Search results

Education in sustainability science is largely ignorant of the implications of the environmental crisis on inner dimensions, including mindsets, beliefs, values and worldviews. Increased awareness of the acuteness and severity of the environmental and climate crisis has caused a contemporary spread of hopelessness among younger generations. This calls for a better understanding of potential generative forces of hope in the face of climate change. This paper aims to uncover strategies for fostering constructive hope among students.

This study examines, through qualitative interviews, the characteristics of constructive hope amongst proactive students enrolled in university programs related to global environmental challenges. Constructive hope describes a form of hope leading to sustained emotional stability and proactive engagement through both individual and collective actions.

The findings are presented according to four characteristics of constructive hope: goal, pathway thinking, agency thinking and emotional reinforcement. This shows how students perceive the importance of: collaboratively constructing and empowering locally grounded objectives; reinforcing trust in the collective potential and external actors; raising students’ perceived self-efficacy through practical applications; teaching different coping strategies related to the emotional consequences of education on students’ well-being.

We outline practical recommendations for educational environments to encourage and develop constructive hope at multiple levels of university education, including structures, programs, courses and among students’ interactions. We call for practitioners to connect theoretical learning and curriculum content with practice, provide space for emotional expressions, release the pressure from climate anxiety, and to foster a stronger sense of community among students.

To determine the nature of the relationship between merger survivors' trust, hope, and normative and continuance commitment.

Correlation and multiple regression studies.

The results indicate a statistically significant relationship between merger survivors' trust, hope, and normative commitment. The results of a correlation study indicate no significant relationship between merger survivors' trust, hope, and continuance commitment.

One limitation evolved from the scales used to measure the relationship between the study's constructs. The scales were not isolated to measure particular aspects of merger survivors' trust, hope, nor normative and continuance organizational commitment. Also, debate exists regarding the proper time to evaluate mergers survivors' perceptions regarding the merger.

Trust in management can reduce perceptions of threat and harm, and facilitate constructive, goal‐determined, survivor responses. Hope can enhance merger survivors' sense that they could cope with the merger. In turn, high levels of hope produced more active responses to the merger. Active and constructive survivor responses can produce positive commitment toward the organization. Conversely, a lack of trust in management can increase perceptions of threat and harm in merger survivors. The lack of trust in certain merger survivors can facilitate destructive responses, where the merger survivors' focus is on goals outside the organization.

No systematic attempts to understand the relationship among the constructs has been identified.

WE begin a new volume of THE LIBRARY WORLD with this number. For forty‐nine years we have striven to maintain the policy and programme of its founder and first Editor, James Duff Brown: to provide a journal for independent opinion to find utterance in; for young librarians to make their needs and aspirations known; for intelligent, and we hope generally constructive, criticism to be made; and for such personal chronicles to appear as would seem to create and perpetuate friendships. Much of permanent worth has adorned our pages and, of course, much that served the passing moment but always, even in the many controversial Letters on Our Affairs which for thirty‐three years have continued unbroken, the effort has been to serve and in no circumstances to allow personal anonymous attack. We shall continue in our established course but we hope, as conditions grow easier, to widen our activities in harmony with the necessary advances in library method and practice. We invite the new men, to whom the profession looks for the new heart which keeps its body going, to use our pages when they have anything to say.

This is the uncompleted story of an attempt to co‐ordinate documentation internationally in a limited field. It is presented as an example of how things do happen and in the hope that constructive suggestions may arise in the discussion.

This study aims to explore how young adults understand the climate change problem. It also explores whether environmental paradigms explain how young adults perceive climate change risks in their everyday green conscious behavior.

This interpretive research draws on in-depth interviews with 20 young Australians (aged between 19-25 years) who engage in green conscious behavior.

Three thematic categories (“non-local” climate change risk, oscillation between environmental paradigms and anthropocentric environmentalism) emerged from the data. The study finds that “non-local” climate change risk perceptions and environmental paradigms inform green conscious behavior. However, no association between environmental paradigms and climate change risk perceptions is found. The study postulates a skeletal theoretical framework for understanding the green conscious behavior of young adults.

Recommendations are provided on how to sustain young adults’ interest in environmental wellbeing and in promoting green commodities in young consumer markets. Suggestions include creating a clear awareness of climate change with a constructive or positive appeal resolving ‘non-local’ climate change risk perceptions and position green commodities as “pro-actions” or “solutions”, as opposed to “reactions”, when reaching young consumer markets.

A high level of green consciousness among young adults is recorded in recent global surveys. This green conscious young consumer segment, however, appears to be largely ignored by green commodity marketers. This study provides green commodity marketers with necessary insights to explore the opportunities that might arise in this unique market segment.

Although a burgeoning body of literature has established the influence of hope and employee creativity, the debate on the relative importance of hope and its components of pathway and agency on its outcomes has not been clarified. Literature has it that hope and its individual components of pathway and agency have a varying magnitude of influence on its outcomes. Some scholars argue that agency and pathway components better predict its outcomes than overall hope. The current study establishes the relative importance of hope and its components on creativity using evidence from Makerere University, Uganda.

The study adopted a cross-sectional quantitative survey design to collect data from the academic staff of Makerere University. The study used usefulness analysis to establish the relative importance of the predictor variables on the dependent variable.

The study findings revealed that agency and hope components of hope significantly predicted creativity. Overall, hope also significantly predicted creativity. Regarding relative importance, hope turned out to be the most “useful” predictor of creativity, followed by its components of agency and pathway.

The study was conducted in a public university setting located in urban areas. The findings may not be generalizable to private settings due to variations in the teacher's creative behaviour with variation in the creative environment. The study was also cross-sectional, which may not yield results of changing employee creativity over time. Further studies should establish the link between hope and creativity using a longitudinal survey to compare employee creativity using data collected at different intervals.

The value of the current study is both theoretical and empirical. Theoretically, the study findings enrich the hope theory by revealing the relative importance of hope on its outcomes over and above its components. The study also confirms the assertions of the dual pathway to creativity model by revealing that employees who are rich in hope components of agency and pathway have the cognitive flexibility to pursue creative goals and, when faced with failure, can generate alternative solutions to solve work problems.

The National Ports Council has been developing a concept of progress meetings based on working groups, over a period of ten years. The original ideas were refined from experience with a Fred Olsen Lines cargo handling subsidiary in the London Millwall Docks and extended to the local Port Authority as well as a number of other British ports. In Olsens the project began in 1967 when the NPC was called in to assist with problems encountered in operating a new labour agreement. The new mechanised system of loading and unloading ships with palletised cargo handled by fork lift trucks was a complete contrast to traditional methods of handling the Canary fruit trade. In particular the management of the new system put great strains on the cargo superintendents and supervisory group who were coping with the new technology. The approach used was essentially to create an atmosphere of mutual trust and support between individuals and between related levels of management. People were encouraged to discuss: • What their job objectives were and how these related to their concept of overall efficiency for the organisation. • What problems existed and possible means of overcoming them. The role that we played was to listen, to summarise and to help the various levels of management and managed to diagnose the work problems they encountered. As we had no axe to grind we could put a point of view to people and at the same time show them how they might be perceived by others.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the value of utilising future studies to explore citizenship for people with mental health challenges.

This paper critiques the discipline of future studies and considers it in the context of the citizenship and mental health literature. It explores how future studies can be utilised to promote marginalised voices, such as those of people with mental health challenges.

Technology is leading to rapid change in society including what it means to be a citizen (Isin and Nielsen, 2008; Isin and Ruppert, 2015). Whilst citizenship has been promoted within mental health for a long time, change has been slow (Rowe and Davidson, 2016). In order to create inclusive opportunities for people with mental health challenges, any focus on citizenship in mental health needs to not only address the present time but to anticipate and influence future technological directions.

This paper is original in bringing together mental health and the future impact on society of new technologies. It stands to offer a new perspective to discussions on citizenship.

It is with some trepidation I introduce this subject before an audience with such a wealth of experience in scientific and technical information work, but I hope to hold your attention for the next forty‐five minutes as I try to evaluate the factors which, in my experience, have influenced the flow of information and, I hope too, to provoke some much needed thought on the problems that confront us all in this field today.

Despite advances in Environmental and Sustainability Education (ESE) scholarship and practice, ESE has not yet contributed to mitigate the sustainability-related problems it is meant to remedy. As part of an explanation, some scholars have argued that current ESE scholarship and practice overemphasizes intellectual and neglects (intra-)personal competencies as envisaged learning outcomes of ESE learning programs and activities. To date, however, such personal competencies have not been systematically specified in terms of the challenges they are meant to respond to. This paper aims to derive personal competencies from an analysis of inner challenges individuals face when engaging with the cause of sustainable consumption.

The study is conceptual and proceeds in two steps: In the first step, it analyzes existing research on challenges individuals experience when intending to change their consumer behavior and engaging in consumption-related learning activities. In a second step, a set of personal competencies for sustainable consumption are derived from the analysis of challenges. Based on the set of competencies, suggestions for future research empirically corroborating the reflections of this paper are made.

The discussion of challenges indicates that both sustainable consumption and consumption-related learning activities can come along with a series of affective-motivational challenges. In contrast to established competency frameworks, personal competencies emphasize the importance of affective-motivational learning outcomes instead of intellectual ones. They are defined here as abilities, proficiencies or skills related to inner states and processes that can be considered necessary to engage with the cause of sustainability. Personal competencies responding to the inner challenges of engaging with sustainable consumption include ethics, self-awareness, emotional resilience, self-care, access to and cultivation of ethical qualities and mindsets for sustainability.

Given that this paper is conceptual, further research is needed to empirically inquire into the importance of personal competencies for sustainable consumption and corroborate the provided reflections. Furthermore, the study has not responded to some of the concerns a few ESE experts have expressed concerning the concept of (intra-)personal competencies more generally. To address these concerns, future research should be dedicated to empirically validating and operationalizing personal competencies, eventually leading to tools allowing for a systematic assessment of these competencies. Based on such assessment tools, pedagogical formats should be elaborated and evaluated with regard to their potential to stimulate personal sustainability competencies.

The concept of personal competencies explicitly acknowledges that current unsustainability is associated with the experience of inner, affective-motivational challenges. ESE learning programs and activities should prepare learners for these challenges. However, a specification of these inner challenges and corresponding personal competencies has not yet been undertaken. The set of personal competencies outlined in this paper can serve as a first starting point for specifying personal sustainability competencies and makes a case why their consideration is important when it comes to designing and evaluating ESE learning programs and activities.