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The purpose of this paper is to focus on parents of children with hearing disabilities from Romania and has three objectives. First, it assesses their characteristics regarding use of communication technology. Second, it investigates their opinions regarding the importance of school-based education for healthy lifestyle promotion among their children. Third, it evaluates the availability for their involvement in educational activities using face-to-face approach and communication technology dedicated to helping parents to promote healthy lifestyle among their children, as well as factors which influence this availability.

The study was performed in October–November 2015 in two schools deserving children with hearing disabilities from North-West part of Romania. Anonymous questionnaire were filled in by 182 parents.

The majority of parents recognize the importance of school-based health education and more than 77 per cent totally agree that it should include issues regarding healthy nutrition, promotion of physical activity and smoking prevention. In total, 80.2 per cent of the parents declared that they are interested to participate in educational activities organized periodically at school and 66.5 per cent declared their interest in educational activities developed through communication technology in order to help them to stimulate the adoption of healthy lifestyle among their children. The availability was influenced by residence, educational level, understanding the importance of parents’ involvement, characteristics regarding the use of communication technology.

This represents the first study from Romania investigating the opinions and availability for their involvement with regard to school health education among parents of children with hearing deficiencies. The results have several implications for health education among children with hearing deficiencies and their parents.

This paper presents an analytical framework to understand the complex CSR accountability standard architecture, studying the CSR standardization cycle through the organizational studies perspective. It has two main aims: to discuss the theoretical approach to CSR governance, proposing a matrix to classify international CSR accountability standards; and to study the CSR multi-industry standardization cycle (setting and design, diffusion and implementation), creating an analytical framework to understand the innovative dynamics adopted through CSR standard-setting.

The paper is based on empirical research on global CSR multi-industry standards and the emergence of a regulatory dynamic based on competition-collaboration. The paper's arguments stem from a case study of the Global Reporting Initiative and its inter-linkage and convergence with the UN Global Compact and ISO 26000. The author analyzes this case based on the global governance and institutional dynamics of regulation research.

Based on the study of CSR standards, the paper presents an analytical framework with various elements to analyze CSR accountability standards: scope, type of actors, performance type and mechanisms and type of legitimacy and monitoring strategies. Second, the paper advances the study of emerging inter-linkages between GRI, UNGC and ISO 26000 and analyzes the emergence of a meta-standardization process generated by the competition-collaboration dynamic.

Further research is needed to focus on the role of agency and different stakeholders on the meta-standardization process. Other research has to focus on the institutional logic and the multi-level analysis of the convergence between CSR standards and the self-regulation advanced process. In this respect, this research serves to demonstrate the leading innovative role adopted by private actors (mostly companies) in developing private standard setting for global governance.

The value of this paper is its analysis of the main convergence dynamic adopted by the most popular, global-scope CSR multi-industry standards, GRI, UNGC and ISO 26000. The findings show how this standardization cycle helps a new collaborative governance dynamic to emerge based on the adoption of private standard-setting. The paper is also useful for practitioners, helping them understand the growing convergence among CSR multi-industry standards, and how the convergence of sustainability reporting processes is advancing towards the integration and drafting of homogeneous guidelines with the prevalence of the GRI model.

The intellectual and academic legitimacy of Comparative Education has been a critical issue in the international debate for a long time now. The fragility of the field is well known and understood. Despite frictions and misunderstandings, there are academic and professional structures robust enough to sustain the identity of the field in numerous countries on all continents. In Romania, there are no systematic concerns related to Comparative Education as an epistemologically autonomous field. Moreover, we cannot even argue for the existence of enough academic infrastructures to support Comparative Education as a research direction. But as countries in the world cannot afford to ignore global trends in terms of economy, technology, culture, Romania cannot disregard developments of educational policies and practices in Europe and throughout the world. Globalization and interconnections between contemporary societies raise common challenges for education systems in the world, and these are eventually reflected in national academic discourses. The major objectives of the present chapter are the following: (1) proposing an inventory of causes that led to the delay in establishing Comparative Education as an autonomous research field in Romania and (2) identifying progresses and accumulations that could lead to establishing Comparative Education as an explicit rather than tangential research field in Romania.

THE joint publication, by the Institute and Society of County Treasurers, of Public Library Statistics for 1963–4 provides material of considerable topical interest at this time. The Public Libraries and Museums Act 1964 came into force on 1 April 1965 and only a day or so before this date the Department of Education and Science issued Circular 4–1965, which, in addition to giving a general description of the provisions of the Act, includes an appendix drawing attention to the report of the Ministry of Education published in 1962 (“Standards of Public Library Service in England and Wales”) which, the Circular says, “gives guidance on the factors to be taken into account in considering the adequacy of the service”.

Academic innovation strives to benefit from an ample talent pool, and entrepreneurship and research competitions constitute an integral part of the effort. This prompts discussions about how to optimize the impact of interdisciplinary learning, especially for less-traditional participants. The main purpose of this article is to describe how synergies between research and business plan competitions can facilitate inclusive engagement and enhanced development of transferable skills.

A case illustration addresses the following questions: (1) what skills can be enhanced through a single project toward parallel participation in research and business plan competitions? (2) How can synergies between research and business plan competitions support more inclusive student development? The case illustration outlines the process and outcomes of an initiative with three first-gen business students, two female and two international.

The case illustration describes how synergies and alignments of deadliness between research and business plan competitions enhanced the learning process by facilitating more opportunities to showcase learning and receive feedback. In addition, the parallel preparation facilitated student inclusion by providing purposeful authentic practice in a project envisioned by the students. As a result of the 2019 learning experience, students and their employers continue to value in 2021 the effective development of transferable skills.

Previous studies examine independently entrepreneurship initiatives, science technology engineering arts and mathematics (STEAM) initiatives, transferable skills and pedagogy that support inclusive education. This manuscript describes the option of synergies between research and entrepreneurship competitions to support more inclusive student development. In addition, it provides recommendations for impact when scaling-up synergies.

The purpose of this paper is to expand the field of sustainability/corporate social responsibility research to include a focus on leadership. It aims to present an exploratory study of senior leaders in organizations formally adopting principles of sustainability and how these leaders enact the tasks of leadership: setting direction, creating alignment, and maintaining commitment within the context of sustainability.

The study uses a qualitative approach, sampling senior executives from organizations formally adopting sustainability practices and using a structured interview to uncover their leadership practices related to sustainability.

Leaders adopting sustainability practices are similar to other “effective” leaders and yet they also have additional capacity and mindset to include a wider expanse of stakeholders and a different mindset as to the purpose of organizations.

Limited sample of senior executives/CEOs, as well as a difficulty in attesting an organization's level of commitment to sustainability; this research links the field of leadership to the field of sustainability and calls for a more in‐depth investigation into the roles leaders and leadership play in the successful implementation of sustainability practices.

Leaders interested in pursuing a sustainability agenda should pay attention to how the concept is framed and introduced into the organization; they should build capacity in their systems (educational, communication, rewards, performance, etc.) and culture to support sustainability, and broad and deep stakeholders engagement is essential for success.

One of the main challenges of organisations today is how to navigate their development into ideal sustainable organisations. However, each readiness level requires a different rubric of indicators. Therefore, this study develops a corporate sustainability maturity model (CSMM), which can be used by organisations to conduct self-assessments, identify their current sustainability maturity levels and transition into mature sustainable organisations.

This CSMM comprises various maturity domains, sub-domains and levels as well as a rubric of indicators for assessing the maturity of corporate sustainability. In its development, a systematic literature review examined existing maturity models, after which a pilot study, based on the literature review, content analysis and expert interviews, was used to create a prototype of the CSSM. Finally, the model was refined and expanded by considering practitioners' feedback and the tendencies of other sustainability maturity models.

On the basis of the findings, some Indonesian organisations conducted sustainability activities, without having a strategic plan. Moreover, the factors driving organisations to conduct sustainability efforts included external and internal pressure. However, typical factors, such as awareness of sustainability and organisational reputation gained from conducting sustainability activities, were insignificant in the sample.

This CSMM is the first sustainability maturity model developed for readiness assessment in an Indonesian context. Through this CSMM, organisations can determine their current readiness level of sustainability maturity and choose the correct indicators to help improve each sustainability domain in the matrix.

With the growth of organizations and businesses, customer acquisition and retention processes have become more complex in the long run. That is why customer lifetime value (CLV) has become crucial to sales managers. Predicting the CLV is a strategic weapon and competitive advantage in increasing profitability and identifying customers with more splendid profitability and is one of the essential key performance indicators (KPI) used in customer segmentation. Thus, this paper proposes a stacked ensemble learning method, a combination of multiple machine learning methods, for CLV prediction.

In order to utilize customers’ behavioral features for predicting the value of each customer’s CLV, the data of a textile sales company was used as a case study. The proposed stacked ensemble learning method is compared with several popular predictive methods named deep neural networks, bagging support vector regression, light gradient boosting machine, random forest and extreme gradient boosting.

Empirical results indicate that the regression performance of the stacked ensemble learning method outperformed other methods in terms of normalized rooted mean squared error, normalized mean absolute error and coefficient of determination, at 0.248, 0.364 and 0.848, respectively. In addition, the prediction capability of the proposed method improved significantly after optimizing its hyperparameters.

This paper proposes a stacked ensemble learning method as a new method for accurate CLV prediction. The results and comparisons support the robustness and efficiency of the proposed method for CLV prediction.

The concept of corporate social responsibility (CSR) covers a wide range of actions toward sustainable development. While there are growing bodies of research examining the drivers of CSR, little has been done to examine the effect of the characteristics of the managerial team on CSR. This paper aims to investigate the interplay between managerial characteristics and CSR practices to discover how such a fit affects financial performance.

A partial least squares-path modeling approach was applied to a sample of 60 French companies in the tourism sector (hotels, restaurants, leisure and leisure equipment) from 2014 to 2019. This choice was triggered by the importance of this sector in job creation, which has been strongly impacted by the pandemic crisis.

The findings suggest the positive impact of the managerial characteristics on the practices of CSR activities under certain financial constraints related to the size and indebtedness level. Then, the authors clarify that the variable characteristics component of the managerial team is mainly the educational level, the managerial experience and the ethical behavior. However, no age effect is mentioned. Third, the authors show that the managerial team characteristics and the practices of CSR activities restore the financial tourism sector performance.

This study has obviously certain limitations: first, the selected European sample can mark a big difference in the founding results because of the difference in civil rights. Second, the sample is more marked in the CSR activities. Third, this study did not take into consideration variables operationalizing ownership structure and board nature.

This study develops a model based on “managerial team” mechanisms in a sensitive area. This is a breakthrough in understanding the determinants of CSR strategies and their impact on performance while taking into account the management team’s personal characteristics.