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The purpose of this paper is twofold: first, to compare the assessment in two subjects of the Business Administration Degree between Finland and Spain and, second, to test whether there are factors such as gender, age, subject, students’ motivation, or preferences that may have an impact on the assessment.

A survey was designed for students enrolled in Statistics and Financial Accounting subjects in the two universities, and multivariate statistical analysis were run.

First, coursework marks are higher than the final examination marks. In both universities and subjects, learning is enhanced by student involvement in coursework activities that are directly related to the learning outcomes. Second, there are differences in assessment by culture, gender, and type of subject. Finnish students are more used to work in teams and apply varied teaching resources than Spanish students.

The sample size and the analyses are from two subjects in two universities. More similar studies are needed to generalize the findings.

There are several implications for Higher Education. First, university policymakers should design training courses on the good implementation of new assessment processes and criteria in order to align learning objectives and assessment criteria. Second, teachers from different countries should openly discuss their manner of assessment and promote creativity and innovation in their methodologies to assess learning outcomes. Third, students should engage with deeper learning and competence development in subjects. This will contribute to their future employability.

Our findings not only question the concept of assessment validity and the compulsory relationship between assessment and learning but also provide suggestions to improve assessment criteria.

This paper aims to present the results from a questionnaire distributed to a group of Spanish postgraduate teacher students pursuing a Master’s Degree in Secondary School Education. The aims of the administered questionnaire were to identify students’ perceptions of the development of sustainability competencies; to analyse the relationship between students’ perceived level of competence and the subject area, previous teaching experience and previous participation in sustainability projects; and to explore the strengths and limitations of the assessment tool used.

An ad hoc questionnaire of 18 items was designed to analyse students’ self-conception of the development of four sustainability competencies. A set of six units of competence were identified and three levels of acquisition for each unit Knowledge (referred to conceptual learning), Knowhow (related to practical skills) and Do (linked to the demonstration in action and its transferability to real-life situations). The sample included 183 postgraduate secondary teacher students from different disciplines and subject areas.

The findings of this study show that students positioned themselves for the four sustainability competencies in a medium level of competence. No statistical significant differences exist between the subject areas and the level of sustainability competence. A statistically significant difference was found between previous teaching experience and participation in sustainability projects in relation to their perceived level of sustainability competencies. Participation in sustainability projects is clearly shown as a differentiating factor in the levels of sustainability competencies.

An empirical study has been conducted to investigate preservice teachers’ perceptions on the self-development of four sustainability competencies, considering three levels of acquisition (Know, Knowhow and Do). This study provides insights into ESD teaching and learning approaches and the assessment of Education for Sustainable Development outcomes. It also points out the importance of conceptualising sustainability competencies and operationalising these competencies in assessment tools that can help measure sustainability competencies’ development.

The correlation between health care expenditure, gross domestic product (GDP) and population over 65 years (understood as share of the elderly) is a key question for health economics and demographic impact. The purpose of this paper is to study the role of ageing society to curb rising health care expenditures along the Spanish regions over the period 2002-2013, identifying their geographic differences and explain them based on GDP differences.

Cointegration technique is used in order to test if there is a statistically significant connection between variables.

They are similar to some obtained when using unit root test. In particular, the authors find how the elderly positively affects health care expenditure per capita.

The findings suggest that any cooperation policies should aim at improving the access of people to health care services based on public health care expenditures.

To the best of the knowledge this is one of the first studies which suggest different results by Spanish regions due to mature decentralized system in recent years.

The control role of the Board of Directors is aimed at monitoring the decisions and actions undertaken by managers in order to protect stockholders’ interests. Considerable theoretical and empirical research has analyzed whether directors’ behavior is consistent with their fiduciary responsibility, but this research has reported inconsistent findings. This paper offers a comprehensive review of both theoretical and empirical literature on the control role of the board and suggests several guidelines for future research.

The purpose of this study is to provide a unique competitive advantage to businesses in providing a wide range of products to prospective customers. To the best of the author’s knowledge, there is no study to discuss the impact of customer-centric retailing on total supply chain profit under price competition between organized and unorganized retailers.

This paper considers a supply chain comprising of organized and unorganized retailers and a single manufacturer. This paper proposes three mathematical models considering a customer-centric approach in a competitive environment. Stackelberg game is used to examine how members of the chain interact, and Nash equilibrium was used to find optimal strategies for players under different customer-centric approaches.

The results show that the total supply chain profit is higher when both organized and unorganized retailers use a customer-centric approach independently instead of collaborating process. The result, in addition, establishes that when the dissatisfying cost exceeds a certain threshold (1.5), the total profit is higher for the organized customer-centric effort model compared to the other two models.

The main contribution of the study is to examine the effect of customer-centric retailing, considering dissatisfying costs on supply chains profit and individual decision-making under price competition between organized retailers and unorganized retailers. The authors developed different mathematical models in the different customer-centric approach.

The purpose of this paper is to focus on understanding of stakeholder attributes and attitudes towards privatisation. It examines the stakeholder attributes through the framework provided by Mitchell et al. (1997). By combining it with the concept of issue salience proposed by Bundy et al. (2013), it addresses the current gap in research on how stakeholders influence the process of privatisation.

This research uses a process research approach to examine the privatisation process in New Zealand’s electricity industry in order to explore contexts, content and process of change. By collecting real-time data during the period of privatisation, utilising a process approach provided the authors a view of the historical path and associated events which lead to identification of stakeholder attributes and attitudes towards privatisation.

The research offers a unique insight into stakeholder attributes exhibited by different groups during privatisation. The authors identified that during privatisation the government is the ultimate stakeholder who sets the rules of the game of privatisation by exhibiting the attributes of power, legitimacy and urgency. The attributes exhibited by other stakeholders were transitory and were impacted by issue salience. The authors also identified that stakeholders exhibiting all three attributes (the government) chose a non-response approach to deal with any conflicting issues raised by other stakeholders.

The research examined the new public management emphasis on the privatisation of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) vis-à-vis stakeholder groups, utilising the complementary concepts of stakeholder salience and issue salience. This research makes a contribution to stakeholder management theory in the public sector by identifying how various stakeholders influence the process of privatisation of SOEs.

The purpose of this paper is to describe the specification language TML for adaptive mission plans that the authors designed and implemented for the open-source framework Aerostack for aerial robotics.

The TML language combines a task-based hierarchical approach together with a more flexible representation, rule-based reactive planning, to facilitate adaptability. This approach includes additional notions that abstract programming details. The authors built an interpreter integrated in the software framework Aerostack. The interpreter was validated with flight experiments for multi-robot missions in dynamic environments.

The experiments proved that the TML language is easy to use and expressive enough to formulate adaptive missions in dynamic environments. The experiments also showed that the TML interpreter is efficient to execute multi-robot aerial missions and reusable for different platforms. The TML interpreter is able to verify the mission plan before its execution, which increases robustness and safety, avoiding the execution of certain plans that are not feasible.

One of the main contributions of this work is the availability of a reliable solution to specify aerial mission plans, integrated in an active open-source project with periodic releases. To the best knowledge of the authors, there are not solutions similar to this in other active open-source projects. As additional contributions, TML uses an original combination of representations for adaptive mission plans (i.e. task trees with original abstract notions and rule-based reactive planning) together with the demonstration of its adequacy for aerial robotics.

According to convergence theory, over time societies form similar social structures, political processes and public policies. In 2001, Israel adopted a welfare reform plan that rejected the traditional strategy of passive income support and instead endorsed the concept of activation. The plan was modeled on the Wisconsin Welfare to Work program and was designed to put the long-term unemployed to work. The program began operating in four regions in 2004 but was abruptly terminated six years later. The purpose of this paper is to analyze why Israel’s welfare reform failed to follow the smooth path predicted by convergence theory and elucidates the factors in the Israeli environment that made the implementation of a program borrowed from the USA unsustainable.

A multi-method approach including interviews with key informants, content analysis of media materials and government documents and a quantitative comparative values analysis of four nations.

The failure of US-style welfare reform in Israel was due to four main factors: a more diverse recipient population, a lack of understanding of Israeli cultural values, a welfare population that included a substantial number of ethnic minorities whose customs conflicted with program regulations and a social movement against the program by non-profit organizations.

This paper demonstrates the limitations of convergence theory and highlights the salience of cultural values in the transmission of activation policies across nations. Specifically, it shows that outcomes vary when policies that are superficially similar are implanted in nations with fundamentally different cultures.

Emotions and affect continue to garner widespread interest in the organizational sciences, and psychometric instruments tend to be the most often utilized method of assessing emotional phenomena in the workplace. However, psychometric questionnaires/surveys suffer from various shortcomings in that they may not adequately capture the underlying emotional experiences of individuals for various reasons (such as social desirability, lack of awareness, political posturing, and so forth). Neuroscience approaches allow researchers to directly assess the underlying neural activity that is occurring inside individuals’ brains. Accordingly, neuroscience can help researchers to overcome some of the limitations of surveys, thus allowing for both broader conceptualization and measurement. We briefly discuss the various neuroscience methodologies that can be used to help researchers gain insight into how individuals in the workplace experience emotions. Our discussion targets emotional contagion and emotional regulation as two areas that could especially benefit from utilizing a neuroscientific approach. We end the chapter with a consideration of practical implications.

Behavioral ethics research in the field of management is burgeoning. While many advancements have been made, applying an organizational neuroscience approach to this area of research has the possibility of creating significant new theoretical, empirical, and practical contributions. We overview the major areas of behavioral ethics research concerning moral cognition and conation, and then we concentrate on existing neuroscience applications to moral cognition (moral awareness, moral judgment/reasoning, effects of moral emotions on moral reasoning, and ethical ideology). We also demonstrate the usefulness of neuroscience applications to organizational behavioral ethics research by summarizing a recent study on the neuroscience of ethical leadership. We close by recommending future research that applies neuroscience to topics such as moral development, group ethical judgments and group moral approbation, and moral conation (e.g., moral courage and moral identity). Our overall purpose is to encourage future neuroscience research on organizational behavioral ethics to supplement and/or complement existing psychological approaches.