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The aim of this paper is to outline the collaborative approach used to craft national learning standards for tertiary programs in the field of environment and sustainability in Australia. The field of environment and sustainability is broad and constituted by diverse stakeholders. As such, articulating a common set of learning standards presents challenges.

The authors developed and used a staged collaborative curriculum design methodology to engage more than 250 stakeholders in tertiary environmental education, including discipline scholars, students, professional associations and employers and other environmental educators. The approach was adaptive, to ensure underrepresented stakeholders’ perspectives were welcomed and recognised. The project was commissioned by the Australian Council of Environmental Deans and Directors (ACEDD) and funded by the Federal Government’s Office for Learning and Teaching.

The collaborative approach developed and used for this work facilitated an inclusive process that valued diversity of perspectives, rather than marginalise diversity in favour of a perspective representing a minimum level of agreement. This is reflected in the standards themselves, and is evidenced by participant feedback, piloting of the standards and their subsequent application at multiple universities. Achieving this required careful planning and facilitation, to ensure a democratisation of the stakeholder consultation process, and to build consensus in support of the standards. Endorsement by ACEDD formalised the standards’ status.

Collaborative curriculum design offered the opportunity to foster a shared sense of common purpose amongst diverse environmental education stakeholders. This approach to curriculum design is intensive and generative but uncommon and may be usefully adapted and applied in other contexts. The authors note one subsequent instance where the approach has been further developed and applied in transforming a generalist science program, suggesting the methodology used in this case may be applied across other contexts, albeit with appropriate adjustments: the authors offer it here in the spirit of supporting others in their own complex curriculum design challenges.

This paper aims to investigate the evolution, roots and influence of the rural entrepreneurship literature.

Using a bibliometric exercise, the analysis starts with investigation of studies on entrepreneurship and gathering all (772) articles on rural entrepreneurship (from 1981 to 2020) found in both Scopus and Web of Science up to 15 August 2020. Citation analysis of the references/citations of 755 articles are listed in the abstract database, generating a citation database involving 46,432 references/citations. This paper considers 635 (out of the 772) articles on rural entrepreneurship (i.e. articles cited in one or more studies), generating a database of 10,767 studies influenced by the rural entrepreneurship literature.

This study discovers that the relative importance of rural entrepreneurship within the entrepreneurship literature has increased in the last few years, but rural entrepreneurship remains a European concern; the most frequently addressed topics include growth and development, institutional frameworks and governance and rurality, with theory building being rather understudied. Most of the studies on rural entrepreneurship are empirical, involving mainly qualitative analyses and targeting high income countries; rural entrepreneurship is rooted in the fields of economics and entrepreneurship and is relatively self-referential.

This study provides a comprehensive and updated investigation of evolution of the rural entrepreneurship literature. The assessment of the literature’s scientific roots of rural entrepreneurship had not yet been tackled before. To the best of the author’s knowledge this study can be considered as the first effort for identifying the scientific influence of the rural entrepreneurship literature.

Public libraries are incubators for collective action in the knowledge economy. As three case studies from the United States and Singapore demonstrate, public libraries can serve as influential champions that garner financial resources, communicate an urgent need for change, and respond to the unmet information and economic needs of marginalized individuals and communities. In the Raise Up Radio (RUR) case, public librarians engaged schools, museums, youth, and families in rural communities to develop and deliver STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) content over local radio stations. In collaboration with organizational partners, RUR librarians created a model for library-community-radio projects for the rural United States. In the What Health Looks Like (WHLL) case, public librarians engaged senior citizens in discussions of health and the creation of health comics. In partnership with an interdisciplinary health research team, WHLL librarians developed a pilot for library-community-public health projects aimed at information dissemination and health narrative generation. In the Singapore shopping mall libraries case, the National Library Board (NLB) created public libraries in commercial spaces serving working families, senior citizens, and the Chinese community. The NLB developed an exportable model for locating information centers in convenient, popular, and useful business spaces. These case studies demonstrate how libraries are nodes in the knowledge economy, providing vital services such as preservation of cultural heritage, technology education, community outreach, information access, and services to working families, small- and medium-size businesses, and other patrons. In the years to come, public libraries will be called upon to respond to shifting social norms, inequitable opportunities, emergencies and disasters, and information asymmetries. As the cases of RUR, WHLL, and the shopping mall libraries show, public librarians have the vision and capacities to serve as influential champions for collective action to solve complex problems and foster sustainable development and equitable participation in the knowledge economy.

This study aims to investigate the content of hotel brands’ mission statements (MSs) and their relationship with selected attributes of hotel brands.

Content analysis of hotel brands’ MSs was used to detect the MSs’ key words, which were further processed by methods of social network analysis, complemented by clustering techniques and correspondence analysis on the generalized aggregated lexical tables, a special type of correspondence analysis.

Hotel brands operating in luxurious markets more often emphasize experiences than those in midscale markets. Furthermore, hotel brands with longer traditions and those with a large number of controlled rooms communicate words in their MSs that represent a rather traditional approach to hospitality. Younger hotel brands with fewer controlled rooms chose words that indicate a more commercially oriented approach. Finally, cluster analysis revealed four dimensions of hotel brands’ MSs, instead of the nine most typically used in mission statement component models.

Understanding the frequencies and networks of keywords, and their relationship with hotel brand attributes, will help create more focussed MSs. This will strengthen hotel brands, raise their revenues and subsequently increase company performance.

The analysis provides valuable insight into MSs in the specific tourism context of hotel brands. The authors have achieved this with the use of a wide range of advanced network analytic methods. These insights can guide hotel brands to better position themselves in the competitive tourism accommodation market.

This study aims to compares the effects of different human-like appearances (low vs. medium vs. high) of service robots (SRs) on consumer trust in service robots (CTSR), examines the mediating role of perceived warmth (WA) and perceived competence (CO) and demonstrates the moderating role of culture and service setting.

The research design includes three scenario-based experiments (Chinese hotel setting, American hotel setting, Chinese hospital setting).

Study 1 found SR’s human-like appearance can arouse perceived anthropomorphism (PA), which positively affects CTSR through parallel mediators (WA and CO). Study 2 revealed consumers from Chinese (vs. American) culture had higher CTSR. Study 3 showed consumers had higher WA and CO for SRs in the credence (vs. experience) service setting. The authors also had an exploratory analysis of the uncanny valley phenomenon.

The findings have practical implications for promoting the diffusion of SRs in the hospitality industry. Managers can increase CTSR by augmenting the anthropomorphic design of SRs; however, they must consider the differences in this effect across all service recipients (consumers from different cultures) and service settings.

The authors introduce WA and CO as mediators between PA and CTSR and set the culture and service setting as moderators.

The present study aims to examine whether leisure time posts shared on WhatsApp status drive to travel and tourism consumption among users.

In this study, discriminant analysis was employed to test hypotheses and identify essential factors.

The study indicated that the eight most contributing factors are expressing happiness, planning leisure time, views and comments, attractiveness, inquiring about places, preferring to post, nice way of expression and relax. These factors came from the latent variables of attitude, motivation and self-expression. Overall, the main influencing factors are internal (attitude and motivation), followed by an external factor i.e. self-expression. Additionally, the findings indicated that these significantly and positively impact travel and tourism consumption.

The discriminators identified in the study would guide tour and travel agencies and the agencies' managers on how best to adopt WhatsApp and WhatsApp's status application to influence aspiring travelers.

This study enlarges the existing literature by integrating three factors, attitude, motivation and self-expression, into a model to influence the behavioral outcomes of aspirational travelers using WhatsApp status.

In the following theoretical article, the author generates a theory of Leadership Pedagogy and its connection to Creative Arts Education.

The article analyzes Leadership Theory across three pillars: Socio-relational, Cognitive and Creative, and how these areas underscore thoughtful and caring pedagogy and inclusive teaching in undergraduate education.

Drawing on the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL), the article advocates for a flexible, multifaceted approach to curricular design rooted in theoretical pluralism, prioritizing interdisciplinary methods to bridge theory and practice in Creative Arts Education.

The article concludes with implications for future research and collaboration connecting Leadership Studies and the Arts.

It is predicted that micromanagement may become a growing workplace concern post-Covid-19, with managers grappling for control in the current hybrid/remote working environment. This will be happening at a time when millennials represent half of the working population. This study contributes to existing literature and provides an overall appreciation of the complexities of micromanagement and how it impacts millennials' followership styles.

A quantitative study was undertaken and a series of hypotheses were tested. The target sample for this research was the millennial cohort aged between 24 and 41. Data were analysed using SPSS.

This paper confirmed that “unfavourable followership styles” consisted of various negative followership reactions such as anxiety, demotivation, dissatisfaction, disengagement, reduction in support for managers, limited upward feedback, team conflict, reduced productivity and innovation due to fear of making mistakes ultimately facilitating a toxic workplace. Essentially, this research validated the notion that in order to create a sustainable organisation post-Covid-19, HR professionals must take proactive measures to mitigate this form of harmful leadership.

Data weaknesses transpire where respondents have never interacted with a micromanager in reality. Therefore, perceived reactions to a hypothetical micromanager may differ from those respondents who were exposed to micromanagers.

A lack of research exists on the intersection of micromanagement and millennials' followership styles and as such this paper bridges that gap.

The paper aims to expand on the works well documented by Joy Boulamwini and Ruha Benjamin by expanding their critique to the African continent. The research aims to assess if algorithmic biases are prevalent in DALL-E 2 and Starry AI. The aim is to help inform better artificial intelligence (AI) systems for future use.

The paper utilised a desktop study for literature and gathered data from Open AI’s DALL-E 2 text-to-image generator and StarryAI text-to-image generator.

The DALL-E 2 significantly underperformed when it was tasked with generating images of “An African Family” as opposed to images of a “Family”. The pictures lacked any conceivable detail as compared to the latter of this comparison. The StarryAI significantly outperformed the DALL-E 2 and rendered visible faces. However, the accuracy of the culture portrayed was poor.

Because of the chosen research approach, the research results may lack generalisability. Therefore, researchers are encouraged to test the proposed propositions further. The implications, however, are that more inclusion is warranted to help address the issue of cultural inaccuracies noted in a few of the paper’s experiments.

The paper is useful for advocates who advocate for algorithmic equality and fairness by highlighting evidence of the implications of systemic-induced algorithmic bias.

The reduction in offensive racism and more socially appropriate AI can be a better product for commercialisation and general use. If AI is trained on diversity, it can lead to better applications in contemporary society.

The paper’s use of DALL-E 2 and Starry AI is an under-researched area, and future studies on this matter are welcome.

This study explores whether and how Internet usage improves the subjective health of middle-aged and older adults by analyzing the mediating role of social engagement and heterogeneity of different living arrangements.

Based on data from the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study, the ordinary least squares (OLS) method is adopted to explore the relationship between Internet usage and the subjective health of middle-aged and older adults. Propensity score matching method (PSM) is used to alleviate self-selection bias in the samples. The bootstrap method is adopted to test the mediating role of social engagement, and generalized structural equation modeling (GSEM) is employed to resolve endogeneity. A permutation test is adopted to examine the heterogeneous effects of Internet usage on different living arrangements.

Internet access can help relieve depression among middle-aged and older adults and enhance their self-rated health, leading to perceived changes in health status. However, Internet usage is not directly associated with health satisfaction among middle-aged and older adults. Nevertheless, Internet usage can enhance middle-aged and older adults' subjective health by facilitating social engagement and significantly influences middle-aged and older adults living with their children.

This study reveals the underlying role of Internet usage among older adults and provides insights for governments and families to help middle-aged and older adults actively adapt to a digital society and improve their health.