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Without the contribution of the higher education (HE) sector, none of the United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) are achievable. Through research, teaching, and community engagement, universities globally make vital contributions towards Agenda 30. Through partnerships, their impact is enhanced – university networks are key to facilitating collaboration. The Association of Commonwealth Universities (ACU) is a global university network encompassing more than 500 universities. ACU spans five continents with membership representative of the full diversity of the Commonwealth. University networks such as this demonstrate that bringing institutions together enhances their ability to tackle global challenges. University networks are vital vehicles for knowledge sharing and best practice. ACU members in low- to middle-income countries face systematic biases that need significant support for disparities to decrease. The ACU provides a platform for all its members, including in the global South, to have their voices heard and affect policy-makers at the most prominent forums, including the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM), the Conference of Commonwealth Education Ministers (CCEM), and the Conference of the Parties (COP). The ACU implements initiatives that build capacity. Examples include Climate Impacts Research Capacity and Leadership Enhancement (CIRCLE), which supports researchers and institutions across Africa to produce internationally peer reviewed research into the climate change; and Partnership for Enhanced and Blended Learning (PEBL), which works with universities in Africa to enhance access to quality education through blended learning. These projects rank alongside similar initiatives that leverage networks to deliver outcomes that would not otherwise be possible. Without networks such as these, the great potential of universities to tackle the SDGs will likely not be realised.

The author argues that contemporary college culture is predicated on hedonism indicated by a use of predominantly social time in which parties, alcohol, casual sex, and lax academics pervade students' experiences. Coincident with this culture, however, is a deleterious pattern among students that has developed dramatically: their compromised mental health. The situation presents an apparent paradox: why are many students suffering when enveloped by fun? This chapter draws a connection between fun and suffering by treating each as conditions that spring from the sociohistorical context that situates institutions of higher education. In so doing, a theory is set forth to explain why despair is rendered applicable and how it is institutionally installed in the minds of modern-day college students.

In this chapter, we conduct a metadata analysis of articles published in accounting, business and finance journals ranked by Australian Business Dean Council (ABDC), and benchmarked against the Chartered Association of Business Schools (ABS) ranking, that discuss firm- and country-level greenhouse gas (GHG) emission practices and reporting. Number of publications on GHG research, research methods, number of citations and ratio, across countries and continents are some of the topics we cover. We employ a list of articles on accounting, business and finance journals ranked A* and A in the ABDC journal rankings from 2015 to 2022. The study uses a structured literature review to analyse 74 papers on GHG reporting practices at the firm- and country level. Although this line of enquiry is still nascent and developing, the study found underrepresentation of Africa and the Middle East in GHG literature generally. In addition, majority of the articles examined also concentrate on quantitative methods. Most of the articles on GHG research are A-ranked in the ABDC ranking scheme. It was also found that few studies focus on the countries and companies with the highest emissions. While there has been some progress in interrogating GHG across the globe, there is still much room for further research. A key area of future research is exploring the GHG reporting practices in the African and the Middle Eastern sub-regions. There is also a need to examine countries and companies with high emissions. A further study needs to explore the benefits of other research methods in addition to quantitative methods, as different research methods could yield different insights that would enhance research-based conclusions.

The overall goal of science is to build a valid and reliable body of knowledge about the functioning of the world and how applying that knowledge can change it. As personnel and human resources management researchers, we aim to contribute to the respective bodies of knowledge to provide both employers and employees with a workable foundation to help with those problems they are confronted with. However, what research on research has consistently demonstrated is that the scientific endeavor possesses existential issues including a substantial lack of (a) solid theory, (b) replicability, (c) reproducibility, (d) proper and generalizable samples, (e) sufficient quality control (i.e., peer review), (f) robust and trustworthy statistical results, (g) availability of research, and (h) sufficient practical implications. In this chapter, we first sing a song of sorrow regarding the current state of the social sciences in general and personnel and human resources management specifically. Then, we investigate potential grievances that might have led to it (i.e., questionable research practices, misplaced incentives), only to end with a verse of hope by outlining an avenue for betterment (i.e., open science and policy changes at multiple levels).

The smart city paradigm has evolved from a perspective focused on technological infrastructures to an approach in which the effects of the technological apparatus improve the quality of life of people, urban resilience, urban sustainability, and health, by introducing the concept of smart and sustainable city 3.0. In this chapter, the authors evaluate mobility as a key aspect of improving the environmental, social, and economic well-being of communities under the central concept of smart and sustainable city 3.0. To this end, the authors underline the link between mobility, the Sustainable Urban Mobility Plans (SUMP), and environmental health. Then, the authors outline (i) the mobility requirements to be met from a smart perspective on environmental health and how (ii) the SUMPs can be considered as the basic tool for connecting smartness with mobility and environmental health. Finally, the results obtained will be discussed, and future directions of this research will be illustrated.

This study aims to fill a gap in the literature. The notion of giveaways/free has not been well addressed in management history literature and arguably is a valuable contribution in that it has a strategic dimension.

This paper is conceptual. It is a structured survey of ideas/opinions about the notion of “free” in commercial endeavor. The survey is organized largely from a historical perspective.

Several categories of “free” are delineated and placed into a historical and strategic context.

The work has strategic implications and lays out a new research agenda for management historians.

A semiparametric stochastic frontier model is proposed for panel data, incorporating several flexible features. First, a constant elasticity of substitution (CES) production frontier is considered without log-transformation to prevent induced non-negligible estimation bias. Second, the model flexibility is improved via semiparameterization, where the technology is an unknown function of a set of environment variables. The technology function accounts for latent heterogeneity across individual units, which can be freely correlated with inputs, environment variables, and/or inefficiency determinants. Furthermore, the technology function incorporates a single-index structure to circumvent the curse of dimensionality. Third, distributional assumptions are eschewed on both stochastic noise and inefficiency for model identification. Instead, only the conditional mean of the inefficiency is assumed, which depends on related determinants with a wide range of choice, via a positive parametric function. As a result, technical efficiency is constructed without relying on an assumed distribution on composite error. The model provides flexible structures on both the production frontier and inefficiency, thereby alleviating the risk of model misspecification in production and efficiency analysis. The estimator involves a series based nonlinear least squares estimation for the unknown parameters and a kernel based local estimation for the technology function. Promising finite-sample performance is demonstrated through simulations, and the model is applied to investigate productive efficiency among OECD countries from 1970–2019.