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This study aims to better inform environmental management at universities by applying and validating the policy integration processes theory through a case study of Manchester Metropolitan University.

Social network analyses were used to identify, differentiate and categorise working networks of individuals and departments and the interconnections between them.

In an organisation, networks can be developed and active at departmental level but not at individual level. High numbers of departments can be doing work related to sustainable development whilst having low and medium levels of interconnections between departments. Influence of stakeholders throughout the network suggests levels of sustainable development policy integration at individual and departmental.

New insights provide evidence for universities’ environmental managers of the need of developing and implementing strategies that involve individuals’ work between departments by providing incentives, supporting capacity building and staff empowerment.

This paper applied and validated the theory of policy integration processes, showing that work at individual level and between departments needs more attention.

This paper examines the relationship between work, resilience and sustainable futures for organisations and communities by considering the nature of work-related problems (WRPs) and the work-based research designed to investigate them. The authors explore the axis of work environment > work-related problem > resilience > sustainable futures as it might be impacted by work-based research.

The paper introduces two current real-world examples, one in Australia and one in Asia, of work-based research projects associated with higher education aimed at promoting resilience and sustainability, and discusses the research problems, questions, designs, methods, resilience markers and sustainability markers used by these projects.

Work-based research, when conducted rigorously using mixed methods, may contribute to increased resilience of organisations and communities and thereby seeks to promote more sustainable organisational and social futures.

Work-based research conducted in higher education seeks to investigate, address and solve WRP, even when such problems occur in unstable, changing, complex and messy environments.

Resilience and sustainable futures are ambiguous and disputed terms, but if work-based research can be brought to bear on them, organisations and communities might better adapt and recover from challenging situations, thus reducing their susceptibility to shock and adversity.

While resilience and sustainability are commonly referred to in the research literature, their association to work, and specifically problems associated with work, have yet to be examined. This paper goes some of the way to addressing this need.

This paper examines the role of government procurement as a social policy mechanism within a multilateral open trading system. Government regulations globally are being transformed to foster more responsible business conduct in multinational enterprises (MNEs). Yet, concern that sustainability may present a discriminatory barrier to trade has stalled the progress of sustainable public procurement (SPP) at the international level, raising questions regarding the role and scope of the World Trade Organisation’s (WTO) Government Procurement Agreement (GPA) to align taxpayer-funded contracts with the United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals.

With a focus on social sustainability, this paper reviews the grey and academic literature to assess the changing landscape of public procurement policy and supply chain legislation in high-income countries.

Frontrunner nations are adopting a mandatory approach to sustainable public procurement and due diligence legislation is elevating supply chain risk from reputational damage to legal liability. While technological innovation and the clean, green production of manufactured goods dominates the sustainable public procurement literature, the social aspects of sustainability poverty, inequality and human rights remain underrepresented.

The scope of this paper is limited to the examination of government procurement covered by the WTO-GPA (2012). Smaller value contracts, under the WTO-GPA thresholds and the category of defence are beyond the scope of the paper.

The paper focusses on the underserved topic of social sustainability in business-to-government (B2G) – business to government – supply chains arguing that for responsible business conduct to become a competitive advantage, it must be more meaningfully rewarded on the demand-side of all taxpayer-funded contracts in organisation for economic co-operation and development countries. The paper introduces the idea of priceless procurement as a mechanism to build system capacity in the evaluation of non-financial sustainability objectives.

To build the capacity to stimulate competition based on social and environmental policy objectives, the paper introduces the concept of priceless procurement in B2G contracts.

Higher educational institutions, such as universities of applied sciences, have a significant role in promoting progress towards a sustainable future as defined by the United Nations (UN) sustainable development goals (SDGs). This paper aims to identify how the UN SDGs are featured in master’s theses set in work–life contexts.

Using a descriptive review and content analysis, this study identified the number of SDGs appearing in 31 master’s theses. Sustainable development (SD) and corporate social responsibility were reflected using the approaches and models in the literature. Finland’s eight objectives for committing to SD were used to examine the commitments made by the business school of the university of applied sciences to achieve Agenda 2030.

Emphasising the value of higher education for SD, this study found that SDGs three, eight and 12 appeared most frequently in the theses. Sustainable and responsible dimensions reflected several issues concerning both the worlds of business and industry among the firms and organisations investigated by the master’s degree students in the business school at the Jyväskylä University of Applied Sciences.

This research holds practical and pedagogical value, serving to encourage master’s and PhD students to further explore research on SDGs and to shape public policy.

Sustainability was looked at in a new way as investigated by the theses. Ways to integrate the SDGs into management degree programmes and conduct research in the fields of business administration, tourism and hospitality management were identified.

This study aims to investigate the adoption of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as the new performance perspective in cities. It also aims to understand how accounting for SDGs begins in city administrations by following Power’s (2015) fourfold development schema composed of policy object formation, object elaboration, activity orchestration and practice stabilization.

Focusing on a network of cities coordinated by the Finnish local government association, we analyzed the six largest cities in Finland employing a holistic multiple case study strategy. Our data consisted of Voluntary Local Reviews (VLRs), city strategies, budget plans, financial statements, as well as results of participant observations and semi-structured interviews with key individuals involved in accounting for SDGs.

We unveiled the SDG framework as an interpretive scheme through which cities glocalized sustainable development as a novel, simultaneously global and local, performance object. Integration of the new accounts in city management is necessary for these accounts to take life in steering the actions. By creating meaningful alignment and the ability to impact managerial practices, SDGs and VLRs have the potential to influence local actions. Our results indicate further institutionalization progress of sustainability as a performance object through SDG-focused work.

While prior research has focused mainly on general factors influencing the integration of the sustainability agenda, this study provides a novel perspective by capturing the process and demonstrating empirically how new accounts on SDGs are introduced and deployed in the strategic planning and management of local governments.

The purpose of this study is to address United Nations’ sustainable development goals (SDGs) 8 and 9 from a service perspective. SDG 8 is a call to improve the dignity of service work by enhancing wages, working conditions and development opportunities while SDG 9 calls upon nations to construct resilient infrastructures, promote inclusivity and sustainability and foster innovation.

This study uses a bibliometric review to extract important themes from a variety of scholarly journals.

Researchers tend to investigate policy-level topics, such as national and international standards related to working conditions, while ignoring the experiences or well-being of workers occupying marginalized and low-opportunity roles in service organizations. Service researchers, educators and practitioners must collaborate to improve the state of service industries by conducting participatory action research, promoting grassroots organizing/advocacy, implementing digitized customer service and addressing workforce soft skills deficiencies.

The authors consider how service work can be transformed into respectable employment and present four specific ways nations can enhance their service industries.

Economic planners can view SDGs 8 and 9 as a framework for understanding and promoting the well-being of service employees and accelerating the productivity and innovation levels of the service sector.

The United Nations’ SDGs are examined from a services perspective, which increases their significance in service-dominated economies.

This paper aims to examine how CEO talk of sustainability in CEO letters evolves in a period of increased expectations from society for companies to increase their transition towards becoming more sustainable and to better account for progress and performance within the sustainability areas.

By adopting an interpretive textual approach, the paper provides a careful analysis of how CEO talk of sustainability in CEO letters of large listed Swedish companies developed during 2008–2017.

The talk of sustainability is successively becoming more elaborated, proactive and multidimensional. CEOs frame their talk by adopting different perspectives: the distinct environmental, the performance and meso, the product-market-oriented and the sustainability embeddedness and value creation. The shift towards an embeddedness and value-creation perspective in the later letters implies that the alleged capitalistic and short-sighted focus on shareholder value maximisation might be changing towards a greater focus on sustainability embeddedness as an important goal for succeeding with the transition towards a sustainable business.

The findings are relevant for policymakers and government bodies when developing policies and regulations aimed at improving the positive impact of companies on global sustainable development. Findings are also useful for management teams when structuring their sustainability talk as a response to external pressure.

The findings provide relevant input on how social norms, values and expectations are shaping the corporate discourse on sustainability.

The findings of this study contribute to an increased understanding of the rhetorical response in influential CEO letters to the surrounding sustainability context, including new national and international policies as well as sociopolitical events and discourses related to sustainability. This offers a unique frame of reference for further interpretational work on how CEOs frame, engage in and shape the sustainability discourse.

Research findings are ambiguous regarding the effects of age on sustainable labour participation (SLP), defined as the extent to which people are able and willing to conduct their current and future work. The purpose of this paper is to contribute by examining age effects on SLP by focusing on the moderating role of workload.

A mixed-method study was conducted in 2018. First, a survey was distributed among a sample of 2,149 employees of the Dutch central government. Second, 12 interviews with public sector employees took place to gain greater insight into the quantitative data collected.

Three components that reflect an employee’s SLP were studied: vitality, work ability and employability. The quantitative results, in general, showed that SLP decreased with ageing. However, in contrast to the hypothesis, the results showed a significant positive relationship between age and energy. Moreover, relationships between an employee’s age and certain aspects of their SLP were moderated by workload. The interviews helped to interpret these results.

The findings demonstrate that some of the older worker stereotypes are unfounded, and the important practical implications of these are discussed.

Earlier research has produced conflicting findings regarding the relationship between age and (aspects of) SLP. By investigating several aspects of SLP in separate regressions within this research, the specific influences of age have become clearer. Furthermore, the research provides fresh insights into the relationship between age and SLP by including moderating effects of workload.

The purpose of this paper is to assess previous research on conditions for managers’ learning and development in daily work practices and how such conditions may influence their sustainability and also to propose a concept and a heuristic model that reconceptualizes and expands on the theoretical foundations generated in previous studies of managers’ learning and development at work.

This paper is based on an integrative literature review. The literature search identified 1,403 unique studies. Nine qualitative and seven quantitative studies met the relevance and quality criteria and were included in the review.

The results of the review found associations between managers’ learning conditions, career opportunities, individual engagement and sustainability. However, the small amount of empirical data used in the reviewed studies and the cross-sectional design of the studies make it difficult to establish the nature of the relationship between different variables.

The results of this paper show that managers need to care for and take advantage of opportunities for their own development and not only function as creators of their employees’ development. Employers should keep in mind that the development environment includes managers and employees.

This paper contributes with an original concept of managers’ development environments and a conceptual model that integrates theory with results from the included studies. Based on the model, propositions that may serve as an agenda for future research are formulated.