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The paper examines the key driving factors behind the rapid and uneven growth of social enterprises in China based on Kerlin’s Macro-Institutional Social Enterprise (MISE) model of social enterprise development, with an emphasis on testing key local institutional factors.

The study adopts the quantitative method approach. The hypotheses have been tested based on a cross-regional empirical analysis with two national datasets on China.

This study shows that among the state, market and civil society, local government support in terms of favorable policies is the sole determinant factor driving China’s social enterprise growth. On the other hand, the market is irrelevant and local civil society impedes social enterprise growth. This demonstrates that the current growth model is the result of government intervention.

The datasets have a limited sample size. We suggest that future studies may collect a larger sample size with more comprehensive information. We think this study will encourage more comparative qualitative studies at the local level to reveal the underlying mechanisms of growth.

Since government policy is the determinant factor, the quality and quantity of government-backed incubation programs and platforms would matter the most for social enterprise growth. Our study also helps social entrepreneurs understand what factors matter when they try to develop social enterprises in China. They are advised to work on aspects of gaining legal legitimacy and political support in order to grow the sector.

This conclusion suggests that professionals and practitioners should review the implications of the current growth of social enterprises in China, in terms of their sustainability, given their institutional isolation from other sectors.

Current studies have yet to thoroughly explore the role of meso- and micro-institutional factors in social enterprise development, especially in different contexts. With reference to Kerlin’s framework and the tri-sector model, this paper advances the understanding of social enterprise growth in China.

This article conceptualizes and constructs a comprehensive framework that can better help to answer that question – Who is accountable for social and public problems? – theoretically and practically.

Tracing the drivers behind two phenomena “accountability hole” and “accountability black hole”, stemming from “pushing power game” and “pulling power game”, respectively, this study considers (1) the three actors of society: citizens (civil society), corporations (market) and civil servants (government), and (2) the principal-agent relationship between the three actors in the face of social and public problems. As a result, the 4CAs framework that contains the three actors’ collaborative accountabilities to one another is presented.

The 4CAs model emphasizes (1) all three actors function as agents that are accountable to one another, (2) collaborative accountability beyond collaborative governance and (3) repowering citizens and corporations beyond just empowering them, i.e. returning their inherent rights and obligations to serve one another.

The 4CAs model may function as a descriptive and prescriptive lens through which the trilemma between market failure, government failure and citizen failure can be re-assessed and balanced. The model can also be used as a set of indicators for assessing and helping a society to better resolve the social and public problems collectively.

The main aim of this article is to broaden the notion of strategic intent in public relations. It also develops an understanding of the social value of what can be defined as the first modern health communication campaign in Europe based on strategic intents and the development of modernity.

The study is based on both historical research and empirical material from the Norwegian tuberculosis campaign from 1889 up to 1913, when Norwegian women achieved suffrage. The campaign is analysed in the framework of modernity and social theory. The literature on lobbying and social movements is also used to develop a theoretical framework for the notion of strategic intent.

The study shows that strategic intent can be divided into two layers: (1) the implicit strategic intent is the real purpose behind the communication efforts, whereas (2) the explicit intent is found directly in the communication efforts. The explicit intent may be presented as a solution for the good of society at the right political moment, giving an organisation the possibility to mobilise for long-term social changes, in which could be the implicit intent.

The distinction between explicit and implicit strategic intent broadens our understanding on how to make long-term social changes as well as how social and political changes occur in modern societies. The article also gives a historical account of what is here defined as the first modern health communication campaign in Europe and its social value.

This paper aims to provide an overview of South African perspectives on preventing, monitoring and combating hate victimisation, towards informing international understandings.

Using a general review approach, this paper provides a historical examination of measures proposed by the South African Government and civil society since 1994, to prevent, monitor and combat hate crime, hate speech and intentional unfair discrimination.

Regardless of a constitutional commitment to social inclusion, diversity and minority rights, significant progress remains lacking after almost three decades of related advocacy, lobbying and limited government intervention. Findings of the South African Hate Crimes Working Group (HCWG) longitudinal Monitoring Project emphasise the need for decisive legal responses to hate victimisation.

A Bill, recognising hate crime and hate speech as distinct criminal offences, has been in development for almost 15 years and will soon serve before Parliament. Enactment of this legislation will be ground-breaking in Africa.

This paper contributes to the field of hate studies by providing an overview of the journey towards current conceptual understandings of hate in (South) Africa. It sets the stage for evaluating the potential of the redesigned HCWG monitoring tool, which holds promise for early identification and intervention in hate hotspots and targeted sectors. This instrument can establish trends not only in South Africa but also across the African continent.

With 43.2 million coronavirus cases and 525,000 deaths in 2022, India ranked second worldwide, after the United States (84.6 million cases and 1 million deaths), according to the latest available June 2022 COVID-19 impact data.

Amid people’s growing mistrust in the government, India’s news media enhanced the nation’s distinguished designation as the world’s largest and most populous democracy. India’s news media inform, educate, empower, and entertain a surging population of 1.4 billion people, which is roughly one-sixth of the world’s people.

Drawing upon the media agendamelding theoretical framework, we conducted a case study research into interplay between two prominent democratic institutions, the media and the government, to analyze the role of the COVID-19 pandemic in redefining India’s networked society.

India’s COVID-19 pandemic aggravated internecine tensions between media and government relating to four key freedom issues: (1) world’s largest COVID-19 lockdown affecting 1.3 billion Indians from March 25, 2020 to August 2020 with extensions and five-phased re-openings, to restrict the spread of COVID-19; (2) Internet shutdowns; (3) media censorship during the 1975–1977 “Emergency”; and (4) unabated murders of journalists in India.

Although the COVID-19 pandemic caused deleterious problems debilitating the tensions between the media and the government, India’s journalists thrived by speaking truth to power. This study delineates key aspects of India’s media agendamelding that explicates how the people of India form their media agendas. India’s news audiences meld media messages from newspapers, television, and social media to form a picture of the issues, insights, and ideas that define their lives and times in the 21st century digital age.

Social enterprises are embedded in ecosystems with multiple actors interested in the field’s growth. One way to enhance social enterprises is through public policies and developing countries like Brazil included this in the public agenda. After an important mobilization of private organizations and public managers, the Brazilian federal government implemented in 2017 the National Impact Investment and Business Strategy (ENIMPACTO) renamed in 2023 to National Impact Economy Strategy with the same abbreviation. Since its creation, ENIMPACTO saw significant modifications leading to a decree in 2023 extending its mandate, amplifying membership and changing its name to the National Impact Economy Strategy while maintaining the same acronym. This experience leads us to the following question: How was ENIMPACTO created and developed?

We used institutional arrangements and advocacy coalition theory to analyze the key elements that contributed to ENIMPACTO’s creation and its evolution through time. A qualitative, single-case study on the Brazilian experience implementing ENIMPACTO was conducted through semi-structured interviews with national strategy members, participant observation, document and data analysis.

We argue that advocacy coalition and institutional arrangements frameworks combined are needed to understand Enimpacto’s complexity. The strategy presented an extensive multiple-actor articulation involving shared beliefs that were also important to gather support on recreating and expanding Enimpacto when external events threatened its continuity. Yet, it presented important challenges on how to achieve consensus and alignment regarding important concepts and regulation strategy among the actors and manage the public policy governance and activities implementation.

We combine institutional arrangements and advocacy coalition frameworks and apply them to analyze a public policy composed of actors of multiple sectors that play an active advocacy coalition role. We also present empirical evidence that elements of the advocacy coalition framework add analytical elements to institutional arrangements literature and how they affect each other. We point to two important elements of the institutional arrangements framework (territoriality and subsidiarity) that were not initially considered by ENIMPACTO and were later incorporated because of tensions in the field. We provide empirical evidence of the incipient role that public administration can play in promoting social enterprises' agenda that might base similar strategies to boost social enterprises in other locations.

Construction projects commonly encounter complicated delay problems. Over the past few decades, numerous delay analysis methods (DAMs) have been developed. There is no consensus on whether existing DAMs effectively resolve delays, particularly in the case of complex concurrent delays. Thus, the primary objective of this study is to undertake a comprehensive and systematic literature review on concurrent delays, aiming to answer the following research question: Do existing delay analysis techniques deal with concurrent delays well?

This study conducts a comprehensive review of concurrent delays by both bibliometric and systematic analysis of research publications published between 1982 and 2022 in the Web of Science (WoS) and Scopus databases. For quantitative analysis, a bibliometric mapping tool, the VOSviewer, was employed to analyze 68 selected publications to explore the co-occurrence of keywords, co-authorship and direct citation. Additionally, we conducted a qualitative analysis to answer the targeted research question, identify academic knowledge gaps and explore potential research directions for solving the theoretical and practical problems of concurrent delays.

Concurrent delays are a critical aspect of delay claims. Despite DAMs developed by a limited number of research teams to tackle issues like concurrence, float consumption and the critical path in concurrent delay resolution, practitioners continue to face significant challenges. This study has successfully identified knowledge gaps in defining, identifying, analyzing and allocating liability for concurrent delays while offering promising directions for further research. These findings reveal the incompleteness of available DAMs for solving concurrent delays.

The outcomes of this study are highly beneficial for practitioners and researchers. For practitioners, the discussions on the resolution process of concurrent delays in terms of identification, analysis and apportionment enable them to proactively address concurrent delays and lay the groundwork for preventing and resolving such issues in their construction projects. For researchers, five research directions, including advanced DAMs capable of solving concurrent delays, are proposed for reference.

Existing research on DAMs lacks comprehensive coverage of concurrent delays. Through a scientometric review, it is evident that current DAMs do not deal with concurrent delays well. This review identifies critical knowledge gaps and offers insights into potential directions for future research.

This paper takes an ideal type of different welfare regimes as a starting point. It investigates with survey data people's experiences and expectations towards the welfare state and its functioning against various social risks. The paper discusses questions like, are there differences in perceptions between welfare regimes? And what is the role of the welfare state regime in explaining those differences?

This research article is based on OECD survey data and classical welfare state classifications. The analysis of welfare regimes provides both a theoretical and methodological structure for study. The study-applied analysis of variance (one-way ANOVA) to test a hypothesis that regimes matter analyses more nuanced aspects of current and prospects to the near future welfare state provision.

This examination suggests that welfare regimes still matter even though the differences in averages were not as immense as expected. Perceptions in different welfare regimes also have priorities related to the willingness to pay more taxes in order to receive better access to services and financial support if needed. In Nordic countries, the acute priority based on survey data is investment in education and re-training. In Continental Europe, more financial support is needed for pensions. Overall, respondents representing emerging Eastern European and Mediterranean welfare regimes think that welfare provision should be financed more compared to other welfare regime respondents. Health is a universal and unifying issue, particularly in ageing welfare states, and brings health as a traditional and central question again.

Respondents' perceptions work as people's voice and assessments are used to gain a contemporary understanding of welfare and about welfare state functioning.

This study aims to reflect on how the COVID-19 pandemic has intensified the social and economic vulnerability of Indian elderly women, thereby making them prone to varied forms of abuse and denying them of the basic rights of secured existence.

This study was conducted by analyzing primary data from government sources that dealt with the aging Indian population and the common predicaments that elderly women experienced during the pandemic. A qualitative interview was conducted in three old-age homes in India where the experiences of 26 elderly female residents were documented for understanding their experiences during the pandemic. The secondary data collected from different newspaper articles and online resources also enabled in perusing the difficulties that they faced both at home and the caregiving space at the critical juncture of COVID-19.

Nearly 73% of the elderly population in the country has faced an incidence in different forms of abuse and exploitation during the subsequent waves of the pandemic. Disrespect and neglect were the most common type of mistreatment and around 23.1% reported physical assault. The elderly women were victimized further on socioeconomic grounds and their rights of living a secured and dignified life were significantly neglected.

The basic premise of this paper operates on the ground that the family as an institution has shunned taking care of the responsibilities vis-a-vis the elderly and therefore formal institutions have been introduced to aid in the conventional caretaking responsibilities in the Indian societal structure. This situation became all the more grave during the pandemic and therefore needed much intervention. This paper follows the theoretical lens of gender theory and case study method to analyze the data.

The HelpAge India report findings entail that elderly women/widows are doubly marginalized in the Indian society, and the COVID-19 pandemic has escalated the caregiver stress on manifold levels, thus exacerbating the problem. As most of the female senior citizens are economically dependent on their children and relatives, financial exploitation became one of the important premise that deprived them of a healthy living both at home and elderly caregiving institution. Despite the prevalence of certain elderly assistance schemes in the country, the older women’s needs and well-being got heavily impacted and their voice gets hardly recognized in the wider spectrum of sociopolitical events. To extend the requisite help and assistance to this socially vulnerable section, the government on September, 2021, launched a pan-India, toll-free helpline number “Elder Line” to provide relevant information on elderly legal and medical aid and guidance on procuring pension.

According to the secondary findings, a significant percentage of elderly women have been susceptible to physical and emotional abuse and factors such as widowhood, economic dependency, physical infirmity, cognitive impairment along with other stressors have aggravated their exposure to ill-treatment during the pandemic span. Thus, to recognize and mitigate the existing problems affecting the elderly subjects, the government should devise the necessary protocols and adopt essential measures to ensure the welfare of the marginalized section and protect their basic rights of a holistic existence.

The globalisation of supply chains has contributed to modern slavery by degrading labour standards and work practices. The inherent difficulties involved in monitoring extremely fragmented production processes also render workers in and from developing countries vulnerable to labour exploitation. This research adopts a benchmark methodology that will help examine the inherent modern slavery challenges.

This study examines how the benchmark model, including governance, risk assessment, purchasing practice, recruitment and remedy of victims, addresses supply chain modern slavery challenges. The proposed hypotheses are tested based on the reoccurring issues of modern slavery in global supply chains.

Estimations suggest that modern slavery is a growing and increasingly prominent international problem, indicating that it is the second largest and fastest growing criminal enterprise worldwide except for narcotics trafficking. These social issues in global supply chains have drawn attention to the importance of verifying, monitoring and mapping supply chains, especially in lengthy and complex supply chains. However, the advent of digital technologies and benchmarking methodologies has become one of the existing key performance indicators (KPIs) for measuring the effectiveness of modern slavery initiatives in supply chains.

This review provides an understanding of the current situation of global supply chains concerning the growing social issue of modern slavery. However, this includes various individual specialities relating to global supply chains, modern slavery, socially sustainable supply chain management (SCM), logistic social responsibility, corporate social responsibility and digitalisation. Furthermore, the review provided important implications for researchers examining the activities on benchmarking the effectiveness of the existing initiatives to prevent modern slavery in the supply chains.