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Any credible agenda that seeks to eradicate global poverty must seek to correct the structural injustices and inequities that cause and perpetuate endemic poverty. Such an agenda must aim not merely to aid the poor with grants, welfare, and subsidies (that indirectly perpetuate poverty) but seek to enhance self-sufficiency and productive skills of the poor by ensuring them comparable access to opportunities of the market economies to participate, on more equitable terms, in the dynamic process of overall economic growth. In this context, we apply critical thinking to identify and recognize the structured injustices of the market system, which not only cause poverty but also compromise human dignity via social inequalities and inequities arguably caused by the free market and corporate capital systems of the world. Global poverty that affects more than a quarter of the human population is a pernicious self-serving system connected to the injustices of the business and political systems of the world. The persistent nature of poverty is in direct proportion to our inability to eradicate it as a whole in the cosmic system. Eradication of global desperate poverty and its unjust structural causes can be achieved, we submit, by tracing the roots of global poverty to corporate and free enterprise capital systems and their unexamined structures of social injustice and social inequalities.

In this chapter, the authors review the concept of sustainable entrepreneurship and how it has evolved with increasing concerns about the environmental and social impact of business firms. The authors offer a background to the emergence of sustainability issues in the field of entrepreneurship research, and review a number of influential approaches to entrepreneurship that in various combinations address the relationships between the economic, environmental, and social dimensions of business. The authors further suggest three levels at which entrepreneurs can understand and assess their approach to sustainable entrepreneurship, highlight how the issue of sustainable entrepreneurship applies equally to startups and already established corporations, and in the conclusions point toward the emergence of humane entrepreneurship as a critical posture for entrepreneurship in the 21st century.

Effective experience design requires not only a knowledge of tourist goals, but an understanding of how these can be met in a particular tourism site. Research on experiences and experience design is supported by cognitive psychology concepts such as perception, attention, appraisal, emotion, consciousness, feelings and memory. However, these concepts are often used in a combination with others from sociology, social or environmental psychology in a manner that leads to confusion rather than clarity, without apparent understanding of the theoretical mechanisms by which these concepts are related. This chapter develops a series of propositions for potential application to tourism experience design. Future research should examine the efficacy of these propositions from cognitive psychology for tourism experience design.

The impact of COVID-19 on the lives of people and businesses across the globe was devastating. While governments across the world had undertaken a slew of measures to control the spread of the COVID-19 virus within their geography, many of these measures had long and unintended consequences. The restrictions imposed by the governments on the movement of people and goods across the world brought supply chains to a grinding halt. This study identifies the cascading effects of supply chain disruptions (SCDs) on the energy sector and thereby on the security of supply of energy from a European Union perspective. Since these systems are closely integrated and the impact of COVID-19 needs to be analysed at a much broader level, this study uses a systems-thinking approach to study the effect of SCDs on energy services. The study develops a causal loop model to gain further insight into how SCDs caused by COVID-19 affected the coping capabilities of society and how critical services were affected. Furthermore, the study puts forth certain policy recommendations for both businesses and governments to prepare for and protect against a similar situation in the future.

Competitiveness is an important personality trait that has been studied in various disciplines and has been shown to predict critical work outcomes at the individual level. Despite this, the role of competitiveness in groups and teams has received scant attention amongst organizational researchers. Aiming to promote future research on the role of competitiveness as both an adaptive and maladaptive trait – particularly in the context of work – the authors review competitiveness and its effects on individual and team stress and Well-Being, giving special attention to the processes of cohesion and conflict and situational moderators. The authors illustrate a dynamic multilevel model of individual and team difference factors, competitive processes, and individual and team outcomes to highlight competitiveness as a consequential occupational stressor. Furthermore, the authors discuss the feedback loops that inform the different factors, highlight important avenues for future research, and offer practical solutions for managers to reduce unhealthy competition.

The author’s interest in studying this topic was inspired by new extraordinary external influences, such as the COVID-19 pandemic and war operations in Europe, which have a direct impact on economic entities and therefore on the economies of many countries in the surrounding area and beyond. The aforementioned external, unpredictable factors appeared unexpectedly. As soon as they appeared, they caused major disruptions in business operations and a crisis on the market, which could not be influenced beforehand, nor could its occurrence be prevented. The impact of external shocks on economies will vary depending on individual countries’ exposure to Russian energy sources, food security, as well as their own economic structure, geographic location, and the degree of flexibility of their public finances. Empirical findings show that there are relatively significant differences in the reactions to the resulting conditions, between large companies that still take into account the durability and publicity of development indicators and others, which are characterized by the absence of a long-term perspective and its reduction to a set of short-term goals that are sought to be achieved in the framework of the visible future. In addition to the standard theoretical analysis, the authors conducted research by surveying selected business entities in Serbia, which provided an insight into the current state of the company and indicated the necessary directions for changes both at the level of business entities and at the level of the entire economy. Based on the conducted research, the authors came to the knowledge that economic entities can solve economic instability by implementing one or more reorganization models.

The chapter explores academic success and academic distress, noting that both high- and low-performing students experience academic distress. The multidimensional nature of academic distress is discussed, including worry about future performance; stress about current performance; low academic self-confidence; frustration; confusion; poor motivation; and excessive expectations, both self-imposed and other-imposed. Popular measures of academic distress among college students are presented. The chapter also presents information related to the prevalence and mental health predictors of academic distress and academic success. Attention is devoted to cultural considerations (e.g., gender and ethnicity) not only in academic distress and success but also in terms of starting salaries for college graduates. The chapter focuses on the prevention and remediation of academic problems by exploring typical campus resources that promote academic success, involvement in extracurricular activity and choosing a major that is suited to a student’s interests, abilities and values. The chapter concludes by focusing on several prominent theories of career development. For example, Super’s lifespan career development theory is covered, as is Holland’s person–environment theory and social-cognitive career theory.

This chapter focuses on the COVID-19 pandemic’s impact on the recognition through discourses of essentiality, of low-status workers and more specifically of care aides as an occupational group that performs society’s ‘dirty work’. The pandemic appears as a privileged moment to challenge the normative hegemony of how work is valued within society. However, public recognition through political discourse is a necessary but insufficient element in producing social change. Based on the theory of performativity, this chapter empirically probes conditions and mechanisms that enable a transition from discourse of essentiality to substantive recognition of the work performed by care aides in healthcare organizations. The authors rely on three main sources of data: scientific-scholarly works, documents from government, various associations and unions, and popular media reports published between February 2020 and 1 July 2022. While discourse of essentiality at the highest level of politics is associated with rapid policy response to value the work of care aides, it is embedded in a system structure and culture that restrains the establishment of substantive policy that recognizes the nature, complexity, and societal importance of care aide work. The chapter contributes to the literature on performativity by demonstrating the importance of the institutionalization of competing logics in contemporary health and social care systems and how it limits the effectiveness of discourse in promulgating new values and norms and engineering social change.