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This article provides an overview and analysis of 50 years of European policies, actions, and challenges to align its higher education and research, as well as lessons learned from this for similar initiatives elsewhere.

The study builds on a comprehensive overview and study of policy documents and scholarly literature to identify by decade the main policies and actions and the related challenges towards a European Higher Education and Research Area.

The findings make clear the key rationales, challenges, shifts and lessons to be learned from 50-year European policies for the alignment of higher education.

Its value lies in the historical overview and analysis of current initiatives, in particular the European Universities Initiative (EUI), to provide a historical and geographical context, which might give insight for similar initiatives elsewhere.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how a supervisor’s virtuous leadership as perceived by subordinates influences subordinates’ work-related well-being and to examine the mediating role of trust in the leader and the moderating roles of individual leader virtues and various characteristics of subordinates and organizations.

An online survey was conducted through Prolific among a self-selected sample of 1,237 employees who worked with an immediate supervisor across various industries in primarily the UK and the USA. Structural equation modeling was used to test the hypotheses.

The empirical results indicate that an immediate supervisor’s virtuous leadership as evaluated by the subordinate positively influences all three considered dimensions of work-related well-being – job satisfaction, work-related affect and work engagement – for a wide variety of employees in different industries and countries. A subordinate’s greater trust in the supervisor fully mediates this positive influence for job satisfaction and work engagement and partially for work-related affect. All five individual core leader virtues – prudence, temperance, justice, courage and humanity – positively influence work-related well-being.

The findings underscore that promoting virtuous leadership is a promising pathway for improved employee well-being, which may ultimately benefit individual and organizational performance.

Despite an age-old interest in leader virtues, the lack of consensus on the defining elements of virtuous leadership has limited the understanding of its consequences. Building on recent advances in the conceptualization and measurement of virtuous leadership and leader character, this paper addresses this void by exploring how virtuous leadership relates to employees’ well-being and trust.

The aim of this study is to determine which of previously used survey measures can be considered the most appropriate to assess children’s advertising exposure. First, three levels of content specificity for assessing children’s exposure to advertising were distinguished as follows: exposure to the medium, exposure to broad content and exposure to specific (i.e. commercial) content. Second, using longitudinal data from 165 children between 8 and 11 years old, the test-retest reliability and content validity of survey measures from all three levels were examined.

Due to societal concerns about the effects of advertising on children’s well-being, research into this topic is expanding. To enhance knowledge accumulation and bring uniformity to the field, a validated standard survey measure of advertising exposure is needed. The aim of this study is to provide such measures for television and internet advertising.

The findings suggest that all measures provided solid estimates for children’s television and internet advertising exposure. Yet, due to minor differences in reliability and validity, it may be concluded that television advertising exposure can best be measured by asking children how often they watch certain popular (commercial) television networks, either weighting or not weighting for advertising density. Internet advertising exposure can best be measured by asking children how often they use the internet or how often they visit certain popular websites, weighting for advertising density.

The current measures for children’s advertising exposure through traditional media can easily be adapted to fit new media.

Advance the state-of-the-art on how frugal innovation links to sustainability outcomes and based on content analysis of empirical publications in the field of frugal innovation, analyzing when and how FI is connected with social, environmental and economic outcomes.

Quantitative content analysis on empirical papers published on frugal innovation, using data visualization techniques to disclose relationships among the constructs adopted. Materials were collected following a step-wise methodology. In total, 130 articles were identified, read in depth and coded according to five main categories: context; development; implementation, adoption, diffusion; characteristics; and impacts.

The potential of frugal innovation to drive sustainability outcomes is influenced by the type of actors developing the innovation, regarding their organizational form (large firms, small firms, non-firm actors), their geographical origin (foreign or local) or motivations (mostly profit-motivated or socially-oriented). Collaboration plays a key role along the various stages of the frugal innovation cycle and is thus relevant for its potential to drive sustainability outcomes. The results reaffirm the need for greater attention to where and when sustainability-enhancing outcomes of frugal innovation are more likely to occur.

This study provides a qualitative study based on content analysis of empirical studies to explore the associations between frugal innovations and improved economic, environmental and social sustainability outcomes. The key novelty of this study lies in the systematic coding of each paper regarding the features of the innovation, the innovators, and the outcomes achieved. This allows taking stock of the evidence emerging in such a scattered literature, quantifying the extent to which insights take place in the empirical literature, looking for correlations, and highlight research gaps to understand to what extent frugal innovation can contribute to sustainable development.

This study aims to examine whether the development of students’ sustainability competences is dependent on how courses are delivered at higher education institutions (HEIs). It further investigates to what extent such competences can affect students’ belief in the new environmental paradigm (NEP) and pro-environmental behaviors (PEBs).

The data was collected through an online survey conducted in 2021 among the students of an international research university based in The Netherlands. The final sample (N = 262) consisted of all the students who completed the survey and claimed that they had taken at least one course that addressed sustainability. Linear regression models were used to examine the relationship of sustainability education and students’ competences, as well as their pro-environmental attitudes and behaviors.

The findings reveal that the strength of universal, broadly applicable pedagogies is positively related to the development of students’ sustainability mindset/framework as well as their sustainability action/communication. The results also reveal that developing students’ competences on sustainability mindset/framework is directly related to their belief in the NEP and PEBs.

To develop an integrative pedagogical approach requires understanding how a HEI’s engagement in sustainability can impact students’ attitudes and behaviors, but little research has actually measured the development of students’ competences. This study fills this gap through empirically testing how different pedagogical approaches can affect students’ sustainability competences differently. This has important implications for systematically linking pedagogical approaches to teaching practices or concrete learning objectives.

In this study, the authors explain citizens’ adoption of social media in citizen–government relations in China, a country that blends an authoritarian governance regime with limited tolerance of and responsiveness to online citizen participation.

Original survey data were gathered using a vignette survey among 307 respondents living in the People’s Republic of China. Multivariate analysis of the data was used to test four hypotheses and identify antecedents of Chinese citizens’ social media adoption for “thin” participation purposes.

Citizens’ perceived impact of “thin” participation, citizens’ skills and capabilities and citizens’ trust in institutions are significantly associated with citizens’ social media adoption. Social media anxiety was found not to be associated with Chinese citizens’ social media adoption.

This study demonstrates how vignettes can be used to study adoption of technological and institutional innovations in an authoritarian governance regime and how in this context existing adoption theories can be extended with notions of institutional trust to adequately explain citizens’ adoption of technological and institutional innovations in citizen–government relations.

Although some argue that social media activity could potentially mitigate democratic deficits caused by the state, in the case of China, the intertwinement of state and social media platform renders this argument unsustainable.

This study is one of the few systematic survey studies focusing on Chinese citizens’ adoption of social media in citizen–government relations.

The aim of this article is to examine how professionals within Dutch sports media give meaning to racial/ethnic diversity in the organization and reflect on the use of racial stereotypes in sports reporting.

Ten in-depth interviews with Dutch sports media professionals have been conducted to obtain the data. Respondents had a variety of responsibilities within different media organizations in the Netherlands. The authors used thematic analysis supplemented with insights from critical discourse analysis to examine how sports media professionals give meaning to racial/ethnic diversity and the use of racial/ethnic stereotypes.

The following main themes emerged from the analysis of the interviews: (1) routines within the production process, (2) reflections on lack of diversity on the work floor and (3) racial/ethnic stereotyping not seen as an issue. Generally, journalists showed paradoxical views on the issue of racial/ethnic diversity within sport media production dismissing it as a non-issue on the one hand while also acknowledging there is a lack of racial diversity within sport media organizations. Results will be placed and discussed in a wider societal and theoretical perspective.

By focussing on the under-researched social group of sport media professionals in relation to meanings given to race and ethnicity in the production process, this research provides new insights into the role of sports media organizations in (re)producing discourses surrounding race/ethnicity in multi-ethnic society and the operation of whiteness in sports media.

The purpose of this study is to examine how five different multi-level governance (MLG) models affect place branding (PB) performance in Saudi Arabia.

In hierarchical administrative systems, central governments exert control on PB, influencing its effectiveness. While PB as such is widely studied, the effect of MLG on PB performance in centralized administrative systems remains understudied. The study is approached as a multiple case study of nine cities.

The study reveals that different MLG models indeed affect PB performance differently. Direct access to central leadership and resources boosts branding performance, while privatization promotes flexibility with similarly positive effects. Study findings, furthermore, show that some cities are considered too big to fail. Cities such as Riyadh and Neom are of prime importance and receive plenty of resources and leadership attention, while others are considered peripheral, are under-resourced and branding performance suffers accordingly. Emerging differences in PB performance associated with different MLG models are thus likely to deepen the gap between urban economic winners and losers.

This paper introduces five MLG models based on the actors involved in PB, their interactions and their access to resources. For each model, this paper assesses other factors which may influence the effectiveness of PB as well, such as access to the national leadership and staff capacity. This research thereby adds to the literature by identifying specific factors within MLG models influencing PB performance in hierarchical administrative systems.

This article aims to explore whether and how economic, political and demographic municipal conditions shape citizens' attitudes regarding decentralised social policies.

The authors analysed the 2018 wave of the Dutch Local Election Studies, which includes a novel survey item asking respondents whether they prefer local social policies to be primarily: (1) protection-based, (2) cohesion-building or (3) activation-based. The authors appended context indicators to that survey and performed multilevel logistic regression analyses (1,913 respondents nested in 336 municipalities).

At the individual level, these preferences are affected by gender, age, income, education and political inclination, as expected. However, preferences towards local social policies are not shaped by local economic, demographic or political conditions. The authors discuss the implications of these findings for future research.

By using unique data, including a newly developed survey item, this study is the first to explore whether and how municipal conditions shape preferences regarding local welfare. Understanding those preferences is increasingly important as many Western European countries have decentralised swathes of social policies from the national to the local level in recent decades.

The purpose of this study is to examine the role of organisational conditions and workplace characteristics in midcareer and senior employees’ intention to volitionally provide career support to junior organisational members, their protégés.

Hypotheses are tested using multilevel linear modelling on a heterogeneous sample of Dutch employees ages 29 to 69 who participated in a vignette study in the autumn of 2017.

In line with the hypotheses, the findings of this study show that volitional (informal) mentoring is positively related to an organisation’s endorsement of intrinsic values (e.g. learning opportunities) and negatively to the presence of hindrance demands (e.g. time pressure).

Practitioners could facilitate co-mentor consultation, employ autonomy-supportive direct supervisors and fulfil psychological contract obligations by providing job security and learning opportunities. Organisations could also lower time pressures through job carving.

This study extends extant mentoring research by combining insights from perceived organisational support (POS) and self-determination theory (SDT) to examine the role organisational conditions and workplace characteristics play in aiding or hindering volitional mentoring. It enriches extant knowledge management studies on the link between organisational aspects and (intended) knowledge sharing behaviour by showing that similar organisational motivators predict volitional mentoring, thereby launching a call to study knowledge management through volitional mentoring using a SDT- and POS-based lens. A methodological novelty is the reliance on a vignette study.