What is the future of Richemont, Kering and Lvmh´s online-offline strategies in China?

Despite the notion of luxury brands retailing online is regarded in contempt, COVID-19 disrupted and induced the luxury industry to transform digitally mainly in China. This paper studies the current and future strategies of Chinese technology behemoths, Alibaba and Tencent, including major luxury conglomerates, Richemont, Kering and LVMH’s omnichannel approaches in China through data obtained from business literature and other sources. The analysis discovered three distinct religions from the luxury groups. ‘New retail’ concept is gaining moment um rapidly in China and the luxury sector might witness more meaningful opportunities for consolidation in the foreseeable future whilst maintaining exclusivity

STEAM and the Way Forward

The STEAM Journal editorial in which we present this issue and describe our way forward in furthering transdisciplinary thought and practice in the integration and connection of STEM and the Arts. STEAM is poised to become a critical space of thought and practice in research, education, and the arts in addressing emerging complex and global issues

Ethnic Entitled Conflict? An Ethnic - Based Analysis to Conflict in Sri Lanka <Research Note>

As a phenomenon to be understood, ethnic conflicts in the current world trend are becoming as a force shaping human affairs and create an escalation of threat. Once ethnicity came at the center of politics in country after country, a potential source of challenges formed not only nationally but also internationally as well. The aim of this paper is to explore the implications of ethnicity in severely divided societies; the primary focus is on Sri Lanka. The attempt, based on ethnicity, is to define the nature of Sri Lankan conflict by using some empirical viewpoints and then provide the background, ethnic affiliation and its importance, and, ethnic dynamics throughout the conflict and its escalation, including major actors as well as sources

Putting the Home Grown Mechanism into Practice in Post War Sri Lanka : The Presidential Commission of Inquiry on Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation <Research Note>

The aftermath of the prolonged civil war concluded with the defeat over the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) by the Sri Lankan government forces, Sri Lanka entered into post-war peacebuilding phase, encompasses with various measures, to achieve stable peace. In order to pursue peace and reconciliation, Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission (LLRC) has established as a home grown mechanism to address and resolve the injustices subjected throughout the past. Though the long awaited final report's recommendations, made by the Commission, were met with some shortcomings, it is significant for devising benchmarks for necessary transition from conflict to peace. The aim of this study is to evaluate the prospects of the Presidential Commission of Inquiry in general and to examine the four key issues, related to political solution, rehabilitation and reintegration of former LTTE cadres, demilitarization and resettlement of Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs), and the recommendations the LLRC report holds for genuine reconciliation in Sri Lanka

Quality System Implementation By Selected Local Vendors In The Malaysian Automotive Industry

Looking at the number of complaints on local cars by public has triggered the possibility of whether suppliers to car manufacturers could be the reason of numerous quality defects on local cars. As quality of product is also determined by the correct quality practice in an organization, the effectiveness of quality systems implementation, ISO 9000, QS 9000 or TS 16949, among local vendors becomes a factor in determining the quality of local cars. It is therefore, a need to address this issue emerges as Malaysia needs to compete aggressively in the automotive market to gain more sales, recognition and respect. The root of the quality problems has to be identified and either treated or eliminated. The study has only one objective, that is, to study the performance of vendors implementing quality systems. The research is a case study on selected local automotive vendors. Eight vendors and four car manufacturers were selected for the purpose of analysis. The study consists of both quantitative and qualitative methods. Questionnaires were sent via e-mail or hand to participants and are followed by a personal interview or via telephone conversation once the questionnaire is completed. Additional questions were asked during personal interview to gain more insight on relevant matters. The results were analyzed using the SPSS Software. The analysis showed that the performance of local cars depends on three parties; the suppliers who manufacture the car components, certification bodies who certify the suppliers and car manufacturers who assemble the cars. The main important issue in assuring quality in an organization is found not due to quality system but the management’s commitment to the quality system. Organizations that were studied on practice quality system but the quality practices were not fully implemented. Employers and employees alike do not understand the importance of quality in both work practice and produced parts. Other factors contributing to low quality production of cars includes car manufacturers’ leniency towards vendors, low technical know how and technology, attitude, lack of choice in selecting vendors and lack of testing facilities. There is slight difference in quality system implementation between companies that do not perform well and companies that perform well. This is because an organization’s performance depends on many other factors too; new part development, man power turnover and lack of technical expertise. There is difference in supplier expectations between local and foreign car manufacturers. It was also found that effective quality system implementation goes hand in hand with the quality of product produced

Business intelligence framework using ant colony optimization for feature selection in higher education institution

Recently, business intelligence (BI) has become an important tool for effective decision-making. BI is a mathematical framework to gain information and knowledge through the process of extracting, transforming, managing, and analyzing data. The demand for accurate knowledge in higher education sector needs a correct technique to extract the exact information for decision-making. However, current BI frameworks and systems lack the ability to transform data into information, and these caused users not to able to fully utilize the BI outcome. This research developed a BI framework for the higher education that is able to explore, analyse and visualize the relevant data into information for use by the top management. This framework identifies the best set of attributes and evaluates the performance of the model with the help of 27 input features. In this case study, the framework used Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) technique mainly to identify the best set of attributes, and the performance was validated using Support Vector Machine (SVM). The framework consists of four layers which are data source, data integration, analytic, and access. Each layer contributes to decision making in terms of processing data, selection of significant features and data visualization. In this study, 46,658 input data were processed for identification of Graduate on Time (GOT) decision in the context of higher education referred as Masters and Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) postgraduates who completed their study within a specified period. The performance evaluation of the data achieved accuracies of 86.44% for PhD and 96.2% for Master’s. Based on the findings, the results showed that the BI dashboard as an output from the framework is capable of providing a good decision-making tool for education management

The Shifting Frontiers of Literary Studies in the Twenty-first Century

Traditionally seen as a discipline that was immersed in published narratives, with poetry, drama, short fiction, and novels as the sole determinant corpus, Literary Studies in the twenty-first century has progressed across the latitudes of narrativity, as the notion of text itself has pushed past established boundaries of words on a published page. The page in the contemporary context can be taken to mean the written text, the visual text, the moving text, and the hypertext, to name just a few. The articles in this Forum Kritika present a glimpse into the shifting frontiers in Literary Studies as it presents varied facets of contemporary literary scholarship by literary scholars. The discussions take us across a number of planes. They integrate both print and multimodal texts, demonstrate eclectic frameworks of reading that cross disciplinary boundaries, reveal the utilization of analytical tools from the hard sciences, and also project the inculcation of innovative and entrepreneurial skills in the literary classroom. Yet, the Forum is also mindful that however far away we trek beyond established frontiers, we must still ensure our contact with the core of our discipline, that of traditional forms of the printed text. For, if we dismiss them from our view, we run the risk of inadvertently devaluing the worth of literary fiction and its attendant academic scholarship. As such, the Forum also incorporates articles that engage with contemporary theater and novels and their inherent validity in reflecting the socio-political concerns of our world, emphasizing that these will never lose their currency however much the arena changes