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Research management is slowly being recognised as a profession in Iceland as demands from funders and quality assurance have increased. The Icelandic research community is very small and funding for research is limited. The development of the profession in Iceland is tightly connected to international cooperation in research and participation in international programmes, in particular, the EU framework programmes. This participation has increased the administrative burden on researchers and shown the need for a specific profession that manages all other aspects of the research enterprise. This has slowly developed from being mostly financial management of grants into complete research management from idea to impact. A pivotal moment for research management in Iceland was the founding of ICEARMA in 2012, which has put a spotlight on the role of research managers within institutions, and led to most major research institutions hiring a designated research manager. This has also increased cooperation within the community.

Discussions on tourism development address the urgent need to reduce the negative impacts of tourism on tourist destinations. Despite decades of trying to find potential ways to foster sustainability, however, current tourism development is still mainly driven by political interests and growth agendas. In spite of concepts intending to improve sustainable tourism development, negative dynamics, such as over-tourism and the exploitation of nature and local communities, dominate the current reality of tourism. This article focuses on the concept of degrowth as a potential solution for rethinking tourism policy and practices to ensure greater sustainability. Its aim is to explore the gap between these policies and the academic theories on instigating sustainable change, and the actual reality of the tourism industry, which is primarily driven by economic motivations such as growth.

To explore this dichotomy, this paper investigates the values of tourism lifestyle entrepreneurs. Small businesses are the most dominant group in the industry in terms of numbers. I contend that researching their viewpoint on current developmental trends could lead to valuable insights into how to tackle this gap between theory and reality. This paper also explores how the degrowth paradigm may promote sustainability in tourism, as well as the potential role that tourism lifestyle entrepreneurs could play in this development. The discussion is illustrated by a case study based on interviews with tourism entrepreneurs in Iceland.

The findings indicate that various tourism stakeholders have different approaches to growth, with many tourism lifestyle entrepreneurs tending to embrace degrowth practices by acting according to their value base, albeit sometimes unconsciously. This focus on aspects other than growth could potentially encourage tourism lifestyle entrepreneurs to contribute to sustainable development.

The examples discussed in this paper are locally limited and cannot be generalized due to the small size of the interviewed sample group. The scalability of individual entrepreneurs’ impact is limited due to their small size.

The actions and values applied by these tourism lifestyle entrepreneurs demonstrate how degrowth can be manifest on a small scale: growth is only embraced up to a certain limit, so it oes not exceed social and environmental capacities; from that point on, community well-being plays the key role. This study demonstrates the untapped knowledge tourism lifestyle entrepreneurs could provide to rethinking the tourism industry.

This study demonstrates the importance of shedding more light on ethical issues and values beyond growth in both academic and political discussions. Addressing tourism lifestyle entrepreneurs as smaller-scale actors of tourism degrowth could be a meaningful starting point for holistically rethinking tourism and give them a voice.

This research emphasizes untapped knowledge by acknowledging entrepreneurs and their potential for rethinking tourism development, concluding with recommendations for practice and policy.

This study focuses on the key success factors (KSFs) for strategy implementation in the fisheries industry in Iceland identified by chief executive officers within the industry. The purpose is to provide a comprehensive categorization of KSFs that influence how strategy is mobilized. The secondary aim is to uncover the level of priority that companies place on the dimensions of the United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

The methodology involves qualitative case studies based on in-depth elite interviews with nine chief executive officers of Icelandic fishing companies.

The research indicates strategy implementation can be improved in four main areas. First, by engaging and involving all employees in the implementation process. Second, by enhancing bottom-up innovation and communication. Third, through alignment of the corporate strategy and the UN SDGs, and fourth, by following rigorous action plans with clear, measurable and prioritized objectives and timeframes for the managers to follow. These improvements have both theoretical and practical implications for the fishing industry. Consequently, a conceptual framework for integrated strategy implementation in the fisheries industry is proposed.

A limited number of in-depth elite interviews were conducted since access to the chief executive officers of the country’s largest fishing companies proved challenging. However, the nine companies collectively hold nearly 50% of the country’s total quota, thereby proving a deep understanding of the topic relevant to the industry. The research uncovered a substantial cross-section of viewpoints, and as such, the results are relevant for both academia and practitioners alike.

This study contributes to the debate on KSFs relevant to strategy implementation within a specific industry but also aligns with the UN SDGs by proposing a dedicated framework for implementing strategies in the fisheries industry. Overall, this study can help managers achieve strategy implementation.

The purpose of this paper was to investigate how recordkeepers in Canada, Finland, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Iceland and Italy experienced accomplishing their tasks from home over varying lengths of time during the COVID-19 pandemic.

A multilingual survey including 44 questions was designed and administered to the six countries identified above in 2022. This research was preceded by an environmental scan looking at existing studies considering archival and records management responses to the pandemic.

The impact of working from home on recordkeeping and, more generally, work performance was perceived differently by the survey respondents depending on various factors. The study also identified a number of similarities across countries, such as an increased awareness of the importance of records management shared by organizational actors. Surprisingly, the pandemic did not appear to have a great impact on the perceived quality of records management.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study aiming to capture records professionals’ perceptions of their role while working from home during the pandemic.

Increased emphasis is being placed on developing creative approaches when working with children in research settings, especially with sensitive research topics like violence against children. Community art is a social form of art that gives artists the opportunity to work in collaboration with the public, with the aim of highlighting and addressing specific social issues. This chapter reflects on an art exhibition organised in Reykjavík called Wishes of Icelandic Children. The project was a collaboration between artists and children. The aim of the chapter is to present how an art exhibition may put violence that children experience into focus and encourage attendees to reflect on the subject by looking at descriptive pictures and texts from the Convention on the Rights of the Child and then writing comments about their thoughts and feelings. The research questions are: How do children express themselves about sensitive topics such as abuse and violence? Can community art enable professionals to better support increased participation of children in discussions about abuse and violence? This study involved a qualitative thematic analysis of comments written by children after having seen the exhibition. Three students took part in the analysis process as co-researchers. The exhibition was successful in creating a platform where children could express themselves on topics concerning abuse and violence. Many comments expressed an ardent desire to end violence in society, especially emphasising bullying, which can limit young people's capacity to feel safe and express themselves.

Leadership is an essential contributor to employee creative self-efficacy, and past research suggests a positive relationship between servant leadership and creative self-efficacy. However, the relationship is complex and contingent upon moderating variables, and this research examines the moderating effect of role clarity by drawing on social exchange theory and social cognitive theory.

Data collected from a survey among 116 emergency room employees is used to test the research model using moderated ordinary least squares regression.

The results confirm a positive relationship between servant leadership and creative self-efficacy and suggest a U-shaped relationship between role clarity and creative self-efficacy. Furthermore, role clarity positively moderates the relationship between servant leadership and creative self-efficacy.

The sample used for this research mainly consisted of highly educated employees within a specific setting. Future research is needed to study if the relationships found in this research can be generalized to other organizational settings.

This research suggests that leaders can support employees' creative self-efficacy through servant leadership, particularly when coupled with high role clarity.

Rapidly changing work environments are characterized by decreased role clarity, so attention is needed to its moderating role on the relationship between servant leadership and creative self-efficacy.

This chapter tests theoretically and empirically the existence of a stable relationship between energy consumption and CO2 emissions. Based on microeconomics and physics, a model has been specified and applied to annual data for twenty countries, which representing 61 percent of the world’s population in 2018, over the period 1995–2015. The data are from the International Energy Agency (2019) and econometric techniques including panel data and causality tests have been used. The results indicate that there is a causal relationship between energy consumption and CO2 emissions. In general, consumers cannot directly change emissions caused by production processes, but they can act on emissions caused by their own domestic energy consumption. Approximately three quarters of domestic energy consumption is due to heating and domestic hot water consumption. Taking into account the lower emissions and the lower economic cost of the initial investment, four potential energy systems have been selected for use in heating and domestic hot water. Their social returns have been assessed across nine of the twenty countries in the sample over a lifecycle of 25 years from 2018: France, Portugal, Ireland, Spain, Iceland, Germany, United Kingdom, Morocco and the United States. Cost-benefit analysis techniques have been used for this purpose and the results indicate that the use of thermal water, where applicable, is the most socially profitable system among the proposed systems, followed by natural gas. The least socially profitable systems are those using electricity.

Introducing the concepts of equality, diversity, and inclusion (EDI), the chapter provides an overview of frameworks and approaches used to manage workforce diversity. First, the authors introduce the notion of the old deal based on the uneven relationship between human diversity, nature, and technological innovation. The chapter then explores the new deal between humans, nature, and technology. The authors are providing cases from the EU, Ecuador, Bolivia, and Iceland to show the emergence of the new deal in managing diversity.

This paper aims to focus on the involvement of mental healthcare professionals in a co-design process of a digital healthcare platform. Many people with severe mental disorders need constant support and monitoring, and with long waiting lists and scarce resources in mental healthcare, there is a dire need for innovative digital solutions to counteract those issues. This paper elaborates on a co-design process of a digital platform and mobile app designed for people with mental disorders. The platform primarily considers two perspectives: i) the patients and ii) the healthcare professionals.

This paper is based on canonical action research, where the co-design involvement with 13 healthcare professionals is analyzed and their interactions with three primary scenarios are focused.

The main contribution of this paper is three co-design principles: i) clarity and information accessibility regarding the patient's side, ii) efficiency and flexibility when it comes to the healthcare professional's side and iii) a notification function in the mobile application.

The theoretical contribution is the conceptualization of the three co-design principles that others can use when designing digital platforms in healthcare in general and psychiatric care in particular. The practical contributions are firstly outlined through the co-design process itself, where scenarios to guide the work are used, and secondly, the improvements made in the digital platform derived from the results of the co-design process.

The purpose of this paper is to structure existing research on knowledge management (KM) in small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to offer a comprehensive overview of research strands and topics in KM in SMEs to determine their evolution over time.

The paper, which is considered a follow-up literature review, is based on a systematic literature review that covers 180 scientific papers that were published since the review paper by Durst and Edvardsson in 2012 that covered 36 papers.

The findings of this review and those of the aforementioned review are brought together in the form of an overview that structures research on KM in SMEs based on themes that, in turn, allow the derivation of promising research directions and research questions aimed at structuring future research on KM in SMEs.

By combining the findings of this review with the findings from the review published in this journal in 2012, this paper offers, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, the most comprehensive literature review on KM in SMEs produced to date.