No abstract

Globally, policymakers have overlooked the challenges faced by international migrants in host countries during the Covid‐19 pandemic. The policies and support systems designed by host governments highlight the lack of social justice and raise concerns for scholarly attention. Considering the experiences of international migrants living in the UK during the Covid‐19 lockdown from the theoretical perspective of coping, this interpretivist study investigates international migrants’ coping strategies adopted during the first UK national lockdown. Data collected from 60 Chinese, Italian and Iranian migrants using semi‐structured interviews during the lockdown period were analysed thematically using NVivo. The findings show that migrants adopted multi‐layered and multi‐phase coping strategies. To cope with the anxiety and uncertainties caused by the pandemic, they initiated new practices informed by both home and host institution logics. Nevertheless, the hostile context's responses provoked unexpected new worries and triggered the adoption of additional and compromising practices. The paper illustrates how coping became paradoxical because migrants had to cope with the hostile reactions that their initial coping strategies provoked in the host environment. By introducing the new concept of coping with coping , this paper extends previous theoretical debate and leads to several managerial implications for governments and policymakers.

This study explores the use of electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) for university selection by prospective international students, a little understood phenomenon in the context of high-involvement decision making. A total of 34 in-depth interviews were conducted, with a Taiwanese student group based in Taiwan, and another Taiwanese group based in the UK. The findings reveal that the co-creating nature of eWOM increases perceived information quality and truthfulness from eWOM receivers, leading to reliance on eWOM to evaluate the performance of universities, rather than conventional marketing-dominated information sources. This study provides insights into the impact of cultural identity on eWOM usage and how eWOM receivers obtain both information and emotional support from online forums. As eWOM from current students and alumni directly affect prospective students' enrolment choices, academic leaders and recruitment managers at universities are advised to strengthen their Relationship Marketing with alumni to stimulate eWOM and facilitate student recruitment.

This article investigates the working relationships between UK universities and Chinese student recruitment agents. Data draw on insights from the senior management of ten UK institutions. Findings reveal that the ranking position of a university is the ultimate source of power that defines its position in the international HE network of universities and agents. In addition, this article throws light on the debate of power relations between universities and agents in the international HE context and discusses the various sources of power that universities could employ to counterbalance the influence of rankings and to negotiate their network positions. Finally, the findings offer practical advice to university managements and government policy makers by discussing how universities of different ranking positions could exercise their sources of power to better leverage their relationships with Chinese agents.

We describe here the Drosophila gene hydra that appears to have originated de novo in the melanogaster subgroup and subsequently evolved in both structure and expression level in Drosophila melanogaster and its sibling species. D. melanogaster hydra encodes a predicted protein of ;300 amino acids with no apparent similarity to any previously known proteins. The syntenic region flanking hydra on both sides is found in both D. ananassae and D. pseudoobscura, but hydra is found only in melanogaster subgroup species, suggesting that it originated less than ;13 million y ago. Exon 1 of hydra has undergone recurrent duplications, leading to the formation of nine tandem alternative exon 1s in D. melanogaster. Seven of these alternative exons are flanked on their 39 side by the transposon DINE-1 (Drosophila interspersed element-1). We demonstrate that at least four of the nine duplicated exon 1s can function as alternative transcription start sites. The entire hydra locus has also duplicated in D. simulans and D. sechellia. D. melanogaster hydra is expressed most intensely in the proximal testis, suggesting a role in late-stage spermatogenesis. The coding region of hydra has a relatively high Ka/Ks ratio between species, but the ratio is less than 1 in all comparisons, suggesting that hydra is subject to functional constraint. Analysis of sequence polymorphism and divergence of hydra shows that it has evolved under positive selection in the lineage leading to D. melanogaster. The dramatic structural changes surrounding the first exons do not affect the tissue specificity of gene expression: hydra is expressed predominantly in the testes in D. melanogaster, D. simulans, and D. yakuba. However, we have found that expression level changed dramatically (; .20-fold) between D. melanogaster and D. simulans. While hydra initially evolved in the absence of nearby transposable element insertions, we suggest that the subsequent accumulation of repetitive sequences in the hydra region may have contributed to structural and expression-level evolution by inducing rearrangements and causing local heterochromatinization. Our analysis further shows that recurrent evolution of both gene structure and expression level may be characteristics of newly evolved genes. We also suggest that late-stage spermatogenesis is the functional target for newly evolved and rapidly evolving male-specific genes.Citation: Chen ST, Cheng HC, Barbash DA, Yang HP (2007) Evolution of hydra, a recently evolved testis-expressed gene with nine alternative first exons in Drosophila melanogaster. PLoS Genet 3(7): e107.