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This research explores how contextual elements and significant events influence the changing storylines within a company's directors' reports spanning a period of six decades. These elements and events encompass the internal dynamics of the family that owns the company, industry-specific advancements, political and socioeconomic climates, and explicit guidelines related to corporate reporting.

This research employs a case study methodology to analyse the directors' reports of Barilla, a prominent Italian food manufacturer, within the theoretical framework of historical institutionalism. A systematic content analysis is conducted on sixty directors' reports published between 1961 and 2021. The study also identifies and examines significant contextual events within this six-decade period, which are linked to four key institutional factors.

Based on the research findings, the directors' reports exhibited notable fluctuations throughout the studied timeframe in reaction to shifts in the institutional setting. Our investigation highlights that each institutional element experienced crucial pivotal moments, and given their interconnected nature, modifications in one factor impacted the others. It was noted that these pivotal moments resulted in alterations in the directors' reports' content across various thematic areas. Additionally, despite Barilla being a multinational company, it was found that national events within Italy had a more pronounced influence on the evolving narratives than global events.

Previous research on directors' reports or chairman's statements has primarily focused on the influence of macro-level institutional factors on the narratives. In contrast, our study considers both macro-level and micro-level institutions, specifically examining the internal events within a family business and how they shape the content of directors' reports. Our study is also distinctive in its analysis of specific critical junctures and their interactions with the investigated institutional factors. Additionally, to the best of our knowledge, few existing studies span a timeframe of sixty years, particularly concerning an Italian company.

Drawing on interviews with two types of essential workers – wound clinicians and care workers – the chapter examines stigma management in dirty care work through the lens of emotion management. The study combines two dimensions of dirty work: physical taint in relation to bodywork and social taint linked to working in close proximity to socially stigmatized clients. Hence, stigma management extends to dealing with the physically and socially dirty features of essential care work. In addition, the authors’ assessment of social stigma includes how essential care workers also sought to alleviate the social stigma encountered by their clients. In so doing, the authors extend the literature on dirty work to identify how emotion management skills are central to the stigma management strategies of the essential care workers in this study. The authors demonstrate how both groups deal with their stigma by emphasizing the emotion management skills in ‘doing’ dirty work and in the ‘purpose’ of this work, which includes acknowledging how the authors attempt to address the social taint encountered by their clients. Additionally, by comparing two occupations with different contexts and conditions of work, the authors show how complex emotion management skills are gendered in care work to expand the understanding of gender and stigma management. Furthermore, these emotion management skills emanate from the deep relational work with clients rather than through occupational communities. The authors argue that by focussing on emotion management, the hidden skills of dirty work in gendered care work are illuminated and contribute to contemporary debates about whether stigma can be overcome.

This study applies Garfinkel’s (1967) concept of ‘breaching experiment’ to explore the impact of COVID-19-induced disruptions on the ‘emotion management’ practices of residential care workers in the United Kingdom and Germany. It examines the influence of professional feeling rules on workers, emphasizing the prescribed importance of displaying affective, empathetic concern for residents’ health and well-being. Findings demonstrate that authenticity and adherence to professional feeling rules in relation to emotional management are not mutually exclusive. The authors underscore how adherence to professional feeling rules upholds authentic care by reinforcing a professional ethos, which acts as a cornerstone motivating residential care workers. Ultimately, the study showcases how a professional ethos substantiates altruistic motivations, guiding proficient emotion management practices among care workers. It highlights how these workers drew upon their personal understanding and experiences to determine the appropriate emotions to express while providing care for residents amid the unprecedented challenges of the pandemic.

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.

This study aims to design a facility network for the weavers to do direct business in the Indian handloom industry by using tourists as potential customers.

Data from 4,001 weavers of the handloom industry and 82 tourist locations of Varanasi city were collected. This data was analysed using the k-mean and elbow methods to determine the locations and the optimal number of collection centres, selling stores and warehouses to provide opportunities for the weavers to do direct business.

The study's findings showed that a greater opportunity could be provided with four optimal collection centres and selling stores, along with two warehouses in the handloom industry of Varanasi city. These results provide valuable guidance for policymakers to plan the Varanasi handloom network of facilities efficiently and effectively to improve the conditions of weavers.

Determining the optimal locations is crucial for designing a facility network. The proposed network will aid the government and policymakers in comprehending and pinpointing potential sites to establish new facilities in the handloom industry in Varanasi, a city with tourism potential.

School exclusion in England is highly gendered, racialised and classed. For instance, boys are three times more likely than girls to be excluded from school and certain groups, including Black Caribbean boys are subject to disproportionate levels of exclusion. Against this backdrop, I explore the context and consequences of exclusion from English mainstream schooling for young masculinities. The arguments presented also have broader international significance due to a global tendency towards punitive measures in schooling. Through bringing masculinities scholarship into conversation with childhood studies, this chapter aims to present a nuanced theorisation of young masculinities which foregrounds lived experience and is located within the interdisciplinary field of childhood studies. It examines ways in which exclusion and schooling in alternative settings, such as a Pupil Referral school, can shape the identities of boys and their subjectivities. The empirical data demonstrate that excluded boys face severe constraints arising from ways in which they are positioned. Drawing on original qualitative data, it is argued that boys who are categorised in this way demonstrate highly agentic ways of ‘doing boy’. This chapter is underpinned by two questions, firstly, how can we theorise boyhood and school exclusion in ways that recognise excluded boys as agentic and constrained subjects? Secondly, what possibilities for change might our theorisation reveal? This chapter concludes by arguing for intersectional masculinities and strengthened theorisation of childhood studies which explicitly recognises lived experience. Through this discussion, I seek to illuminate the emotional costs of school exclusion and insights into ways to achieve change.

This chapter argues that the National Basketball Association (NBA) and American mainstream sporting media produce and mediate a representation of India as underdeveloped and as an unmodern subject/nation as a way to enter the Indian basketball marketplace. The chapter emphasizes that the NBA produces the attendant discourse of the ‘white saviour’ through a multi-pronged process. The chapter shows how it draws upon the legacies of British colonialism, along with the expansion of US imperialism, to construct India in particular racialised ways as backward, unmodern, and not cosmopolitan. In this respect, Black NBA players’ modes of basketball reach India as part of the racialisation of Indian basketball. Finally, the chapter engages with the larger global circuits of race and racialisation to understand how India is then imagined within the US sporting landscape. This chapter underscores the capitalist desires of the NBA alongside the desires of South Asian Americans for an Indian basketball hero. Both desires, institutional and personal, showcase racialisation at work. The NBA uses the language and performance of Judeo-Christian modernity through NBA players in India to racialise Indians as in need of NBA mentorship and upliftment. On other hand, diasporic Indians in the US dream of an Indian NBA player as a way to unravel, destabilise, and challenge their racialisation as hypo-masculine subjects. These competing forms of racialisation provide important information on the global flows of capital, desire, and sport.

This chapter draws on an ethnographic study with children aged 10–14 and their parents from heterogeneous socio-economic backgrounds in Türkiye. Building on a relational approach, it employs parental surveillance and children's individual privacy management in their intrafamilial relationships as a point of entry to reflect on childhood masculinities. From the perspectives of boys, girls and their parents, it illustrates how children's experiences of achieving privacy emerge as a gendered and age-related cultural phenomenon. Looking particularly at family negotiations around personal spaces and time at home and outside, it suggests that privacy regulation is a significant aspect of everyday family lives through which childhood masculinities and femininities are constructed, reproduced and performed. It further argues the ways that Turkish parenting culture may view intergenerational dialogue as a hierarchic category, rather than a relational category, contribute to a generational divide in boys' and girls' access to individual privacy.

The presence of green spaces plays a vital role in promoting urban sustainability. Urban green parks (UGPs) help create sustainable cities while providing fundamental ecological functions. However, rapid urbanization has destroyed crucial green areas in Ranchi City, endangering inhabitants’ health. This study aims to locate current UGPs and predict future UGP sites in Ranchi City, Jharkhand.

It uses geographic information system (GIS) and analytical hierarchical process (AHP) to evaluate potential UGP sites. It involves the active participation of urban communities to ensure that the UGPs are designed to meet dweller’s needs. The site suitability assessment is based on several parameters, including the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI), land use and land cover (LULC), population distribution, PM 2.5 levels and the Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect. The integration of these factors enables an evaluation of potential UGP’s sites.

The findings of this research reveal that 54.39% of the evaluated areas are unsuitable, 15.55% are less suitable, 12.76% are moderately suitable, 11.52% are highly suitable and 5.78% are very highly suitable for UGPs site selection. These results emphasize that the middle and outer regions of Ranchi City are the most favorable locations for establishing UGPs. The NDVI is the most important element in UGP site appropriateness, followed by LULC, population distribution, PM 2.5 levels and the UHI effect.

This study improves the process of integrating AHP and GIS, and UGPs site selection maps help urban planners and decision-makers make better choices for Ranchi City’s sustainability and greenness.