erosion and stagnation of its manufacturing sector. To rebuild the state's workforce, technical training on a large scale was necessary. To take on this herculean task the creation of a statewide system of technical colleges was needed. In 1964, the Virginia Technical College System (VTCS) was founded. This system exists today as the Virginia Community College System (VCCS). The creation of these colleges were a direct result of Virginia's ill-conceived response to "Brown." Funding had been available for many years to support technical training, but it took the contested environment created by massive resistance to make the creation of a statewide system of technical education a reality.

This report explores the ways in which human resource (HR) managers use "TOEIC"® scores to inform hiring, promotion, and training decisions in an international workplace. Two data sources were used (a) previously collected test users' testimonials that described managers' use of TOEIC scores to inform HR decisions and (b) test-use examples collected from HR managers and TOEIC representatives specifically for this project. Our analysis of test-use examples provided insight into how companies use TOEIC scores to inform HR decisions related to hiring, promotion, and training of employees in international businesses. To conclude, we provide suggestions for future research such as providing services to test users (e.g., assessment literacy, the development of assessments measuring additional components of workplace English, or algorithms to help analyze the various variables relevant to informing HR decisions) to continue to support meaningful and relevant score-based HR decisions and score interpretations.

Public education reformers have created a widespread expectation of school choice among school consumers. School leaders adopt rigorous academic programs, like the International Baccalaureate (IB) Diploma Programme (DP) and Career Programme (CP), to improve their market position in the competitive landscape. While ample research has investigated the nature of school choice policies, few studies have looked directly at marketing language or materials to probe the meanings of the sales pitches used by schools to recruit students for selective enrollment programs. This study aimed to develop understandings of meanings that emerge from the marketing discourses of specialized secondary programs. It draws from document analysis (Prior, 2003) and multi-modal social semiotics (Hodge & Kress, 1988; Kress, 2010) to investigate the marketing of IB Programmes in two U.S. high schools. American schools operate within the quasi-market education system and engender business ideologies meant to attract program participants and supportive parents. The policy discourses of school choice are maneuvered into marketing narratives to shape the 21st century student-subject.

Entrepreneurship is defined as the process where an individual discovers, evaluates and exploit opportunities independently. Most countries have embraced entrepreneurship development as ways of creating employment and economic growth and development. The objective of the study was to examine the challenges faced by commercial enterprises in Lira District Northern Uganda. Using both simple random sampling procedures, a sample of 274 participants were selected for the survey. The data were analyzed using SPSS statistical package. The study recommended that development partners operating in the district should consider supporting commercial enterprises (CEs) in accessing financial support, training upcoming managers in management skills and creating a favouarable environment which supports creativity and innovations.

The worldwide big data and analytics investment market continues to grow, with projections indicating strong compound annual growth rates over the next decade. To achieve true competitive advantage from business intelligence and data analytics, organizations must control how these investments are being integrated into the culture of the organization. Analytics integration is dependent on employees displaying a comprehensive set of skills that extends beyond technical competencies. This qualitative research identifies specific personal, interpersonal, and communication skills critical for effective interaction among analytics specialists and corporate decision makers. In applying these skills, analytics professionals can shift the decision culture within the organization to engage a data-informed approach to decision making.

This article reports on a study that inquired into the journeys of sixteen Indigenous Australian athletes from their first touch of the footy to the Australian Football League (AFL) and National Rugby League (NRL) that identified two distinct stages of their journeys. These were: (1) the development of expertize and of a distinctly Aboriginal style of play from their first touch of a footy to around the age of thirteen and, (2) a process of cultural transitioning toward and into the AFL and NRL. This article takes an interdisciplinary approach to focus on the second stage of transitioning into the world of professional sport and sport as business. Identifying this as a process of cultural transitioning from local Aboriginal culture to the culture of professional sport provided insight into this transitioning process while illuminating the profound importance of culture in this process. It also helped identify the ways in which tensions between local approaches to 'footy' as play and cultural expression and professional sport as work, within the global culture of sport-as-business, were manifested in the challenges that the participants had to overcome. This article thus contributes to knowledge about Indigenous development of sporting expertize, of the specific challenges they face in transitioning into the global culture of commodified sport and how they succeed from a cultural perspective.

Undergraduate business law courses typically utilize traditional textbooks organized by topic. Individual chapters, address the usual topics including contracts, torts, the court system and ethics. An innovative approach to facilitating a business law course involves segregating sections of the course into common business disciplines. Rather than the abstract teaching of legal concepts, substantive material is presented in well defined sections including management, finance, accounting, real estate, marketing, and human resource management. Each section is defined by excerpts of published cases in private law, public law, preventative law and ethics. Individual disciplines are highlighted by instructive and provocative discussion questions following actual court opinions. Team teaching is an essential ingredient in discipline based instruction. Faculty members from specific disciplines are invited to participate and contribute to the course. The curriculum is presented in an applied format and relevant to the study and practice of business administration. Students are asked to apply legal concepts and issues to the individual disciplines they are studying in a business school format.

This paper will develop and explain a conceptual framework for the use of business industry marketing techniques within the higher educational spectrum. This framework will demonstrate how sound marketing management can help higher education increase its effectiveness and improve student interest, as well as encourage the development of managerial skills that will lead to better operational efficiency. The material will be presented in a detailed, specific, and practical manner that can be utilized by educational administrators. There are many benefits in the utilization of the marketing concept for higher education. Marketing can lead to a better understanding of your customer (student), a more efficient use of money geared specifically towards your target market, a better understanding of where your college or university stands relative to your competitors. Marketing can also help create a more effective use of your human resources and an increased awareness of marketing trends. Marketing, specifically targeted towards the student using the nine p's and taking into account the differences between marketing for higher education and marketing for products, may result in improved student interest towards the marketed university or college, which may result in higher enrollment.

Social enterprise is a burgeoning, although nebulously defined, strategy for linking market-based revenues with social good in nonprofit, for-profit, and public organizations. This article offers a unifying definition of social enterprise, tracks its development throughout traditional sectors, and takes a first step in extending the concepts of social enterprise to the higher education sector. We argue that administrators of university centers associated with schools of social work should employ social enterprise principles. Key benefits would be to gain revenue for the centers, break down disciplinary silos in the university, better link social work schools to the world outside academe, help train students in an emerging organizational model, and increase civic engagement in the university.

Abstract Non-financial companies listed on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange face considerable difficulties due to expensive funding and the need to make complex decisions about their capital structure. These problems impact their judgments about dividend policy, resulting in ambiguity and possible inefficiency. This study draws on the bird-in-hand theory to investigate the influence of the cost of capital on dividend policy decisions among non-financial firms listed on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange, focusing on 227 companies from 2005 to 2022. The data for this study were sourced from Thomson Reuters Datastream. Employing the common shock autoregressive distributed lag (CS-ARDL) and two-step generalized method of moments (GMM) estimations, findings reveal that the cost of debt consistently negatively impacts dividend payouts and coverage ratios. In contrast, the cost of equity has an insignificant effect. Conversely, the weighted average cost of capital positively influences dividend payouts and coverage ratios but negatively influences dividend yield. All the findings supported the bird-in-hand theory except for the negative impact of WACC on dividend yield. These insights highlight the importance of considering the cost of capital and market share dynamics in dividend policy formulation. Firms should prioritize efficient debt management to sustain dividend distributions, and aligning dividend policies with overall capital structure management is crucial in this regard, providing a sense of reassurance and confidence to the firms and their stakeholders. This study provides valuable guidance for financial decision-makers navigating dividend-related strategies within corporate environments.

Purpose -- The purpose of this paper is to undertake a survey of the external and internal forces changing the nature of business schools and business education. It aims to investigate how management education responds to increasing productivity, innovation and capability challenges, examine how MBA programs currently meet these demands, and how these courses might redefine their identity and delivery and finally explore how to deepen engagement between business schools and business stakeholders, and to balance the imperatives of relevance and quality. Design/methodology/approach -- This is a survey of business schools and business education in the context of evolving educational and industry policy in Australia in response to an increasingly international and competitive economy. The different potential roles and strategies of business schools are examined, and future strategies identified. Findings -- The paper finds that management education is facing insistent pressure to change internationally, and that business schools need to become more dynamic, innovative and responsive to succeed. Research limitations/implications -- This survey considers the implications of recent policy on business education and relates this to emerging practice. Further research is required on how innovative pedagogical approaches will deliver more integrated and relevant business education. Practical implications -- The paper defines key business school strategies, and outlines significant new approaches to making business education more innovative, responsive, integrated and engaged. Social implications -- The paper considers means to more active stakeholder engagement for business schools. Originality/value -- The paper highlights the weaknesses of traditional business education strategy, and reveals the potential for significant change. (Contains 4 figures.)

Paradigms are important. Since the early part of the 20th century, a corporatist paradigm has influenced education policy and structure. A corporatist view is based on two assumptions: Schools are like businesses; therefore, sound business practices will improve schools. Another paradigm that has received only minimal attention in formulating education policy in the United States is a community paradigm, which envisions education as a comprehensive endeavor and the integration of students into the larger social system as the paramount goal. Both paradigms have views about the social good, and in my article, I attempt to outline each paradigm, its assumptions, and its potential impact on schooling in the United States.

This study is set to examine the influence of financial capability on quality service delivery in the social protection funds in Tanzania. The study draws experience from the Public Service Social Security Fund in Dodoma. Using a cross-sectional research design, data were collected from 142 employees through questionnaire surveys. Data were analysed using descriptive and inferential statistics. The descriptive statistics were presented through mean and standard deviation. Also, inferential statistics was presented using multiple linear regression. Results show that employees at PSSF perceive quality service delivery as moderate. Further analysis reveals that budget allocation, investment in service, financial resources and funding sources significantly influence quality service delivery. Likewise, the R Square value of 0.546 indicates that 54.6% of the variability in quality service delivery is explained by the independent variables. ANOVA results confirm a significant relationship (p < .001) with an F-statistic of 46.840. The findings underscore the importance of financial capability in enhancing quality service. The study recommends that human resource departments to integrate financial literacy initiatives into employee development plans to empower staff with the skills needed to navigate financial challenges effectively. Additionally, policymakers and regulators should ensure adequate financial resources and support systems are in place to sustainably improve quality service delivery.

En el Perú, aún no se han implementado medidas concretas que garanticen los derechos de las mujeres gestantes y con hijos en el sistema penal, siendo fundamental realizar un estudio que permita evaluar la situación actual y proponer acciones específicas que puedan ser incorporadas en las políticas públicas. Por lo que esta investigación tuvo como objetivo analizar la prisión preventiva y las medidas alternativas para mujeres gestantes y con hijos menores de tres años, desarrollándose un estudio de tipo básico, con enfoque cualitativo y hermenéutico de alcance descriptivo basado en la teoría fundamentada, donde se aplicó una entrevista a la muestra integrada por 12 profesionales vinculados al proceso judicial. Los resultados arrojaron que las prisiones preventivas aplicadas vulneran los derechos y garantías penales y procesales de las mujeres, teniendo una repercusión negativa para su salud y bienestar. Se concluyó que en Perú no se están aplicando bien las políticas que protejan adecuadamente a mujeres gestantes y con hijos pequeños en el sistema penal porque, aunque existen opciones alternativas a la prisión preventiva, estas no se usan mucho por la falta de capacitación judicial y la preferencia por enfoques más punitivos.

There is a growing body of research focusing on women in the business sector using a transformational model of leadership that identifies the ways in which they lead yet little is known about the style of leadership women practise in sport. In attempting to redress this oversight in the literature, this article draws on data from a larger study to identify how women practise leadership within a sporting context. It identifies the leadership styles of women working at the community (club and regional) and elite (state and national) sectors of the Australian sport system in the state of Victoria as being feminine but which appropriate aspects of masculine styles. It also suggests that the women's early experiences of growing up played a significant part in shaping their leadership styles.

The Major Field Test in Business (MFT-B), a standardized assessment test of business knowledge among undergraduate business seniors, is widely used to measure student achievement. The Educational Testing Service, publisher of the assessment, provides data that allow institutions to compare their own MFT-B performance to national norms, but that procedure fails to take the characteristics of institutional student cohorts into account. Using empirical methods, the authors describe and test a procedure to set a priori goals that take dispositional factors, most notably ACT scores, into account. This procedure enables interpretation of the MFT-B in relation to expectations. (Contains 6 tables and 3 figures.)

The relationship between values and academic identity has received scant attention in the higher education literature with some notable exceptions (Churchman, 2006; Harley, 2002; Henkel, 2005). This paper contends that the perceived need to align all academics around corporate values and goals has given rise to academic identity schisms in higher education. Central to the academic identity schism is the notion of person-organisation values fit and the degree to which the ideologies and values of academics are "congruent" (the "academic manager") or "incongruent" (the "managed academic") with the prevailing discourse of corporate managerialism. To reduce the prevalence of academic disengagement and make it easier for academic managers to gain the support of the managed, the paper proposes two inter-related strategies for bridging identity schisms in academe. (Contains 1 table.)

This article intends to investigate the challenges of e-learning implementation with an emphasis on education innovation. The Botswana government imports technology rather than developing it in-house through or in association with a well-developed national research and development (R&D) centre. In simple terms, e-learning is the delivery of education or teaching by electronic means. This technological change puts pressure on leaders and policy makers. This research will enable researchers to provide scientific advice to stakeholders on the use of e-learning as a platform for education innovation in Botswana. In spite of limited access to computers, technophobia and slow network connection, e-learning can be a very useful tool in its flexibility and provision of self-directed learning. A variety of teaching and learning methods can be applied towards the development of the individual. The general objective of this study was to determine employee awareness of the influence and abilities, as well as limitations, of information and communication technologies (ICTs) for advancing a personal, active, open, collaborative and lifelong learning process. A survey of employees at both management and technical levels from industry was conducted, asking the importance in terms of being a lifelong learner of characteristics such as technical competence, analytical and creative thinking skills, the desire to enquire, and the impact of technology at work, at home and in society, among other things. How well these factors were offered in the technical education that was acquired at tertiary level was also rated.

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to reflect on and inform about learning points from ECUANET, a two-year duration best practice action research and transnational networking project as it approaches its final stage. Design/methodology/approach: The paper explicates the key positive and obfuscating dynamics that the project team have had to, and will have to conjure with, in reaching its recommendations about the evolution of best practice in corporate university and enterprise academy design and management. The project partners have operated a voluntary or self selection process in their recruitment of corporate partner organisations to participate in the project action research case study work. The research methodology was based upon the corporate university blueprint architecture and browser toolkit to provide depth in practice evidence and a searchable database for comparative case to case practice evaluation of the key performance indicators (KPIs). Findings: It was found that the corporate university organisation and business development concept is a subject area which is either well understood by company management and education institutions or there is considerable confusion about its role and purpose. This comment does not apply comfortably and consistently universally as there are very different states of maturity, adoption and interpretation in the concept's development and practice across the world region by region. From a wide and diverse portfolio of companies and organisations who were invited to participate in the action research case studies those who accepted have one very important characteristic in common they are all intensively engaged in managing a major innovation, i.e. they already have the commitment and fortitude to making new ideas work in practice. The experience of this project confirms that to be successful in this turbulent era of intensive new learning management, there needs to be continuous commitment to engendering innovation diffusion in both strategic and tactically inspired new learning process management. In addition it also demands serious reflection about the creative nature of the learning leadership role and also the style of its management. Originality/value: The a priori browser based corporate university blueprint model architecture employed in the empirical case study research mode proved to have both the depth and flexibility to provide a high quality evaluative framework and capture all the dynamics relating to the key variables in good corporate university design and management. The data base of case foundation information, KPIs and best practice outcomes will be one of the most comprehensive and world class quality reference sources published to date.

Organizational learning (OL) is about how individuals collect, absorb, and transform information into organizational memory and knowledge. This case study explored how six high-technology firms in Taiwan chose OL as an organization development intervention strategy. Issues included how best to implement OL; how individuals, teams, and organizations learn; and the extent to which OL activities contributed to organizational performance. Five themes emerged as findings: (1) using language with which employees are familiar, (2) implementing OL concepts that are congruent with employees' work or personal life, (3) putting individual learning first and diffusing it to team learning and organizational learning, (4) using the knowledge management system to create an opportunity for individuals, teams, and the organization to learn, and (5) linking OL to organizational strategy to improve organizational performance. (Contains 1 table and 3 figures.)

Language planning is normally thought of in terms of large-scale, usually national planning, often undertaken by governments and meant to influence, if not change, ways of speaking or literacy practices within a society. It normally encompasses four aspects: status planning (about society), corpus planning (about language), language-in-education (or acquisition) planning (about learning), and (most recently) prestige planning (about image). When thinking about these aspects, both policy (i.e. form) and planning (i.e. function) components need to be considered as well as whether such policy and planning will be overt or covert in terms of the way it is put into action. Language policy and planning on this scale has dominated current work in the field. However, over the past decade language planning has taken on a more critical edge and its ecological context has been given greater emphasis, leading to an increasing acceptance that language planning can (and does) occur at different levels, i.e. the macro, meso and micro. This shift in focus has also led to a rethinking of agency--who has the power to influence change in these micro language policy and planning situations. Given this break with the dominant macro history, the question may be asked, is this developing notion of micro language planning and local agency actually language planning? If so, what are its parameters? Micro language planning studies are examined to illustrate trends in the literature. (Contains 1 figure, 1 table and 8 notes.)

Teaching and assessment of student learning are not unrelated activities. Rather, assessment is an integral part of the learning process. Teaching is how instructors help students to discover knowledge and new ideas and ways of organizing and perceiving what they have learned. Assessment of learning incorporates the broad array of techniques that can capture what a student knows about what was taught. Just as there is no "best" teaching method, neither is there only one "best" approach to student assessment. Tests, however, are generally the primary and sometimes the only method for assessing learning. This article begins with an overview of the relevant aspects of the research of Benjamin Bloom and other educational psychologists on the levels of intellectual competencies important to learning and the test question cues related to these competencies. The article then describes legal environment of business exams where students can choose both which essays to answer and how many to answer, thereby self-determining the mix between objective questions (true-false and multiple choice) and essay questions. The results of a student questionnaire as well as data analysis of student point scores are also examined. The article concludes with observations on the benefits of offering students essay choice. (Contains 1 figure, 17 footnotes and 5 tables.)

PURPOSE: Nowadays enterprises operate in a very turbulent environment characterized by frequent, significant, and often unpredictable changes. Such conditions, including crises, force enterprises to take quick actions to adapt to changing conditions. The aim of the paper is to identify chances and timing strategies used by tourism entrepreneurs in conditions of large-scale emergencies (such as COVID-19) and show how they can serve organizational resilience. METHODOLOGY: Qualitative research was conducted in the form of 12 individual in-depth interviews and 4 focus group interviews with 22 representatives of selected industries in the tourism sector. The concept of chance management and timing strategies is used to present how, according to our interviewees, changes in the environment caused by the pandemic contributed to the survival and development of their entities in the tourism market. FINDINGS: The research findings showed that changes caused by the pandemic allowed entities to identify several chances. These chances mainly concerned the introduction of changes to the offer (accelerating previously planned changes and enabling the introduction of unplanned changes). Moreover, they provided the chances to use held digital competences and time to think about the company’s development strategy, as well as establishing and developing relationships with stakeholders. Additionally, our research identified four timing strategies used by tourism entrepreneurs in the time of crisis, i.e. chance-grasping strategy, chance-entraining strategy, chance-riding strategy, and chance-creating strategy. IMPLICATIONS: Tourism enterprises are highly exposed to operating in crisis conditions. Therefore, chance management can be very useful in their activity and our research findings can be also useful regarding its theoretical and practical implications. From the theoretical point of view, we show how the concept of chance management (in particular timing strategies) can be useful for analyzing the reactions of tourism entrepreneurs to changes in times of crisis and taking advantage of opportunities arising from crisis situations. From a practical point of view, we show what strategies, depending on entrepreneurs’ subjective assessment of the current and future conditions for implementing changes, can serve organizational resilience in times of crisis. ORIGINALITY AND VALUE: This paper fills a research gap related to the use of the concepts of chance management and timing strategies from the perspective of tourist enterprises resilience, previously not used in this context and to a limited extent used in the general management literature so far.

Alongside natural language processing and computer vision, large learning models have found their way into e-commerce. Especially, for recommender systems and click-through rate prediction, these models have shown great predictive power. In this work, we aim to predict the probability that a customer will click on a given recommendation, given only its current session. Therefore, we propose a two-stage approach consisting of a customer behavior-embedding representation and a recurrent neural network. In the first stage, we train a self-supervised skip-gram embedding on customer activity data. The resulting embedding representation is used in the second stage to encode the customer sequences which are then used as input to the learning model. Our proposed approach diverges from the prevailing trend of utilizing extensive end-to-end models for click-through rate prediction. The experiments, which incorporate a real-world industrial use case and a widely used as well as openly available benchmark dataset, demonstrate that our approach outperforms the current state-of-the-art models. Our approach predicts customers’ click intention with an average F1 accuracy of 94% for the industrial use case which is one percentage point higher than the state-of-the-art baseline and an average F1 accuracy of 79% for the benchmark dataset, which outperforms the best tested state-of-the-art baseline by more than seven percentage points. The results show that, contrary to current trends in that field, large end-to-end models are not always needed. The analysis of our experiments suggests that the reason for the performance of our approach is the self-supervised pre-trained embedding of customer behavior that we use as the customer representation.

Abstract The study examines the effect of bank recapitalization and dividend policies on the financial sustainability of rural and community banks (RCBs) in Ghana. Data from 135 RCBs from 2011 to 2020 revealed an average financial sustainability index of 0.525 over the past decade, suggesting that RCBs can finance their operations and liabilities without diminishing shareholder value. Recapitalization and dividend payouts positively impact financial sustainability, with well-capitalized, highly pay-out RCBs showing faster improvements in sustainability compared to those with retention policy. This highlights the importance of RCBs bolstering their capital base, even when not mandated by regulators, to enhance financial sustainability. Furthermore, adopting a relaxed pay-out policy can signal operational efficiency and sustainability to shareholders.

This study explores the interdependence of exchange rates between the West African Monetary Zone and the West African Economic and Monetary Union countries using monthly data from 2000 to 2021. Employing wavelet multiple correlation and wavelet multiple cross-correlation by Fernando-Macho, we generally uncovered low degrees of integration between the two blocs at higher frequencies, but the level of integration gradually becomes stronger as it navigates from higher a frequency (lower scale) to a lower frequency (higher scale). This implies that ex-ante convergence of exchange rates is difficult; however, in the long time horizon, exchange rate convergence is possible. Evidence from cross-correlation analysis shows that lead (lag) effects is time-varying and heterogeneous, showing no particular country’s exchange rates as leaders or followers. Different currencies have the potential to lead or lag on varying scales. These results suggest that member states establish a regional surveillance mechanism that can monitor macroeconomic indicators in the region. The effective implementation of this mechanism can aid in identifying macroeconomic imbalances and potential risks to macroeconomic stability and convergence.

AbstractWeb 2.0 networks have provoked a revolution in the last years due to their capacity to modify human relationships, particularly in business contexts. Social capital, as a crucial intangible asset embedded in Web 2.0 networks, can be extremely helpful to build and optimize personal and organizational performance. The study analysed the influence of web 2 adoptions on the organisational performance of MTN Ghana with perceived ease of use playing a moderating role. The study adopted a quantitative approach and explanatory research design. Data were collected via structured questionnaires from 367 conveniently sampled customers from the 16.2 million active subscribers who had successfully linked their Sim cards with their Ghana cards as of June 30, 2022. The study obtained a valid data set of 272 with a response rate of 74.1% which was then processed via IBM SPSS (v.26) and SmartPLS3 software. The study found that web 2 adoption comprising wikis, blogs, social networking sites, and file sharing has a significant positive effect on MTN’s overall performance. It was concluded that perceived ease of use plays a significant moderating role in the link between web 2 adoption and MTN-Ghana performance. The study, therefore, recommended that policy makers including the management of MTN-Ghana should continue to adopt and invest in its web 2 technologies in order to attain higher performance levels and become more competitive.

AbstractThis study investigates the determinants of FinTech adoption among small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in Ghana, utilizing the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) as a theoretical framework. It employed a survey design with a quantitative approach to data analysis. Data was gathered from a sample of 309 SMEs by adapting a closed-ended questionnaire. To test the hypotheses, the data were analysed using structural equation modelling Partial Least Square. The findings of this research demonstrate that the majority of the constructs in the conceptual framework has significant explanatory power in relation to the desire to embrace FinTech in Ghana. Specifically, 11 out of the total 13 hypotheses were confirmed. The key factor that positively impacts the uptake of FinTech innovations is the perceived usefulness, followed by the intention to use as the second influential factor. The results also indicate that there is a positive association between perceived ease of use and attitude towards use with FinTech adoption. Nevertheless, the observed direct impact of perceived ease of use on the adoption of FinTech is not statistically significant. But the impact of perceived ease of use on the adoption of FinTech is mediated by either perceived usefulness or intention to use. This research will assist FinTech service providers in designing FinTech services that take into account a wide range of SMEs’ needs. FinTech services could be made more beneficial to build attitude affirmations and shape intentions. This will encourage SMEs and other users to use FinTech regularly and persuade nonusers to try it.

Examines the issue of fraud on the Internet and discusses three areas with significant potential for misleading and fraudulent practices: securities sales and trading; electronic commerce, including privacy and information protection; and the rapid growth of Internet companies, including advertising issues. (Author/LRW)