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Outsourcing of business-logistics services is a well-established business practice that allows an outsourcer to obtain the services or products from a logistics-service provider (LSP). The outsourcer can order a range of logistics services, including but not limited to warehousing, transportation, and forwarding. The outsourcers had traditionally focused on service-provider selection criteria such as costs, quality, and responsiveness while having devoted considerably less attention to how sustainably the practices are carried out. Past research identified different external and internal motivators that facilitate consideration of sustainability in selection of the service providers, whereas the current study investigates the outsourcers’ perception of importance of environmental sustainability in adoption of green logistics practices and selection of LSPs. We use a vantage point of outsourcers (“buyers”) to conduct the quantitative research based on a survey conducted on large manufacturing companies. The findings reveal a (mis)match between the perception of importance and realized inclusion of environmental-sustainability criteria. Ultimately, this study finds a link between the levels of perception and rate of adoption, and provides recommendations for the future adoption of environmental-sustainability criteria in the selection of the LSPs.

Sustainable management requires companies to build up new knowledge to acquire the competencies needed for action. This chapter aims to deliver knowledge about sustainability and knowledge for sustainability. Firstly, we systematically analyse the sustainability literature in the social sciences through a bibliographic analysis and topic modelling using VOSviewer and Mallet software. We outline research directions, themes and critical contributions for each research cluster identified. Additionally, we categorise over 30 definitions of sustainability identified by Meuer, Koelbel, and Hoffmann (2020). Secondly, we enumerate knowledge types needed for effective sustainability transitions of organisations. We trace typologies of sustainable business models and their distinct evaluations of sustainability. In this chapter, we argue that integrating the triad of social, ecological and economic goals is central for sustainability attempts as well as long-term thinking. Therefore, our research offers a comprehensive overview of sustainability in the social sciences supporting researchers and practitioners to navigate this miscellaneous and scattered field. Accordingly, our study is precious to young scholars researching sustainability who want to use the term in an informed and meaningful way.

Socially responsible investing (SRI) funds depart from mainstream finance by incorporating environmental, social, and governance considerations, but their success varies across regions. By using a historical comparative case design, we identify an empirically puzzling phenomenon in China: despite an initially favorable resource environment and the presence of socially skilled institutional entrepreneurs, SRI wanes over time in Hong Kong but survives in Mainland China where initial resource endowments and actors’ social skills were inferior. By comparing four periods of SRI development, we reveal how state sustainable development policies, a change in the institutional context, led unintentionally to a shared orientation and a public pool of resources, which sustained the SRI niche. Our paper contributes to research on market emergence, institutional change, and cultural entrepreneurship.

The circular economy (CE) proposes that all materials flow in a close-looped system. Waste generated by one production stage may be useful in another. Thus, the idea of a CE is linked to the goal of zero waste (ZW) and promotes a range of sustainable economic, social and environmental benefits in each sector. When we apply this to construction waste management, waste can be managed through reducing, recycling, upcycling and reusing. However, there is an inevitable cost implication associated with this process due to the additional requirement of inventory and waste processing, and this becomes a disincentive to implementing the CE. Formal institutions, referring here to legal rules and regulations, play a critical role in motivating firms and individuals towards a CE. As different countries have different government rules and regulations, and there is limited research on their differences, we review Asia’s and Europe’s legal rules and regulations relevant to the goal of ZW and CE in the construction sector.

Despite an intensified anti-corruption campaign, China's economic growth and social transition continue to breed loopholes and opportunities for big corruption, leading to a money-oriented mentality and the collapse of ethical standards, and exposing the communist regime to greater risk of losing moral credibility and political trust. In Hong Kong, the setting up of the Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC) in 1974 marked the advent of a new comprehensive strategy to eradicate corruption and to rebuild trust in government. The ICAC was not just an anti-corruption enforcement agency per se, but an institution spearheading and representing integrity and governance transformation. This chapter considers how mainland China can learn from Hong Kong's experience and use the fight against corruption as a major political strategy to win the hearts and minds of the population and reform governance in the absence of more fundamental constitutional reforms, in a situation similar to Hong Kong's colonial administration of the 1970s–1980s deploying administrative means to minimize a political crisis.

Women from many cultures have historically been closely tied to the land and the environment through their role as subsistence farmers. But as the more developed nations have shifted to commercial agriculture and improved technology, farming has become a male-dominated industry. China’s shift from traditional family-operated farms to government-controlled collectives required a system of incentives to encourage agricultural labor to remain and prevent mass exodus to the cities. Hukou was created in the 1950s as a system of governmental registration for restricting the internal migration of labor within China, identifying citizens’ residency by place of birth. Residents of rural or urban locations are classified agricultural or nonagricultural labor, respectively. But as China’s industrialization has grown and technology has reduced the need for human agricultural labor, the need and desire for urban employment has intensified. For women, relocating has changed marriage practices, influenced child rearing, and altered their right to land tenure in their home region. This paper examines the role of gender in the changing use of hukou in the development of China, focusing on the impact of women’s patterns of migration on land tenure. Although hukou policies are still changing and there is a lack of data on the most recent changes, initial studies show that there are few who wish to give up their rural hukou in order to obtain urban hukou. Changes over the past decade indicate that rural woman are not only taking on more of the agricultural workload as men are drawn to urban employment, but also that they are less likely to care about environmental degradation in China.

Since the beginning of the new millennium, Confucian doctrines on one’s self-cultivation have been re-introduced to curriculum in China. The revived cherish of the Confucian legacy in the twenty-first century is a reverse from the official rejection of Confucianism in the Mao era (1950–1976). It also appears as a counterweight to the individualism proliferating among the Chinese youths born at the beginning of the new millennium (Gen Z). The re-introduction of Confucianism is thus ideologically purposeful. Yet how does the mixed exposure to Confucius’ legacy and the modern idea of self-awareness impact this cohort of young people, in particular their way of learning? This chapter focusses on Chinese Gen Z studying in Australia. Using the Bourdieuan theory of human habitus, this chapter examines how these students negotiate between the ideas of self-cultivation and self-awareness, and what implications such experiences have in an intercultural academic community.