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Happiness in teaching, termed Eudemonia, comes from a perception of a relationship with students. Such a perception is vital to sustaining teachers in their work in both on- and offline contexts. While the importance of these relationships has been acknowledged, there have not been attempts to account for how teachers pursue relationships and the accompanying sense of happiness. It is in this frame that we discuss findings from a larger study of online teachers working to support students with disabilities in a part-time program at a large virtual school.

The chapter considers expectations for online teachers and sets up a dialogue between same and different as they relate to on- and offline pedagogy. It then asks more questions about these responsibilities in the context of efforts by teachers to feel legitimate in their claims to relationships with students.

Stories that both elicited and threatened Eudemonia are shared and discussed. In particular, the authors learned that online teachers desired relationships with students to such a great extent that they were willing to narrate relationality into most interactions with the students.

These findings suggest the difficult emotional work that online teachers must do in order to consider their work with students as beneficial. More work is needed to think about how relationships between teachers and students online can be leveraged for greater learning and to sustain both teachers and students in their work.

This chapter offers in-depth insight into the teacher work that online learning requires. It also offers a unique theoretical approach in the juxtaposition of stories of relationships with students online and offline.

In the wake of the extraordinary financial scandals that both preceded and followed the September–October Financial Crises of 2008, discussions about the executive virtues of honesty and integrity are no longer academic or esoteric, but critically urgent and challenging. As representatives of the corporation, its products and services, corporate executives in general, and production, accounting, finance, and marketing executives in particular, must be the frontline public relations and goodwill ambassadors for their firms, products, and services. As academicians of business education, we must also analyze these corporate wrongdoings as objectively and ethically as possible. What is wrong must be declared and condemned as wrong, what is right must be affirmed and acknowledged as right. We owe it to our students, our profession, our stakeholders, and to the business world. Contemporary American philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre (1981) proposes the issue of morality in a threefold question: Who am I? Who ought I to become? How ought I to get there? The answer to every question refers to the virtues, especially to corporate executive virtues. This chapter explores corporate executive virtues, especially the classical cardinal virtues of prudence, temperance, fortitude, and justice as defining and enhancing corporate executive life.

Given the special challenges identified for businesses and health systems during a pandemic, the authors look in this chapter at various qualities and virtues that enable flourishing post pandemic. The classical virtues of humility, fortitude, and patience are discussed alongside others more specific to a post pandemic situation – endurance, adaptability, flexibility, and toughness – and necessary for sustaining healthy businesses and profitable health systems.

Having in mind how principles and practices can be value-driven and people-centred, the authors review the ethics and principles that have guided major medical decisions over time. Several of these are insufficient for human flourishing or eudemonia and, if the authors are to ensure that foundational principles for business and healthcare are fully oriented to moral ends, then a greater turn towards the right ethical standards for all human actions is important post pandemic.

In this chapter, the authors reflect on varying personal narratives of the pandemic experience, as well as the chapter content of the book contributors, to suggest collective lessons for humanity. The authors conclude that increased flexibility, with new ways to be accountable, sustainable, and ethical, is essential. The authors also identify that, to meet the challenges of remote working, including working from home, more team spirit, solidarity, and loyalty are needed.

Education towards understanding the ethical foundations of responsibility and sustainability is important. It would enhance the acquisition of virtues that move emotions, knowledge, choices, and action towards promoting the flourishing of and protecting human beings, human society, and planet, and towards increasingly orienting business profits towards the good.

Once again, we are going through “dark times.” The current juncture is critical. For those who associate themselves with critical social theory, broadly understood, there are two options: hypercritique or reconstruction. Either one darkens the picture, uses all possible theories at hand (Adorno, Bourdieu, Foucault, Luhmann) to sketch out a general theory of domination and “closes the system.” Or, alternatively, with the hope of the desperate, one looks for a way out and aligns various theories that propose an alternative vision of the world. This is the task of reconstruction. Drawing on critical realism (Bhaskar), critical theory (Habermas), and antiutilitarian social theory (Caillé), this chapter outlines some principles of reconstructive social theory. Following the distinction between metatheory, social theory, and sociological theory, it explores the epistemological, normative, and existential foundations of reconstructive theory; proposes an articulation between culture and agency as an alternative to the agency-structure debate; and indicates some promising signs that configure a future ontology of the present.

This paper aims to examine customer experience value orchestrated by non-banks' financial touchpoints to understand how they enhance the financial inclusion of low-income consumers.

Two independent but related studies were conducted using qualitative comparative analyses (QCA) research design with semi-structured interviews to compare and contrast customer experience value at two rural locations in Southern Africa. The interview transcripts were analysed using ATLAS.ti, which is a powerful operating system for analysing qualitative data.

The results indicate that non-banks in the two countries design financial services that include functional, economic, humanic, social and mechanic customer experience value dimensions.

The data for this study was collected from financial services customers of retailers and mobile phone network operators in only one research setting in each country. Further research could extend the comparative context for qualitative studies across similar markets. Other limitations are discussed in the paper.

This paper contributes to the body of knowledge by highlighting the salient and germane dimensions and components found to be important in understanding financial inclusion using customer experience value. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study that incorporates customer experience value dimensions in understanding the financial inclusion of low-income consumers at the base of the social and economic pyramid in emerging markets.

This paper aims to explore the effects of the customer-to-customer co-creation experiences of savings/credit groups in the African context and how savings/credit groups influence financial capability and enhance financial well-being.

Using purposive sampling, a study of a total of 18 focus groups was conducted in sub-Saharan Africa. Nine urban-based savings/credit groups were drawn from across South Africa and additional nine, rural-based savings/credit groups were studied in the Monduli district of Tanzania.

Findings demonstrate that the African philosophy of Ubuntu, which promotes customer-to-customer interaction, is the cornerstone of the customer-to-customer co-creation experience. Ubuntu philosophical principles were found to influence the dialogue, access, risk and transparency model of co-creation and customer-dominant logic. The results show further that customer-to-customer co-creation experience positively influences the cognitive, financial, personal and social experiences of members. Specifically, it was found that cognitive and financial experiences positively influence financial satisfaction, financial self-esteem, financial self-efficacy and financial capability, all of which enhance financial well-being. In addition, personal and social experiences positively influence equality, self-confidence, entrepreneurial skills and motivation that in turn enhance social well-being.

This study has implications for many different stakeholders concerned with the financial inclusion of low-income consumers, particularly in the southern part of Africa.

To the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to explore the effects of customer-to-customer co-creation experiences in traditional financial services settings in order to understand how these indigenous financial services influence the financial capability and financial well-being of co-creation members.

This chapter questions the way virtue ethics is being drawn into debates about the ethics of social research. In particular, it suggests that discussion of virtue may be motivated by a desire to counter existing, largely principlist, approaches to the ethics of research and its associated administrative structures; virtue ethics has a prima facie appeal for those who are seemingly in need of an alternative moral philosophy. In addition, I argue that, as it stands, the complexity of virtue theory is not fully reflected in, or acknowledged by, debates about the ethics of social research. In the light of these remarks I suggest that the resources of social research can be drawn upon to generate critical theoretical insights into the ethics of social research. I discuss how a normative understanding of practices, and the concept of synderesis understood in a broadly Bourdieuan framework, could provide a starting point for such critical insights. I conclude that this perspective might be taken to suggest that the ethical stance most appropriate to the culture of social research is one of ongoing critical engagement.

Consideration of the micro-foundations of sustainability, arising from an empirical study of Conscious Corporate Growth in business enterprises, shows the capacity of firms to act as a vehicle to nurture virtue and human well-being. The example of love is used to examine the capacity of individuals and organizations to engage in such activity. We are unable to understand love without direct experience of it. That experience may help us to engage in similar activity, through mindfulness and other contemplative practices, to train ourselves and our organizations in conscious sustainability.