The research team, led by Holly Wei of Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center with colleagues from the Mayo Clinic Alix School of Medicine and TTUHSC’s compliance and academic affairs offices, built the model through a directed content analysis — a structured qualitative method in which predetermined categories guide the examination of literature rather than emerging inductively from it. The team searched Scopus, Web of Science, ERIC, PubMed, and Google Scholar for peer-reviewed studies, conceptual papers, and policy reports published primarily between 2020 and 2026, using combinations of terms such as artificial intelligence, generative AI, higher education, assessment, governance, and ethics. Publications focused purely on algorithm development without educational implications were excluded. Each publication was then mapped against five philosophical domains drawn from the team’s earlier work: teleology, ontology, axiology, ethics, and epistemology.

Those five domains were then translated into five institutional applications. Teleology — the philosophy of purpose and intentionality — becomes Purpose: aligning AI initiatives with institutional mission, workforce preparation, and human flourishing. Ontology — the study of existence and identity — becomes Identity: redefining the evolving roles of students, faculty, and leaders in AI-augmented environments. Axiology — the philosophy of values — becomes Values: embedding integrity, equity, transparency, and inclusion into institutional culture. Ethics becomes Oversight: the governance structures, accountability mechanisms, and human-in-the-loop stewardship that keep AI implementation responsible. Epistemology — the theory of knowledge — becomes Transformation: the continuous organizational learning through which institutions adapt as knowledge creation itself changes.

The Purpose domain may be the most consequential for students. As AI systems increasingly generate, organize, and synthesize information, the framework argues that higher education must shift its emphasis toward what the authors call epistemic agency — the capacity to question, interpret, evaluate, and apply knowledge using sound human judgment. Students must learn to critically evaluate AI-generated outputs, recognize limitations and potential biases, and integrate machine-supported insights with independent reasoning. The reviewed literature consistently identified AI literacy, critical thinking, responsible AI use, and curriculum redesign as the dominant educational priorities, with the strongest evidence supporting workforce readiness and curriculum innovation as central institutional goals. Crucially, the framework draws a line between genuine thinking and effective prompting: knowing how to elicit a good answer from a chatbot is not the same as knowing whether that answer is true, biased, or ethically sound.

Identity, the second domain, tackles the question that has unsettled faculty lounges worldwide: does AI replace us? The literature review found the opposite pattern. AI consistently reshapes rather than replaces human roles. Faculty transition from information providers to facilitators of inquiry, mentors, learning designers, and evaluators of authentic learning. Students evolve from passive recipients of AI-generated information into curators, evaluators, and responsible users of knowledge co-created through human–algorithm interaction. The educational emphasis shifts from producing content to asking meaningful questions, guiding AI use, and exercising independent judgment. AI becomes a continuous learning companion supporting information retrieval, idea development, and personalized feedback — while educators assume greater responsibility for fostering intellectual independence and ethical reasoning. The authors acknowledge ongoing uncertainty about faculty preparedness and professional identity as AI capabilities continue to evolve.

Values, the third domain, confronts a widening equity gap. The strongest evidence emphasized academic integrity, equity, accessibility, transparency, inclusion, learner well-being, and responsible innovation as essential principles guiding AI adoption. But the review also found a sobering warning: students with greater technological access and AI literacy may derive disproportionate educational benefits, potentially widening existing disparities if institutions fail to implement equitable policies and support systems. AI can improve efficiency, expand access, and support personalized learning, the framework notes, but it cannot replace critical thinking, ethical reasoning, creativity, empathy, collaboration, and reflective judgment. Educational value, in this view, lies not in adopting AI technologies but in preparing graduates who can navigate complex technological environments while maintaining intellectual integrity and human-centered decision-making. The authors flag that empirical evidence on the long-term effectiveness of equitable AI strategies remains limited — a critical area for future research.

Oversight, the fourth domain, moves governance from compliance to stewardship. The reviewed literature most frequently recommended establishing AI governance committees, developing faculty and student guidance, protecting privacy, monitoring algorithmic bias, promoting transparency, and preserving human responsibility for educational decision-making. The framework calls for human-in-the-loop governance models in which AI augments rather than replaces human judgment — coordinated leadership across academic, technical, legal, and administrative domains, with continuous monitoring and adaptive policy development rather than isolated regulatory actions. Universities, the authors argue, must move beyond regulatory compliance toward proactive stewardship by embedding ethical responsibility into institutional strategy, curriculum, and everyday academic practice, addressing data privacy, authorship, intellectual integrity, and equitable access as evolving rather than settled questions.

Transformation, the final domain, reframes AI adoption as an ongoing process of institutional learning rather than a discrete technological event. The strongest evidence highlighted AI’s influence on curriculum redesign, authentic assessment, faculty development, instructional innovation, and adaptive learning environments. The transformation is particularly visible in assessment, where traditional assignments are increasingly challenged by AI-assisted work, prompting a shift toward authentic, process-oriented, reflective, and interactive evaluation — think reflective portfolios, oral examinations, case-based analyses, simulations, collaborative problem-solving, iterative project development, and transparent AI disclosure statements that emphasize students’ reasoning processes rather than final products alone. Institutions are simultaneously adopting more flexible, hybrid, and learner-centered educational models that combine technological innovation with meaningful human interaction.

To demonstrate practical utility, the team mapped AI-related initiatives at an academic health sciences university — drawn from a university-wide environmental scan and stakeholder engagement process — onto the five PIVOT domains. This illustrative application, the authors stress, is not empirical validation but a demonstration of how the framework can organize institutional AI initiatives, evaluate strategic alignment, identify implementation gaps, and inform future planning. It shows that AI implementation extends far beyond classroom teaching to encompass institutional mission, faculty and student development, governance, responsible innovation, and organizational transformation. Future multisite qualitative, quantitative, and mixed-methods studies are needed to evaluate and refine the framework across diverse higher education settings.

The deeper message of the PIVOT framework is that the primary shift is not in what higher education does, but in how it fulfills its core mission under new conditions. The model envisions a human-centered feedback loop — fed by student evaluations, faculty communities of practice, AI governance committees, learning analytics, assessment outcomes, and academic integrity monitoring — that continually aligns technological innovation with institutional mission and educational values. Rather than diminishing academic expertise, the authors argue, AI increases the importance of human judgment in navigating complex sociotechnical environments. Isolated technological adoption without corresponding attention to purpose, identity, values, oversight, and systemic transformation, they warn, may produce fragmented or unsustainable implementation efforts. The future of higher education, the framework concludes, will depend not simply on advances in AI, but on institutions’ ability to integrate these technologies in ways that strengthen human development, critical inquiry, ethical responsibility, organizational adaptability, and meaningful participation in an increasingly AI-powered world.

Subject of Research: Education

Article Title: The PIVOT model for strategic academic transformation in AI-powered higher education

Article References: Wei, H., Castro-Quirino, S., Wei, A., & Kruse, S. W. (2026). The PIVOT model for strategic academic transformation in AI-powered higher education. Discover Education, 5(1), Article 863. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44217-026-02123-3

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44217-026-02123-3

Keywords: PIVOT, model, strategic, academic, transformation, AI-powered, higher, education, scientific research

The rationale behind the work is demographic as much as medical. The world’s older population is growing rapidly, and the authors point out that societal attitudes toward sexuality influence older adults more strongly than any other age group. Older adults also tend to absorb their vulnerability more deeply, largely because of negative perceptions of themselves, a dynamic that can erode confidence, intimacy, and the willingness to seek help. Sexual health, in the framework the researchers adopt, is not merely the absence of dysfunction; it is a state of physical, emotional, mental, and social well-being in relation to sexuality that requires a positive and respectful approach to sexual relationships, along with the possibility of pleasurable and safe experiences. For older couples, chronic disease, medication effects, hormonal changes, loss of partners, and social taboos all interact to shape that state, often in ways that standard geriatric services never address.

What makes this protocol technically interesting is its refusal to treat sexual health as a purely clinical problem. Instead, the team borrows the logic of strategic planning, the same framework used by health systems and organizations to set missions, visions, and priorities. The authors argue that devising a strategic plan is preferable to any other approach precisely because sexual health is so heavily shaped by social attitudes, culture, and context. A plan built this way can be adapted by any center that provides health services to older adults, rather than remaining locked inside a single clinic or a single country’s norms. The study was supported and ethically approved by Isfahan University of Medical Sciences, with the protocol reviewed under ethics code IR.MUI.NUREMA.REC 1403.026 and protocol ID 3403467, and it forms part of a reproductive health Ph.D. thesis.

The first stage of the research is qualitative, designed to identify the actual needs of sexual health from the ground up. Participants include two distinct groups: older couples themselves, whose personal experiences reveal what intimacy, communication, and sexual well-being look like in real later life, and sexual health actors, the healthcare providers, counselors, and other professionals who encounter these needs professionally. Listening to both groups matters because the gap between what older adults experience and what providers assume is often where sexual health quietly fails. Qualitative work of this kind typically uses in-depth interviews and thematic analysis to surface needs that older adults may never voice in a routine appointment, from the effects of chronic illness on desire to the shame that keeps couples from asking questions.

The second stage is a structured literature review, a systematic sweep of existing research to identify sexual health needs documented across studies worldwide. This step provides the technical counterweight to the interviews: it grounds the emerging plan in peer-reviewed evidence about prevalence, interventions, and barriers, ensuring that the final strategies are not limited to the memories and opinions of a single participant group. By triangulating the qualitative findings with the published literature, the researchers can distinguish needs that are universal from those that are specific to their cultural and social setting, a distinction the authors explicitly value since the resulting plan is intended to be based on cultural and social factors.

The third stage is where strategic management takes over. A focus group discussion will be used to integrate the needs identified in the qualitative stage with the findings of the literature review, and from that integration the team will establish the goals, mission, and vision of the plan. Then comes the analytical core: strategies will be devised based on needs after focusing on internal factors, meaning strengths and weaknesses, and external factors, meaning opportunities and threats, and on the balance between them. This is the classic SWOT logic of strategic planning, and in this protocol it is applied to something rarely subjected to such analysis, the sexual well-being of older couples. Internal strengths might include the resilience and experience of long-married couples or the presence of dedicated geriatric services, while internal weaknesses could involve provider discomfort, lack of training, and the internalized stigma older adults carry. External opportunities might include growing policy attention to aging populations, while external threats include taboos, misinformation, and resource constraints.

Once candidate strategies exist, the stakeholders themselves will select and prioritize them during focused group discussion sessions using matrix tables. These tables, a standard tool of strategic planning, allow participants to score strategies against criteria such as feasibility, impact, and resource demands, turning a diffuse conversation into a ranked, defensible set of priorities. The use of stakeholders, including the providers and actors who will eventually implement the plan, is a deliberate design choice: strategies imposed from above tend to collapse in practice, while strategies chosen by the people responsible for delivery are far more likely to survive contact with real clinics, real budgets, and real cultural resistance.

The final safeguard is consensus testing. The complete plan will be devised and then evaluated by the stakeholders using the modified Delphi technique, a structured consensus method in which expert panels score statements across repeated rounds, with feedback between rounds allowing views to converge. In this protocol, the Delphi process acts as a quality filter, ensuring that every element of the final strategic plan, from its mission statement to its prioritized strategies, commands genuine expert agreement rather than reflecting the preferences of a single research team. Modified Delphi designs are widely used in health services research precisely because they combine the judgment of diverse experts with a transparent, reproducible scoring procedure, making the resulting consensus difficult to dismiss.

The authors conclude that the strategic sexual health plan produced by this study will consider the sexual experiences of older couples and healthcare providers, and will therefore be rooted in cultural and social factors rather than imported clinical templates. That orientation is what could make the work travel: because the plan is built from needs identified locally and validated through structured consensus, centers providing health services to older adults can adopt and adapt it to their own populations. The protocol is open access, published in BMC Geriatrics with the DOI 10.1186/s12877-026-08402-w, and its authors declare no competing interests. As a protocol, it describes what will be done rather than reporting results, but its architecture is already a statement in itself, insisting that the sexual health of older couples is a system-level challenge that can be planned for, prioritized, and preserved with the same rigor applied to any other pillar of geriatric care.

Subject of Research: Preserving sexual health of older couples: a protocol for a strategic plan

Article Title: Preserving sexual health of older couples: a protocol for a strategic plan

Article References: Rahimi, M., Noroozi, M., Ghorbanian, A., & Beigi, M. (2026). Preserving sexual health of older couples: a protocol for a strategic plan. BMC Geriatrics. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12877-026-08402-w

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12877-026-08402-w

Keywords: Preserving, sexual, health, older, couples, protocol, strategic, plan, scientific research

The study, published on 19 August 2026, applies geoeconomic statecraft as its primary theoretical lens, treating infrastructure as an instrument of power politics pursued by economic means. Rather than asking whether the Belt and Road Initiative is good or bad for South Asia, the authors ask a more technical question: which configurations of financing concentration, contractual risk allocation, operating rights, regulatory capacity, recipient-state bargaining and access to alternative partners make economic involvement convertible into political influence? The answer, they find, is that convertibility is rare, conditional and heavily dependent on the domestic institutions of the recipient state.

The clearest case of potential Chinese leverage is Pakistan. The China–Pakistan Economic Corridor, the flagship corridor running from Kashgar to Gwadar, concentrates financing from a single partner, embeds long-term contractual commitments and operates within a Pakistani political system in which the military plays a central role in economic governance. The corridor’s long-term plan through 2030, approved by Pakistan’s Planning Commission, formalises agricultural, industrial and port commitments that extend decades into the future. Yet even here, the study stops short of claiming automatic political control. Citing scholarship on how Pakistan and China negotiate, the authors note that Islamabad retains bargaining agency, and that the corridor’s benefits and risks are contested within Pakistan’s own federal politics, with provincial governments negotiating over route alignments and revenue shares.

Sri Lanka’s Hambantota Port is the second case the study identifies as comparatively favourable for potential leverage, but through a distinct mechanism: long-term commercial operating rights. In 2017, a Chinese state-owned enterprise acquired a 99-year lease on the port in exchange for debt relief, a transaction that CSIS analysis famously characterised as China buying Hambantota. The operating rights give China a commercial foothold in the Indian Ocean that could, in principle, support strategic access. But the study is emphatic that this does not establish military access or political control. Sri Lanka’s government retains regulatory authority over the port’s operations, and the transaction itself has become a cautionary tale about fiscal vulnerability rather than a template for debt-trap diplomacy. The authors align with Deborah Brautigam’s critical analysis of the debt-trap meme and with Chatham House research showing recipient influence on Belt and Road outcomes.

Elsewhere in the region, leverage is far more constrained. Bangladesh, Nepal and the Maldives present configurations in which implementation is uneven, financing is diversified and governments actively negotiate among competing partners. Bangladesh’s infrastructure portfolio mixes Chinese loans for the Karnaphuli tunnel and the Teesta river project with Japanese financing for the Matarbari power plant, World Bank support for regional connectivity and Asian Development Bank and Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank projects for railways and transmission infrastructure. Dhaka’s bargaining position is strengthened by this diversification, and the study documents how Bangladesh has urged China to lower interest rates on loans and reduce the trade gap, while simultaneously signing an $850 million deal with the World Bank in 2025. Bangladesh’s foreign policy, as the study notes through a neoclassical realist lens, is shaped by dilemmas of managing relations with both India and China rather than aligning with either.

Nepal’s case illustrates how a landlocked state uses infrastructure diplomacy to gain sea access without surrendering sovereignty. The 2019 transit transport protocol with China opened a new route to the sea, but Nepal’s implementation of Belt and Road projects remains slow, and the country has simultaneously engaged with the Millennium Challenge Corporation, an American grant programme, demonstrating the domestic agency that conditions whether Chinese involvement produces developmental benefits or strategic access. The study cites research on Nepal’s infrastructural rivalries showing how Kathmandu navigates between the BRI and the MCC, retaining regulatory authority and negotiating among partners rather than accepting a single corridor’s terms.

The Maldives presents a third configuration of constrained leverage. Chinese financing built the China–Maldives Friendship Bridge, a landmark project connecting Malé with the airport island, and Chinese loans constitute a significant share of the country’s public debt, as documented by the Auditor General’s Office and the Ministry of Finance. But the study notes that Maldivian governments have alternated between pro-China and pro-India orientations, and that the country’s debt sustainability depends on fiscal management rather than on any single creditor’s terms. The Maldives retains regulatory authority over its ports and airspace, and the study finds no evidence of automatic political control despite the concentration of Chinese financing in specific projects.

India’s response, the study argues, is neither a unified counter-encirclement strategy nor necessarily more effective than Chinese-backed projects. Instead, New Delhi combines sovereignty-based opposition to the BRI, particularly its passage through Pakistan-administered Kashmir, with alternative corridors such as the Chabahar port agreement with Iran and Afghanistan, the Kaladan multi-modal transit facility with Myanmar, and the India–Middle East–Europe Economic Corridor announced in 2023. India also pursues coalition finance through partnerships with Japan, the European Union and the United States, maritime public goods through the Information Fusion Centre for the Indian Ocean Region, and geocultural diplomacy through heritage projects such as Project Mausam and Buddhist circuit infrastructure. The study cites Timothy Winter’s concept of geocultural power to characterise how India deploys civilisational narratives alongside infrastructure, competing with China’s own geocultural claims along the Silk Road’s historical geography.

The study’s most significant contribution is conceptual: infrastructure diplomacy is a relational process, not a unilateral instrument. Project design, domestic institutions and recipient-state agency jointly condition whether economic involvement produces developmental benefits, fiscal vulnerability or strategic access. The authors draw on scholarship by Schindler, DiCarlo and Paudel on the rise of the twenty-first-century infrastructure state, and on Flint and Zhu’s geopolitics of connectivity, to argue that infrastructure is not simply a conduit for pre-existing power but a medium through which power is negotiated. This reframing challenges both the debt-trap narrative popular in Western commentary and the triumphalist narrative promoted by Belt and Road advocates, positioning recipient states as active negotiators rather than passive recipients.

The findings arrive at a moment when South Asia’s infrastructure competition is intensifying. China’s Belt and Road Initiative continues to expand through new frameworks, including a 2024 Belt and Road cooperation framework with Nepal and a 2025 joint press release with Bangladesh, while India deepens partnerships with France and Italy through joint statements in 2026 and strengthens Quad cooperation on maritime security. The study suggests that the region’s future will be shaped not by a single corridor’s dominance but by the ongoing negotiation among competing infrastructure offers, in which the terms of financing, the allocation of operating rights and the strength of domestic institutions determine whether ports and railways become instruments of leverage or vehicles of development. The authors’ analysis positions South Asian states as sovereign actors with real bargaining power, challenging the assumption that infrastructure competition inevitably produces strategic control, and offering a technical vocabulary for understanding when economic involvement converts into political influence and when it does not.

Subject of Research: Infrastructure diplomacy and uneven strategic leverage in South Asia: China’s Belt and Road Initiative and India’s competitive connectivity

Article Title: Infrastructure diplomacy and uneven strategic leverage in South Asia: China’s Belt and Road Initiative and India’s competitive connectivity

Article References: Mishra, M., & Patel, S. (2026). Infrastructure diplomacy and uneven strategic leverage in South Asia: China’s Belt and Road Initiative and India’s competitive connectivity. SN Social Sciences, 6(9), Article 357. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43545-026-01649-5

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43545-026-01649-5

Keywords: Infrastructure, diplomacy, uneven, strategic, leverage, South, Asia, China, Belt, Road, Initiative, India

The research, conducted by Hongya Fan and Weiqian Xiang of Shanxi University in Taiyuan, China, arrives at a moment when intercultural marriage is steadily becoming more common. In 2024 alone, 61,900 marriages involving foreign nationals or residents from Hong Kong, Macao, and Taiwan were registered in China, according to the National Bureau of Statistics. Unlike monocultural couples, intercultural couples face inherent friction as they attempt to integrate different cultural backgrounds, and these differences are particularly visible in language use, through which partners negotiate identities, adjust relational boundaries, and cultivate a shared couple culture. Silence, as a non-verbal behavior, has long been an important but understudied part of this process.

The cultural stakes of silence are considerable. In many Chinese and other East Asian cultures, silence has traditionally been endowed with pro-social values, serving as a pragmatic tool to express respect, preserve face, and maintain interpersonal harmony. In Western cultures, especially English-speaking countries, silence is more likely to be interpreted as embarrassment, disapproval, unfriendliness, or incompetence. These mismatches can cause cognitive bias in Sino-Western intercultural marriages, lead to pragmatic misunderstandings, intensify relational conflicts, and affect the sustainable development of marital relationships. Yet while existing research has explored silence in public and institutional contexts such as education and the workplace, the private, high-stakes realm of marriage and intimacy has received little attention.

To fill this gap, the researchers adopted a proceduralized grounded theory approach, a qualitative methodology characterized by rigorous bottom-up inductive reasoning that allows categories and generative mechanisms to emerge directly from raw data. The study integrated three types of qualitative data: semi-structured interviews with 25 Chinese participants in Sino-Western intercultural marriages, each lasting 40 to 50 minutes and covering cross-cultural conflict experiences, the contexts and manifestations of silence, internal psychological processes, and subsequent coping strategies. The anonymized transcripts were translated into English, resulting in approximately 130,000 words of interview material. Second, the team collected 20 public interaction videos posted by intercultural couples on mainstream social media platforms including Xiaohongshu and TikTok, documenting instances of silence along with accompanying non-verbal cues such as body movements, facial expressions, and partner feedback. Third, supplementary textual materials were gathered for comparative analysis, comprising 20 academic publications and 10 journalistic reports or social commentaries on intercultural marriages.

Through iterative open, axial, and selective coding procedures, the researchers identified 92 initial concepts and 20 categories, which were abstracted into four major categories and ultimately integrated around a single core category: the dynamic adaptation mechanism of Chinese partners’ silence in Sino-Western intercultural marriages. The resulting processual model follows a structured trajectory of antecedents, manifestations, adjustments, and consequences. To ensure structural validation, roughly 75 percent of the raw data were randomly assigned to the initial coding corpus, while the remaining 25 percent were reserved for independent saturation testing, which confirmed that no new categories or relational structures emerged and that the theoretical model had reached theoretical saturation.

The findings reveal that silence among Chinese partners evolves through a processual trajectory rather than functioning as a stable cultural disposition. Triggered by a triad of antecedents—cross-cultural value divergences, situational norm conflicts, and second-language pragmatic constraints—silence manifests in three distinct functional orientations. Intimacy-maintaining silence, characterized by altruism, prioritizes marital stability, extended family cohesion, and the emotional well-being of the spouse above personal self-expression. Boundary-preserving silence, by contrast, adopts a self-oriented attitude as an active defensive strategy to safeguard emotional boundaries, cultural integrity, and subjective rights. Mutuality-enhancing silence, observed at more advanced stages of relationship evolution, focuses on balancing the needs of both partners to co-create shared interactional meaning and promote continuous cultural negotiation.

Crucially, the study identifies two adjustment pathways that enable partners to transform silence from a potential source of misunderstanding into a constructive relational resource. Proactive individual adjustment involves unilateral cognitive and behavioral optimization at the personal level, including meta-communicative elucidation, in which Chinese partners proactively explain the reasons and meanings behind their silence so their spouses are not left guessing. Partners also regulate the temporal boundaries of their silence, framing it as a limited and rational pause, such as requesting five minutes to think, and mobilize multimodal compensation strategies like gestures, eye contact, and facial expressions to overcome linguistic-pragmatic constraints. Collaborative dyadic adjustment, the synergistic pathway, involves bilateral coordination grounded in mutual understanding, including forging shared interpretations of silence, co-constructing relational ground rules such as agreeing to break the ice if silence lasts over ten minutes after quarrels, and engaging in reciprocal cultural learning.

These adaptive processes produce consequences that unfold along a progressive continuum across three levels. At the micro level, silence regulates marital relationships by opening up cognitive and behavioral buffer zones to accommodate cross-cultural divergences, easing tension during parenting disputes and daily friction. At the meso level, silence catalyzes the tacit reshaping of domestic power dynamics, as Chinese partners replace straightforward emotional disputes with rational restraint, disrupting unilateral dominant patterns that often disadvantage minority-culture spouses and gradually deconstructing stereotypes held by Western partners. At the macro level, through protracted interactions, silence actively participates in cultural inclusiveness and negotiation, enabling both partners to gradually cultivate a resilient relational matrix following the collision of cultural divergences, ultimately advancing the progression of cultural integration.

Theoretically, the study reconceptualizes silence as an agentive interpersonal strategy through which Chinese partners actively manage cultural differences, emotional expression, and relational boundaries in intercultural marriages. This finding challenges culturally deterministic interpretations of Chinese silence as accommodation, compliance, or face-saving. Rather than representing a uniform tendency toward relational submission, silence can constitute an agentic practice through which Chinese partners simultaneously negotiate relational continuity and defend personal and cultural boundaries. The researchers also note that silence is topic-sensitive and relationally contingent rather than a uniform cultural response, since spouses occupy multiple overlapping relational roles simultaneously as romantic partners, household members, co-parents, financial partners, and mediators of extended-family relationships.

Practically, the findings provide valuable insights for intercultural couples, relationship counselors, and communication practitioners by highlighting the importance of interpreting silence within specific cultural and relational contexts. The proposed framework may inform the development of culturally sensitive counseling approaches and communication training programs aimed at reducing misunderstandings, enhancing empathic understanding, and facilitating more adaptive interaction patterns in intercultural marriages. By recognizing the agentive and relational functions of silence, individuals and practitioners can better support couples in navigating cultural differences and managing interpersonal challenges in increasingly diverse social contexts. The study does carry limitations: the sample focused on relatively highly educated Chinese partners, the qualitative design makes the functional weight of the core category impossible to quantify, and the perspective does not fully explore the experience of Western partners. Future research could expand the demographic scope, employ mixed-methods designs to verify the structural stability of the conceptual framework, and adopt a fully dyadic perspective to analyze the coordinated adaptation mechanism of silence in Sino-Western intercultural marriages.

Subject of Research: Silence as relational adaptation: Strategic communicative practices of Chinese partners in Sino-Western intercultural marriages

Article Title: Silence as relational adaptation: Strategic communicative practices of Chinese partners in Sino-Western intercultural marriages

Article References: Fan, H., & Xiang, W. (2026). Silence as relational adaptation: Strategic communicative practices of Chinese partners in Sino-Western intercultural marriages. Frontiers in Psychology, 17, Article 1957138. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2026.1957138

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2026.1957138

Keywords: Silence, relational, adaptation, Strategic, communicative, practices, Chinese, partners, Sino-Western, intercultural, marriages, scientific research

The review, published on 14 August 2026, synthesizes literature on how Strategic Facilities Management (SFM) can translate high-level ESG commitments into concrete, facility-level actions. The authors ground their argument in Stakeholder Theory, the influential framework formalized by R. Edward Freeman in the 1980s, which holds that organizations create long-term value only when they balance the legitimate interests of all parties affected by their actions—employees, customers, suppliers, regulators, and local communities. Viewed through this lens, buildings are not merely physical assets to be maintained at minimal cost. They are social environments that shape employee wellbeing, inclusion, productivity, and community outcomes in measurable ways.

The evolution of facilities management itself tells a striking story. Emerging as a distinct management discipline during the 1980s and 1990s, FM was originally aimed at controlling and reducing costs through innovative methods of organizing diverse activities that had previously received minimal management attention. Over the following decades, the field transformed from a narrow, cost-focused operational function into a strategic discipline centered on value creation, sustainability, and stakeholder engagement. The International Organization for Standardization now defines FM as an organizational function that integrates people, place, and process within the built environment to improve quality of life and the productivity of the core business—a definition that signals a fundamental shift from asset maintenance to human-centered value creation.

Central to understanding this strategic potential is the FM Value Map, a framework that traces how facility-level inputs, processes, and outputs translate into outcomes for organizations and their stakeholders. The Value Map identifies three primary routes through which facilities management adds value: exchange value, encompassing cost savings, asset appreciation, and financial efficiency; use value, the benefits experienced by users including satisfaction, productivity, and wellbeing; and relational value, the enhanced relationships with stakeholders reflected in brand reputation, social responsibility, and trust. This structured logic provides the analytical backbone for the review’s proposed conceptual framework, which integrates Stakeholder Theory with SFM practice to guide the identification, implementation, and evaluation of social ESG outcomes.

The empirical evidence linking facility decisions to human outcomes is growing. In the South African context, research by Nurick and Thatcher demonstrated that indoor environmental quality in green-certified office buildings significantly influences the productivity and wellbeing of knowledge workers. Factors such as thermal comfort, lighting, acoustics, and air quality shape the workplace experience in ways that directly affect organizational performance. Other studies synthesized in the review connect healthy workplaces to employee satisfaction, productivity, and cost outcomes, strengthening the business case for social-oriented facilities strategies. Meanwhile, the FM profession’s reach extends well beyond the office: facilities managers translate strategic community plans into operational realities, manage shared amenities, and oversee contracts for cleaning, security, maintenance, catering, and waste management—each an opportunity for local economic inclusion.

Digital transformation is reshaping the governance dimension of this picture. Recent research highlights that SFM increasingly relies on Building Information Modeling (BIM) and the Internet of Things (IoT) to provide the granular data necessary for accurate ESG reporting, enabling facilities managers to transition from static annual reporting to dynamic performance management. But the review also flags a tension at the heart of this technological shift. As Nappi and de Campos Ribeiro caution, the same sensors that optimize workplace environments also create risks of surveillance and re-identification, positioning technology as both an enabler of social value through improved comfort and efficiency and a potential threat to privacy and trust.

The review identifies several major debates that define the field. The first concerns measurement: can social value be quantified with the same precision as environmental metrics? Porter and colleagues argue that the investment community already possesses the analytical tools to assess social performance and that the real obstacle is a lack of organizational commitment. Semet and Mandell counter that the tools themselves are the problem, pointing to the absence of standardized metrics, the subjective nature of social value, and the difficulty of attributing community outcomes to specific corporate actions. The Urban Land Institute similarly notes that no consensus exists on standardized methods for defining and quantifying social value. The stakes are high: if social value is deemed fundamentally unmeasurable, facilities management’s contribution to the social pillar will remain peripheral, whereas frameworks such as Social Return on Investment (SROI) could position SFM as a credible contributor to corporate sustainability reporting.

A second debate concerns the proper scope of facilities management’s social responsibility. Much of the literature focuses on internal stakeholders—employee wellbeing, occupant satisfaction, and productivity gains within the workplace—positioning FM as a support function that enhances human capital for the organization’s benefit. In contrast, other scholars contend that facilities managers have a role in fostering community prosperity, social justice, and local economic development. A third controversy pits standardization against context sensitivity: while some researchers advocate aligning FM operations with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals to enable benchmarking and investor communication, others highlight the proliferation of inconsistent global rating systems and argue that sustainability is inherently socio-technical, emerging from local contexts and relationships that cannot be reduced to universal metrics.

The gap between strategic ambition and operational capability emerges as perhaps the field’s most persistent challenge. The review documents that FM departments often struggle to communicate their value in the language of executive leadership, lack the mandate and resources to operate at their full potential, and face inconsistent reporting standards with unclearly defined roles and responsibilities. Litvin emphasizes that technical systems alone are insufficient—what matters is the presence of trained professionals who can drive environmental and social agendas. Without investment in human capital and professional development, the strategic potential of SFM will remain unrealised. The proposed framework addresses this by offering facilities managers, corporate real estate teams, and ESG officers a structured approach spanning stakeholder identification, practice implementation, and outcome evaluation, with indicative metrics ranging from absenteeism rates and indoor environmental quality to procurement spend directed toward small and medium-sized enterprises.

The South African context gives these findings particular urgency. The country’s history of spatial planning created deeply entrenched inequalities in the built environment, with communities deliberately separated and economic opportunities concentrated in urban centers—inequalities that persist today in unequal access to employment, education, healthcare, and public amenities. In this setting, the social dimension of ESG carries a transformative imperative: corporate actors are expected to actively contribute to redressing historical inequities through their operations and investments, supported by robust governance codes and regulatory frameworks that place social outcomes at the center of organizational legitimacy. The authors conclude that SFM is well positioned to bridge the strategy execution gap in corporate ESG and strengthen socially responsive sustainability practices, while acknowledging that their framework remains conceptual and awaits empirical validation through case studies, comparative research across regulatory environments, and the development of robust measurement tools for social outcomes at individual, organizational, and community levels.

Subject of Research: Leveraging strategic facilities management to achieve corporate ESG and sustainability: a literature review

Article Title: Leveraging strategic facilities management to achieve corporate ESG and sustainability: a literature review

Article References: Nephawe, T. E., Nurick, S., & Michell, K. (2026). Leveraging strategic facilities management to achieve corporate ESG and sustainability: a literature review. Frontiers in Environmental Economics, 5, Article 1839120. https://doi.org/10.3389/frevc.2026.1839120

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/frevc.2026.1839120

Keywords: ESG, facilities management, social sustainability, stakeholder theory, built environment, corporate real estate, workplace wellbeing, Sustainable Development Goals, ethical procurement, South Africa, Leveraging, strategic

The biological logic of maternal vaccination is well established. Vaccines given during pregnancy induce maternal antibodies that cross the placenta, protecting both the pregnant woman and her infant during the first months of life. Protection of the infant occurs primarily through active transplacental transfer of vaccine-induced maternal immunoglobulin G (IgG), a process that increases exponentially across gestation and is modulated by maternal antibody concentration, IgG subclass, placental function, and maternal health. Because placentally transferred IgG decays in the infant with a half-life of roughly 30 days, the duration of passive protection typically spans four to six months. Transfer occurs mainly via the neonatal Fc receptor expressed on syncytiotrophoblasts, peaking in the third trimester, and is influenced by antibody glycosylation, total maternal IgG concentration, maternal health status, and infant birthweight.

Timing, however, is not a simple equation. Vaccination late in pregnancy may not allow sufficient time for peak antibody generation and placental transfer before delivery, whereas earlier vaccination supports antibody maturation but may leave maternal antibody concentrations waning by the time of birth. The interval between vaccination and delivery strongly influences cord blood antibody concentrations and thereby the duration of neonatal protection. Evidence from the United Kingdom shows that although early third-trimester pertussis vaccination yields higher vaccine effectiveness, a wider vaccination window achieves better overall coverage. For RSV and pertussis, where disease burden extends into the first months of life, both antibody concentrations at birth and their persistence matter. For early-onset GBS disease, which strikes immediately after birth, maternal vaccination must achieve sufficiently high antibody concentrations at delivery. Preterm infants, who are more susceptible to infection and have reduced cumulative IgG transfer, add a further layer of complexity, as do maternal comorbidities such as HIV infection and chronic inflammation, which impair placental IgG transfer.

The COVID-19 pandemic generated unprecedented evidence on vaccination in pregnancy across multiple platforms. Although pregnant women were largely excluded from initial clinical trials despite their increased burden of severe disease, widespread deployment and subsequent observational studies demonstrated that vaccine-induced antibodies were efficiently transferred across the placenta and detectable in breast milk. Systematic reviews and meta-analyses consistently found no increase in adverse pregnancy or neonatal outcomes, and large cohort studies showed that maternal mRNA vaccination reduced the risk of severe COVID-19 in both the pregnant woman and her infant. Comparative studies found mRNA vaccines more immunogenic than adenoviral vector vaccines such as Ad26.CoV2.S or ChAdOx1-S. The pandemic also accelerated European regulatory and pharmacovigilance infrastructure, expanding pregnancy exposure registries, active surveillance programmes, and data linkage capabilities that enabled real-time safety assessment.

The RSV vaccine story illustrates both the promise and the fragility of maternal immunisation. RSV is a leading cause of lower respiratory tract disease and hospitalisation in infants under six months of age. Prefusion F (preF) protein-based vaccines target stabilised conformations of the RSV fusion glycoprotein, inducing high-titre, affinity-matured neutralising antibodies that cross the placenta efficiently. Clinical trials demonstrated efficacy against severe infant disease, and real-world effectiveness data from Scotland and France support these findings. Yet safety monitoring remains critical. An earlier preF vaccine candidate was discontinued after a preterm birth safety signal, and the pivotal trial of the now-licensed Pfizer preF vaccine showed excess prematurity among South African participants (relative risk 2.06, 95% CI 1.21–3.51), though not in other countries or the trial overall. Emerging post-licensure data provide reassurance, but sustained confidence depends on ongoing surveillance. An mRNA RSV vaccine candidate is now in phase 2 testing in pregnancy, and long-acting monoclonal antibodies such as nirsevimab and clesrovimab offer an alternative passive strategy, with recent observational studies suggesting slightly greater protection against RSV-related hospitalisation than maternal vaccination.

GBS vaccines are advancing beyond antigen discovery toward late-phase evaluation. Current candidates follow two strategies: capsular-polysaccharide protein conjugates and protein-based vaccines. Pfizer’s investigational hexavalent conjugate GBS6 showed acceptable safety and efficient antibody transfer to infants in a phase 2 maternal study and has progressed to phase 3. In parallel, MinervaX’s GBS-AlpN, a multicomponent protein subunit vaccine composed of N-terminal domains from alpha-like proteins selected to maximise strain coverage, showed an acceptable safety profile and vaccine-specific antibody responses in mothers and infants, also supporting phase 3 progression. Harmonised assays and standardised immunological thresholds will be critical to support immunobridging approaches and conditional licensure, allowing widespread implementation before full efficacy data accumulate.

New platforms are reshaping the pipeline. With the exception of live attenuated vaccines, which are contraindicated in pregnancy, and DNA vaccines, which lack pregnancy-specific safety data, inactivated, subunit, toxoid, viral vector, mRNA, and virus-like particle platforms are all suitable for use during pregnancy. mRNA technology is opening doors to pathogens without licensed vaccines and to combination products. A phase 3 trial of an mRNA quadrivalent influenza vaccine showed superior efficacy against influenza-like illness compared with a licensed inactivated vaccine, with a relative efficacy of 34.5% (95% CI 7.4–53.9). The CHMP of the European Medicines Agency has provided a positive opinion recommending marketing authorisation for Moderna’s mCOMBRIAX, a combination influenza and COVID-19 vaccine that was at least as immunogenic as standard-of-care vaccines with an acceptable safety profile. Combination vaccines may improve acceptability as the number of recommended maternal vaccines grows, but they raise theoretical concerns: vaccines targeting seasonal infections must balance optimal gestational timing against seasonal campaign timing, and co-administered products may compromise the individual gestational timing needed for maximal infant effectiveness.

The pipeline extends to emerging and priority pathogens. Zika virus vaccine candidates aimed at preventing fetal transmission remain in early-phase development, slowed by low current incidence. Lassa fever carries a case fatality rate of approximately 34% in pregnancy and 67–75% in neonates, yet pregnant women remain excluded from ongoing trials. Ebola vaccines were licensed without pregnancy-specific data, though WHO recommended their use during outbreaks and a large study has since demonstrated the safety of the two-dose Ad26.ZEBOV/MVA-BN-Filo regimen in pregnancy. The only WHO-prequalified mpox vaccine, MVA-BN, is not currently recommended for pregnant women, though the PregInPoxVac study is now assessing safety and immunogenicity in pregnancy. Among bacterial threats, Klebsiella pneumoniae, classified by WHO as a priority 1 pathogen, is a major cause of neonatal sepsis with increasing antibiotic resistance; a modelling study concluded that an effective maternal vaccine could prevent around 80,000 neonatal deaths and 399,000 neonatal sepsis cases annually. A phase 1/2 trial of the tetravalent bioconjugate vaccine Kleb4V recently demonstrated acceptable safety and immunogenicity. Escherichia coli vaccine candidates are in preclinical and early clinical development, though the nine-valent ExPEC9V conjugate vaccine failed to demonstrate sufficient efficacy in a phase 3 trial in older adults. Congenital cytomegalovirus, the most common congenital infection globally and the leading non-genetic cause of sensorineural hearing loss, has defeated vaccine development for more than five decades; the failure of the most advanced candidate, an mRNA vaccine encoding glycoprotein B and the pentameric complex, underscores the difficulty of preventing primary infection and may prompt renewed scrutiny of antigen selection and clinical endpoints.

Regulatory readiness is advancing but unevenly. The EMA evaluates vaccines for pregnancy via its standard centralised assessment, with targeted initiatives including pre- and post-authorisation evidence strategies, regulatory cluster collaborations with the FDA and MHRA, and promotion of pregnant women’s inclusion in clinical research where ethical and scientific justification allow. Post-marketing surveillance is governed by Good Pharmacovigilance Practices, requiring Risk Management Plans and Periodic Safety Update Reports, with collaborative networks such as ENCePP and the ACCESS project supporting systematic monitoring. Yet a central challenge lies beyond the licensing stage: following EMA approval, decisions on recommendation by National Immunisation Technical Advisory Groups, reimbursement, procurement, inclusion in national schedules, and service delivery remain the responsibility of individual countries. The recent rollout of maternal RSV immunisation illustrates this fragmentation, with countries differing considerably in policy recommendations, implementation timelines, funding mechanisms, and delivery pathways. The authors propose a European Maternal Immunisation Preparedness Plan (EMIPP), developed by a European coordination group with representation from vaccine developers, regulators, public health and communications experts, implementation specialists, and patient groups.

Equity and confidence are the final determinants of success. Lower uptake of all maternal vaccines has consistently been associated with socioeconomic deprivation, lower educational attainment, migrant and minority backgrounds, language barriers, limited antenatal care engagement, and lower trust in healthcare institutions. Public concerns about insufficient long-term safety data and unknown effects on the developing fetus are recurring themes, heightened when the vaccine or platform is new; the exclusion of pregnant women from trials created a data void rapidly filled by misinformation during the COVID-19 pandemic. A meta-analysis found that pregnant women who received a provider recommendation had ten to twelve times higher odds of accepting pertussis or influenza vaccination, yet communication training for obstetric and midwife providers remains limited. The commercial case also needs attention: the maternal vaccine market has historically been perceived as small, with higher development costs and more complex regulatory requirements, and addressing these barriers will require coordinated action from regulators, public funders, policymakers, and industry, including push incentives such as research grants and pull incentives such as advance market commitments. A European precedent already exists: in January 2026, VacPertagen, a recombinant acellular pertussis vaccine, received EU marketing authorisation on the basis of comparative immunogenicity rather than clinical efficacy, with post-marketing studies stipulated to confirm effectiveness and pregnancy safety. As the authors conclude, realising the potential of the next generation of vaccines in pregnancy will require integrated action across research, regulation, implementation, and communication. Europe is well positioned to lead, but only with deliberate, coordinated investment in equitable delivery.

Subject of Research: The next generation of maternal vaccines: scientific advances, regulatory readiness, and strategic planning in Europe

Article Title: The next generation of maternal vaccines: scientific advances, regulatory readiness, and strategic planning in Europe

Article References: Heath, P. T., Galiza, E. P., Salcedo, P. J., Karafillakis, E., Khalil, A., Maertens, K., Le Doare, K., & Jones, C. E. (2026). The next generation of maternal vaccines: scientific advances, regulatory readiness, and strategic planning in Europe. The Lancet Regional Health – Europe, 71, Article 101899. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lanepe.2026.101899

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1016/j.lanepe.2026.101899

Keywords: next, generation, maternal, vaccines, scientific, advances, regulatory, readiness, strategic, planning, Europe, scientific research

The study was conducted by chemical engineers at Ho Chi Minh City University of Technology and Vietnam National University Ho Chi Minh City, who developed a methodological framework designed to work under confined industrial data availability. Rather than requiring detailed plant-specific emission factors or continuous monitoring systems, the team applied a Tier 1 methodology based on the 2006 Guidelines of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which uses standard emission factors and net calorific values to estimate direct carbon dioxide from fuel combustion. The approach integrates four sequential elements: a Scope 1 greenhouse gas inventory, identification of emission hotspots, assessment and prioritization of low-carbon technologies, and a scenario-based transition analysis culminating in a long-term roadmap.

The demonstration case, referred to as Petrochemical Refinery Y, is a representative Vietnamese refinery and petrochemical complex processing around 200,000 barrels of crude oil per day, roughly ten million tons annually, at full design capacity. The researchers collected annual feedstock and fuel consumption data for six major process units for the 2025 operating year, covering fuel oil, fuel gas, and petroleum coke use. The assessment boundary was defined according to the Greenhouse Gas Protocol, focusing exclusively on Scope 1 emissions, the direct emissions from onsite combustion and process reactions, while excluding indirect Scope 2 and value-chain Scope 3 emissions that fall outside the refinery’s operational control.

The carbon accounting produced a strikingly concentrated emission profile. The residue fluid catalytic cracking (RFCC) unit, which burns coke deposited on catalyst to crack heavy hydrocarbons into lighter products, emerged as the largest single source, responsible for 1,026,315 tons of carbon dioxide per year, or 25.95 percent of the refinery’s total. Coke combustion alone contributed 65.3 percent of the RFCC’s emissions, reflecting the enormous energy demand of processing heavy Middle Eastern crude. The electricity and steam generation systems ranked second at 957,191 tons, or 24.20 percent, followed closely by the hydrogen generation unit at 827,810 tons, or 20.93 percent, where steam reforming of LPG produces the high-purity hydrogen needed for hydrotreating and reforming but releases carbon dioxide as an unavoidable by-product. Together, these three units account for more than 70 percent of the refinery’s direct emissions, meaning that targeting just three facilities offers the greatest leverage for refinery-wide abatement.

The remaining units, the crude distillation unit, the hydrotreating unit, and the continuous catalyst regeneration reformer, contributed 425,289, 399,095, and 318,959 tons of carbon dioxide respectively, mainly from burning fuel oil and refinery fuel gas. When normalized against throughput, the refinery’s emission intensity works out to approximately 54.17 kilograms of carbon dioxide per barrel of crude processed, which sits above the commonly reported average of 30 to 50 kilograms per barrel. The researchers attribute this partly to the complexity of the petrochemical configuration, noting that Vietnam’s Dung Quat Refinery, a simpler fuels-focused plant, emits around 33.72 kilograms per barrel. The similarity in emission structures between the two Vietnamese refineries, with RFCC and energy generation dominating in both cases, suggests the accounting method reliably reflects operational reality.

To translate the quantified emission profile into actionable strategy, the team evaluated feasible green solutions for each hotspot, drawing on international case studies from companies including Petrobras, Eni, BP, and ExxonMobil. For the RFCC unit, the options include co-processing biogenic feedstocks, such as fast pyrolysis bio-oil blended with vacuum gas oil at rates of 5 to 20 percent, which Petrobras demonstrated at pilot scale with reduced coke yield and slightly improved gasoline output. Switching supplementary fuel oil to natural gas, enabled by Vietnam’s expanding LNG infrastructure including the Thi Vai terminal, could cut combustion emissions by up to 30 percent. Advanced process control and heat integration offer cost-effective near-term gains; at Motiva in Texas, upgraded heat recovery cut energy use by 18 percent and emissions by 17 percent. For deeper abatement, amine-based post-combustion capture can be retrofitted onto the RFCC flue gas, a configuration proven at a Canadian refinery that reduced 85 percent of its RFCC emissions.

The electricity and steam generation unit, which supplies energy to the entire refinery, represents the most suitable entry point for renewable integration. Heat recovery steam generators could recover thermal energy from turbine exhaust, a measure European refineries have used to cut emissions by 10 to 15 percent, equivalent to roughly 144,000 to 191,000 tons of carbon dioxide per year at Refinery Y. Onsite solar and wind installations in the Nghi Son Economic Zone, where average solar irradiation reaches 4.2 to 4.8 kilowatt-hours per square meter per day and coastal wind speeds run 6.0 to 6.5 meters per second, could supply renewable electricity for pumps, compressors, and fans. For the hydrogen generation unit, the decisive long-term option is switching from gray hydrogen produced by steam methane reforming to green hydrogen generated by water electrolysis powered by renewables; replacing at least 30 percent of current production could reduce emissions by 25 to 35 percent, though green hydrogen currently costs two to three times more than its fossil-derived counterpart.

Based on this technology assessment, the researchers constructed a four-phase roadmap toward carbon neutrality by 2050. Phase 1, running from 2025 to 2030, deploys commercially mature measures including advanced process control, predictive maintenance, furnace optimization, heat integration, and hydrogen network optimization, achieving 8 to 15 percent cumulative reduction for an investment of 30 to 50 million dollars with payback of roughly two to three years. Phase 2, from 2030 to 2040, pivots from operational optimization to structural energy change through electrification of pumps, compressors, and heaters, renewable electricity supply, battery storage, and direct power purchase agreements, reaching 21 to 34 percent cumulative reduction for 150 to 250 million dollars. Phase 3, from 2035 to 2045, introduces bio-oil co-processing in the RFCC, pilot green hydrogen production with 10 to 20 megawatt electrolyzers, and pilot-scale carbon capture on the RFCC, adding 13 to 23 percent more reduction for 200 to 300 million dollars. Phase 4, from 2040 to 2050, completes the transition with full-scale carbon capture, utilization, and storage (CCUS) expansion to the RFCC and hydrogen units, industrial green hydrogen above 100 megawatts, direct air capture, and residual carbon offsets, delivering the final 80 to 90 percent cumulative reduction for 740 to 960 million dollars.

Scenario analysis indicates that cumulative emission reductions ranging from 80 percent under conservative assumptions to 90 percent under optimistic ones may be achievable, with the bounding scenarios derived by weighting each measure’s within-unit efficiency, supported by cited literature ranges, against that unit’s share of total baseline emissions. The residual gap to net zero is closed explicitly through direct air capture and carbon offsets rather than left implicit. The researchers also quantified the economic characteristics of each technology, revealing a steep gradient in abatement cost: advanced process control costs under 20 dollars per ton of carbon dioxide, heat integration runs 10 to 40 dollars, electrification 30 to 70 dollars, bio-feedstock co-processing 45 to 75 dollars, green hydrogen 100 to 250 dollars, full-scale CCUS 60 to 100 dollars, and direct air capture 300 to 600 dollars per ton. This cost hierarchy underpins the phased sequencing, ensuring cheap, mature measures come first while expensive, less mature technologies wait for cost declines and infrastructure development.

The study also confronts the practical constraints that will shape Vietnam’s industrial transition. CCUS deployment remains constrained by the absence of a commercial carbon dioxide transport and storage network, despite previous geological assessments indicating significant offshore storage potential in sedimentary basins such as the Cuu Long, Nam Con Son, Malay-Tho Chu, and Song Hong, with an estimated theoretical capacity of 11.8 gigatons. Detailed site characterization, monitoring protocols, and liability regulations remain undeveloped. Electrification and green hydrogen production will substantially increase refinery electricity demand, and while Vietnam’s Power Development Plan VIII targets rapid renewable expansion, stable renewable electricity availability remains uncertain in the short term due to transmission constraints and curtailment. Water availability poses another challenge: electrolyzers typically require 9 to 15 liters of high-purity water per kilogram of hydrogen produced, meaning commercial-scale green hydrogen would demand expanded purification capacity and improved recycling systems. Beyond Refinery Y, the framework is designed as a transparent, transferable basis for decarbonization planning in other refineries across Vietnam and in similar developing countries where site-specific data are restricted, bridging the gap between emission assessment and transition strategy while supporting national climate commitments, including Vietnam’s pledge at COP26 to reach net-zero emissions by 2050.

Subject of Research: A strategic decarbonization roadmap for a petrochemical refinery in Vietnam: integration of CCUS, green hydrogen, and the circular economy

Article Title: A strategic decarbonization roadmap for a petrochemical refinery in Vietnam: integration of CCUS, green hydrogen, and the circular economy

Article References: Ngo, T. H. T., Dam, H. N., & Dao, T. T. K. (2026). A strategic decarbonization roadmap for a petrochemical refinery in Vietnam: integration of CCUS, green hydrogen, and the circular economy. Frontiers in Chemical Engineering, 8, Article 1870346. https://doi.org/10.3389/fceng.2026.1870346

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fceng.2026.1870346

Keywords: strategic, decarbonization, roadmap, petrochemical, refinery, Vietnam, integration, CCUS, green, hydrogen, circular, economy

The research, published in Frontiers in Sustainability by a team at Fujairah University led by Hazem Aldabbas, draws on two of the most influential frameworks in management science. Stakeholder theory explains why responsible behavior earns approval: when a firm attends to the legitimate claims of employees, customers, regulators, and communities, those groups revise their evaluations upward. The resource-based view, developed by Jay Barney in 1991, explains when such approval becomes a durable weapon. Firms win sustainably only through resources that are valuable, rare, imperfectly imitable, and non-substitutable. The study integrates the two into a single testable chain: CSR earns stakeholder approval, and that approval, once accumulated into reputation, becomes the inimitable asset.

The logic of why reputation, rather than CSR spending itself, satisfies the resource-based criteria is subtle but powerful. A competitor can observe and match a rival’s community investment or environmental program; expenditure is describable and therefore imitable. Reputation, by contrast, is accumulated rather than acquired. It is built from years of consistent, visible conduct, held in the minds of stakeholders rather than on the balance sheet, and its formation is socially complex and causally ambiguous in exactly the sense the theory requires. No rival can purchase an authentic responsibility profile or announce it into existence.

To test this chain, the researchers surveyed 150 managers and senior executives across the UAE’s hospitality, banking, education, healthcare, government, and other sectors, drawn from 200 questionnaires distributed in February 2025. All constructs were measured with previously validated multi-item scales on five-point Likert formats. The measurement quality was rigorous: exploratory factor analysis yielded a clean three-component solution explaining 76.83 percent of the variance, composite reliability ranged from 0.874 to 0.885, average variance extracted ranged from 0.583 to 0.719, and the Fornell–Larcker criterion confirmed that the three constructs were empirically distinct. A confirmatory factor analysis fit the data well, with a comparative fit index of 0.957 and a root mean square error of approximation of 0.078, and it fit significantly better than one- and two-factor alternatives.

The team then estimated a mediation model using ordinary least squares regression within Hayes’ PROCESS Model 4, with 5,000 bootstrap resamples, controlling for firm age, organization size, and organization type. The results were striking. CSR was a powerful predictor of corporate reputation, with an unstandardized coefficient of 0.746 (p < 0.001), explaining 57.3 percent of the variance in reputational standing. Reputation, in turn, significantly predicted competitive advantage (B = 0.403, p = 0.001). The total effect of CSR on competitive advantage was positive and significant (B = 0.526, p < 0.001), apparently confirming the conventional wisdom.

But once reputation entered the model, the direct pathway collapsed. The direct effect of CSR on competitive advantage fell to 0.226 and became statistically insignificant (p = 0.061), while the indirect effect through reputation remained robust at 0.301, with a 95 percent bootstrap confidence interval of 0.079 to 0.507 that excluded zero. The mediated pathway accounted for approximately 57.2 percent of the total effect, a pattern the authors classify as indirect-only, or full, mediation. In plain terms: what looked like a direct strategic return on responsible conduct was, on closer specification, a return on the reputational asset that responsible conduct accumulates.

Why does reputation confer advantage? The study identifies three routes. First, it lowers transaction costs, because customers, suppliers, regulators, and employees extend trust to well-regarded firms and demand fewer contractual safeguards. Second, it generates a preference premium: when offerings are otherwise comparable, stakeholders choose the firm they regard more highly, a mechanism that earlier work by Roberts and Dowling linked to sustained superior financial performance. Third, it provides insurance value, because accumulated goodwill cushions the firm when problems arise. Rivals cannot copy these benefits quickly, since reputation is earned through conduct over time rather than bought at a point in time.

An instructive asymmetry emerged in the coefficients. The CSR-to-reputation link was strong (standardized beta = 0.724), while the reputation-to-advantage link was more moderate (beta = 0.361). This suggests that converting responsible conduct into reputational standing is the more reliable of the two transformations, whereas converting reputation into competitive position is more contingent, depending on market structure, firm visibility, and stakeholders’ ability to act on their evaluations. Notably, none of the control variables reached significance, hinting that the reputational pathway operates similarly across organizations of different ages, sizes, and sectors within the sample, though the authors caution this should be treated as provisional.

The practical implications are direct. Managers should treat reputational standing as the intermediate outcome against which responsibility investments are judged; programs unlikely to become known to or valued by stakeholders should not be expected to yield competitive returns, however worthwhile on other grounds. Consistency between conduct and communication is essential, because any divergence damages the mechanism itself, not merely the message. And because firm age, size, and sector showed no significant effects, smaller and younger firms have no structural reason to regard reputation-building through responsible conduct as out of reach.

The authors acknowledge limitations: the design is cross-sectional, the data are self-reported from a single country, and common method variance cannot be ruled out entirely, though procedural remedies and statistical diagnostics suggest it is unlikely to account for the findings. Within those boundaries, the study delivers a message with real weight for the Gulf region and beyond. The strategic value of corporate social responsibility is real, but it is stored in reputation. Models that omit this pathway are likely to misattribute where that value actually lives.

Subject of Research: Corporate social responsibility as a strategic resource: examining the mediating role of corporate reputation in securing competitive advantage

Article Title: Corporate social responsibility as a strategic resource: examining the mediating role of corporate reputation in securing competitive advantage

Article References: Aldabbas, H., Elamin, A. M., Gernal, L., Ahmed, A. Z. E., & Ibnauf, R. M. (2026). Corporate social responsibility as a strategic resource: examining the mediating role of corporate reputation in securing competitive advantage. Frontiers in Sustainability, 7, Article 1920283. https://doi.org/10.3389/frsus.2026.1920283

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/frsus.2026.1920283

Keywords: Corporate, social, responsibility, strategic, resource, examining, mediating, role, reputation, securing, competitive, advantage

Whole-transcriptome analysis, which examines the total RNA within a biological sample, has become a cornerstone of contemporary molecular biology because it allows the expression of both coding and non-coding genes to be characterized in a single experiment. The applications span remarkable ground. In agricultural and animal sciences, transcriptomics has advanced veterinary parasitology, teleost physiology, and plant-pathogen interactions. In genomic medicine, it illuminates pathological mechanisms; in pharmacology, it supports molecular-level studies across organisms; and in structural biology, it reveals the functions of small RNAs during transcription. Yet the authors caution that every step of the workflow, from initial data processing to final interpretation, can introduce biases that substantially affect biological conclusions.

The review organizes the field around three major scenarios that determine which analytical strategies are appropriate. When a well-annotated reference genome exists, researchers can align short sequencing reads to the genome and quantify gene abundance with relative ease. When only a closely related annotated organism is available, transcriptome assembly becomes more involved. And for non-model species lacking any adequate reference, de novo assembly is required—a far more demanding task. The choice of workflow also depends on the class of RNA under study, whether messenger RNA, small regulatory RNAs such as microRNAs, or long non-coding RNAs, each of which demands distinct library preparation and computational treatment.

Experimental design receives particular scrutiny in the review, and the authors’ practical recommendations challenge some long-standing conventions. While three biological replicates have traditionally served as an accepted minimum for differential expression analysis, the authors note that this number may be insufficient to capture biological variability or detect small-magnitude expression changes. Citing published work showing that increasing replicates to between six and twelve can substantially improve detection of differentially expressed genes, they recommend that six or more replicates may provide a useful balance between experimental cost and statistical power, particularly for studies involving patient samples or outbred animal models with substantial inter-individual variability. Homogeneous materials such as cell lines, by contrast, can yield satisfactory results with at least three replicates when expression changes exceed twofold.

Batch effects emerge as one of the most insidious threats to transcriptomic validity. This form of technical variation arises when samples are processed in different batches, on different days, in different laboratories, or by different technicians, and it can generate false positives—genes flagged as differentially expressed when the difference actually reflects the day they were sequenced. Drawing on their experience at the University Unit for High-Throughput Sequencing and Bioinformatics, the authors identify RNA extraction as a particularly sensitive stage, where small differences in processing time, temperature, and reagent lots can introduce systematic variation. Exploratory analyses such as principal component analysis and multidimensional scaling, performed on normalized expression data, can reveal clustering patterns associated with processing batches rather than biological conditions, and batch can then be included as a covariate in statistical frameworks such as DESeq2 or edgeR.

On the sequencing side, the review weighs the trade-offs between established short-read platforms and emerging long-read technologies. Illumina systems remain widely used because of their low error rates, high throughput, and relatively low cost per base, making them cost-effective for studies involving large numbers of samples. For de novo transcriptome assembly, however, long-read sequencing from Oxford Nanopore Technologies and Pacific Biosciences offers important advantages: reads that span much larger portions of, or in some cases entire, transcripts simplify reconstruction of isoforms and reduce uncertainty about exon connectivity. PacBio HiFi sequencing achieves very high single-read accuracy, while ONT supports direct RNA sequencing without cDNA conversion, reducing biases from reverse transcription and PCR amplification and enabling detection of RNA base modifications. The higher cost of long-read approaches remains a limiting factor.

The computational pipeline itself is mapped in careful technical detail. Quality control begins with tools such as FastQC and MultiQC to assess raw sequencing quality across samples, followed by preprocessing with Cutadapt, fastp, or Trimmomatic to remove adapters and low-quality bases. For de novo assembly from short reads, de Bruijn graph-based assemblers Trinity and rnaSPAdes reconstruct transcripts through multistage processes, while RNA-Bloom2, isONform, and RATTLE serve long-read data. Assembly quality can then be evaluated with reference-free tools such as TransRate or reference-based suites including rnaQUAST and DETONATE. When a reference genome is available, splice-aware aligners HISAT2 and STAR map reads while identifying splice junctions, and quantification tools ranging from Salmon and Kallisto to RSEM, StringTie, HTSeq, and featureCounts convert alignments into abundance matrices. For long-read data, Bambu, IsoQuant, and Oarfish provide transcript and isoform quantification.

Differential expression analysis, the statistical heart of most transcriptomic studies, is examined through the leading frameworks. DESeq2 and edgeR both use negative binomial models to account for biological variability and overdispersion in RNA-seq count data, with edgeR employing an empirical Bayes approach to dispersion estimation that shares information across genes. The limma framework, adapted for RNA-seq through the voom transformation, uses linear models on log-transformed expression values with precision weights, offering computational efficiency for complex designs. The non-parametric NOISeq estimates noise distributions empirically and may be useful when distributional assumptions are difficult to satisfy, though the authors stress that the absence of biological replicates substantially limits statistical inference regardless of method. The resulting gene lists then feed into functional enrichment analysis against databases such as Gene Ontology, KEGG, and COG, using approaches from over-representation analysis to gene set enrichment analysis.

Woven through the technical guidance is a sustained argument for FAIR compliance—the principles that data should be Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable. The authors detail what this means in practice: persistent identifiers such as GEO or BioProject accession numbers and stable gene identifiers rather than gene names alone; deposition of raw FASTQ files in public repositories such as the NCBI Sequence Read Archive, the European Nucleotide Archive, or the DNA Data Bank of Japan; standardized formats such as BAM, GTF/GFF3, and CSV; and comprehensive documentation of software versions, parameter settings, and reference genome assemblies. Containerization tools such as Docker and Conda can preserve the computational environment, strengthening reproducibility of quantitative results.

The review culminates in a call for bioinformatics democratization, embodied in IDEAMEX, a web-based platform the authors developed to facilitate transcriptomic analysis from abundance matrices. The platform supports exploratory data analysis and differential expression analysis using four methods—DESeq2, edgeR, limma, and NOISeq—whose integration provides complementary evidence for identifying robust expression patterns, all without requiring advanced programming skills. The authors frame this not merely as a technical convenience but as a response to systemic inequalities: women remain underrepresented in bioinformatics in Mexico as in other STEM disciplines, and researchers in resource-limited settings often lack access to essential computing infrastructure, mentoring, and training. Combined with FAIR-compliant workflows, they argue, such resources can contribute to more open, reproducible, and inclusive access to genomic knowledge, regardless of available computational infrastructure or financial resources.

Subject of Research: FAIR-compliant transcriptomic workflows and democratization of RNA-seq bioinformatics

Article Title: Strategic roadmap for FAIR-compliant transcriptomic workflows: from technical challenges to bioinformatics democratization

Article References: Jiménez Jacinto, V., & Vega-Alvarado, L. (2026). Strategic roadmap for FAIR-compliant transcriptomic workflows: from technical challenges to bioinformatics democratization. Frontiers in Bioinformatics, 6, Article 1882808. https://doi.org/10.3389/fbinf.2026.1882808

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fbinf.2026.1882808

Keywords: transcriptomics, RNA-seq, FAIR principles, bioinformatics, differential expression, de novo assembly, IDEAMEX, UNAM, reproducibility, democratization, Strategic, roadmap

The study is anchored in one of the most influential theories of modern strategic management, the resource-based view. First articulated in the 1980s and 1990s, the resource-based view holds that firms win not because of their position in a market, but because of what they possess internally. According to the theory, a resource confers sustained competitive advantage only if it satisfies four criteria, often abbreviated as VRIN: it must be valuable, meaning it helps the firm exploit opportunities or neutralize threats; rare, meaning few competitors have it; inimitable, meaning rivals cannot easily copy it; and non-substitutable, meaning there is no equivalent alternative that delivers the same benefit. Human capital, the argument goes, is uniquely suited to meet these tests. Skills, tacit knowledge, organizational culture, and employee commitment are notoriously difficult for competitors to replicate, unlike machines that can be purchased on the open market.

What makes the new research distinctive is that it tests all four VRIN dimensions simultaneously in a single statistical model, applied to a developing economy that has received comparatively little empirical attention. The authors note that while human capital is increasingly recognized as a strategic driver of sustainable industrial performance, evidence on how VRIN-consistent human resource attributes translate into competitive advantage and sustainable performance in developing economies remains sparse. Bangladesh, one of the world’s largest garment exporters and a country whose industrial growth is directly relevant to United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 9 on industry, innovation, and infrastructure, provides an ideal testing ground. The study’s theoretical premise is that strategic human resource management practices, such as selective hiring, training, and performance-linked rewards, are the mechanisms through which VRIN-consistent resources are expected to emerge in the first place.

Methodologically, the researchers employed a quantitative survey design, collecting responses from HR managers and senior HR professionals in manufacturing companies located in the Dhaka and Gazipur districts. The data were analyzed using Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling, or PLS-SEM, a statistical technique widely used in management research because it can estimate multiple relationships between latent constructs, variables that cannot be directly observed, such as resource value or competitive advantage, at the same time. PLS-SEM works by modeling each latent construct through its survey indicators and then estimating path coefficients, standardized values between roughly minus one and one that indicate the strength and direction of the relationship between constructs. The analysis was carried out with the software SmartPLS, and the significance of each path was evaluated against bootstrap confidence intervals, a resampling procedure that estimates how stable the coefficients would be if the survey were repeated many times.

The results are striking in their hierarchy. By far the most powerful positive contributor to competitive advantage was resource value, with a path coefficient of 0.499, meaning that when employees possess capabilities that genuinely help the firm compete, the effect on advantage dwarfs every other factor measured. Non-substitutability came second at 0.169, followed by inimitability at 0.121. In plain terms, the study suggests that it matters far more that your workforce’s skills are useful than that they are merely hard to copy. A firm can have idiosyncratic, deeply embedded practices that no rival can imitate, but if those practices do not create value for customers or operations, they contribute little to competitive standing. This ordering offers a practical lesson for managers in emerging markets: invest first in making human capabilities genuinely valuable to the business, and only then worry about protecting and differentiating them.

The study also examined whether competitive advantage feeds into sustainable performance, a construct encompassing the economic, environmental, and social dimensions of a firm’s operations. Here the answer was affirmative but more modest: sustainable performance was positively correlated with competitive advantage, with a path coefficient of 0.224. The finding supports a chain-of-effects logic that underlies much of the strategic human resource management literature. Well-managed human resources create advantages in cost, quality, innovation, and reputation; those advantages, in turn, give firms the slack and the incentive to invest in cleaner technologies, safer workplaces, and more durable business models. For a manufacturing sector under intense pressure from international buyers to meet environmental and labor standards, this link between internal capability and sustainability outcomes carries real weight.

Not every hypothesis survived the statistical scrutiny, and the authors are refreshingly candid about it. The study hypothesized that resource rarity would moderate, that is, change the strength of, the relationship between competitive advantage and sustainable performance, a proposition drawn from the idea that rare resources might act as a boundary condition on how advantage converts into outcomes. The point estimate for this moderating effect was negative, at minus 0.384, but it failed to achieve significance when evaluated against its 95 percent bootstrap confidence interval, and its effect size, measured by the statistic f-squared, was a negligible 0.002. The researchers explicitly frame this as an exploratory pattern for future research rather than a confirmed finding about resource rigidity. In other words, the data do not show that rarity harms sustainability; they simply show no reliable evidence that rarity changes the advantage-performance link in this sample.

The implications ripple outward in several directions. For scholars, the study is described as one of the first PLS-SEM investigations to integrate all four VRIN dimensions in a single model of Bangladesh’s manufacturing industry, treating valuable, inimitable, and non-substitutable resources as direct antecedents of competitive advantage while positioning rarity as a potential boundary condition on the advantage-to-performance pathway. For practitioners, the message is that strategic human resource management is not an administrative afterthought but a core engine of industrial competitiveness. Recruitment systems that identify genuinely valuable capabilities, training programs that build skills competitors cannot easily replicate, and retention practices that keep those capabilities in-house are, according to this evidence, direct investments in a firm’s sustainable future. For policymakers pursuing SDG 9, the research suggests that upgrading a nation’s industrial base may depend as much on human capital policy as on infrastructure spending.

The study also carries a caution about generalization. Its sample of 274 HR professionals was drawn from a single country and concentrated in two industrial districts, and the respondents were, by design, people whose professional identity may predispose them to view human resources favorably. Cross-sectional survey data, collected at one point in time, can establish correlation and model-consistent pathways but cannot definitively prove causation. The authors themselves acknowledge that the rarity moderation result should be treated as exploratory, and they position their work as a foundation for further inquiry rather than a final verdict. Still, the research was approved by the Institutional Review Board of Daffodil International University, informed consent was obtained from all respondents, and the analysis was published open access, allowing researchers across the developing world to scrutinize and build upon the methods.

What lingers after reading the study is a deceptively simple reframing of an old debate. For decades, managers in cost-sensitive manufacturing hubs have treated labor as an expense to be minimized, something to be optimized through wage control and turnover management. This research, grounded in rigorous structural equation modeling of real firms, argues the opposite: the attributes of human resources, their value above all, but also their uniqueness and irreplaceability, are measurable predictors of competitive advantage, and competitive advantage is a measurable predictor of sustainable performance. In an era when factories face simultaneous demands for productivity, decarbonization, and decent work, the finding that people-centered resources drive all three at once may prove to be one of the most consequential management insights to emerge from the Global South in years. The factories of Dhaka and Gazipur, it turns out, may be teaching the world a lesson about where competitive advantage truly lives.

Subject of Research: The role of VRIN human resource attributes and strategic HRM in achieving sustainable manufacturing performance in Bangladesh

Article Title: Strategic human resource management and resource value attributes for sustainable manufacturing performance

Article References: Mia, M. M., Showrav, D. G. Y., Ahmed, S. F., Khan, S., Miah, M. S., Singh, J. S. K., Tanchi, K. R., Al Amin, S., Islam, M. R., & Mansour, A. W. (2026). Strategic human resource management and resource value attributes for sustainable manufacturing performance. Discover Sustainability. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43621-026-04840-z

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43621-026-04840-z

Keywords: strategic human resource management, resource-based view, VRIN resources, competitive advantage, sustainable performance, manufacturing, Bangladesh, PLS-SEM, human capital, SDG 9, developing economies, Strategic