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This paper is intended as an original contribution to researching ESG from a PR perspective, as well as offering a case study of the use of letters as a mode of corporate communication.

The methodology is interdisciplinary but is centred on a critical discourse analysis of the organizational rhetoric on ESG in the annual letters of BlackRock CEO Larry Fink from 2018 to 2023. The article also considers the content of the BlackRock letters alongside the campaign rhetoric deployed by opponents to ESG over the same period.

The analysis of the letters showed up a difference in tempo and tone between the courteous, collaborative and somewhat “corporate” style of text in the Fink letters and the more urgent and confrontational tone of opponents that adopted a populist line of argumentation against ESG in general and Larry Fink and BlackRock in particular.

While advantages can accrue to CEOs and corporations for speaking out on issues, there are also perils awaiting in the contemporary environment for opinion. The findings suggest it is also important to gauge the intensity of cultural and political division in society when speaking out on contentious issues and make a judgement on whether to proceed based on that analysis. Moreover, in countries where the middle ground of public opinion has eroded, ideology and cultural affiliations can prevail instead of openness to argument and counter-argument on topics such as climate change.

The paper presents a fresh case study of a CEO who has been prominent in shaping the discourse on ESG, which has itself become is a matter of contemporary relevance to public relations. The findings offer original insights that are additive to existing guidance and criteria for CEOs deciding to speak out on issues on behalf of their organizations.

Modular capacity units enable rapid reconfiguration, providing tactical flexibility to efficiently meet customer demand during disruptions and ensuring sustainability. Moreover, the Physical Internet (PI) enhances the potential of modular capacity in addressing efficiency, sustainability, and resilience challenges. To evaluate the sustainability and resilience advantages of the PI-enabled reconfigurable modular system (PI-M system), this paper studies a PI-enabled sustainable and resilient production-routing problem with modular capacity.

We develop a multi-objective optimization model to assess the sustainability and resilience benefits of combining PI and modular capacity in a chemical industry case study. A hybrid solution approach, combining the augmented e-constraint method, construction heuristic, and hybrid adaptive large neighborhood search, is developed.

The experimental results reveal that the proposed solution approach is capable of obtaining better solutions than the Gurobi and the existing heuristic in a shorter running time. Moreover, compared with the traditional system, the PI only and traditional with modular capacity systems, PI-M system has significant advantages in both sustainability and resilience.

To the best of our knowledge, this study is the first to integrate the PI and modular capacity and investigate sustainability and resilience in the production-routing problem.

This paper aims to explore how one elementary school administrative team responded to their changing student populations to include Latin(x) within their black community. The responses included looping practices, relationship building with families and culturally relevant pedagogies. In particular, this paper considers how the three aspects of the change worked together toward the goal of providing its students with quality educational opportunities and enhancements.

The research presented here is part of a longitudinal (four-year) qualitative study where ethnographic approaches to data collection were adopted.

The four-year immersion in the values of culturally relevant pedagogy created a reciprocal growth in understanding among the teachers and the students of the black and Latin(x) populations, sustained the overarching ideas of deep family connections and contributed to asset-driven curriculum.

A national trend shows rapid changing demographics where Latin(x) families are moving into black neighborhoods and schools. This change in schools’ student populations finds educators facing new challenges in addressing the educational and cultural needs of two minoritized populations. This research adds to the existing scholarship by documenting how one school shifts their learning atmosphere to deeply engage students in culturally relevant pedagogies.

In this chapter, we contribute to ongoing discussions surrounding decolonising research and teaching in higher education by considering the place of language and linguistic diversity within this decolonising turn. The question we explore is how academic researchers and lecturers can recognise and respect that a move to decolonise will involve engaging with epistemologies expressed in different languages and expressed from diverse worldviews. We take inspiration from the work of linguistic citizenship researchers who make explicit the links between knowledge systems, languages and issues of equality/inequality. In linguistic citizenship, research connections are made between the everyday practice of translanguaging, moving between different linguistic repertoires by multilingual speakers, and transknowledging or the fluid movement between differing systems of knowing. To explore the potential of using the concepts of translanguaging and transknowledging as tools in the task of decolonising higher education research and practice, we discuss in depth two published research studies for critical reflection.

Based on the social penetration theory and affect theory of social exchange, this study aims to examine the relationship between authentic leadership (AL) and workplace loneliness (WL), as well as the mediating effect of interactional justice (IJ) on this relationship during the COVID-19 pandemic in the US higher education sector.

An online, self-administrated questionnaire was distributed to full-time employees working at higher education institutions in the USA. A total of 464 employees participated in the survey, with structural equation modeling being used to analyze the data.

The outcomes provide evidence that AL is positively related to IJ, whereas the latter is negatively associated with WL. Moreover, IJ fully mediates the relationship between AL and WL. Overall, the findings underline the importance of IJ in affecting employee WL.

The outcomes provide valuable insights for higher education leaders and HR professionals in reducing employee WL. In particular to this end, it is recommended that organizations focus on improving employee IJ and AL perceptions. Furthermore, higher education organizations need to select and promote leaders who exhibit IJ behaviors and AL characteristics. In addition, organizations could offer IJ and AL training to their current leaders.

This study contributes to the limited literature on WL by offering a unique research model that examines IJ as a mediating variable between AL and WL. In addition, it adds to the literature by investigating WL in the context of US higher education sector, which is an understudied area in this research context.

The goals of this research study included evaluating the outcomes of Interdisciplinary Science Threshold Experience (InSciTE) on student experience of science discipline, level of sense belongingness to a large Faculty of Science (FoS), outcomes in learning science literacy skills and whether a student's background played a role in the differences of effects of the high-impact teaching practices. InSciTE was designed to facilitate the transition from high school to a large research-intensive university, and specifically to a FoS with over 6,000 undergraduate students.

The FoS in a Canadian university engaged in the development of a *9 credit program bundling foundational statistics and chemistry courses with integration of aspects of mathematics and biology or physics to create a new first-year, academic interdisciplinary experience called InSciTE. This project-based curriculum emphasized teamwork and leadership, and presented complex interdisciplinary challenges facing today's world. A team-teaching environment consisting of instructors, a lab coordinator and teaching assistants was instrumental for the core InSciTE courses. In addition, the authors utilized a variety of learning practices with interdisciplinary themes to meet the learning outcomes. Course activities included field experience and tours, blended learning and flipped lectures, guest speakers, discovery-based lab activities, group discussions and projects, a capstone research project, and a combination of formative and summative assessments. The authors proposed two hypotheses for the evaluative study; first that the high-impact practices (HIP) will improve students’ experiences and belongingness to science faculty, and second that InSciTE facilitates learning of scientific literacy skills. To assess the effectiveness of InSciTE, the authors used two surveys, the first being the Test of Scientific Literacy Skills (TOSLS), which measures skills related to major aspects of scientific literacy: recognizing and analysing the use of methods of inquiry that lead to scientific knowledge and the ability to organize, analyse, and interpret quantitative data and scientific information. The second survey examined student belongingness, motivation and autonomous learning, combined with demographic data questions.

The results suggest that InSciTE students reported higher feelings of relatedness, group membership, and career aspirations and performed better on the TOSLS compared to students in other science courses.

As a leader in interdisciplinary science, the FoS at a Canadian university developed a full-year course bundling foundational statistics and chemistry courses with integration of some aspects of mathematics and biology or physics to create a new first-year, academic interdisciplinary experience called InSciTE. This project-based curriculum emphasized teamwork and leadership, and presented complex interdisciplinary challenges facing today's world aiming to facilitate transition from high school to a research-intensive university.

This article explores brand positioning and authenticity within the global-local continuum, utilizing the evolution of the Italian rock band, Måneskin, as a case study.

Employing Greimas’s (1987) semiotic framework, I analyze social media and media articles on Måneskin’s success, unveiling consumer perceptions of global, local and intermediate brand positionings and related authenticity dimensions. I particularly uncover a narrative centered on “global” versus “local” brand positioning and their counterparts (i.e. “not global” and “not local”), forming a semiotic square.

In the “global” perception, the band is evaluated in terms of conforming to global standards, while, in the “local” understanding, the emphasis shifts to connections to local roots. In the “glocalization” perspective (global and local), the band’s activities are assessed concerning an integration between global conformity and local connections. The “glalienation” viewpoint (neither global nor local) is related to consistency, in the sense of being unique and avoiding a commitment to either global or local values. The data also highlight issues of inconsistency regarding brand positioning’s contradictions, such as the band’s incoherently merging local and non-local elements.

The proposed structural semiotics approach enriches previous theories by examining authenticity within global-local dynamics, offering insights into various authenticity dimensions and their interplay. It underlines shifts in authenticity perceptions and challenges binary brand positioning, advocating for strategic placement across the global-local continuum. Moreover, it emphasizes leveraging cultural elements and semiotics to effectively communicate authenticity.

The vibration of the rails is a significant source of railway rolling noise, often forming the dominant component of noise in the important frequency region between 400 and 2000 Hz. The purpose of the paper is to investigate the influence of the ground profile and the presence of the train body on the sound radiation from the rail.

Two-dimensional boundary element calculations are used, in which the rail vibration is the source. The ground profile and various different shapes of train body are introduced in the model, and results are observed in terms of sound power and sound pressure. Comparisons are also made with vibro-acoustic measurements performed with and without a train present.

The sound radiated by the rail in the absence of the train body is strongly attenuated by shielding due to the ballast shoulder. When the train body is present, the sound from the vertical rail motion is reflected back down toward the track where it is partly absorbed by the ballast. Nevertheless, the sound pressure at the trackside is increased by typically 0–5 dB. For the lateral vibration of the rail, the effects are much smaller. Once the sound power is known, the sound pressure with the train present can be approximated reasonably well with simple line source directivities.

Numerical models used to predict the sound radiation from railway rails have generally neglected the influence of the ground profile and reflections from the underside of the train body on the sound power and directivity of the rail. These effects are studied in a systematic way including comparisons with measurements.

The high specific strength makes magnesium alloys have a wide range of applications in aerospace, military, automotive, marine and construction industries. However, its poor corrosion resistance and weldability have limited its development and application. Friction stir welding (FSW) can effectively avoid the defects of fusion welding. However, the microstructure, mechanical properties and corrosion behavior of FSW joints in magnesium alloys vary among different regions. The purpose of this paper is to review the corrosion of magnesium alloy FSW joints, and to summarize the protection technology of welded joints.

The corrosion of magnesium alloy FSW joints includes electrochemical corrosion and stress corrosion. This paper summarizes corrosion protection techniques for magnesium alloys FSW joints, focusing on composition, microstructure changes and surface treatment methods.

Currently, this research is mainly focused on enhancing the corrosion resistance of magnesium alloy FSW joints by changing compositions, structural modifications and surface coating technologies. Refinement of the grains can be achieved by adjusting welding process parameters, which in turn minimizes the effects of the second phase on the alloy’s corrosion resistance.

This paper presents a comprehensive review on the corrosion and protection of magnesium alloys FSW joints, covering the latest research advancements and practical applications. It aims to equip researchers with a better insight into the field and inspire new studies on this topic.