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The purpose of this paper is to provide a conceptual framework for using citizen science – defined as a data collection method through which non-professionals engage in contributing to authentic scientific inquiry – within the expedition cruise industry to contribute significantly to the collection of environmental data from hard-to-access Arctic areas.

The authors review trends in Arctic expedition cruise tourism and current needs in Arctic research and monitoring, and clarify where the expedition cruise tourism industry could have the most impact by providing data to the scientific community. The authors also compare the regulatory context in the Antarctic to that in the Arctic and discuss how these differences could affect the widespread use of citizen science. At last, the authors describe some general principles for designing citizen science programs to be successful on board, and highlight several existing programs that are being recognized for their contributions to a greater scientific understanding of the Arctic.

The authors find that citizen science data from the expedition cruise industry are underutilized as a tool for monitoring Arctic change. Numerous examples illustrate how citizen science programs on-board expedition ships can successfully collect robust scientific data and contribute to enhancing the knowledge and stewardship capacity of cruise passengers. Inclusion of citizen science data from the expedition cruise industry should be considered a critical part of international Arctic observing networks and systems.

Active participation in Arctic citizen science by tourists on expedition cruise ships has many potential benefits beyond the collection of high quality data, from increasing passengers’ knowledge and understanding of the Arctic while on board, to affecting their attitudes and behaviors after they return home.

The potential for tourism to contribute to Arctic observing systems has been discussed previously in the scientific literature; the authors narrow the focus to citizen science programs in the expedition cruise industry, and provide concrete examples, in the hope that this will streamline acceptance and implementation of these ideas by researchers and tourism practitioners.

Meta-organizations are crucial devices to tackle grand challenges. Yet, by bringing together different organizations, with potentially diverging views on these grand challenges, meta-organizations need to cope with the emergence of contradictory underlying social orders. Do contradictory orders affect meta-organizations’ ability to govern grand challenges and if so, how? This paper investigates these essential questions by focusing on the evolution and intermeshing of social orders within international governance meta-organizations. Focusing on the International Whaling Commission and the grand challenge of whale conservation, we show how over time incompatible social orders between the meta-organization and its members emerge, evolve and clash. As our study shows, this clash of social orders ultimately removes the “decidability” of certain social orders at the meta-organizational level. We define decidability as the possibility for actors to reach collective decisions about changing an existing social order that falls under a collective’s mandate. We argue that maintaining decidability is a key condition for grand challenges’ governance success while the emergence of “non-decidability” of controversial social orders can lead to substantial failure. We contribute to both the emerging literature on grand challenges and organization theory.

The chapter summarizes key literature, including emerging ideas, that is pertinent to the question of how organizations and their leadership deal with and are resilient through crises – highlighting what works in surviving unexpected crises. The chapter presents an illustration of organizational response; it concludes with an analysis of what is missing from the literature and recommends a path forward to expanding actionable knowledge in this area. Multiple, interdependent factors that foster resilience are identified including (1) being sensitive to possible threats – even seemingly small failures, (2) not relying on simple interpretations of events but rather seeking diversity to create a complete view of the environment, (3) leadership that embraces communication, transparency, and continuous learning, (4) valuing expertise and allowing expert staff to make decisions during a crisis, and (5) a cultural commitment to a resiliency mindset that accepts failures as opportunities to learn and improve. Emerging concepts that may foster resilience but require more research include managing paradox, emotional ambivalence and diversity. Additional areas for fruitful research include: the impact of short-term versus long-term, or successive, crises; external versus internal shocks and the framing of the source of shocks; how crisis affect the pace of innovation and change; the role of diversity in organizational responses to crises; and a set of methodological opportunities to leverage natural experiments or simulations in ways that allow for longitudinal data illuminating the full cycle of crises across organizations from anticipation, to response, to longer-term adaptation to the new normal.

Climate change is occurring around us and impacting on our daily lives, meaning that we have to deal with our cities in a different way. There is also increasing awareness of the need for daily contact with green spaces and the natural environment in order to live a happy, productive and meaningful life.

This reflective essay tells the narrative of how urbanisation has been disconnecting humans from nature. Non-sustainable, non-resilient patterns of urbanisation, along with the neglect of inner-city areas, have resulted in fragmentation and urban decline, led to a loss of biodiversity, and caused the deterioration of ecosystems and their services. Urban regeneration projects allow us to “repair” and restore some of this damage whilst enhancing urban resilience. Connecting existing and enhanced ecosystems, and re-establishing ecosystems both within cities and at the peri-urban fringe is vital for strengthening ecosystem resilience and building adaptive capacity for coping with the effects of climate change.

Cities worldwide need to look for suitable solutions to increase the resilience of their urban spaces in the face of climate change. This essay explores how this can be achieved through the integration of nature-based solutions, the re-greening of neighbourhoods and by correctly attributing value to natural capital. Transforming existing cities and neighbourhoods in this way will enable ecosystems to contribute their services towards healthier and more liveable cities.

Global climate change speeds up ice melting and increases flooding incidents. China launched a sponge city policy as a holistic nature-based solution combined with urban planning and development to address flooding due to climate change. Using Weibo analytics, this paper aims to study public perceptions of sponge city.

This study collected 53,586 sponge city contents from Sina Weibo via Python. Various artificial intelligence tools, such as CX Data Science of Simply Sentiment, KH Coder and Tableau, were applied in the study.

76.8% of public opinion on sponge city were positive, confirming its positive contribution to flooding management and city branding. 17 out of 31 pilot sponge cities recorded the largest number of sponge cities related posts. Other cities with more Weibo posts suffered from rainwater and flooding hazards, such as Xi'an and Zhengzhou.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to explore the public perception of sponge city in Sina Weibo.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of some pressing but under-researched aspects of public leadership. Ten propositions about public leadership are set out and these are intended to be thought-provoking and even controversial in order to stimulate researchers to design research which addresses key theoretical and practical questions about leadership in the public sphere. They will also help practitioners navigate an increasingly complex leadership context.

This invited essay uses ten propositions about public leadership, selected from three sources: the leadership literature, the author’s own research and from collaborative research discussions with academics, policy makers and practitioners.

The first proposition argues for distinguishing public leadership from public service leadership given that the former is about leadership of the public sphere. Other propositions concern context; purpose; conflict and contest at the heart of public leadership; leadership with political astuteness; dual leadership; leadership projections; fostering resilience; leadership, authority and legitimacy; and the challenge to researchers to use research designs which reflect the complexity and dynamism of public leadership.

While this essay is primarily addressed to researchers, there are many ideas and concepts which practising leaders will find insightful and useful in their work.

This essay draws on deep experience in undertaking high-quality academic research about public leadership which draws from and feeds into policy and practice. It utilises organisational psychology, public management and political science to create synergies in order to enhance the understanding of public leadership.

Scientific knowledge is usually regarded as the basis for the management of natural environment and wildlife in ecotourism. However, recently, social construction approaches challenge the domination of natural science. This study aims to examine the effectiveness of the social construction paradigm in ecotourism management, through conducting a content analysis of social media comments on an accident caused by a monkey in a Chinese ecotourism area. The results show that people commented on the accident from five aspects. First, the public expressed their compassion and mourning for the deceased. Second, people thought that the death was casual and absurd, yet life is full of uncertainty and people should cherish the present. Third, people commented much on the deceased tourist’s company, which is a famous sugar brand well entrenched in many Chinese people’s childhood memories. Fourth, people constructed the monkey as Monkey King, Golden Monkey (another famous sugar brand in China) and as a criminal. Fifth, people also gave their opinions about possible causes of the accident, namely, it was caused by “the mandate of heaven,” company competition, conspiracies or poor management. This study only seriously considers the comments about the mandate of heaven. This explanation is consistent with the Chinese traditional construction of nature as “heaven,” which is believed to dominate the natural and human worlds. Most people, including the managers, accepted the accident and did not explore further about the reasons for the accident. In this case, such a social construction of nature does not aid effective ecotourism management.

This study aims to reflect on quality, sustainability and resilience as emerging organisational priorities within total quality management (TQM) and organisational excellence.

The paper uses a conceptual approach based on reflection and theoretical studies on the philosophical foundations of quality, excellence, resilience and sustainability as cornerstones for organisational excellence. Bearing in mind that sustainable excellence rests upon a combination of systemic and soft issues that define organisational ability for resilience and sustainability, there is a need to analyse and reflect on short business cases from world-leading companies and further reflect on the fundamental principles, which have helped such companies to survive, grow and sustain. This study includes such a business case – the LEGO case. In addition, a Japanese case has been included. Japanese training material on human motivation developed in the 1980s exemplifies how company managers were trained, at that time, to understand and practice human motivation, excellence principles and tools.

Organisational excellence constitutes an evolving concept as the world becomes more chaotic and interconnected with multiple disruptive shocks. Organisational excellence challenges the inflexibilities of Newtonian mindsets, recognising the paramount importance of interactions and further underlining the significance of invisible elements such as human potentiality, motivation and values that formulate the principles of organisational excellence.

The paper investigates the notions of quality, resilience and sustainability and their relation to motivation and organisational excellence within the framework of business management and TQM. A world-leading company – LEGO – will be used to exemplify the theoretical findings together with the Japanese Motivation Training Programme case.

The purpose of this paper is to present the author’s method of conservative load spectrum (LS) derivation and close-proximity LS extrapolation applying a correction for measurement uncertainty caused by too low sampling frequency or signal noise, which may affect the load histories collected during the flying session and cause some recorded load increments to be lower than the actual values.

Having in mind that the recorded load signal is burdened with some measurement error, a conservative approach was applied during qualification of the recorded values into 32 discrete load-level intervals and derivation of 32 × 32 half-cycle arrays. A part of each cell value of the half-cycle array was dispersed into the neighboring cells placed above by using a random number generator. It resulted in an increase in the number of load increments, which were one or two intervals higher than those resulting from direct data processing. Such an array was termed a conservative clone of the actual LS. The close-proximity approximation consisted of multiplication of the LSs clones and their aggregation. This way, the LS for extended time of operation was obtained. The whole process was conducted in the MS Excel environment.

Fatigue life calculated for a chosen element of aircraft structure using conservative LS is about 20%–60% lower than for the actual LS (depending on the applied value of dispersion coefficients used in the procedure of LSs clones generation). It means that such a result gives a bigger safety margin when operational life of the aircraft is estimated or when the fatigue test for an extended operational period is programed based on a limited quantity of data from a flying session.

This paper presents a proposal for a novel, conservative approach to fatigue life estimation based on the short-term LS derived from the load signal recorded during the flying session.