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The first part presents a review of concepts relating to reflection, drawing on the literature in this area. This literature review relates to the following aspects of reflection: the definition of reflection, the process of reflection, strategies in reflection, content of reflection, barriers to reflection, and advantages of reflection.

The second part of this paper presents an investigation into the perceptions of a small sample of English language educators and supervisors, through personal interviews with 9 teachers and 3 supervisors from one higher education institution and other educational institutions in the United Arab Emirates. The findings of the investigation are analyzed with respect to the dimensions that appear in the literature review. These findings show that the teachers do have some knowledge of reflection. They reveal that the teachers: attitudes towards reflection and its applicability in the teaching and learning process is largely positive, mixed with some degree of skepticism. Teachers agree that reflection is useful, but many seem uncertain about how it can be applied in their situation. In some cases the interviewees seemed to be more concerned about the technicalities of their job, making collaborative reflection appear less of a priority.

Our understanding of leadership has undergone a significant shift in the early part of the 21st century. An emerging perspective, dubbed Eco-Leadership, suggests leadership is a collective process involving both leaders and followers co-creating leadership. Because our beliefs and attitudes toward leadership affect how we lead, it becomes crucial to better understand the views youth have towards leadership, as they develop into our future leaders, to improve curricula and instruction. In this study, no relationship was found between youth attitudes and beliefs towards systemic and hierarchical thinking with respect to their preferred problem-solving style. These findings indicate youth may adaptively or innovatively associate leadership equally through systemic and hierarchical thinking. Further, neither being more adaptive nor more innovative implies one to be better at leading.

Organisations increasingly rely on professional interim managers (PIMs), i.e. independent contractors who perform managerial work. These managers, who are usually very experienced and skilled, could help organisations drastically improve their performance. However, research has found that they often fail to do so, indicating that PIMs face unique on-the-job challenges that challenge their capability to be effective managers. In the study reported in this paper, I explored PIMs’ on-the-job challenges and how they overcome them. To better understand the various on-the-job challenges, I developed the concept of the liability of outsiderness.

I applied an exploratory approach and conducted 32 interviews with 21 PIMs.

I uncovered three on-the-job challenges common and unique to PIMs – communicating the contract status and contract period, being quick off the mark and attaining power – and the ways they overcome these challenges.

This paper reports findings and theory that provide several valuable guidelines for practitioners involved with interim management.

Interim management has received little scholarly attention despite its increasing relevance. Empirical research, particularly on PIMs in executive positions, is lacking. This leaves us with little evidence to base our theories and guidelines for interim management. The study reported in this paper adds novel insights to an under-researched but important field of management. The study also introduces the liability of outsiderness concept, which holds much promise for future studies of interim management.

The purpose of this paper is to offer some insights into the future of urban tourism with particular consideration given to immigration and visiting friends and relatives (VFR) travel. The discussion highlights the fact that cities are increasingly home to immigrants and transitory residents who host visitors, blurring resident-visitor distinctions, with implications for cultural and economic development, and tourism practitioners. These trends are highlighted, and discussions relating to the future are offered.

This discussion is based on a literature review and a conceptual approach.

The number of immigrants to cities keeps growing. These immigrants are shaping their new communities and changing local culture. They contribute to increased tourism through generating VFR travel and creating new tourist attractions.

The implications of VFR and immigration on urban tourism are most visible in large urban centers that are major points of entry into a country and international magnets. They are not, however, limited to big cities.

There are potential implications for municipal governments and destination marketers to consider how cultural development and the touristic promotion of the city overlap with areas and direction for possible partnerships with community groups.

This paper promotes the idea that for immigrants, to experience their communities through hosting VFR has positive social implications in terms of integration and cultural development.

This paper discusses a topic rarely addressed the impact of VFR and immigration on shaping urban tourism.

Education in sustainability science is largely ignorant of the implications of the environmental crisis on inner dimensions, including mindsets, beliefs, values and worldviews. Increased awareness of the acuteness and severity of the environmental and climate crisis has caused a contemporary spread of hopelessness among younger generations. This calls for a better understanding of potential generative forces of hope in the face of climate change. This paper aims to uncover strategies for fostering constructive hope among students.

This study examines, through qualitative interviews, the characteristics of constructive hope amongst proactive students enrolled in university programs related to global environmental challenges. Constructive hope describes a form of hope leading to sustained emotional stability and proactive engagement through both individual and collective actions.

The findings are presented according to four characteristics of constructive hope: goal, pathway thinking, agency thinking and emotional reinforcement. This shows how students perceive the importance of: collaboratively constructing and empowering locally grounded objectives; reinforcing trust in the collective potential and external actors; raising students’ perceived self-efficacy through practical applications; teaching different coping strategies related to the emotional consequences of education on students’ well-being.

We outline practical recommendations for educational environments to encourage and develop constructive hope at multiple levels of university education, including structures, programs, courses and among students’ interactions. We call for practitioners to connect theoretical learning and curriculum content with practice, provide space for emotional expressions, release the pressure from climate anxiety, and to foster a stronger sense of community among students.

The purpose of this study is to identify research perspectives/clusters in the field of urban tourism (city tourism) in narrow sense and tourism cities (cities and tourism) in the broader sense to examine the complex relationship through the optics of science mapping. This paper believes that the existing qualitative assessments of this field can be experimentally verified and visualized.

First, the key conceptual dilemmas of research perspectives in urban tourism are highlighted. Based on the Web of Science (WOS) Core Collection and the VOSviewer (computer program for visualizing bibliometric networks), the data will be analyzed. Clustering is used to evaluate information retrieval (inclusivity or selectivity of the search query), publication patterns (journal articles), author keywords, terminology and to identify the respective cities and author collaborations between countries.

Terminological specificities and their contextuality (authors’ preferences) are elaborated, as the topic is studied by authors from different disciplinary fields. Compared to other specific tourisms, urban tourism includes geographic terms (variations of city names) and terms with different connotations (travelers, visitors). Recent Spanish (also Portuguese) linguistic/geographic contexts are noticeable and a strong presence of WOS Emerging Sources Citation Index papers. Research perspectives are represented in the network of clusters of connected terms. If the search is based on a narrower sense of strict urban tourism, then tourism-business topics predominate. If tourism and cities are less closely linked, socio-cultural and environmental-spatial perspectives emerge, as does tourism/cities vulnerability (climate change and health issues).

The construction of a search syntax for the purpose of retrieval is always marked by compromises, given different terminological usages. A narrow search query will miss many relevant documents. On the other hand, if the query is too general, it returns less relevant documents. To this end, this paper tested queries on three different levels of inclusivity or selectivity. More consistent use of terms would benefit authors in the field of urban tourism when searching for references (information retrieval) and, as a consequence, would allow better integration of the field.

This study provides a practical method for evaluating cities and tourism in combining the expertise of an information scientist and a sociologist. It points out numerous caveats in information retrieval. It offers an overview of publishing just prior to the outbreak of Covid-19, thus providing an opportunity for further comparative studies.

This study is the first to examine urban tourism using such a method and can serve as a complement to the existing systematization of qualitative approaches. The findings are consistent with numerous qualitative assessments of weak the research interconnection between the specifics of cities and tourism in terms of broader socio-spatial processes. However, the study suggests that such research linkage is increasing, which is noticeable in relation to issues of social sustainability (e.g. overtourism, Airbnb and touristification).

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 challenge the current educational methods taking place in Danish lower secondary school by introducing the concept of education for sustainable development (ESD) to help managers and teachers facilitate an action-oriented approach aimed at potentiating the level of sustainability and environmental awareness.

This conceptual paper is based on the relevant literature and examines the necessity to move beyond traditional education curricula by offering a new practical sustainable framework for facilitating ESD at Danish lower secondary schools. A particular focus relates to evaluating and adopting sustainable approaches in the educational literature that is sufficiently sensitive to practical changes in Danish lower secondary teaching methods.

With the purpose of generating awareness about climate change and students’ ecological footprint to lower secondary school students in Denmark, it was found that embedding ESD in the Danish curriculum would be an important tool for this purpose. The authors outline practical recommendations for managers at the lower secondary school level.

This conceptual paper addresses the core issue of traditional education in Danish lower secondary schools by suggesting to adopt the educational framework of ESD. To this end, the authors have offered a variety of specific practical suggestions accordingly to how traditional education can be redesigned by focusing on action-oriented learning and future-oriented ESD. Furthermore, the authors propose that certain educational components of smart cities might promote an underlying commitment to meet the core issues of climate change, as this has yet to be examined. The research on ESD for managers at the Danish lower secondary school level is fairly limited to date.