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The world is shaped by an education system that reinforces unsustainable thinking and practice. Efforts to transform our societies must thus prioritise the education of educators – building their understanding of sustainability and their ability to transform curriculum and wider learning opportunities. The purpose of this paper is to focus on university educators and critically review the professional development and policy landscape challenges that influence their effective engagement with Education for Sustainable Development (ESD). The paper is informed by a pan-European collaboration involving 33 countries that identified emerging scholarship and practice in this area and assessed the lessons learned from ESD professional development initiatives. It sets the context for a special issue titled “Professional Development in Higher Education for Sustainable Development” that draws together a collection of articles focusing on professional development of university educators across the world.

This paper provides a critical review of existing practice, international policy frameworks and literature relating to ESD, professional development and higher education. It examines innovative initiatives worldwide that seek to improve the capability of educators in higher education to integrate ESD into academic practice at individual, disciplinary and institutional levels. A rigorous process of selection was applied and overseen by an international expert group. This ensured that the initiatives sought educational change in ESD, and not simply the embedding of content about sustainability into learning opportunities. It also assured that the initiatives had a clear and intentional professional learning process to underpin the engagement of participants with ESD.

ESD has grown in visibility and status worldwide, with a clear increase in activity in higher education. The sector is viewed as a significant force for change in societies, through the education provision it offers to future professionals and leaders in all sectors. However, universities currently lack capacity to integrate ESD effectively into mainstream teaching practices and the training they provide for academic staff or to integrate ESD into their institutional teaching and learning priorities. Many ESD activities remain focused on teaching issues arising in sustainable development research and delivering specialist modules or courses in sustainability. Very few countries and institutions have significant staff development programmes to enhance the ESD competences of university educators and build their academic leadership capabilities for ESD. The contributions to this special issue show the need for greater understanding of the multi-level task of integrating ESD into professional development activities, not just for individual impact in the classroom but to advance institutional change and decisively influence the teaching and learning discourse of higher education.

There are few research studies and documented activities on ESD professional development in higher education available in the literature. This paper attempts to explore what ESD professional development involves and describes its complexity within the higher education sector. The special issue provides a collection of innovative research and practical initiatives that can help those involved in education and learning to develop ESD as a priority for future university innovative pathways.

This paper seeks to explore the influence of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) on employee performance in the workplace, viewed from a managerial perspective. It concentrates on key elements such as employee engagement, trust in GenAI and attitudes toward its implementation. This exploration is motivated by the ongoing evolution of GenAI, which presents managers with the crucial task of understanding and integrating this technology into their strategic frameworks.

We collected 251 responses from managers and senior managers representing companies that have embraced GenAI in Spain. A hierarchical regression analysis was employed to examine the hypotheses. Subsequently, mediating effects and moderated mediation effects were scrutinized using the bias-corrected bootstrapping method.

The data analysis suggests a significant enhancement in employee engagement and performance from a managerial perspective, attributed to improved attitudes and trust toward the adoption of GenAI. This conclusion is drawn from our research conducted with samples collected in Spain. Notably, our findings indicate that while positive attitudes toward GenAI correlate with enhanced engagement and performance, there exists a weakening effect on the significant positive impact of GenAI adoption in the workplace. This suggests that GenAI is still in its early stages of adoption within these companies, necessitating additional time for managers to develop greater confidence in its efficacy.

This study represents one of the pioneering investigations centered on the implementation of GenAI within the workplace context. It contributes significantly to the existing body of literature concerning the stimulus-organism-response (S-O-R) model in technology innovation adoption within work environments.

There are two main aims of this conceptual paper. The first is to explore the issues associated with staging events in public spaces, and to produce a typology of different event spaces. The second is to explore if and how events should be designed into parks, streets and squares and whether this might reduce some of the negative impacts and associated user conflicts.

The paper analyses the history, drivers and effects of using public spaces as venues and examines the reciprocal relationships between events and the spaces that host them. To explain the range and dynamics of contemporary events, a typology of event spaces is developed. This typology highlights nine different types of event spaces which are differentiated by the level of public accessibility (free entry, sometimes free, paid entry), and the mobility of event audiences (static, limited mobility, mobile). Using this typology, the paper discusses ways that public spaces might be adapted to make them better suited to staging events. This discussion is illustrated by a range of examples.

The paper finds that it makes practical sense to adapt some urban public spaces to make them better equipped as venues, but designing in events presents new issues and does not necessarily resolve many of the problems associated with staging events. Disputes over events are inevitable and constituent features of public spaces.

This paper makes an original contribution by developing a new classification of event spaces and by synthesising ideas from urban design with ideas from the events literature.

As has been widely recognized in the literature, the post‐war economic boom which drew to a close by the early 1970s has been followed by an intense period of industrial restructuring characterized by marked instability in all three major spheres of economic activity: production, distribution, and finance. This process has taken place both at the global level and at the level of national economies (Cardenas, 1990). It reflects a profound change in the mode of capitalist accumulation. Prior to the current round of restructuring, accumulation was taken to be principally the inward‐oriented task of each nation's own economy. Now, it seems that successful capital accumulation (i.e. development) depends most upon a nation's competitive integration into the world market for goods and services (Garrido, 1995). The present mode of accumulation implies an opening of national economies to international trade in commodities and capital, both among the advanced industrial nations and between the industrialized and the newly‐industrializing countries. This has generated a heightened degree of competition among countries and among firms, given that the easy movement of capital, goods, and services has allowed for real competition to emerge among dispersed places around the globe based upon their comparative financial and productive advantages.

In June 2016, a clear majority of English voters chose to unilaterally take the United Kingdom out of the European Union (EU). According to many of the post-Brexit vote analyses, the single strongest motivating factor driving this vote was “immigration” in Britain, an issue which had long been the central mobilizing force of the United Kingdom Independence Party. The chapter focuses on how – following the bitter demise of multiculturalism – these Brexit related developments may now signal the end of Britain's postcolonial settlement on migration and race, the other parts of a progressive philosophy which had long been marked out as a proud British distinction from its neighbors. In successfully racializing, lumping together, and relabeling as “immigrants” three anomalous non-“immigrant” groups – asylum seekers, EU nationals, and British Muslims – UKIP leader Nigel Farage made explicit an insidious recasting of ideas of “immigration” and “integration,” emergent since the year 2000, which exhumed the ideas of Enoch Powell and threatened the status of even the most settled British minority ethnic populations – as has been seen in the Windrush scandal. Central to this has been the rejection of the postnational principle of non-discrimination by nationality, which had seen its fullest European expression in Britain during the 1990s and 2000s. The referendum on Brexit enabled an extraordinary democratic vote on the notion of “national” population and membership, in which “the People” might openly roll back the various diasporic, multinational, cosmopolitan, or human rights–based conceptions of global society which had taken root during those decades. This chapter unpacks the toxic cocktail that lays behind the forces propelling Boris Johnson to power. It also raises the question of whether Britain will provide a negative examplar to the rest of Europe on issues concerning the future of multiethnic societies.

The case introduces the evolution and diversification of the Ceretto family business from the production and distribution of their own wines to the opening of two restaurants and the promotion of cultural and artistic projects. The case provides specific details about how strategic decisions were made. In particular, it shows how non-economic factors such as founders’ identity and personal relationships can shape the choice of new ventures and the formation of alliances. Since the second generation of the family joined the company, the case is useful to highlight the succession process in a family-owned company. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

Due to the exploratory nature of the study the authors adopted a qualitative approach. Information was collected through secondary data and semi-structured, face-to-face interviews with family members and the company's top management. The case explores from a theoretical and empirical point of view the entrepreneurial decision-making process and how it affects the evolution of the company strategy.

The case illustrates the role of founders’ (organizational) identity and of social relationships in influencing the diversification of the company and its partnership strategy.

The research strategy does not allow generalizations.

The case integrates strategic alliances literature highlighting the importance of the nature of the tie existing between companies before the alliance is set and of the decision makers’ identity in shaping partnerships’ choice. The case is useful in entrepreneurship and managing small or family business courses but also for students attending management of foods and beverage or cultural management courses.

Consumers’ product evaluations are often influenced by information contained in their memories. Prior to product evaluations, consumers are often exposed to data that permits them to judge the covariation relationships among different product attributes. However, these attribute covariance perceptions may lead to biased product evaluations. Using an experimental design, this study examines the accuracy of consumers’ product attribute covariance beliefs as a function of their product experience and the relevancy of product information to which they are exposed prior to evaluating product performances. The results indicate that even limited product information affects consumers’ beliefs about product performances on attributes for which no information is available. In other words, specific product information may serve as a cue or indicator for other product characteristics via attribute covariance inferences. The accuracy of these inferences appears to be, at least partly, the function of the consumers’ product experience. Consumers with high levels of product experience are more effective at encoding and retrieving product attribute performance information. Implications of the findings are discussed and suggestions for future research are provided.

Price fairness is important amongst construction and engineering consultants because a perceived lack of it engenders unwillingness to pay amongst clients. This can create contractual disputes that negatively impact upon a consultant’s ability to generate sufficient revenue to ensure business continuity and survival. With this in mind, this research aims to analyse the pricing measurement forces needed to attain pricing fairness within a Ghanaian construction cost consultancy practice. Specific objectives are to identify the key variables responsible for price fairness within cost consultant services and to establish any interrelationships between them.

This study leans towards the positivist methodological tradition by adopting a quantitative approach. A survey questionnaire was distributed to a random sample of 79 construction cost consultancies, drawn from a population of 372, who were registered with the Ghana Institution of Surveyors. Hypotheses developed from the literature review were then tested on data collected.

The analysis revealed that fairness of construction cost consultancy services pricing is significantly related to value and affordability, pricing objectives, pricing strategies, taxes and international trade and its effects on inputs for construction cost consultancy services.

The paper advances knowledge by providing a basis for the consideration of pricing forces in the valuing of construction cost consultancy services which hitherto has not been the case.