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In today’s turbulent and demanding work environment, the negative effects of workplace stress and strain on employee health and organizational productivity have been well-documented. Positive organizational scholarship has increasingly highlighted the importance of fostering psychological resources that can help buffer against such strains and facilitate employee thriving, resilience and performance. Hope and belonging are two key workplace resources that the mental health and retention effects of which have not been fully explored. The purpose of this paper is to highlight the potential value of both hope and belonging as critical workplace psychological resources that may help employees optimize mental well-being and employers improve retention and productivity.

The authors collected responses to an online questionnaire distributed in January 2024 to employees drawn from meQuilibrium customers. The final sample consisted of 5,989 employed adults ages 18 and over.

Among participants, intrinsic hope was more commonly reported than hope derived from extrinsic sources. These data show that high levels of internal or intrinsic hope correlate with reduced anxiety and depression risks. Internal hope also significantly lowers quiet quitting and turnover intent. Among participants, a strong sense of belonging correlates with lower risks of anxiety and depression.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, this paper is the first to investigate the value of hope for employee well-being, retention and performance and adds to the literature on belonging at work.

The present study explores five Iranian English language teachers’ hopes by drawing on an ecological approach as its conceptual underpinning.

Data were collected from narrative frames and semi-structured interviews.

Analyses of our data highlighted how teacher- and student-related factors caused fluctuations in teachers’ hopes. In addition, our findings indicated that while teachers’ past teaching experiences increased their hope, teachers’ lack of agency and economic inflation were among the most significant factors that decreased teachers’ hope in their profession.

This study is one of the first studies in the field of language studies with an ecological perspective on language teachers' hope.

This article examines how hope for an effective partnership approach to policing is maintained in everyday policing.

Data collection involved 22 qualitative interviews, and observations with police officers and municipal employees in Stockholm, Sweden. It also includes an analysis of their documents.

Using the concept of mechanisms of hope (Brunsson, 2006, 2009), this article explores how police officers and other actors in the security landscape maintain hope in partnership policing despite having compelling reasons to be cynical and sceptical. The findings indicate that mechanism of hope is an important element in the way police handle uncertainty and maintain institutional pressures in their everyday policing practices.

By demonstrating how actors responsible for implementing a partnership approach to policing maintain hope in partnership policing, this article advances our understanding of myths in policing, as well as the institutional settings in which policing is conducted (Crank, 2003). Moreover, this article provides insight into the opportunities and challenges embedded in the social configuration of hope.

Although hope is commonly used in terms of wishful thinking, as a positive psychological concept consisting of the dimensions of both willpower (agency) and waypower (pathways), it has been found to be positively related to academic, athletic and health outcomes. The impact of hopeful leaders, however, has not been empirically analyzed. This exploratory study (N = 59) found that high‐ as compared to low‐hope leaders had more profitable work units and had better satisfaction and retention rates among their subordinates. The implications of these preliminary findings of the positive impact that hopeful leaders may have in the workplace are discussed.

The changes in the service context due to COVID-19 have challenged service marketers to understand and react to consumers’ feelings that impact their shopping behavior in services. Moreover, consumers had to face a challenging situation with an impact on mental health. This study aims to assess the impact of spirituality and compassionate love as coping mechanisms that might increase hope, which, in turn, decreases anxiety. Hope also mitigates the impact of fear on anxiety. The authors also investigate the mediate effect of hope in its relationship to spirituality and well-being during the pandemic in Brazil and its potential impact on services marketing.

To investigate the relationship between fear, anxiety, hope, compassionate love, spirituality and well-being, the authors conducted an online survey with 469 Brazilians who had been in quarantine for more than 45 days. To conduct the investigation, the authors used a purposive sampling to reach respondents due to the exceptional situation of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Using a structural equation model, the authors found that hope is a mediator with a buffer effect on the relationships between anxiety and fear and between spirituality and anxiety. Moreover, the authors found that hope mediates the relationship between spirituality and well-being, leading to greater levels of well-being. Service companies in general can benefit from using these findings to better manage their relationships with consumers during and after COVID-19 pandemic.

The sample included only Brazilian respondents, and pre-pandemic well-being was not measured.

There is evidence that traumatic events (e.g. war) influence feelings and consumer behavior. The findings suggest that the adoption of practices related to spirituality during an extreme, stressful situation has an influence on people’s hope and potentially mitigates anxiety. Increasing spirituality and hope can also benefit perceptions of well-being. Besides, in this context, the authors recommend that service providers communicate unobservable elements in a transaction (e.g. care, safety) by providing observable signals of spirituality and hope to reduce negative emotions.

In this chapter, I reflect on the place of hope in activist criminology. Offering reflections from my own activist scholarship, this chapter draws out the ways in which hope structures and sustains our work across temporal frames and distinct modes of academic practice. This chapter develops a hopeful analysis of lineage, memory and resistance, reflecting on my participatory research with the Tamil community in London, and reflects on the revival of utopian thought in criminological scholarship. Hopeful imaginaries of an abolitionist future inform my scholar-activism with Reclaim Holloway – an abolitionist collective formed to influence the redevelopment of the Holloway prison site. I describe this future-oriented work before considering hope as a practice in the present, focusing on ‘pedagogies of hope’ as activist criminology in the classroom.

In this chapter we apply a range of insights drawn from social science studies of hope amidst contexts of illness, and studies of hope emerging from the sociology of emotions, in critically considering social processes of hoping amidst the Covid-19 pandemic. While much of the health sciences literature on hope emphasises positive outcomes in terms of coping and motivation, we also draw upon various perspectives which denote a dark side of hoping, whereby inequalities and injustices are tolerated, or where feeling rules insidiously coordinate collective hopes in ways which serve various political-economic interests. Reflecting this ambivalence across different literatures, our examples and analyses suggest that hoping as a social process is itself inherently conflicted, dissonant and rife with tensions. As we explore the contradictions of hoping amidst a pandemic, the tensions between expectations and desire, tragedy and optimism, aspiring to act and fatalistic acceptance make apparent that emotions of hope can be neither neatly delineated nor disentangled from a ‘messy’ web of related feelings and framings. We extend our emphasis of these blurry, dissonant and messy aspects of hoping through work on ‘tragic optimism’, following Frankl, wherein wider lifeworlds or imaginaries pertaining to deeply embodied and implicit notions of self and a good life are central to maintaining hope amidst heightened vulnerability and uncertainty. We close by laying out a post-formal approach to hope, which methodologically and conceptually focusses on contradictions and dissonance in narratives of hope, whereby living hopefully always involves living awkwardly with these tensions.

Amid the multitude of economic effects emanating from impositions of COVID-19, workers in the tourism sector are potentially experiencing significant psychosocial impacts. These effects are compounded by the uncertainty of pathways for positive change and the precariousness of adjustments to life and livelihoods. Their attitudes to the newly imposed circumstances are possibly conditioned by a sense of hope which may have implications for their adaptations in the face of sudden or slow change. In this chapter, we argue that one’s sense of hope represents an important component of psychosocial well-being and may even be visualized as a necessary component of adaptation. Hope is conceptualized as a cognitive process that entails thinking and planning in order to achieve proposed goals (Snyder, Irving, & Anderson, 1991; Snyder, Lopez, Shorey, Rand, & Feldman, 2003) and can be operationalized into three core components: goals, pathways, and agency. Based on in-depth interviews and a questionnaire survey administered to former accommodation workers in the Negril tourism industry, this chapter examines expressions of hope(lessness) existing among workers displaced by COVID-19. It potentially provides nuanced understandings of hope as a necessary raw material for adaptation initiatives and explores ways in which a sense of hope could be harnessed in the face of disasters and despair.