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Since the publication of the 1987 Brundtland Report, discussions about sustainable development have been nothing short of a buzz among politicians and academics. This chapter takes stock of an emerging strand of the sustainable city literature that recognizes local political dynamics, conflicts of interest, and power struggles.

The review is organized into three sections. The first section reviews how past studies have utilized sustainable urban development as an opportunity for advancing theories of urban politics, highlighting recent developments in the growth machine, regulatory state, and risk society theses. The second section examines a range of studies that place the questions of scale, unit, and boundary at the center of inquiry. The third section draws together a body of research that interrogates different meanings of sustainability.

The first section discusses the extent to which social and political processes in the sustainability age exhibit a pattern consistent with established theoretical accounts. The second section focuses on studies that address how urban sustainable development has brought challenges to existing configurations of spatial relations. These studies pose important methodological and epistemological questions for studying environmental politics. In the third section, the focus is placed on political implications of urban sustainable development, which is subject to multiple interpretations.

This chapter ends with a review of an emerging thesis – strategic urbanism, which draws attention to the patterns of change in urban politics. Much of the contributions to this thesis are based on urban sustainability politics in recent years.

In this chapter, we examine the interplay between external legitimacy judgments, internal identity beliefs, and conceptions of sustainability. Based on observation at industry events and interviews with key stakeholders, we examine how organizational actors interpret the concept of sustainability in civil aviation, an industry subject to intense legitimacy threat for its environmental impact. We find that the concept of sustainability is interpreted through a process of naturalization, by which conceptual ties to past practices are forged, and the concept becomes corrupted. We describe three mechanisms (relabeling, bundling, and zooming out) through which concept naturalization occurs, and we show how this process creates resonance between sustainability and an industry ethos, which captures the aspirations, ideals and values of the industry.

University methods instructors emerging from disciplinary silos (art, English, mathematics, science, and foreign language) co-created a seminar to support candidates’ using video reflection. They explored how the Inquiry into My Practice protocol (IMP) could be used as a vehicle to surface Three Durable Practices critical for educators: intentional collaboration, instruction, and reflection.

Grounded in an interactional ethnographic perspective, this analysis draws on two telling cases to examine how the faculty team and teacher candidates co-constructed an intentional ethnographic learning community using physical and video-based practices (TeachingChannel.org).

Three Durable Practices came to life in the IMP, and through this shared and coherent conceptual approach, candidates made visible their process for bridging the disconnected worlds of theory and practice as they took up video analysis of their teaching.

Orienting across disciplinary boundaries to a shared conceptual language with associated protocols, faculty and candidates are afforded approaches to navigate their face-to-face and virtual worlds of practice.

This chapter reports and discusses an empirical study that examines the sustainability practices and strategies of NZ companies. The empirical work for this study was carried out in NZ (Auckland, Wellington, and Waikato) between January and December 2009. There were visits to head offices and regional offices of 15 companies comprising large national and multinational companies (MNCs) operating in NZ. Companies were chosen from different industries including aviation, chemicals, energy and power, financial institutions (banks), pharmaceuticals, retail, and telecommunications.

Is the sharing economy a field? Answering this question is crucial to understanding how sharing organizations look and behave, as well as how the sharing economy might develop. In this chapter, the authors applied two different field conceptions – organizational field and issue field – as a starting point for an explorative empirical analysis. To capture both field concepts, the authors collected relational data and data on organizations’ self-representations to see how organizations engaged in the debate on the sharing economy relate to each other. The observed network of organizations suggests that the sharing economy is an issue field. In addition, the core of this network shows the relational structure of an organizational field. Surprisingly, it is not an organizational field of the sharing economy. Instead, it is a field of organizations heavily engaged in proselytizing new organizational forms that will change other fields. What the authors observed is a new field configuration – the authors call it a disruptive field – that is, less inward-oriented than other fields but much more engaged in changing other fields’ structures and dynamics. With these insights, the authors contribute to institutional research on field configuration and shed light on the phenomenon of the sharing economy and its potential development.

All values are really paradoxes since they are contrasts, like courage–caution, diversity–inclusion and define one another. Values are differences at the end of continua. All metaphors are paradoxical being both like and unlike that to which they refer. Emergency management is a paradox. How can you manage something suddenly emerging like Australian bush fires? It is, however, possible to prepare for a range of events, all infections require masks, social distancing, gowns, disinfectant etc. Many East Asians countries have navigated the current COVID-19 pandemic better than many Western countries by such readiness. The key to resolving paradoxes is dynamic equilibrium, wherein opposed values harmonize and grow ever more salient. All innovation is an exercise in resolving paradox, by creating new wholes out of old and existing parts. These ideas are explored via a commentary of three pieces on paradox in relation to logic, Luhman and emergency management.

To explore the funds of knowledge that six emergent bilingual students build upon as they produce multimodal texts, how the practices surrounding these events are mediated, and the role of student agency within an ethnographic social semiotics framework. Ethnographic methods were used to document this yearlong study that included videotaping small group interactions, writing field notes, conducting interviews, and collecting multimodal work samples. The researcher served as a participant observer in a third-grade classroom where she met with students two days per week to interact with mulitmodal poetry. The findings reveal the media-rich popular culture and home digital practices students bring with them to school and the ways in which these resources were utilized for designing multimodal poetry. Several essential factors are discussed including funds of knowledge, role of play and creativity, nonlinear writing structures, and agentive design decisions. Multimodal text making requires a revamping of classroom literacy instruction that embraces multiple modes especially noting the importance of images, central role of experiential learning, and space for student choice thus empowering them as learners.

Auditors use behavioral red flags (BRFs) to examine which individuals are more prone to unwarranted behavior such as corruption and asset misappropriation. Using a rich data set from the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners (ACFE), we analyze the impact of BRFs on loss sizes from asset misappropriation. We control for antifraud mechanisms established at the company level and other factors both at the individual and the firm level. Performing an exploratory factor analysis yields six factors for BRFs which capture the principal perpetrator's situation both at the private level and the workplace. A general wheeler-dealer attitude and financial distress significantly increase loss sizes. By contrast, we find no evidence that nonmonetary private problems lead to higher losses.

This paper uses Leon Trotsky’s theory of Uneven and Combined Development (UCD) in order to transcend both globalising and methodologically nationalist theories of the global political economy. While uneven development theorists working in economic geography have demonstrated the logical corollary of capitalist development and the completion of the world market in the persistence of geographic unevenness, they fail to specify or problematise the role of states in this process. This leads to an ambiguity about why the states system has persisted under conditions of deep economic integration across states. State theorists, meanwhile, tend to exclude the world market and system of states as conditioning factors in state (trans)formation. For this reason, much state theory offers only a contingent account of the relationship between patterns of capital accumulation and states’ institutional forms. Geopolitical economy, with its focus on the competitive interrelations between states as constitutive of capitalist value relations, is well placed to transcend the pitfalls of these twin perspectives by closely engaging with the theory of UCD. UCD provides a nonreductionist means of integrating global processes of capital accumulation with their distinctive and peculiar national mediations. A research programme is developed to operationalise UCD for purposes of concrete research – something lacking from recent development in the field.