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The purpose of this paper is to examine meaning in life as an important resource during the COVID-19 pandemic.

This paper summarized key research establishing links between meaning in life and mental health and well-being variables, reviewed the literature on meaning as a protective factor and meaning-making as a coping mechanism amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as provided focal points in cultivating meaning in life.

Studies strongly support the notion that meaning in life is essential for health and well-being. Research also suggests that meaning protects against worsening mental health, and that engaging in meaning-making is a coping process that ultimately leads to improved adjustment despite the stressors of the COVID-19 pandemic. Eight themes are also identified in cultivating skills to build meaning during adverse times.

Integrating what research has found about meaning, resilience and coping can help individuals develop practical strategies to cultivate meaning in their lives to support themselves and their communities during stressful times.

Understanding the ways in which meaning can support individuals’ health and well-being is critical during a global upheaval such as that of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The purpose of the study was to specify the perceived outdated nature and lack of definitional clarity associated with the concept of work and further to outline that the nature of work has dramatically changed in the 21st century, while definitions of work referenced in research remain those that were dominant in the previous century. Lastly, the study aimed to propose an updated conceptualisation and definition of work to aid future research.

A scoping literature review was adopted as the methodology guiding the study. A scoping review is particularly suited to identifying the conceptual boundaries on a given multi-disciplinary topic and is used to map the key concepts underpinning a research area as well as to clarify working definitions.

Nine main themes underpinning the concept of work were extracted from the extant literature. These were assimilated with contemporary literature across multiple disciplines. Contexts of work as they relate to dimensions of work and workspace are developed and visualised. A proposed contemporary definition of work is presented.

The aim of the study was to address the problem with current and future research continuing to refer to traditional conceptualisations of work, while the nature of work has dramatically changed. The findings are preliminary and intended to stimulate further discourse towards a greater consensus of a definition. The implications of proposing an updated definition of work is that it is intended to better inform future research reflective of its multi-disciplinary and significantly changed nature.

The implications to practice are the main impetus of this study. The authors found that research associated with work was being confounded by traditional and outdated interpretations, excluding alternative forms of work or not recognising its multi-dimensionality. It is proposed by the paper that an updated conceptualisation of the nature of work in this era, as it is reflected across disciplines and practice, would positively contribute to the understanding, management and conceptualisation of work in practice.

A systematic literature review across disciplines of the definition of work will reveal the outdated nature and disparate interpretation of the concept of work. An inclusive, multi-disciplinary and contemporary definition of work has not been suggested. This scoping review was conducted to address this problem and gap in the literature. Further, this paper presents a multi-dimensional and spatial conceptualisation of work that is proposed to better inform future research and practice associated with work.

As an integral part of intellectual capital (IC), social capital (SC) has been studied as an asset crucial to social relationships among individuals and groups of individuals, which in turn have a significant impact on organizational performance outcomes. This study investigates the impact of organizational social capital (OSC) on employee creativity through the mediation role of knowledge sharing (KS) and moderation of work meaningfulness (WM).

The authors base the analysis on employee-level data gathered via a cross-sectional survey designed for this study. The authors surveyed 217 employees of the pharmaceutical industry in Pakistan. The authors run a confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) and use structural equation modeling (SEM) and Hayes method to test the hypotheses.

The authors find that OSC positively affects employees’ willingness to share their knowledge with colleagues, which in turn has a positive effect on employee creativity (EC). The results also show that the relationship between social capital and knowledge sharing is moderated by work meaningfulness.

This study contributes to the IC in general and the SC literature in particular, by providing empirical evidence that shows how creativity could be a focal and pivotal performance outcome of organizational social capital through the moderated mediation roles of work meaningfulness and knowledge sharing.

The authors adopt the concept of SC from the organizational level to the individual level, examining how an individual's perception of organizational capital influences his or her creative behavior and exploring the role of KS and job meaningfulness (JM) in this relationship.

Missing in most of the research on selling has been an examination of the process from the point of view of the customer. When satisfaction in selling has been considered, researchers have focused on the satisfaction of the salesperson with his job and/or the impact of this job satisfaction on performance (e.g. Bluen, Barling & Burns, 1990; Churchill, Ford & Walker, 1979; Pruden & Peterson, 1971). To concentrate on salesperson performance while neglecting customers is to ignore the most important half of the relationship between buyers and sellers and entirely disregards the marketing concept and the streams of research in customer satisfaction. This research takes a different approach and examines customers’ satisfaction with salespeople.

Sustainable management requires companies to build up new knowledge to acquire the competencies needed for action. This chapter aims to deliver knowledge about sustainability and knowledge for sustainability. Firstly, we systematically analyse the sustainability literature in the social sciences through a bibliographic analysis and topic modelling using VOSviewer and Mallet software. We outline research directions, themes and critical contributions for each research cluster identified. Additionally, we categorise over 30 definitions of sustainability identified by Meuer, Koelbel, and Hoffmann (2020). Secondly, we enumerate knowledge types needed for effective sustainability transitions of organisations. We trace typologies of sustainable business models and their distinct evaluations of sustainability. In this chapter, we argue that integrating the triad of social, ecological and economic goals is central for sustainability attempts as well as long-term thinking. Therefore, our research offers a comprehensive overview of sustainability in the social sciences supporting researchers and practitioners to navigate this miscellaneous and scattered field. Accordingly, our study is precious to young scholars researching sustainability who want to use the term in an informed and meaningful way.

This study aims to create a more humane and responsible workplace, individuals’ gratitude and meaningfulness seem of utmost importance. This study is an effort to understand the role of gratitude intent of potential managers.

This study examines the psychological characteristic of business students in India. The researchers surveyed 333 Indian students as future managers. The collected data has been analysed with the Smart PLS 3 version to assess the formative-reflective scale by comparing model fit, measurement model and structural modelling.

The results establish that gratitude significantly affects the life satisfaction of future managers. Findings also show that materialism is negatively related to life satisfaction and meaningfulness. The importance–performance map analysis finding suggests that meaningfulness in life is a potential indicator of life satisfaction for the population studied.

Due to the limited research available on the psychological underpinnings in the Indian context, there is a massive value in examining how materialism and gratitude concurrently and distinctively predict meaning in life and the life satisfaction of future managers. This paper gives a formative explanation of the model consisted gratitude, materialism and meaningfulness in life on the life satisfaction of future managers. This study establishes the importance of meaningfulness of life in attaining life satisfaction for young managers.

Grounding our research in the conservation of resources (COR) theory and the job demands-resources (JD-R) theory, this study addresses the research gap of examining the relationship between meaningful work and dimensions of job burnout with work engagement as the mediator, especially in times of the COVID-19 pandemic. It also attempts to understand if age plays a role in moderating the effect of these relationships.

This study collected data using a questionnaire protocol that was adapted and refined from the original scales in existing studies. The partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) was used to analyze data collected from 530 social workers working in New Zealand nonprofit organizations (NPO).

Results indicated that meaningful work only addressed one dimension of job burnout. Work engagement was found to have mediating effects on the relationships between meaningful work and all the dimensions of job burnout. Age does not have any moderating effect on these relationships.

This study addresses the lack of literature that collectively examines the constructs of meaningful work, dimensions of job burnout and work engagement in the same model. In doing so, this study provides a unique verification of job burnout as a multidimensional construct. At the same time, this study offers insights into the effect of these constructs in NPOs, unraveling the complexities that drive these NPOs' human resources (HR) processes.

This study aims to investigate whether United Kingdom (UK)-based companies have changed their voluntary disclosures on curbing the bribery of foreign officials in response to the UK Bribery Act 2010, and if so whether and how such disclosure changes substantively reflected allegations of bribery of foreign officials by news media.

By using the notions of institutional pressure and decoupling and applying content and thematic analysis, the authors examined, in particular, disclosures on curbing bribery by the largest 100 companies listed on the London Stock Exchange in periods before and after the Bribery Act (2007–2012). News media reports covering incidents of bribery of foreign officials and related corporate disclosures before and after the Act were thoroughly examined to problematise corporate anti-bribery disclosure practices.

The study finds a significant change in disclosure on curbing bribery before and after the enactment of the UK Bribery Act, consistent with the notion of institutional coercive pressure. However, decoupling is also found: organisations' disclosures did not substantively reflect incidents of bribing foreign public officials, mostly from underprivileged developing nations.

This study acknowledges a limitation stemming from using media reports that focus on bribery incidents in identifying actual cases or incidents of bribery. As some of the incidents identified from news media reports appeared to be allegations, not convictions for bribery, companies could have defensible reasons for not disclosing some aspects of them.

Regulators should think why new or more regulations without substantive requirement are not helpful to curb corporate decoupling and injustice. The regulators should address the crisis that multinational companies (MNCs) being suppliers of bribery are much more harmful for the underprivileged communities in developing nations. Accordingly, this paper provides practical insights into how stakeholders ought to critically interpret MNCs' accounts of their involvement in bribery.

This study contributes to the accounting literature by problematising MNCs' operations in underprivileged countries. The findings suggest that not only public officials in developing countries as creators of bribery but also Western-based MNCs as the suppliers of bribery contribute to perpetuating unethical practices and injustices to the underprivileged communities in developing countries. This research is imperative as this is one of the first known studies that provides evidence of the actions including disclosure-related actions companies have taken in response to the UK Bribery Act.

The aim of this article is to examine the interaction effect of customization mode and regulatory focus on the “tailoring” outcomes of customized services in both the number of options retained and consumer evaluations.

Two experiments investigate the interaction between customization mode and consumer regulatory focus, together with mediating and moderating factors.

An interaction effect of customization mode and regulatory focus exists: it significantly influences the number of options retained, and prevention‐focused consumers retain more options in the final customized offering than promotion‐focused consumers in subtractive customization, whereas this effect is reduced in additive customization; it significantly affects how consumers evaluate the customization service with regard to task enjoyment and attitudes toward products; and it is fully mediated by task enjoyment and positively moderated by product familiarity.

This article provides an important contribution to service customization design and regulatory focus theory by shedding light on the interaction between customization mode and consumer regulatory focus and revealing how this interaction affects the decision outcomes of customization services.