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This paper aims to illustrate how service ecosystem governance may provide a suitable ground to pursue holistic resilience to “wicked” socio-economic and ecological problems, for enhancing “place-based” sustainable performance outcomes through an organizational, interorganizational and context setting.

This work suggests the use of “place-based” collaborative ecosystem platforms driven by a dynamic performance governance approach as a setting where facilitated performance dialogue is carried out among networked stakeholders. This fosters a holistic view of performance sustainability where intangibles, inertial, cultural and behavioral factors play a key role in policy analysis.

The paper illustrates how different research streams framing stakeholder relationships under a business, hybrid organization and public sector perspective converge toward the “service ecosystem” construct, as a common field for sustainable “place-based” value creation. This performance governance perspective frames accountability for achieving sustainable outcomes through interconnected viewpoints, i.e. (1) time (short vs long-term), (2) subject (single organization, “theme-focused” service ecosystem and “place-based” service ecosystem) and (3) field (socio-economic, cultural and ecological).

This work has an interdisciplinary track. It recommends feedback and “stock-and-flow” modeling to enhance framing counterintuitive patterns of behavior of dynamic complex socio-economic, cultural and ecological subsystems within “place-based” collaborative ecosystem platforms. Combining an inside-out with an outside-in view triggers sustainable outcome-based dynamic performance governance through an organizational, interorganizational and context setting.

This study aims to understand why some social and environmental reporting (SER) regulations are more successful than others in modifying collective corporate reporting behaviour and expectations. More specifically, it presents a qualitative and historically informed exploration of the construction of the enabling conditions for corporate adoption of SER regulation in a national context.

Drawing on insights from structuration theory and the sociological approach to legal studies, the authors examined the normative persuasion of the first regulation in Spain requiring firms to disclose social and environmental information in a stand-alone report: Article 39 of the Spanish Sustainable Economy Law. The case study is based primarily on 38 semi-structured interviews with relevant actors involved in this SER regulation from 2008 to 2014. Other sources such as legal and policy documents, historical documents, books, press reports and field notes from attendance at technical meetings related to the phenomenon under study help inform and complement the analysis of the interviews.

The analysis reveals that the agency of regulators, regulatees and other relevant actors involved in the SER regulation led to the law becoming a dead letter. However, only by examining the structural circumstances, shaped by history and socio-economic context, can the authors understand how the normative persuasion of law is constructed or undermined.

The study underscores the importance of the national context in developing corporate social responsibility (CSR) regulation and the crucial role of history. The results of this research also suggest that significant progress towards a more transformative CSR regulation cannot be achieved without the support of enabling structures/

Recent SER regulations (European Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive and IFRS sustainability standards, to mention those that are gaining most traction) may not achieve sufficient compliance if those responsible for drafting them do not ensure that the conditions for the emergence of regulatory persuasion are met. Regulators must therefore have a profound understanding of how these conditions are constructed as part of a historical process inextricably linked to the social structures of the environment in which the law is to be applied.

The study reveals the changing landscape of corporate social responsibility, where scientists, academics, NGO activists and civil society organisations struggle to gain some agency in a field populated by actors, such as trade unions or employers, who were constitutive of Western industrial liberal democracies.

This study presents an in-depth and historically grounded analysis of the dynamics involved in creating the conditions that lead to successful SER legislation in a national context.

In this paper, the authors examine the strategies used to reduce labour costs in three public hospitals in South Africa, which were effective and why. In the democratic era, after the revelations of large-scale corruption, the authors ask whether their case studies provide lessons for how public service institutions might re-make themselves, under circumstances of austerity.

A comparative qualitative case study approach, collecting data using a combination of interviews with managers, focus group discussions and interviews with shop stewards and staff was used.

Management in two hospitals relied on their financial power, divisions between unions and employees' loyalty. They lacked the insight to manage different actors, and their efforts to outsource services and draw on the Extended Public Works Program failed. They failed to support staff when working beyond their scope of practice, reducing employees' willingness to take on extra responsibilities. In the remaining hospital, while previous management had been removed due to protests by the unions, the new CEO provided stability and union–management relations were collaborative. Her legitimate power enabled unions and management to agree on appropriate cost cutting strategies.

Finding an appropriate balance between the new reality of reduced financial resources and the needs of staff and patients, requires competent unions and management, transparency and trust to develop legitimate power; managing in an authoritarian manner, without legitimate power, reduces organisational capacity. Ensuring a fair and orderly process to replace ineffective management is key, while South Africa grows cohorts of competent managers and builds managerial experience.

Research on online user privacy shows that empirical evidence on how privacy literacy relates to users' information privacy empowerment is missing. To fill this gap, this paper investigated the respective influence of two primary dimensions of online privacy literacy – namely declarative and procedural knowledge – on online users' information privacy empowerment.

An empirical analysis is conducted using a dataset collected in Europe. This survey was conducted in 2019 among 27,524 representative respondents of the European population.

The main results show that users' procedural knowledge is positively linked to users' privacy empowerment. The relationship between users' declarative knowledge and users' privacy empowerment is partially supported. While greater awareness about firms and organizations practices in terms of data collections and further uses conditions was found to be significantly associated with increased users' privacy empowerment, unpredictably, results revealed that the awareness about the GDPR and user’s privacy empowerment are negatively associated. The empirical findings reveal also that greater online privacy literacy is associated with heightened users' information privacy empowerment.

While few advanced studies made systematic efforts to measure changes occurred on websites since the GDPR enforcement, it remains unclear, however, how individuals perceive, understand and apply the GDPR rights/guarantees and their likelihood to strengthen users' information privacy control. Therefore, this paper contributes empirically to understanding how online users' privacy literacy shaped by both users' declarative and procedural knowledge is likely to affect users' information privacy empowerment. The study empirically investigates the effectiveness of the GDPR in raising users' information privacy empowerment from user-based perspective. Results stress the importance of greater transparency of data tracking and processing decisions made by online businesses and services to strengthen users' control over information privacy. Study findings also put emphasis on the crucial need for more educational efforts to raise users' awareness about the GDPR rights/guarantees related to data protection. Empirical findings also show that users who are more likely to adopt self-protective approaches to reinforce personal data privacy are more likely to perceive greater control over personal data. A broad implication of this finding for practitioners and E-businesses stresses the need for empowering users with adequate privacy protection tools to ensure more confidential transactions.

As a response to challenges that globalization poses, governments often utilize an expansionary fiscal policy, a mix of increased compensation spending and capital tax cuts. To account for these policy measures that are consistent with neither the compensation nor the efficiency hypothesis, this study examines government fractionalization as the key conditional factor.

We test our hypothesis with a country-year data covering 24 OECD countries from 1980 to 2011. To examine how a single country juggles compensation spending and capital taxation policies jointly, we employ a research strategy that classifies governments into four categories based on their implementation of the two policies and examine the link between imports and fiscal policy choices conditioned on government fractionalization.

This study shows that highly fractionalized governments are more likely to implement an expansionary fiscal policy than marginally fractionalized governments as a policy response to economic globalization and import shock.

Our findings imply that fractionalized governments are likely to face budget deficits and debt crises, as the expansionary fiscal policy persists over time.

By examining government fractionalization as one of the critical factors that constrain the fiscal policy choice, this study enhances our understanding of the relationship between economic globalization and compensation or efficiency policies. The arguments and findings in this study explain why governments utilize the seeming incompatible policy preferences over increased compensation spending and reduced capital tax burdens as a response to globalization, potentially subsuming both hypotheses.

Ethical principles and practices frequently support the position that people with disability are vulnerable. Vulnerability in research traditionally infers a need for protection from harm and raises questions over the person’s capacity to consent and engage. In addition, vulnerability in ethics infers a state of permanency and one that is all-encompassing for everyone within the vulnerable groups. This construction of vulnerability in effect legitimises the exclusion of people with disability from research or monitors and restricts how people with disability can engage in research. This results in an implicitly ableist environment for research. In this chapter, which has been led by researchers with disability, we argue that there is a critical need to move beyond a popularised social construction of vulnerability which serves to perpetuate barriers to including people with disability in research. Like all terms, the traditional and popular construction of vulnerability is open to reclaiming and reframing. Under this reconstruction, what is traditionally viewed as a limiting vulnerability can be owned, openly disclosed and accommodated. Following a pandemic-inspired ‘new normal’ that supports flexible workplace practices, and in accordance with UNCRPD goals of inclusive employment and reducing disability inequity, we argue that the pathway for people with disability as career researchers needs an ethical review and overhaul. We provide readers with a practical roadmap to advance a more inclusive academy for researchers with disability.

This chapter presents a study of ‘floral ethics’, defined as a set of standardized practices for handling flowers shared among members of the florist occupation. Drawing on 36 months of ethnographic fieldwork in flower shops in Switzerland and Chicago, it contributes to the sociology of work and professions by providing a nuanced understanding of the tensions that can arise between the professional expertise of florists and the aesthetic preferences of customers. The findings on the micro-level reveal that adherence to floral ethics serves as a strategy for protecting and maintaining occupational legitimacy. By uncovering divergent conceptions of what constitutes ‘work well done’ among florists, this chapter offers a broader argument on the power asymmetry inherent in service relationships.

The higher education sector plays an important role in a nation’s implementation of pro-environmental regulations. Environmental initiatives should be the focal point of a university's mission, and they are expected to be present in everyday academic life on campus. This study aims to propose the extended model of the theory of planned behavior (TPB) to understand the psychological aspects that may enhance the likelihood of university students engaging in environmentally friendly behavior.

This study used a quantitative approach involving a national sample of university student participants (N = 1,608) from various regions across Indonesia. The battery included extended TPB dimension measures (attitudes, norms, behavior control, environmental concern and habits on pro-environmental behavior intention) that were administered in the Indonesian language.

The structural equation modeling analysis revealed that the proposed extended TPB model met fit model indices and significantly predicted participants’ pro-environmental intentions.

This theoretical model has the potential to assist relevant stakeholders and higher education institutions in the development of evidence-based pro-environmental policies and interventions to promote sustainable student behavior.

This study presents a novel approach to understanding the effect of the extended TPB model on participants’ ecological intentions in the Indonesian university setting. This study was among the first to propose a sustainable behavior intention model based on the TPB theory within the Indonesian context. The current findings challenged the established TPB framework and offered fresh insights into the behavioral-psychological interplay within university environmental contexts.