Search results

Scholarly and general interest in sustainable careers is flourishing. Sustainable careers are focused on the long-term opportunities and experiences of workers across dynamic employment situations, and are characterized by flexibility, meaning and individual agency. The current paper analyzes and challenges the underlying ideological assumptions of how sustainable careers are conceptualized and advocates the inclusion of the ecological meaning of sustainability and the notion of dignity into the sustainable careers concept.

Using Slavoj Žižek's (1989, 2001) conceptualization of ideology as fantasy-construction, the authors explore how the use of sustainable careers is influenced by fantasies about the contemporary workplace and the role of the individual in the workplace. This is a conceptual method.

The authors argue that the concept of sustainable careers is grounded in the neoliberal fantasy of the individual. The paper concludes by presenting an alternative concept of sustainable careers grounded in a dignity-perspective on sustainability, which offers an alternative theoretical understanding of sustainable careers in the contemporary workplace, sharpening its contours and usefulness in theorizing careers.

This paper is the first to systematically analyze the use and conceptualization of sustainable careers in the literate and to expose the ideological underpinnings of the concept. Propositions are developed to be explored by future research.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the current focus of supply chain management (SCM) research; it considers field level and societal constraints and consequently the potential for change. It details the underlying assumptions in the field, considering the dominant paradigms and stakeholders, and how this has shaped the research we have engaged in as a community of scholars.

This is a reflective inquiry that seeks to deconstruct the dominant discourses and paradigms in SCM. It offers alternative avenues of inquiry to “traditional” research, considering how different questions, perspectives and approaches might yield different learning for the field. offering alternative avenues to traditional research.

This is a call for collective action, for solidarity, for a re-imagining of what research in SCM could look like. Research activism is challenging and potentially risky but necessary for the research community to engage in, particularly in light of the global societal grand challenges. Change can take place in the SCM field through collective action and solidarity. Three levels of activism are explored here – acting to solve the grand challenges, acting to change the field and acting as individuals.

This is a “speak-out” piece, which embraces and encourages reflexivity, new methods of doing and writing research as well as different perspectives, and especially a consideration for context and multiple players in the supply chain. The authors contend that it is urgent to re-appropriate our own agency as SCM researchers.

This pathway paper offers research guidance for investigating illegal supply chains as they increasingly threaten societies, economies and ecosystems. There are implications for policy makers to consider incorporating supply chain expertise.

The authors’ work is informed by the team's previous and ongoing studies, research from fields such as criminology, investigative journalism and legal documents.

Illegality occurs in many supply chains and consists in multiple forms. Certain sectors, supply chain innovations, longer supply chains, and heterogeneous regulations and enforcement exacerbate illegal activities. But illegal activity may be necessary for humanitarian, religious or nationalistic reasons. These areas are under explored by supply chain researchers.

By encouraging supply chain academics to research in this area as well as form collaborative partnerships outside of the discipline, the authors hope to move the field forward in prevention as well as learning from illegal supply chains.

Practitioners seek to prevent issues like counterfeiting with their products as well as fraud for economic and reputational reasons.

Governments strive to minimise impacts on their economies and people, and both governments and NGOs attempt to minimise the negative social and environmental impacts. Policy makers need supply chain researchers to evaluate new laws to prevent enabling illegality in supply chains.

As an under-explored area, the authors suggest pathways such as partnering with other disciplines, exploring why these supply chains occur, considering other data sources and methodologies to interdict illegality and learning from illegal supply chains to improve legal supply chains.

Socially sustainable supply chain (SSSC) practices address pressing social issues and may provide operational benefits as well as positive impacts on society. However, due to gaps in the current knowledge, it is difficult to know what practices will provide benefits and what management orientations can maximize the impact of these practices on operational performance. The purpose of this paper is to advance the knowledge on the effect of social sustainability orientation on operational performance by examining the mediating roles of basic and advanced SSSC practices and the moderating role of long-term orientation (LTO).

Data were collected through a survey of US-based companies about their relationships with key suppliers. Confirmatory factor analysis and multiple regression were used to test the proposed moderated mediation model.

Surprisingly, sustainability orientation predicts operational performance through advanced but not basic SSSC practices. Results also indicate that the effect of sustainability orientation on operational performance is significantly moderated by LTO.

Results are limited by the US context, the cross-sectional nature of the research, the use of a single-respondent survey instrument and the challenges of measuring LTO.

Managers and policymakers should be aware of the limitations of adopting basic SSSC practices on the performance of their operations. Advanced practices provide a more robust business case and significantly and positively impact operational performance. In addition, the interaction of a sustainability orientation and LTO can lead to even greater improvements in firms’ operational performance. Firms with the highest levels of social sustainability and LTOs attain superior operational performance.

This study contributes to the growing literature on sustainable supply chain management (SSCM) and extends this literature by focusing on social sustainability practices, identifying specific practices that impact and the orientations that maximize operational performance. The authors contribute to the growing literature on the importance of manager’s temporal orientation and provide nuance to emerging SSCM theory by exposing the interplay of these orientations and the impact of SSSC practice adoption.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce the idea of the “knowledge front” alongside ideas of “home” and “war” front as a way of understanding the expertise of university-educated women in an examination of the First World War and its aftermath. The paper explores the professional lives of two women, the medical researcher, Elsie Dalyell, and the teacher, feminist and unionist, Lucy Woodcock. The paper examines their professional lives and acquisition and use of university expertise both on the war and home fronts, and shows how women’s intellectual and scientific activity established during the war continued long after as a way to repair what many believed to be a society damaged by war. It argues that the idea of “knowledge front” reveals a continuity of intellectual and scientific activity from war to peace, and offers “space” to examine the professional lives of university-educated women in this period.

The paper is structured as an analytical narrative interweaving the professional lives of two women, medical researcher Elsie Dalyell and teacher/unionist Lucy Woodcock to illuminate the contributions of university-educated women’s expertise from 1914 to the outbreak of the Second World War.

The emergence of university-educated women in the First World War and the interwar years participated in the civic structure of Australian society in innovative and important ways that challenged the “soldier citizen” ethos of this era. The paper offers a way to examine university-educated women’s professional lives as they unfolded during the course of war and peace that focuses on what they did with their expertise. Thus, the “knowledge front” provides more ways to examine these lives than the more narrowly articulated ideas of “home” and “war” front.

The idea of the “knowledge front” applied to women in this paper also has implications for how to analyse the meaning of the First World War-focused university expertise more generally both during war and peace.

The usual view of women’s participation in war is as nurses in field hospitals. This paper broadens the notion of war to see war as having many interconnected fronts including the battle front and home front (Beaumont, 2013). By doing so, not only can we see a much larger involvement of women in the war, but we also see the involvement of university-educated women.

The paper shows that while the guns may have ceased on 11 November 1918, women’s lives continued as they grappled with their war experience and aimed to reassert their professional lives in Australian society in the 1920s and 1930s.

The paper contains original biographical research of the lives of two women. It also conceptualises the idea of “knowledge front” in terms of war/home front to examine how the expertise of university-educated career women contributed to the social fabric of a nation recovering from war.

The implications arising from the underrepresentation of women and inequality of female participation in leadership and senior management positions continues to challenge many sectors of the economy and transportation, including commercial aviation. Although concerted efforts have been made to introduce initiatives encouraging women into senior leadership roles, change is slow and women remain underrepresented on Senior Management Teams (SMTs) and the Executive Committees of commercial airlines and airports. Globally, and prior to the COVID pandemic, only 3 per cent of airline CEOs were women whilst women held 8 per cent of airline CFO posts and 3 per cent of COO posts (Silk, 2019).

Air transport’s apparent inability to recruit and retain women in top leadership positions poses a serious challenge to the sector and the global economy as a whole. This chapter argues that lack of gender diversity will inevitably hinder the expansion of the sector and pose a significant challenge by failing to capitalise on the skill set of women. The aim of this chapter is to examine women’s representation and progression within the UK aviation sector with a particular focus on airports.

In the aviation sector adversity faced by female pilots stemming from stereotypes, prejudice, and discrimination are well documented. Such adversity in the workplace can cause occupational stress, which may be greater for female pilots, and this influences individual resiliency, impacting job performance and wellbeing. Resilience may be a mitigating factor for coping with occupational stress and individual resilience can be factored into an organisation’s resilience as a whole. When organisations face challenges, there is a need for resilience in order to survive and adapt during disruption and adversity. Resilience with respect to employee and workplace contexts includes both personal resources among the employees as well as workplace resources that are connected to the workplace and organisational environment. As resilience continues to emerge as part of a human capital management strategy, the need to understand the role of the workplace is magnified. For aviation, understanding resilience can potentially inform organisational interventions to address the known occupational stressors and workplace adversity to increase employee performance and well-being. The role of workplace adversity and perceptions of workplace resource availability including supportive environments are discussed in relation to how they influence employee resilience specifically in the aviation industry. The aim of this chapter is to define resilience specific to employee and workplace contexts, introduce personal and workplace resources to influence employee resilience, and discuss the role of occupational stressors specifically for women in male-dominated career fields such as aviation.

This paper aims to understand the relationship between family togetherness and consumption. This is important given the inherent tension permeating discourses of family consumption and a lack of a critical understanding about how togetherness is experienced, expressed and performed. The Nintendo Wii and Wii gaming were explicitly chosen to engage in a more nuanced understanding and to provide a route to access families in their natural consumption habitat.

An interpretive ethnographic methodology was utilised to investigate family consumption in context and used in conjunction with the biographical narrative interpretive method to capture reflective and detailed informants’ consumption experiences. Holistic content analysis was used to interpret and aid thematic development.

Opportunities for idealised family togetherness afforded by the Wii still appeal to family members. Idealised family togetherness is accessed through collective, “proper” Wii gaming but is ultimately unsustainable. Importantly, the authors see that relational togetherness and bonding is also possible, and as such, the lived experience, expression and performance of family togetherness are not prescriptive.

Family togetherness is a useful and important lens through which to understand the dynamic relationship between family, consumption and the marketplace. The authors suggest that current conceptualisations of togetherness are too idealised and prescriptive and should be open to critical rethinking and engagement by both academics and industry practitioners to communicate with and about families and to explore how to be part of relevant and meaningful family conversations.

Only 5 per cent of commercial airline pilots worldwide are women and women who enter the profession may experience negative attitudes and differential treatment on account of their gender. Although a growing body of research has focussed on the experiences of women pilots once they are hired, there is a need to examine women’s experiences during their initial (ab initio) training when their personal and professional identities are being developed and contested. Drawing on empirical fieldwork of the experiences of both women and men ab initio pilots undergoing training at two UK-based Flight Schools, this chapter reveals that women cadets not only perceive elements of their professional identities differently from men but that they actively adopt a range of strategies to negotiate potential conflicts between their developing personal and professional identities. The chapter makes a theoretical and empirical contribution to existing studies of gender-dominated professions and offers recommendations to Flight Training Schools and airlines who are seeking to encourage more women to enter the airline pilot profession.