Search results

The rapid advancement of Education Technology (EdTech) offers promising opportunities for educational institutions to integrate sustainable business practices into their operations and curriculum. The integration of EdTech into sustainability education has emerged as a powerful tool to promote environmental awareness, foster sustainable behavior, and address the pressing challenges of climate change and resource depletion. This chapter explores the growing significance of EdTech in sustainability education, analyzing its potential to cultivate a generation of environmentally conscious and responsible global citizens. It also aims at identifying and examining the most prominent emerging EdTech tools specifically designed to promote sustainability in educational settings. Furthermore, it aims to comprehend the institutional elements that have successfully incorporated and expanded the utilization of EdTech tools to promote enduring business practices. Additionally, the chapter addresses the challenges and obstacles faced by educational institutions in adopting and implementing these technologies and propose strategies to overcome these barriers.

The changing roles of the United Nations (UN) and national institutions have made addressing climate change a critical concern for many multinational enterprises’ (MNEs) survival and growth. This chapter discusses how such institutions, which vary in their nature and characteristics, shape firm strategies for climate change adaptation. Exploring different versions of institutional theory, the chapter demonstrates how and why institutional characteristics affect typical patterns of firm ownership, governance, and capabilities. These, in turn, influence companies’ internationalisation and climate-change strategies. Climate change poses challenges to how we understand firms’ strategic decisions from both an international business (IB) (HQ–subsidiary relations) and global value chains (GVC) (buyer–supplier relations) perspective. However, climate change also provides opportunities for companies to gain competitive advantages – if firms can reconfigure and adapt faster than their competitors. Existing IB and GVC research tends to downplay the importance of climate change strategies and the ways in which coherent or dysfunctional institutions affect firms’ reconfiguration and adaptation strategies in a globally dispersed network of value creation. This chapter presents a perspective on the institutional conditions that affect firms’ climate change strategies regarding ownership, location, and internalisation (OLI), and GVCs, with ‘investment’ and ‘emerging standards’ playing a significant role. The authors illustrate the discussion using several examples from the Global South (i.e. Bangladesh) and the Global North (i.e. Denmark, Sweden, and Germany) with a special emphasis on the garment industry. The aim is to encourage future research to examine how a ‘business systems’, or varieties of capitalism, institutional perspective can complement the analysis of sustainability and climate change strategies in IB and GVC studies.

This chapter analyzes the link between the digital divide, infrastructure regulation, and disaster planning and relief through a case study of the flood in San Jose, California triggered by the Anderson dam’s overtopping in February 2017 and an examination of communication failures during the 2018 wildfire in Paradise, California. This chapter theorizes that regulatory decisions construct social and disaster vulnerability. Rooted in the Whole Community approach to disaster planning and relief espoused by the United Nations and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, this chapter calls for leadership to end the digital divide. It highlights the imperative of understanding community information needs and argues for linking strategies to close the digital divide with infrastructure and emergency planning. As the Internet’s integration into society increases, the digital divide diminishes access to societal resources including disaster aid, and exacerbates wildfire, flood, pandemic, and other risks. To mitigate climate change, climate-induced disaster, protect access to social services and the economy, and safeguard democracy, it argues for digital inclusion strategies as a centerpiece of community-centered infrastructure regulation and disaster relief.

In the mid-2000s, the operator of New York City’s mass transit network committed more than a half-billion dollars to military contractor Lockheed Martin for a security technology capable, in part, of inferring threats based on analysis of data streams, of developing response strategies, and taking automated action toward alerts and calamities in light of evolving circumstances. The project was a failure. This chapter explores the conceptualization and development of this technology – rooted in cybernetics – and compares its conceptual underpinnings with some situated problems of awareness, communication, coordination, and action in emergencies as they unfold in one of the busiest transport systems in the world, the New York subway. The author shows how the technology, with all the theatrical trappings of a “legitimate” security solution, was apparently conceived without a grounded understanding of actual use-cases, and the degree to which the complex interactions which give rise to subway emergency can be anticipated in – and therefore managed through – a technological system. As a case-study, the chapter illustrates the pitfalls of deploying technology against problems which are not well-defined in the first place, to the neglect of investments against much more fundamental problems – such as inadequate communication systems, and unstable relationships with emergency response agencies – which might offer guaranteed benefits, and indeed lay a firm groundwork for future deployment of more ambitious technology.

Purpose: This study examines the effect of uncertainties on the hospitality industry from different perspectives across the globe. The hospitality industry faces several contemporary issues and challenges that have the potential to impact its growth and development. This study aims to analyse the current problems and uncertainties in the hospitality sector.

Need for the Study: The hospitality industry plays a significant role in the global economy with various services, including accommodation, food and beverage, events, and tourism. However, the sector faces several contemporary issues and challenges that have the potential to impact its growth and development. This study provides an overview of the most significant problems and challenges facing the hospitality industry today.

Methodology: A systematic literature review was conducted to identify and synthesise relevant studies on the effect of uncertainties issues on the hospitality industry. A systematic search of the Web of Science and Scopus databases was conducted to determine relevant studies published between 2010 and 2021. Studies were screened and selected based on pre-defined inclusion and exclusion criteria. A thematic analysis was performed to categorise the uncertainties and issues in the hospitality industry.

Findings: The study identified several uncertainties and issues facing the hospitality industry, including the pandemic uncertainties, financial crisis, whether positive and negative impacts, terrorism attacks on hotels and tourist places, uncertainties in government policies, situational risks like uncertainties, ambiguity, cultural differences, changes in tourist preferences and changing habits of the tourist.

Cryptocurrency arose, and grew in popularity, following the financial crisis of 2008 built upon a promise of decentralizing money and payments. An examination of the history of money and banking in the United States demonstrates that stable money benefits from strict controls and commitments by a centralized government through chartering restrictions and a broad safety net, rather than decentralization. In addition, financial crises happen when the government allows money creation to occur outside of official channels. The US central bank is then forced into a policy of supporting a range of money-like assets in order to maintain a grip on monetary policy and some semblance of financial stability.

In addition, this chapter argues that cryptocurrency as a form of shadow money shares many of the problematic attributes of both the privately issued bank notes that created instability during the “free banking” era and the “shadow banking” activities that contributed to the 2008 crisis. In this sense, rather than being a novel and disruptive idea, cryptocurrency replicates many of the systemically destabilizing aspects of privately issued money and money-like instruments.

This chapter proposes that, rather than allowing a new, digital “free banking” era to emerge, there are better alternatives. Specifically, it argues that the Federal Reserve (Fed) should use its tools to improve public payment systems, enact robust utility-like regulations for private digital currencies and limit the likelihood of bubbles using prudential measures.

Environments are gendered and environmental issues have impacts on gender. This introduction highlights some current environmental issues from the ecofeminist perspective that characterizes the contributions and summarizes the chapters in the volume that feature the activities of indigenous women in the Columbian Amazon, urban environments in Athens and Rome, workplace environments in Bangladeshi offices, STEM labs in universities in the United States, and homes used for sex work in Punjab. It ends with a suggestion for a queer spiritual ecofeminist approach to environments.