The study stipulates phases to observe the proposed mechanism in formulating the travel and leisure industry's recovery strategies. The present pandemic COVID-19 has resulted in global challenges, economic and healthcare crises, and posed spillover impacts on the global industries, including tourism and travel that the major contributor to the service industry worldwide. The tourism and leisure industry has faced the COVID-19 tourism impacts hardest-hit and lies among the most damaged global industries. The leisure and internal tourism indicated a steep decline amounting to 2.86 trillion US dollars, which quantified more than 50% revenue losses. In the first step, the study explores the consequences and settings of the COVID-19 pandemic and how innovation and change can contribute to the tourism industry's revival to the next normal. Thus, the study determines that tourism enterprises and scholars must consider and change the basic principles, main assumptions, and organizational situations related to research and practice framework through rebuilding and establishing the tourism sector. In the second step, the study discusses direct COVID-19 tourism impacts, attitudes, and practices in gaining the leisure industry's boom and recovery. In the third phase, the study proposes to observe the characteristics and COVID-19 tourism consequences on the travel and tourism research. The findings provide insights in regaining the tourism industry's operational activities and offer helpful suggestions to government officials, scholars, and tourism firms to reinvest in the tourism industry to set it back to a normal position.

This precise study is the first to perform a focalized investigation on the relationship between entrepreneurial business networks and sustainable performance of small firms. The entrepreneurial business network is a multifaceted business network of business firms, working together to achieve business objectives. Business relationships and firm aggregations are the main categories of entrepreneurial business networks, which help small and medium-sized enterprises to become more dynamic, innovative and competitive. The entrepreneurial business network is a networking, which provides a platform to build business relationships, identify, develop or act upon economic opportunities, share information and seek potential business partners for ventures. However, few studies have sought to understand the association of entrepreneurial business network (EBN) and firms’ sustainable performance in the context of Pakistan. This investigation aims to examine the relationship between EBN and small firms’ sustainable performance by applying the Smart PLS-SEM software V-3.2.8. This study explores how dynamic capabilities mediate the relationship between entrepreneurial business network and sustainable performance of small firms. The data received reports on small firms, manufacturing surgical instruments. The findings indicated that the entrepreneurial business network had a significant positive relationship with dynamic capabilities, which in turn presented a positive relation to a sustainable performance of small firms. By developing sustainable EBN, small firms can achieve sustainable performance by implementing dynamic capabilities in a competitive environment. The results affirmed that highly entrepreneurial firms showed a tendency to create a business network for achieving sustainable performance. The results also revealed that firms using business networks and dynamic capabilities efficiently; achieved their sustainable performance. The findings indicated that the study proposed a holistic and systematic model to achieve sustainable performance through firms’ dynamic capabilities. The generalizability of these findings provides useful insight and direction for future studies in Pakistan.

Background The advent of the pandemic COVID-19 has resulted in a global crisis that resulted in the closure of universities and educational institutions worldwide. This study aims to explore the determinants of students’ intention towards e-library services usage amid the challenging time of the COVID-19 pandemic. This paper reviews the technology-oriented individual attitude based on four dimensions of the technology readiness 2.0 index factors, which affect medical students’ perspectives. Materials and methods The authors provided a self-administered questionnaire to medical students to investigate their e-library adoption attitude during the COVID-19 crisis. The authors distributed 542 questionnaires, received 361 complete responses and analyzed the data through path modeling/partial least squares structural equations modeling technique (PLS-SEM) with the smart PLS software version 3.3.3. The structural equation-modelling tool permits the estimation of results. Results The main finding revealed that medical students have a positive and explicit approach to use the services available at the e-library. Technology use and online services helped students continue their educational needs in the advent of the current pandemic COVID-19. Attitude and subjective norms have significant influence and are strong predictors of intention. However, due to inadequate support for the government side, the perceived behavioural control has an insignificant impact on intention. This paper indicated one of the pioneers investigating the determinants of e-library adoption among medical students based on technology-oriented personality traits, employing the four dimensions of the technology readiness 2.0 index during the challenges of the COVID-19 outbreak. Conclusion The study’s findings provide useful insight that offers valuable insights to implement specific strategies from the government officials to address medical students’ uncertainties and increase the technology adoption amid the COVID-19 pandemic in medical education for developing nations.

This study emphasized the relationship between the Chinese companies’ product market competition and organizational performance. This article explored the mediating effect of capital structure and the moderating impact of firm size in achieving better performance of Chinese companies. This study employed a sample of 2,502 Chinese firm observations and identified that market competition positively influenced firm performance. Additionally, capital structure partly mediated the relationship between product market competition and firm performance. Similarly, the present study also tested the moderating effect of firm size (both small and large) on the association between product market competition and firm performance. The results showed that moderating large businesses affects the nexus between product market competition and firm performance. Conversely, small firms’ moderating role revealed a substantial adverse impact on the association between product market competition and firm performance. These findings contribute to the literature on the complex implications of market competition on business firms’ performance. The results provide insightful and practical implications for future research directions.

For heat conduction along polymer chains, a decrease in the axial thermal conductivity often occurs when the polymer structure changes from onedimensional (1D) to three-dimensional (3D). For example, a single extended aliphatic chain (e.g., polyethylene or poly(dimethylsiloxane)) usually has a higher axial thermal conductivity than its double-chain or crystal counterparts because coupling between chains induces strong interchain anharmonic scatterings. Intuitively, for chains with an aromatic backbone, the even stronger π−π stacking, once formed between chains, should enhance thermal transport across chains and suppress the thermal conductivity along the chains. However, we show that this trend is the opposite in poly(p-phenylene) (PPP), a typical chain with an aromatic backbone. Using molecular dynamics simulations, we found that the axial thermal conductivity of PPP chains shows an anomalous dimensionality dependence where the thermal conductivity of double-chain and 3D crystal structures is higher than that of a 1D single chain. We analyzed the probability distribution of dihedral angles and found that π−π stacking between phenyl rings restricts the free rotation of phenyl rings and forms a long-range order along the chain, thus enhancing thermal transport along the chain direction. Though possessing a stronger bonding strength and stabilizing the multiple-chain structure, π−π stacking does not lead to a higher interchain thermal conductance between phenyl rings compared with that between aliphatic chains. Our simulation results on the effects of π−π stacking provide insights to engineer thermal transport in polymers at the molecular level.

The present study aimed to investigate the effects of fear of COVID‐19 and situational depression on the quality of life (QOL) of Pakistani citizens. An online cross‐sectional survey was conducted on Pakistani citizens via the snowball sampling technique. A total of 377 respondents (256 males and 121 females) participated in this study from August to October 2020. Adapted scales were validated using confirmatory factor analysis, and partial least squares structural equation modelling (PLS‐SEM) was applied to the data to test the hypothesised model. The study's findings showed a negative relationship between fear of COVID‐19 and QOL. Likewise, a reciprocal relationship was found between situational depression and quality of life. The results indicate that fear of COVID‐19 and situational depression during the pandemic have affected the lives of Pakistani citizens. The findings are particularly relevant for improving the QOL by limiting the information received from media and social networks. There is a need to control these mediums and promote community‐based interventions to provide accurate knowledge regarding COVID‐19. Fear of COVID‐19 and situational depression may be reduced in this way. Based on the current findings, psychotherapy and counselling programmes must be planned to minimise the adverse effects of fear of COVID‐19 and depression on the QOL of citizens due to the ongoing progression of the pandemic.

Climate change has become one of the biggest issue across the globe as most countries have been bearing the consequences of this phenomenon on a global scale. Countries have been drafting environmental regulations to help mitigate the environmental pollution caused by climate change. Therefore, the implications of environmental policies in various sectors of the economy are dependent on state regulations. The main objective of this study is to investigate the impact of corporate governance on environmental performance. Furthermore, this study examines the impact of institutional regulations on the relationship of corporate governance and firms’ environmental performance. The data was collected from the top 120 manufacturing companies that are based in Pakistan, India, China and Bangladesh. The binary logit regression methodology was employed in this study. The results indicate that the attributes of corporate governance have a positive and significant impact on green performance. In addition, the results were also positive and significant on the moderating role of institutional regulation for corporate governance and firm performance. Hence, based on the empirical findings, this study recommends strict environmental institutional regulations to further enhance environmental performance. Keywords:Green performance, corporate governance, environment, institutional policies

The extant research findings have identified lacunas (i.e. gaps, unresolved issues, and black box) in the High-Performance Work System (HPWS)-Performance relationship and suggested usage of a mechanism (mediator) that can close up the identified lacunas. Thus, this study investigates whether employee creativity can play a mediating role in the relationship between HPWS and firm non-financial performance. The sample size of the study is 518, and respondents were selected through stratified sampling technique. Data were collected from the sampled 518 managers in Nigerian firms. Partial Least Squares (PLS) algorithm and bootstrapping techniques were used for data analysis. The result indicates that employee creativity competitively/partially mediates the relationship between HPWS and non-financial performance. Employee creativity represents an appropriate mechanism to explain the relationship between HPWS and non-financial performance. Hence, the positive indirect effect via the mediator variable (employee creativity) reveals the ‘true’ relationship between HPWS and non-financial performance. This result implies that HPWS may not necessarily enhance non-financial performance. Ill-configured HPWS could jeopardize non-financial performance, but HPWS that stimulates employee creativity would enhance non-financial performance. Lastly, the implications, limitations and suggestions for future research are discussed.