Search results

In a world with over 8 billion people, ensuring sustainable food sources is paramount. This chapter explores the pivotal role of aquaculture in addressing the challenges of marine conservation and sustainable resource use. Aligned with the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goal 14, aquaculture emerges as a solution to relieve pressure on wild fish stocks and enhance food security. The chapter emphasises the rapid growth of this sector and underscores the importance of international cooperation and policies like the Global Ocean Treaty in ensuring marine biodiversity. While acknowledging the potential of aquaculture, the chapter delves into environmental concerns surrounding fishmeal and fish oil in feed. It advocates for innovative technologies and ingredients to establish a circular bioeconomy. The significance of higher education in advancing sustainable aquafeed technology, breeding, and genetics is highlighted, with a discussion on milestones achieved by experts like Dr John E. Halver and Professor Simon J. Davies. Examining technological advances, the chapter explores molecular genetics, transgenics, and gene editing, particularly CRISPR biosciences, as transformative tools for enhancing aquaculture productivity and sustainability. Environmental impacts are addressed, proposing solutions such as Recirculating Aquaculture Systems (RAS) and Multitrophic Aquaculture Systems (MTA) to minimise ecological footprints. Throughout, there is a strong emphasis on the integral role of research and education in fostering sustainable aquaculture practices. The chapter advocates for specialised courses and programs in higher education to prepare the next generation for the challenges and opportunities in aquaculture, ensuring its contribution to global food security and environmental stewardship.

Across many high-stakes contexts, teams influence their members’ physical and psychological Well-Being. For example, teams can provide social support and backup behaviors to reduce demands on team members. On the contrary, teams engaged in conflict or other deleterious processes can serve as a source of stress for their members. Despite these potential impacts, existing research primarily focuses on the impact of teamwork on team-level, rather than individual-level outcomes. This chapter argues that teams play an important role in members’ Well-Being, synthesizing existing research on the topic and focusing on synthesizing research that suggests teams play an important and overlooked role in members’ Well-Being, and providing recommendations for future research in this domain.

In the prior literature, the motivation to adopt wearable fitness technology (WFT) has been linked with either intrinsic or extrinsic. However, how the subcategories of extrinsic motivations (identified, introjected and external) affect the consumers’ WFT adoption decision remains sparse. Furthermore, do regulatory focus (prevention vs promotion) and gender differences the effects of different motivations on WFT adoption is almost unknown in the health-care marketing literature. This study aims to fill the above-mentioned gap and to unfold the WFT adoption beyond the traditional motivation by incorporating the organismic integration theory (part of self-determined theory) and regulatory focus theory.

This study used a questionnaire-based survey. Using the “AMOS” survey, questionnaire responses of 641 respondents were analyzed and validated by using structural equation modeling. All the variables were adopted from the literature.

The results show that intrinsic, identified and external motivations have the greatest impact on consumers’ decisions, while introjected motivation was not significant directly. The moderation effects of regulatory focus are significant in such a way that prevention focus influences the introjected motivation and promotion focus affects the external motivation and WFT adoption decision. Furthermore, the findings on gender moderation suggest that women are more intrinsically motivated, and men are more externally motivated for WFT adoption.

The new insights and contributions of this study provide a better understanding of WFT adoption and help sellers develop more effective marketing strategies.

This study incorporates subcategories of extrinsic motivations to provide a deeper understanding of consumers’ behavior. Furthermore, this study applies a unique framework of organismic integration theory to consumers’ WFT adoption. It is also among very few research that investigate regulatory focus and gender impact on consumers’ WFT adoption.

The research applied service-dominant logic of marketing theory, a customer-centered and relational that principally grounded in service relationships and actor networks. In actor networks, salespeople provide their skills and knowledge, such as expertise, service quality, ethics and shared value to cocreate value for buyers. Therefore, this study explores the attributes of salespeople that influence the quality of the relationship (trust and satisfaction) and, as a result, loyalty in the context of the business-to-business (B2B) relationship in the Taiwan market.

A causal relationship and survey research design are applied. The study collected 266 valid responses from B2B account managers representing various companies and industries. Structural equation modeling (SEM) was applied to test the hypotheses.

The results showed that salespeople’s expertise demonstrated the most significant influence on both trust and satisfaction, followed by ethics, service quality and share value, in a descending order of impact. Consequently, trust and satisfaction had a significant impact on customer loyalty.

The four attributes of salespeople play a pivotal role in establishing lasting relationships and maximizing the customer lifetime value. To achieve long-term success in customer interactions and relationships, a well-rounded salesperson should diligently strive to excel in all these attributes.

The novelty and contribution of this study are twofold. First, investigating the quality of the relationship in the context of Taiwanese manufacturers in a B2B setting is still rare, and this is the study first to explore the Taiwanese B2B relationship with its global customers. As Taiwanese manufacturers play a pivotal role in the global supply chain, the research findings have symbolic meaning and practical implications for global business partners. Second, drawing from service-dominant logic theory, this research takes an integrative view by examining the attributes (expertise, service quality, shared value and ethics) that influence and establish a quality trusting relationship and consumer loyalty in the B2B context.

This paper aims to explore the extent, nature and communication potential of companies’ use of three popular social media platforms (Facebook, X and LinkedIn) to report on sustainability.

Qualitative methodology through the use of the netnography approach was adopted to evaluate the use of social media for sustainability communication by the Top 50 ASX companies. Content analysis of all company posts determined those with social and environmental content. A thematic analysis was performed using the global reporting initiative (GRI) framework to examine the nature of the reporting. The media richness framework was used to measure the communication potential of the social media platforms for sustainability communication.

The results indicated that the extent of sustainability posts on social media represented less than 20% of total social media posts. The nature of posts by the Top 50 ASX companies was higher on social issues than on environmental issues, which is contradictory to many previous studies. The study also found that while the social media platforms afforded high levels of media richness, most companies failed to exploit the platforms’ full potential to disseminate sustainability information.

This work provides both empirical and theoretical contributions to the ongoing debate concerning the use of social media for sustainability communication. The paper extends Lodhia et al.’s (2020) study of social media use for legitimation purposes and adapts Lodhia’s (2004) media richness framework to social media for sustainability reporting. It adds empirical insights into social media’s communication potential and value for communicating sustainability information.

The extent and nature to which organisations use social media to disclose their sustainability performance has significant practical implications for a variety of stakeholders. The results reveal to these stakeholders and the companies themselves the level of utilisation of social media along with the potential that can be harnessed. These results can potentially improve the quantity, timeliness and usability of sustainability reporting using social media platforms.

The study provides valuable evidence to increase understanding of the sustainability social media communication landscape, which organisations can potentially leverage to communicate their messages. Additionally, sustainability awareness is increased across various demographics by disseminating sustainability information to the wider public. This study will assist policy-setters in developing guidance for using social media for sustainability reporting.

This study extends existing literature, particularly the Lodhia et al. (2020) study, which has primarily focused on examining sustainability content in the media with limited exploration of the communication potential of social media platforms to communicate sustainability content.

The purpose of this study is to investigate and analyse the potential of existing buildings in the UK to contribute to the net-zero emissions target. Specifically, it aims to address the significant emissions from building fabrics which pose a threat to achieving these targets if not properly addressed.

The study, based on a literature review and ten (10) case studies, explored five investigative approaches for evaluating building fabric: thermal imaging, in situ U-value testing, airtightness testing, energy assessment and condensation risk analysis. Cross-case analysis was used to evaluate both case studies using each approach. These methodologies were pivotal in assessing buildings’ existing condition and energy consumption and contributing to the UK’s net-zero ambitions.

Findings reveal that incorporating the earlier approaches into the building fabric showed great benefits. Significant temperature regulation issues were identified, energy consumption decreased by 15% after improvements, poor insulation and artistry quality affected the U-values of buildings. Implementing retrofits such as solar panels, air vents, insulation, heat recovery and air-sourced heat pumps significantly improved thermal performance while reducing energy consumption. Pulse technology proved effective in measuring airtightness, even in extremely airtight houses, and high airflow and moisture management were essential in preserving historic building fabric.

The research stresses the need to understand investigative approaches’ strengths, limitations and synergies for cost-effective energy performance strategies. It emphasizes the urgency of eliminating carbon dioxide (CO₂) and greenhouse gas emissions to combat global warming and meet the 1.5° C threshold.

This study aims to examine process improvement strategy (PIS) (proxied by remote work, workforce training, and technological innovation), and employee productivity amid the COVID-19 pandemic among bank employees.

The study employed cross-sectional and descriptive design by applying multistage sampling techniques using convenience sampling to select the study organization and stratified and simple random sampling to select 900 respondents for the study. Data were collected by using validated measures of the study variables designed into a questionnaire. Pearson’s correlation and simple regression analysis were employed to establish relationships and causal effects among variables respectively.

Results showed significant relationships between the PIS (work-from-home, workplace training, and technological innovation) and the outcome variable (employee productivity); and predictive capabilities between the PIS and the outcome variables (employee productivity). The study revealed that remote work accounted for the highest variability (R2 = 0.775) in employee productivity, followed by workplace training (R2 = 0.499), and finally investment in technological innovation (R2 = 0.486)] and as such PIS fosters employee productivity and may, therefore, be applied when faced with a similar pandemic in the future.

The study was recognized for its significance in examining how PIS supports enhancing employee productivity in banks and, by extension, other organizations during a pandemic. The research has proven to be crucial in providing insights into bank management in emerging economies and other organizations worldwide that have previously gone unnoticed during a pandemic. It has aided in the extension of existing literature on PIS and employee productivity by carefully developing a framework, thus covering practical knowledge gaps.