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This qualitative study aims to provide insights and reflections of how the pandemic affected the identity and a sense of self of students, who completed undergraduate leadership learning academic program.

Interviews.

Findings of this study showed three major themes throughout the interviews. During the COVID-19 pandemic, participants identified experiences with self-reflection, building community and navigating issues of social justice.

These findings highlight how leadership learning enabled certain participants to navigate and seek to resolve these problems and how their leadership learning aided their own self-discovery.

With the growing need for employees to be innovative, public-sector organizations are investing in employee training. This study aims to examine the effects of a combined Lean Six Sigma and innovation training, using action learning, on public-sector employees’ creative role identity and innovative work behavior.

The authors studied a public service agency in Singapore in which a five-day Lean Innovation Training was implemented, using a combination of Lean Six Sigma and Creative Problem-Solving tools, with a simulation on day one and subsequent team-based project coaching, spread over six months. The authors administered pre- and postintervention surveys among all the employees, and initiated group interviews and observations before, during and after the intervention.

Creative role identity and innovative work behavior had significantly improved six months after the intervention, enabled through senior management’s transformational leadership. The training induced managers to role-model innovative work behaviors while cocreating, with their employees, a renewal of their agency’s core processes. The three completed improvement projects contributed to an innovative work culture and reduced service turnaround time.

Starting with a role-playing simulation on the first day, during which leaders and followers swapped roles, the action-learning type training taught all the organizational members to use various Lean Six Sigma and Creative Problem-Solving tools. This nimble Lean Innovation Training, and subsequent team-based project coaching, exemplifies how advancing the staff’s creative role identity can have a positive impact.

Ontario’s Ministry of Environment and Climate Change seeks to legislate diverse waste streams (including food waste) by implementing Bill 151, known colloquially as the Waste Free Ontario Act. The purpose of this study is to investigate how stakeholders in Ontario’s food and waste systems perceive the prospective legislation.

The paper is based on interviews with stakeholders across the food value chain in Ontario, as well as an analysis of legislation and related documents.

The paper argues that Bill 151 represents the Province’s commitment to an ecological modernization paradigm. This research uncovers the lines of tension that may exist in the implementation of food waste policy. These lines of tension represent stakeholders’ ideological perspectives on food waste, including whether it signals an efficient or inefficient economy, whether legislation should prioritize economic or environmental goals and whether it is more appropriate for legislation to incentivize desired food waste treatments or penalize/prohibit undesired activities.

The analysis reveals potential allies in the regulatory process, likely points of contention and areas where greater consensus may be forged, depending on government efforts to reframe the issues at stake.

The purpose of this paper is to consider the social turn in contemporary capitalism and contemporary art through the lens of art-based social enterprises (ASEs) that aim to create positive social benefits for young people experiencing forms of marginalisation, and which trade creative products or services to help fulfil that mission. A growth in ASEs demonstrates a growing interest in how the arts can support social and economic development, and the ways new economic models can generate employment for individuals excluded from the labour market; extend opportunities for more people to participate in art markets; and challenge dominant market models of cultural production and consumption.

This paper considers a number of challenges and complexities faced by ASEs that embrace a co-dependence of three goals, which are often in tension and competition – artistic practice, social purpose and economic activity. It does so by analysing interviews from staff working with 12 ASE organisation’s across Australia.

While the external forces that shape ASEs – including government policy, markets, investors and philanthropy – are interested in the “self-sufficient” economic potential of ASEs, those working in ASEs tend to prioritise social values and ethical business over large financial returns and are often ambivalent about their roles as entrepreneurs. This ambivalence is symptomatic of a position that is simultaneously critical and affirmative, of the conditions of contemporary capitalism and neoliberalism.

This paper addresses a gap in social enterprise literature presenting empirical research focussing on the lived experience of those managing and leading ASEs in Australia.