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This paper highlights an assignment in a combination upper-division undergraduate and graduate civic leadership class at a Midwestern state comprehensive university. The three-part assignment challenges students’ critical thinking skills and research capabilities while simultaneously necessitating the exploration of contrasting viewpoints on contentious issues.

Intentionally exposing students to diverse perspectives in a controlled environment.

We posit that the severity and frequency of these issues can be mitigated through focused efforts.

Students are better prepared to engage in civil debate on controversial topics, which continuously divide our communities, after completing a class using this pedagogical strategy.

Using a decolonial framework for thinking about knowledge, education and internationalisation, this chapter critically unpacks the historical and contemporary complexities in South African higher education, including the colonial roots of higher education and internationalisation, the Eurocentric hegemony and white domination during colonialism and apartheid, and the lack of epistemic decolonisation in post-apartheid South Africa. The chapter shows how the way internationalisation has been practiced by universities since the end of apartheid has contributed to the maintenance of Eurocentric hegemony and coloniality of knowledge. The chapter highlights the need to rethink, reconceptualise and redefine internationalisation, and unpacks a new definition of internationalisation which takes into consideration historical complexities, contemporary realities and challenges, and the need for epistemic transformation and decolonisation in South African higher education. This is in line with Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s decolonial ‘quest for relevance’ of education and knowledge to the people, places and regions in which universities operate, while looking outwards at the world and critically engaging with the plurality of worldviews, ideas, knowledges and ways of knowing. Such a quest could allow students to critically interrogate and understand their being and place in the world, as well as their relationships and linkages to others around the globe.

Strategic flexibility (SF) has become increasingly important for firms because of the fast changes in the external environment. In line with the practical importance of SF, an emerging research field has developed around it that has attempted to understand the nature of SF and the key relationships. The aim of this study is to unveil the semantic structure of the recent literature on SF and to suggest new promising areas for future research.

The authors conduct a systematic literature review with a bibliographic analysis technique, which allows authors to identify the main recent streams in the literature, as well as offer reflections and suggestions for future research.

The authors uncover three main emerging areas in the research on SF, namely SF as a dynamic capability, the role of knowledge management for SF and the relationship between a firm SF and the external environment. The authors put forward three avenues for future research on SF: Avenue 1. SF, business model innovation (BMI) and other dynamic capabilities (DC), Avenue 2. Digital technologies and SF/organizational agility and Avenue 3. SF and sustainability. Articles included in the special issue entitled “A strategic perspective on flexibility, agility and adaptability in the digital era” contribute to Avenue 2, thus paving the way for filling some of the identified gaps regarding the relationship between SF and digitalization.

To the best of authors’ knowledge, this is the first literature review on SF that uses a bibliometric approach to draw conclusions on the findings in the literature. The review contributes to the theoretical understanding of SF by illustrating and explicating core topics that have persisted over time, as well as by presenting three main avenues for further developing authors’ knowledge around SF.