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This chapter provides novel theory that explicates how positive emotions of four actors (supervisors, employees, peers, and customers) in the service profit chain can foster the creation of positively deviant service businesses. It is suggested to incorporate studies and theories of positive organizational scholarship and particularly studies on positive emotions to the services marketing literature. This chapter elucidates how positively deviant behaviors, such as expressions of appreciation, helping others, gratitude, trustworthiness, and unselfishness, can foster the creation of such positively deviant performances that may generate supreme customer experience. These four positively deviant performances are trust in self and others, feeling of oneness, creativity, and seeing the bigger picture. The suggestion is that these positively deviant performances create climate for positivity in the supplier–customer interaction and foster the co-creation of mutual value in service businesses.

This chapter aims at building a conceptual framework that could inspire innovation policies able to take into account the emerging agricultural and rural agenda, based on a comprehensive conceptualization of the innovation system. The systems of innovation and the broader processes of knowledge creation (and co-creation), transfer and adoption represent a crucial set of conditions influencing family farms' trajectories in response to the various opportunities and drivers of change, as well as their capability to contribute to sustainable food systems and FNS. This chapter analyzes the concept of innovation in relation to transition towards new configurations with a non-linear and multidimensional vision based on actors assembling themselves in a geographical space where resources and information are used to generate change. This leads to consider knowledge as an asset co-generated by the interaction of different actors within agricultural knowledge and innovation systems (AKIS) (Leeuwis & van den Ban, 2004). Agriculture and countryside are experiencing deep transformations towards concentration and globalization on one side and post-productivism and rural development on the other (Van der Ploeg et al., 2000). These processes of change require innovation policies aimed at pursuing ‘second-order’ innovation based on new goals and new rules. From a transition perspective (Geels, 2004) these radical innovations can develop within niches to a certain extent protected from mainstream market forces, to be then progressively embodied into higher structuration levels (the ‘regimes’).

The recent pandemic of Covid-19 has substantially changed people’s daily lives. They work and interact even more based on information and communication technologies (ICT). The use of new technologies and the interconnectivity specific to smart cities have intensified in the context of the pandemic. A significant part of the population works from home, participates in concerts and other remote social activities, organizes online parties, communicates virtually with friends and family, etc. These transformations required an extended and more stable infrastructure, significant investments in the development of software applications dedicated to remote activities (streaming, contact tracing, security, online ordering and delivery, telemedicine, etc.), in specific services (data storage and applications, electronic signature services, etc.) and the integration of subsystems used in smart cities. This chapter examines the role of SARS-CoV-2 pandemic in the acceleration of digital transformations in smart cities due to the need and desire to digitize communities and public administrations. It has become a top priority for both private and public companies from smart cities in the context created by the pandemic.

This chapter focuses on techniques and technologies to aid groups in making decisions, with an emphasis on computer-based support. Many office workers regularly meet colleagues and clients in virtual meetings using videoconferencing platforms, which enable participants to carry out tasks in a manner similar to a face-to-face meeting. The development of computer-based platforms to facilitate group tasks can be traced back to the 1960s, and while they support group communication, they do not directly support group decision making. In this chapter we distinguish four technologies developed to provide support to group decisions, clustered into two main traditions. Technologies in the task-oriented tradition are mainly concerned with enabling participants to complete tasks to solve the group's decision problem via computer-supported communications. Group Decision Support Systems and social software technologies comprise the task-oriented tradition. Alternately, in the model-driven tradition, participants use computers to build and use a model that acts as a referent to communicate, mostly verbally, about the group's decision problem. System modeling and decision-modeling technologies constitute the model-driven tradition. This chapter sketches the history and guiding ideas of both traditions, and describes their associated technologies. The chapter concludes with questioning if increased availability of online tools will lead to increased use of group decision support technologies, and the differential impact of communication support versus decision support.

The ability to act in a purposeful and effective way amid institutional tensions and paradoxes is, right now, a highly prized quality in public leadership. The purpose of this chapter is to qualify moderately brave acts as a learning format that combines the analytical and performative skills implied in this kind of agency.

The chapter explores the engagement with paradoxes as a narrative praxis. From existing literature, it sums up an understanding of agency as a social process of mediating paradoxes in order to make action possible. Drawing on Northrop Frye’s theory of modes, the chapter explains this praxis as a narrative endeavour balancing the dynamics of tragedy (disintegration) and comedy (integration). Moderately brave acts are formed as a kind of low-mimetic synthesis – very much akin to comedy and realistic fiction. The narrative dynamics of low-mimetic synthesis are pursued in the case story of Christian, a Master of Public Administration (MPA) student from Copenhagen.

Moderately brave acts appear as a learning format that can inspire a less idealised, but not entirely ironic approach to the paradoxes of management. In this way, they can foster a nuanced and pragmatic agency that combines analytical reflexivity with the ability to take practical action in problematic situations.

The chapter may inspire teachers to use narrative techniques to allow students to deal with real problems of daily praxis in a way that embraces the tension between idealisation and deconstructive irony.

This chapter discusses a form of pedagogy of reflection suggested to be defined as the dialogical-reflective professional-development school (DRPDS) – a framework that develops and empowers students by engaging them in a process of continual improvement, responding to diverse situations, providing stimuli for learning, and giving anchors for mediation. The pedagogy of reflection relates to dialogue not only from a theoretical historical context but also by way of example – that is, it offers empowering dialogues within the traditional teacher-training framework. This chapter outlines the importance of the pedagogy of reflection in the multicultural educational space of the preservice education field in Israel, analyzing the first university PDS model. The pedagogy of reflection in the context of the educational dialogue of educators is outlined as a tool for student empowerment, achieved through a community of learners who dedicate space to the development of their whole personality within the profession, taking a moral stance toward the educational discourse, minimizing judgmentalism and prejudice, creating national/gender equality with the goal of examining the fundamental question of educational performance, and reinforcing their sense of organizational belonging within the system. In these contexts, the chapter is based on the elements of dialogical philosophy exemplified in the thought of Burbules, Nelson, Isaacs, Bohm, and Heckmann and the reflective basis of educational and organizational performance exemplified in the writings of van Manen. The chapter also presents two examples from a project in which teaching units based on dialogue and reflection were developed within a dialogic community that represents in its very being collective empowerment, the possibility of coping with problems that are too large for an individual to solve on his/her own, and an alternative to sealed and alienated organizations.