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Growing environmental challenge awareness among consumers is today's business reality that pushes for sustainable product development. Governments, industries, and consumers' attention are significantly moved from traditional products to eco-friendly product development. Green product development is the future for manufacturing businesses' survival in most markets. Green product development is an emerging phenomenon and, unfortunately, lacks theoretical and empirical research regarding effective organizational policies and practices for green product development. This study aims at filling research gaps towards green product development by highlighting green employee aspects influenced by leadership for sustainable business growth. The study hypothesized relations between the green effect of transformational leadership on green product development as an outcome through green behaviour, green climate, and green innovative creativity. Data was collected from small and medium enterprises (SMEs) of Karachi through a self-administered survey questionnaire. Results revealed significant support for hypothesized relations through the partial least square statistical tool. This study contributes theoretical and empirical advancement in past literature wherein leadership style influences employee behaviour that leads to predict product development from an environmental perspective. Study inferences suggest for visionary green leadership style for sustainable business growth. Limitations of this study regarding other variable inclusiveness, sampling, and geography are potential extensions for further scholarly investigation.

The development puts the problem under consideration in a strategic light and gains attention with its wide comprehensiveness on the plane of unification of the activity of several modern scientific fields, which have always had intersections, but in their essence perform rather different roles – human resources management (HRM), public relations (PR), and sustainable development (SD). Examining the possibilities of applying innovative approaches in the research of these areas, in the context of the influence of digital and smart technologies and an entirely new scientific field. In this sense, the theoretical substantiation of the thesis on the synergy between HR, PR, and sustainable development is targeted in the aspect of highlighting contemporary challenges and the relevant response to achieve organizational effectiveness, based on knowledge of the impact of digitization processes and their connection with the development of human capital in the organization.

Emphasis in the present work is placed on the relationship between the management of human capital in the organization and the influence of digital and smart technologies on these processes. Focus in the research is placed in three directions – first of all – the role of digital/smart/technologies on sustainable development. Second, the impact of digital and smart technologies on green human resource management is explored, and third, emphasis is placed on the changed role of strategic communications in the context of the digital revolution.

The development brings out some good practices and ideas in the described areas.

The study reported in this chapter was designed to investigate how managers representing public relations (PR), human resources (HR), and corporate social responsibility (CSR) departments use their organizations’ CSR initiatives to attract, engage, and retain job-seeking Millennials. To direct attention to a region that has been plagued with employee attraction and retention issues, this study focused this phenomenon as experienced by organizations located in the state of Michigan. Findings identify ways PR, HR, and CSR departments work together to infuse work cultures with CSR thinking. Four main themes and 14 subthemes emerged among interview data – suggesting that employee recruitment activities should evolve to more fully consider CSR in terms of employee value propositions, organizational culture, and empowering and developing employees.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the ways in which academic researchers frame and conduct sustainability research and to ask to what extent we are limited by these frames.

Our approach is based on an epistemological critique. We begin with a discussion of the ways in which sustainable consumption has been conceptualised within marketing; we question the influence of positivist social science research traditions and examine how research on sustainability is impacted by the structure of academia.

Our critical reflection leads us to suggest three ways in which sustainability research might be re-framed: a reconsideration of language, a shift in the locus of responsibility and the adoption of a holistic approach.

We propose that in order to make progress in sustainability research, alternative frames, terms, units of analysis, method(ologies) and research ambitions are needed.

By making visible our collective, unexamined assumptions, we can now move forward with new questions and agendas for sustainability research.

How can large international financial firms go green in authentic ways? What enhances ‘Net Zero action’? Changes in global banks, fund managers, and insurance firms are at the heart of green finance. External change pressures – combined with problematic firm predispositions – exacerbate barriers to change and promote scepticism about authentic Net Zero change. Field research reveals main elements, connections, and interactions of this question by considering financial firms as complex socio-technical systems (Mitleton-Kelly, 2003). An interdisciplinary/holistic narrative approach (De Bakker et al., 2019) is adopted to design a conceptual framework that can support a green ‘behavioural theory of the financial firm’ (green BTFF). The BTFF presents an international version (Peng, 2001) of the resource-based view (RBV) of the firm (Barney, 1991; Hart, 1995; Teece et al., 1997).

The approach of this chapter is aimed at closing knowledge gaps and realign values in financial markets and society. By raising awareness about organised hypocrisy and facades (Brunsson, 1993; Cho et al., 2015; Schoeneborn et al., 2020) in financial firms the chapter aims at overcoming the gap between ‘talking’ and ‘walking’ in the financial sector. The chapter defines testable firm-level hypotheses for ‘Green Finance’ (Poterba, 2021) as well as – by implication – tests for ‘greenwashing’.

The range of tasks and demands placed on a school principal can seem to change daily, and indeed, this appears to be a defining element of the role. Leadership in an education setting is special. Fortunately there are specific purposes associated with education that school leaders can employ as guides to action. One of these key purposes relates to ideology and socialization. School principals are responsible for defining and shaping the culture of their institutions in ways that will model and reflect the needs and priorities of the community. In recent years, this has come to include recognizing and responding to the ever-growing concern for our environment. One way this social justice issue has manifested itself in schools is through a trend known as the green school movement. To define and further understand how green school leadership might be different from that of traditional school leadership, research was carried out to investigate how principals lead and manage in green schools and how the environmental missions are promoted and advanced on a daily basis by school based advocates in administrative roles. To conduct such an inquiry, five school principals were observed and interviewed on multiple occasions to gain an understanding of how they lead and influence their schools through their role as a principal.

The aim of this chapter is to develop a conceptual model for the analysis of sustainable development and the ranking of cities based on selected standard criteria and metrics of smart cities. The conceptual framework contains standard and measurable indicators that influence the creation and survival of smart cities that could be self-sustaining, Green Resilient. We can measure the level of smartness of cities from two perspectives, first from the point of view of the degree of automation of services, infrastructure, buildings, transport, etc. and second from the point of view of planning the further development of the city in order to raise the quality of life of its citizens. Indicators should satisfy the principles of specificity, measurability, availability, relevance and timeliness (Schomaker, 1997). Researchers in the field of smart cities define different sets of characteristics, on which they construct a system of indicators that together describe the degree of development of a smart city. It must be taken into account the fact that there is no single set of indicators that would refer to the level of smartness of the city. It is a complex phenomenon, which occurs differently depending on the conceptual framework and the goal of classifying cities according to the complex characteristics of smartness, especially if you take into account the fact that the general well-being and quality of life of citizens are more important than only indicators of the quality of city services.

This chapter aims to contribute to the literature on sustainability in the public sector by discussing how human resource and human resource management can help to integrate environmental management into organizations and improve environmental performance. Public sector scholars have neglected the study of Green Human Resource Management (GHRM) until now. Nevertheless, implementing such practices could lead to positive outcomes regarding awareness of environmental issues, organizational reputation and attractiveness, job satisfaction and organizational performance. The authors discuss the relevance and the necessity of developing a field of research on GHRM in public organizations. Starting from a conceptual review of the main literature on GHRM, this chapter provided some directions for future research.