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The current academic publishing model, in which researchers rely significantly on multinational publishing companies to disseminate their work, has implications for knowledge enterprise both in terms of knowledge production and distribution. This study aims to provide a critical reflection on the academic publishing model and how it works, particularly in light of the rise of open access publishing and the growing analytics focus of publishing companies and discusses the impact on knowledge equity.

This exploratory essay offers a critical analysis of the impact of the current academic publishing model on research practices. The discussion provides a foundation for the argument that knowledge equity is essential to social justice.

To effectively fulfil the transformative aims of the interdisciplinary research community within social and environmental accounting, it is imperative to establish equitable access to published research.

This essay opens space for discussion of the current publishing model, given its dominance of the knowledge enterprise. It outlines some of the implications of this model for knowledge equity and suggests strategies for fostering a more inclusive and accessible dissemination of scholarly work.

The purpose of this article is to posit an alternative learning design approach to the technology-led magnification and multiplication of learning and to the linearity of curricular design approaches such as a constructive alignment. Learning design ecosystem thinking creates complex and interactive networks of activity that engage the widest span of the community in addressing critical pedagogical challenges. They identify the pinch-points where negative engagements become structured into the student experience and design pathways for students to navigate their way through the uncertainty and transitions of higher education at-scale.

It is a conceptual paper drawing on a deep and critical engagement of literature, a reflexive approach to the dominant paradigms and informed by practice.

Learning design ecosystems create spaces within at-scale education for deep learning to occur. They are not easy to design or maintain. They are epistemically and pedagogically complex, especially when deployed within the structures of an institution. As Gough (2013) argues, complexity reduction should not be the sole purpose of designing an educational experience and the transitional journey into and through complexity that students studying in these ecosystems take can engender them with resonant, deeply human and transdisciplinary graduate capabilities that will shape their career journey.

The paper is theoretical in nature (although underpinned by rigorous evaluation of practice). There are limitations in scope in part defined by the amorphous definitions of scale. It is also limited to the contexts of higher education although it is not bound to them.

This paper challenges the dialectic that argues for a complexity reduction in higher education and posits the benefits of complexity, connection and transition in the design and delivery of education at-scale.

There are often relational interactions in teams that lead to and drive the spread of work engagement. Despite the potential social impacts on work engagement, such as coworker support and organizational citizenship behaviors within teams, they have rarely been studied from a social perspective using social network analysis (SNA). This review draws on the crossover model and conservation of resources theory to suggest that the effects of social diffusion and the exchange of resources can impact Well-Being, specifically work engagement, in teams and that SNA can help measure those social interactions. Linking several network concepts – closeness centrality, density, degree centrality, and tie strength – to work engagement propositions related to the spread of work engagement as well as the number and quality of network ties, this review elucidates the potential for integrating SNA methodology to the field of Well-Being for teams.

This article proposes that survival can be a legitimate organizational goal, challenging a common view that dismisses it as unambitious or contrary to innovation. Drawing parallels from nature and survival strategies across various systems, it advocates that organizations, much like living organisms, should prioritize survivability (i.e. ability to survive) to ensure long-term success. Contrary to being seen as limiting, survival, when understood in its broad sense, can encompass and enhance performance goals such as growth. The article outlines the ERP factors —efficiency, resilience and prominence—as key to achieving survivability, offering a framework for organizations to manage resources, adapt to external forces and balance visibility to thrive amidst challenges.

Conceptual framework.

This model introduces the significance of survivability as an organizational goal.

This article argues for the consideration of survival as an overarching organizational goal, challenging the prevalent view that dismisses it as unambitious or contrary to innovation.

Companies are increasingly appointing a Chief Sustainability Officer (CSO) to anchor the need to highlight climate change at the senior management level. This study aims to examine how CSO power and sustainability-based compensation influence climate reporting and carbon performance.

Using one of the largest data sets to date, consisting of 18,834 company years through the author’s observations, spanning an 11-year period (2011–2021) in 33 countries. This paper used quantitative methods – specifically, ordinal logistic regression estimation. This paper measures the level of climate change disclosure based on the carbon disclosure leadership methodology. Carbon performance is based on the intensity of carbon emissions (Scope 1, Scope 2), which is a quantitative and relatively more objective measure.

The results suggest that climate change disclosure continued to increase and the carbon emissions intensity of the companies in this study gradually decreased over the sample period. This paper finds that the presence of the CSO within the top management team has a positive and significant influence on the level of information on climate change of the companies in the sample. This finding confirms the idea that the managerial capacity of CSOs motivates the disclosure of climate change. The empirical results confirm that there are differences in the role that the CSO and sustainability-based compensation play in influencing the quality of climate information disclosure in developed and developing countries.

The recourse on a mixed theoretical framework, which highlights upper echelons theory, argues the understanding of the role of CSOs in explaining the relationship between climate change disclosure–carbon performance relationship. The novelty of the study lies in the approaches adopted to describe the quality of climate change disclosure. To control for endogeneity, this paper uses a difference-in-difference analysis by adding a firm to the Morgan Stanley Capital International index as an exogenous shock.

The paper seeks to introduce the “critical open access literacy” construct as a holistic approach to confront the challenges in open access (OA) as a dimension of scholarly communication.

The paper first introduces the concepts of information literacy (IL) and OA in the context of transformations in the scholarly information environment. Via a theoretical-analytical exercise on the basis of a literature review of the intersections between the two concepts and of the criticisms of OA, the paper discusses the role of critical IL in addressing the challenges in OA and lays the theoretical-conceptual groundwork for the critical OA literacy construct.

The structural nature of the challenges and transformations in the scholarly information environment require new foci and pedagogical practices in library and information studies. A more holistic, critical and integrative approach to OA is warranted, which could effectively be achieved through the re-conceptualization of IL.

The paper specifies the avenues for putting the theoretical conceptualizations of critical OA literacy into practice by identifying possible foci for IL instruction alongside a transformed role for librarians.

The paper extends deliberations on the role of critical IL for scholarly communication and attempts to advance the research fields of the two domains by proposing a new construct situated at the junction of OA and IL.

The escalating instances of financial distress (FD) in corporate houses across the globe, call for immediate attention from policymakers, practitioners and academics equally. This study aims to examine how board gender diversity (GD) and information disclosures (ID) interact with each other to drive FD.

The authors apply dynamic panel data analysis on a sample of 255 Indian-listed firms from 2016 to 2023 to arrive at the econometric results.

The main findings indicate that while ID exacerbates distress, GD reduces it. In addition, GD also interacts with ID to curtail the adverse effects of disclosures on FD. Therefore, GD acts like a stone that kills two birds simultaneously, first by reducing the distress directly and second by limiting the negative effects of disclosures on distress.

This study extends the understanding of the implications of GD and complements existing research by investigating its direct and indirect impact on FD. It builds on the analysis to propose that GD can foster resilience against adverse FD situations. The findings should apply to other emerging nations after careful consideration of country-specific factors.

Bengali sports history features very few women; some examples include enquiry into the representation of women in cricket stadiums as spectators (Naha, 2021) and the history of physical education in a women’s college (Bhattacharya, 2009). Likewise, young adult sports fiction in Bengali hardly engages with girls, with the notable exception of Moti Nandi’s Kalabati novels. This series of nine novels features the eponymous character as a high school student and a cricketer between 1984 and 2005. Belonging to a zamindar family, it is the possession of cultural capital post-abolishment of the zamindari system which allows Kalabati to play cricket. Situating the novel amidst India’s entry into neoliberalism, this chapter employs close reading to examine the ways adopted by the protagonist to manoeuvre new gender roles in conjunction with traditionally ascribed ones. Kalabati’s participation in a sport and a range of physical activities dominated by men goes against the societal codes prescribed for women. Despite that, masquerade and performativity allow Kalabati to assert her agency. Through alternately impersonating men and performing hyper-femininity, she effortlessly adjusts herself to different bodies, etiquettes and markers of gender identity. The fluidity in gender identities and emphasis on performance opens up the straitjacketed discussions around the former. This chapter argues that Kalabati’s exceptionality as a sportsperson is both an embodied and a genealogical trait.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the effect of the financial structure on innovation.

We utilize the matched firm-level data from two sources: the World Bank Enterprise Survey and the Innovation Follow-Up Survey. A total of 3,664 firms from 11 African countries are included.

The authors find a financially constrained and low technology-intensive firm that uses internal finance more than its peers is less likely to innovate. Our results also show that a firm that uses new equity and debt finance more than its peers is more likely to innovate. The results particularly suggest the significant effect of bank and trade credit finance on firms’ innovation. The extent and, in some cases, the direction of the effect of dependence on internal finance, new equity finance and debt finance on innovation vary due to the heterogeneity in firm size, age and ownership status. Corporate innovation is also associated with firm size, R&D, cooperation, staff training, public support, exportation and group membership.

The management of companies, particularly financially constrained firms, should reduce their dependence on internal finance, which negatively affects their innovation. As a remedy, they could improve their reliance on new equity finance and debt finance, especially bank finance and trade credit finance, which positively affect their innovativeness.

A pending policy task for African business leaders is to design and evaluate reforms that help create strong financial sectors willing to provide capital to a broad range of firms, particularly small and young firms.

This study adds new evidence to the recent surge of debate on the trade-off between going public, using debt or heavily using internal sources to finance innovative projects, and which of these is more important in promoting firm-level innovation.