Search results

This study aims to investigate whether consumers and small businesses can transition from disposable to reusable coffee cups, using a community social marketing intervention, led by a Social Purpose Organisation.

An emergent case study approach using multiple sources of data developed an in-depth, multifaceted, real-world context evaluation of the intervention. The methodology draws on citizen science “messy” data collection involving multiple, fragmented sources.

Moving from single-use cups to reusables requires collective commitment by retailers, consumers and policymakers, despite the many incentives and penalties applied to incentivise behaviour change. Difficult post-COVID economics, austerity and infrastructure gaps are undermining both reusable acceptance and interim solutions to our dependence upon disposables.

Although the non-traditional methodology rendered gaps and omissions in the data, the citizen science was democratising and inclusive for the community.

Our practical contribution evaluates a whole community intervention setting to encourage reusable cups, integrating multiple stakeholders, in a non-controllable, non-experimental environment in contrast to previous research. This paper demonstrates how small community grants can foster impactful collaborative partnerships between an SPO and researchers, facilitate knowledge-exchange beyond the initial remit and provide a catalyst for possible future impact and outcomes.

To assess the impact at both the outcome and the process level of the intervention, we use Pawson and Tilley’s realist evaluation theory – the Context Mechanism Outcome framework. The methodological contribution demonstrates the process of citizen science “messy” data collection, likely to feature more frequently in future social science research addressing climate change and sustainability challenges.

This paper aims to examine the customer-based and supplier-based trade credit gaps for USA firms from 1970 to 2020.

The authors' study examines USA companies from 1970 to 2020. The authors begin with an analysis of the trends in aggregate working capital, the capital's components and the trade credit gaps. Various regression models are used to estimate the impacts of identified firm characteristics and unidentified sources on customer-based and supplier-based trade credit gaps over time. The authors then decompose the impacts of firm characteristics to further understand whether changing firm characteristics and/or changing sensitivity to firm characteristics drive the variation in trade credit gaps.

There is a gradual reduction in the customer-based trade credit gap and a substantial expansion in the supplier-based trade credit gap. Though identified firm characteristics have dominant impacts on observed trade credit gaps, there is evidence of the effects of time and unobservable factors. The main source of changes in customer-based and supplier-based trade credit gaps lies in changes in sensitivity to firm characteristics. In addition, the authors find that firm age is the factor with the largest average effect on both trade credit gaps when examining the full sample period. However, different firm characteristics appear to be the key driver of variations in trade credit gaps over time and across the two types of trade credit gaps. The authors also find that financial distress has the least impact on both customer-based and supplier-based trade gaps. There are variations in the firm characteristics with the largest impacts when evaluating decade-long evaluation periods.

To the authors' knowledge, this is the first paper to examine the customer-based and supplier-based trade credit gaps. The connection between trade credit and the trade credit's corresponding inventory (INV) component extends prior literature on the joint management of trade credit and INV. The authors analyze both identified firm characteristics and unidentified sources in the search for explanations of the trade credit gaps. Furthermore, the authors' study explores the channels through which firm characteristics affect different types of trade credit gaps. The authors' findings help identify relevant and irrelevant risk factors of corporate working capital policy.

Higher education institutions (HEIs) are increasingly recognizing that their unique functions and expertise in research, education, and community leadership make them essential societal partners for helping achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). However, the sector is not reaching its full potential, or acting fast enough, given the dire state of global progress on the SDGs. There has been a growing recognition that higher education’s (HE) ability to scale up action on the SDGs is hampered by a range of systemic and structural barriers within institutions, the HE sector, and the local and global contexts more broadly. However, many of these barriers and the potential solutions for overcoming them have been known for years, and a key challenge HE now faces is how to put these changes into practice. In this chapter, we build on insights from the work of the Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN) and others on system transformations for sustainable development, as well as our own work on HE engagement with the SDGs, to propose several ‘meta’ reasons that might be hampering efforts to scale up HE action on the SDGs, as well as some suggested approaches for addressing them. These approaches include treating HE as a system, defining better the outcomes we are aiming for, employing adaptive leadership approaches, and investing in genuine partnerships. While a detailed treatment of these approaches is beyond the scope of this chapter, we hope to encourage the HE community to look at this old problem in new ways.

Drawing on conservation of resources (CoR) and speech act theories, the authors tested the relationship between managers’ motivating language (ML) and employee service quality and psychological relatedness and competence as mediating variables between their associations.

Using a convenient sampling technique, the authors collected 366 hotel employees’ opinions in Malaysia and analysed them in partial least squares-structural equation modelling.

Three forms of ML, psychological competence and relatedness correlate with employees’ service quality. Although direction-giving language is correlated with competence, empathetic and meaning-making language are not; thus, competence only mediates the relationship between direction-giving language and service quality. Three types (direction-giving, empathetic and meaning-making) of managers’ communication are correlated with relatedness; thus, relatedness mediates the association between the three types of language and service quality.

Hospitality managers are encouraged to enhance psychological relatedness and competence by practising an appropriate ML. Psychological relatedness and competence are significant mechanisms that enlighten the effects of supervisory communicant on service quality, indicating employees’ need satisfaction should be improved.

Our study contributes to speech act and CoR theories by explaining the relationship between ML, psychological relatedness, competence and service quality.

Young people in rural areas often face barriers when accessing participation opportunities in their municipalities. This affects their voices being heard and their ability to create change. Even though almost half the world’s population lives in rural areas, rural young people’s activism is often overlooked in the literature. In addition, when young people’s activism is explored in empirical research, conceptualisations of activism and methods are often not tailored to rural areas. This chapter, thus, adds to our understanding of young people’s activism in rural municipalities by drawing on a mixed methods case study including thirteen focus groups (FGs; n = 35) and a questionnaire (n = 106) with young people aged 13–17, and semi-structured interviews (n = 11) with teachers from one secondary school in a rural municipality in Germany. Five of the FGs were conducted and analysed by Year 10 students, adding unique insights into participants’ experience of activism. In this chapter, activism is conceptualised as one of the multiple dimensions of citizenship. Activism includes demanding systemic change, individually or collectively, which may include refusing to do things, aiming to prevent laws, raising awareness, and making consumer choices. Rather than being full-time activists, the young people in this study were engaged in only a few forms of activism, often carried out ad-hoc, part-time and in connection with other citizenship activities such as volunteering. Spaces for activism included online, the local municipality, everyday spaces such as the supermarket, and school. Participants experienced multiple barriers when engaging in activism including narratives of non-activist young people, age restrictions, power imbalances and few opportunities for creating change, particularly at participants’ school and in their municipalities.

Utilizing a self-regulatory perspective, the authors examine how narcissism influences perceived negative inequity and the downstream effects on self-enhancement motivation and organizational citizenship behaviors (OCBs) over time.

A total of 689 useable three-wave panel data were obtained via Amazon Mechanical Turk during a three-month period. A latent growth curve modeling approach using EQS 6.4 for Windows was employed to test the hypothesized model.

Results illustrate that individuals with higher levels of narcissism perceive higher levels of perceived negative inequity and then form higher levels of self-enhancement motivation, which prompt more OCB directed toward the organization (OCBO) than OCB directed toward individuals (OCBI). When perceived negative inequity increases over time, narcissists experience a faster increase in self-enhancement motivation, which also leads to a faster increase in OCBO compared to the increase in OCBI.

Theoretically, this study provides theoretical and empirical insights into understanding the process through which narcissists' OCBs are motivated. Practically, this study offers several practical recommendations that help managers manage OCBs effectively in the organization.

This study aims to examine the role of safety governance in ensuring public–private interface ecosystems in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. It aims to highlight the role of safety governance in the complex interfaces of pandemic response mechanisms. The analysis is conducted at the national level, considering safety governance issues in terms of test, confirmed cases, fatality rates, vaccination rate, medical capabilities, Information and communications technology capability, Hofstede’s cultural index (individualism and power distance scores), public safety, personal privacy and national health capabilities.

Using multigovernance theory and technology, organization and environment theory, the authors present a research model that defines four independent factors and country level performance outcomes and conducted analysis of variance tests.

Research findings suggest that countries are classified by diverse groups using multiple criteria (e.g. country size, Hofstede’s cultural indexes, ICT capabilities and Governance index). Countries indicate differences in their policy approaches according to their private and public ecosystems. COVID-19 response performance indicators are substantially different.

This study provides the relevance of the multigovernance theory. The empirical results suggest that effective crisis governance is characterized by vertically integrated organizational hierarchies with horizontally connected communication channels that seek maximum voluntary participation and a high level of motivation of informed societal members as a whole. Crisis events occur occasionally, and livelihood routines demonstrate incredible human agility. Gaining insight of the findings from this article may be useful to respond to future crisis events.

This significant study highlights the political and social factors that define response patterns of different countries regarding COVID-19 response mechanisms. With the wide vaccination administration, the COVID-19 landscape shows differences in these countries. This study is rare in providing research framework using Hofstede cultural value and examines with actual data provided by each national government, World Health Organization and credible information sources.

The paper presents the concept of Solidarity Economy proposed by the Austrian-Brazilian economist and professor Paul Singer who passed away in 2018 at age 86 years in his home in São Paulo. Singer arrived at the concept of Solidarity Economy by mixing utopian socialist thought originated in Europe during the Industrial Revolution with the wisdom of Latin American working people to find alternative paths to the capitalist economic system. Following the teachings of Paul Singer, we, as practitioners and academics, report the first stage of the formation of a popular cooperative in the sector of recycling that occurred between 2019 and 2021 in the Town of Goiás, Goiás, Brazil. Our analysis of this collective endeavour leads to two main lessons: first, Solidarity Economy is an even broader proposal of an alternative to the capitalist economy than Paul Singer imagined, because its roots are not restricted to the European cooperativism of the nineteenth century, and second, economics must be taught in more popular way because the most urgent economic problems affect primarily the working people.

Large class sizes are becoming the norm in higher education against concerns of dropping learning qualities. To maintain the standard of learning and add value, one of the common strategies is for the course convenor to proactively monitor student engagement with learning activities against their assessment outcomes and intervene timely. Learning analytics has been increasingly adopted to provide these insights into student engagement and their performance. This case study explores how learning analytics can be used to meet the convenor’s requirements and help reduce administrative workload in a large health science class at the University of New South Wales.

This case-based study adopts an “action learning research approach” in assessing ways of using learning analytics for reducing workload in the educator’s own context and critically reflecting on experiences for improvements. This approach emphasises reflexive methodology, where the educator constantly assesses the context, implements an intervention and reflects on the process for in-time adjustments, improvements and future development.

The results highlighted ease for the teacher towards the early “flagging” of students who may not be active within the learning management system or who have performed poorly on assessment tasks. Coupled with the ability to send emails to the “flagged” students, this has led to a more personal approach while reducing the number of steps normally required. An unanticipated outcome was the potential for additional time saving through improving the scaffolding mechanisms if the learning analytics were customisable for individual courses.

The results provide further benefits for learning analytics to assist the educator in a growing blended learning environment. They also reveal the potential for learning analytics to be an effective adjunct towards promoting personal learning design.