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The purpose of this paper is to document the results and the impact of the ESRC-funded High Street UK 2020 (HSUK2020), a project designed to take the existing academic knowledge relating to retail and high street change directly to UK High Streets, to improve local decision-making and, ultimately, their vitality and viability.

Through a systematic literature review, and by following the tenets of engaged scholarship, the authors identified 201 factors that influence the vitality and viability of town centres. Through the consensus-building Delphi technique, a panel of 20 retail experts identified the top 25 priorities for action.

Taking a place management approach led to the development of a more strategic framework for regeneration, which consisted of repositioning, reinventing, rebranding and restructuring strategies (4R’s of regeneration). Collaboration with the project towns resulted in identification of the strategy area that would add the most value, and the impact of the 4R’s and the top 25 priorities is demonstrated via numerous town examples.

Knowledge exchange projects, such as High Street UK2020, have an important contribution to make, not by developing even more theory that is unlikely to get utilised, instead their contribution is to bring existing theory into practical use.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce engaged scholarship as a method for addressing the “wicked problem” of High Street change through successful collaboration and co-production of knowledge between academics, practitioners, citizens and other place stakeholders.

The first part of this paper introduces engaged scholarship as a participatory form of research and situates it within the context of the High Street. The second part presents the case of High Street UK 2020 (HSUK2020) via Van de Ven’s diamond model of engaged scholarship as a guide.

Engaged scholarship’s focus on knowledge production and on collaboration between the research team and the community enabled us to improve the understanding of factors affecting High Streets amongst a diverse group of stakeholders and focus on what works for the towns. The ongoing impact of HSUK2020 on the project towns’ action plans and on this current research is testament to how engaged scholarship research can drive the agendas for both academics and communities.

The paper presents engaged scholarship as an alternative collaborative method of conducting research on the High Street, one that is more in line with the current trends in retailing and works as a motivating factor for community engagement.

This paper aims to measure and rigorously compare the perceptions of South Korean university social engagement between faculty and students, two definitive stakeholders identified by stakeholder theory – but considerably heterogeneous, to understand how South Korean campus embraces social engagement in practice. To that end, this study delves into the conceptual framework of university social engagement and selects a highly internationalized, research-oriented, four-year comprehensive South Korean university campus that has long sought to become engaged in communities as the research site.

Methodologically, exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses were used to identify the factor model that successfully fit the data of the study. Factorial invariance tests and latent mean analysis were then conducted to measure and strictly compare the between-group mean differences.

According to the findings, neither faculty nor students had positive perceptions of their institution’s social engagement in terms of leadership, participatory decision-making, curriculum and instruction, institutional supports and systemic mechanism. That is, two definitive stakeholders on campus similarly perceived that social engagement has not yet been institutionalized as a core value and therefore embraced in practice. Based on these findings, this study discussed several implications for university decision makers. Specifically, the institutionalization of and the need for authentic leadership in university social engagement were emphasized as a means to encourage and facilitate the delivery of practical, beneficial services to the public.

As with all studies, there are certain limitations that must be noted. The sample for this study represents the experiences and expectations of faculty and students at only one institution. Therefore, the experiences of individuals at this single university are not necessarily representative of all South Korean universities. In addition, given that the public service missions of South Korean universities emanated from Western thoughts (Duke, 2008; Ward, 2003), social engagement in the present study has been discussed and conceptualized according to the dominant Western scholarship.

As both faculty and students similarly perceived, participatory decision-making and systemic mechanism do not work properly, and therefore, social engagement as an institutional value cannot strongly take root on campus. Based on the scale used, this study identified communication and organizational supports as the likely issues that obstruct the institutionalization of social engagement. In relation to communication, Boyte and Hollander (1999) emphasize that it is important that stakeholders are well aware of the engaged effort of the institution. Then, the voices of stakeholders need to be acknowledged as valuable feedback so that university decision makers and stakeholders can discuss mutually important issues and concerns (Minnesota Higher Education Services Office, 2003). Furthermore, the relevant literature consistently contends that engaged effort can only be productive with continuous and systemic organizational supports (Boyte and Hollander, 1999; Holland, 1997; Minnesota Higher Education Services Office, 2003; Weerts and Sandmann, 2008). That is, the engaged work of teaching, research and service should be thoroughly assessed and reported to stakeholders on a regular basis. The implication in this study is that university decision makers should make greater effort to design and implement policies and regulations that enable organizational supports to continue.

For social engagement to be valued in practice, the relevant literature (Kellogg Commission, 1999; Garlick and Langworthy, 2008; Minnesota Higher Education Services Office, 2003; Peterson, 2009) advises that top institutional leaders need to encourage interdisciplinary scholarship that includes research, teaching and learning; develop incentives to encourage faculty involvement in engaged work; support engagement so that it is incorporated into the curriculum and instruction; and secure funding for engagement. The fundamental insight that these suggestions provide to university decision makers is crystal-clear: social engagement must be authentically prioritized in the decision-making process.

The quantitative and descriptive findings of the study seek to provide one further step toward the objective of establishing the groundwork for future research on university social engagement in Asian context. Further, replication studies with various Asian cases and research designs may results in tangible improvements to the theorization of Asian university social engagement.

Research on grand challenges in the management literature is vibrant and growing. Given that the term “grand challenges” was first invoked in our field 10 years ago, it is timely to reflect on how we came to this point – and where we might go from here. In this article, we first explore the origins of the concept of grand challenges in order to trace core assumptions and developments and understand how they shape the current conversation about grand challenges in management scholarship. We next convey findings from our review of 161 papers that cite the editorial for a grand challenges special issue (George, Howard-Grenville, Joshi, & Tihanyi, 2016), uncovering four ways in which papers are shaping the conversation on grand challenges. Finally, based on our perspective on how we got here and where we are now, we make several suggestions for what should come next in driving forward research on grand challenges. We urge scholars to go beyond the study of collaboration for tackling grand challenges and shift toward a more critical, yet generative, exploration of their construction, persistence, and unintended consequences. We also call for increased attention to theorizing grand challenges to guide practitioners’ understanding of the nature of the thing they are trying to address. In these ways, we hope to inspire management scholars to leverage expertise on processes – not content per se – that shape how grand challenges manifest and how they may be tackled.

The climate crisis presents a global threat. Research shows the necessity of joint communication efforts across different arenas—media, politics, business, academia and protest—to address this threat. However, communication about social change in response to the climate crisis comes with challenges. These challenges manifest, among others, in public accusations of inconsistency in terms of hypocrisy and incapability against self-declared change agents in different arenas. This increasingly turns public climate communication into a “blame game”.

Strategic communication scholarship has started to engage in this debate, thereby acknowledging climate communication as an arena-spanning, necessarily contested issue. Still, a systematic overview of specific inconsistency accusations in different public arenas is lacking. This conceptual article provides an overview based on a macro-focused public arena approach and decoupling scholarship.

Drawing on a systematic literature review of climate-related strategic communication scholarship and key debates from climate communication research in neighboring domains, the authors develop a framework mapping how inconsistency accusations of hypocrisy and incapacity, that is, policy–practice and means–ends decoupling, manifest in different climate communication arenas.

This framework creates awareness for the shared challenge of decoupling accusations across different climate communication arenas, underscoring the necessity of an arena-spanning strategic communication agenda. This agenda requires a communicative shift from downplaying to embracing decoupling accusations, from mutual blaming to approval of accountable ways of working through accusations and from confrontation to cooperation of agents across arenas.

The success of last-mile delivery is dependent on consumer acceptance of such services, yet little is known about unattended delivery experience. This paper's purpose is to provide empirically based understanding of customer experience dimensions in unattended home delivery.

Using an engaged scholarship approach, this field study investigated nine households that actively used an unattended delivery service for a period of six to nine months. Empirical data were collected primarily from in-depth interviews.

The study demonstrates that unattended delivery experience is a multidimensional construct that comprises consumers' cognitive, emotional, behavioral, sensorial, physical and social responses to the service. The empirical evidence provides rich descriptions of each customer experience dimension, and the research offers a framework and propositions on unattended delivery experience.

The results guide and support managers in assessing and developing delivery services using a consumer-centric approach to enhance customer experience.

This research is one of the first to address unattended delivery experience by providing a comprehensive, empirically grounded framework. The results provide a foundation for future investigations of last-mile delivery experience dimensions.

Community-engaged partnerships have the ability to combine expertise and resources to enhance the local STEM learning ecosystem, by engaging the actors in communities that can enhance students' experiences in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) education. Texas Tech University (TTU) and Lubbock Independent School District (LISD) have partnered to coordinate an annual STEM Challenge to encourage STEM learning and interest among local middle grade students. Each summer, teams of (three to four) students from ten LISD middle schools participate in a week-long engineering design challenge, facilitated by TTU undergraduate mentors and their teachers, structured by the Engineering Design Process (EDP).

Quantitative (survey) and qualitative (open-ended responses) data from two years of student glider and hovercraft projects offer insight into how 66 students developed STEM knowledge and leveraged 21^st-century skills to accomplish a shared aim (design challenge).

Findings suggest growth in students' 21^st-century skills, most among underrepresented (racial, ethnic and gender minority) groups. Data from year one (2018) informed year two (2019) in both programming and the research, including enhanced training for mentors and a deeper exploration of students' experiences during each stage of the EDP during the STEM challenge.

Significant and salient findings are discussed along with recommendations for both programmatic and methodological improvements for year three (2020). This study provides insight into how to structure similar community-engaged partnerships in enhancing the community STEM ecosystem through collaborative STEM experiences for diverse, younger learners.

This paper aims to explore what environmental justice (EJ) can offer to sport management research and highlights the urgency for sport management scholars interested in environmental and ecological issues to engage with EJ as an important research agenda.

This paper is primarily a position and conceptual paper. Drawing from multidisciplinary literature (e.g. critical human geography, environmental sociology, Indigenous studies and postcolonial studies), it provides an overview of the major conceptualizations of EJ and discusses important premises for sport management researchers to engage with EJ topics.

EJ offers opportunities for sport management researchers to form stronger analyses on existing racial, socio-economic, and gender-related inequities manifest in the sport industry. The incorporation of EJ can strengthen the emerging sport ecology research in sport management and offer opportunities for sport management researchers to form stronger analyses on existing racial, class and gender-related inequities manifest in the sport industry.

It provides a critical and original intervention to the sport management literature. EJ's emphasis on power and its position at the convergence of social movements, public policy, and scholarship hold important potential for sport management researchers to advance scholarship with “actions,” addressing environmental harms and seeking practical solutions for enhancing communities' well-being.