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The purpose of this paper is to assess the contribution of the UNESCO biosphere reserve concept to urban resilience.

The paper examines the challenges underpinning the problem of environmental degradation in cities. It then briefly considers available initiatives that can be implemented toward the realization of more sustainable cities. A case is made for the possible contribution of the UNESCO biosphere reserve concept as a useful urban management tool.

Urban administrators have a range of tools to select from to support the design and management of sustainable cities. It is argued that the UNESCO biosphere reserve concept is potentially a very valuable tool, although, apart from academic studies, not truly tested in an urban context.

Biological diversity is the very essence that sustains life on earth and forms the basis of quality living conditions, even within built‐up areas. Today, cities are facing the pressures of increasing populations and the effects thereof on the environment. The challenge facing cities is how to improve the quality of life of all city dwellers amidst the environmental challenge of dwindling natural resources. The paper looks at a number of initiatives available to city administrators in their quest to create liveable cities. It is perhaps timeous to research the potential applicability of the biosphere reserve framework as an urban tool toward more resilient, environmentally acceptable urban landscapes.

Young entrepreneurs' involvement in social entrepreneurship is gaining momentum, and the impact of their active participation in social enterprises is tremendous. As younger generation creates and leads social enterprises, self-identity that entails their leadership can bring benefits to various stakeholders. In particular, the engagement of younger generation in social entrepreneurship lead to positive identity development that brings impact not only to the founders but also to the employees, volunteers and recipients of the product and services offered by the social enterprise. In this context, the chapter explains the importance of social entrepreneurship in society-building, looking into how it creates values to its participants in regard to personal growth and development. The objective of this chapter is to elucidate the role of social enterprises in developing the personal identity of the younger generation. The chapter maps the characteristics of social entrepreneurs to the characteristics of young people with focus on the development of personal, social and role identities. The chapter also explains the significance of young social entrepreneurs' participation in social activities for the identity formation and how it directly and indirectly contributes to a balanced societal development.

While quality has been widely accepted as essential in today’s global competition, limited work has been conducted on the management processes that lead to it. This paper addresses the control processes in quality assurance and total quality management. The generic management control process is first presented and its deficiencies are highlighted. The paper then proposes control processes for quality assurance and total quality management. Finally, these two processes are compared.

The chapter identifies key components of the new patterns of farming and rural livelihoods emerging in Latin America in the twenty-first century. By the beginning of the millennium, most rural areas of Latin America had become integrated into global agricultural commodity networks that curtail the opportunities for small-scale, family-based farming and result in two predominant types of production, the corporate large-scale enterprise suited to oils seeds and their derivatives, cattle or vegetables for processing and the smaller commercially oriented farm producing market garden products, fruits and wine. Both types of farms often form part of commodity networks organized by domestic intermediaries, large-scale supermarket chains, such as Wal-Mart and Carrefour, and foreign food marketers. In addition to the multiplication of external commercial linkages, high levels of urbanization have increasingly blurred the distinction between the rural and the urban. Off-farm work, including international labor migration, is now an important source of rural livelihoods. This context means that research needs to address the multiple interfaces that now connect the different types of rural inhabitants with a wide range of external actors.

The major purpose of this paper is to answer the overarching questions of how multinational corporations (MNCs) address the multiple institutional logics of accountability and pressures of the field in which they operate and how the dominant logic changes and shifts in response to such pressures pre- and post-disaster situation.

In-depth interpretive textual analyses of multiple longitudinal data sets are conducted to study the case of the Fundão dam disaster. The data sources include historical documents, academic articles and public institutional press releases from 2000 to 2016, covering the environment leading to the case study incident and its aftermath.

The findings reveal how MNCs' plurality of and, at times, conflicting institutional logics shape the organizational behaviors, actions and nonactions of actors pre-, peri- and post-disaster. More specifically, the predominance bureaucracy embedded in the state-corporatist logic of the host country before a disaster allows the strategic subunit of an MNC to continue operating while causing various forms of environmental damage until a globally visible disaster triggers a reversal in the dominant logic toward the embrace of wider, global, emergent social and environmental accountability.

This paper contributes to discussions regarding the need to explore in depth of how MNCs respond to multiple institutional pressures in practice. This study extends the literature concerning disaster accountability, state-corporatism and logic-shifting by exploring how MNCs respond to the plurality of institutional logics and pressures over time and showing how, in some cases, logics not only reinforce but also contrast with each other and how a globally exposed disaster may trigger a shift in the dominant logic governing MNCs' responses.

THE National Reference Library of Science and Invention may be said to be devoted to three R's— reference, research and referral. The purpose of this article is to illustrate this theme, with a picture of the services and activi‐ties of the Library, and to indicate when it can be of help to other libraries. However, it is necessary first to outline briefly the origins and present stage of development of the Library, for despite the amount of publicity it has had, the NRLSI remains relatively little known or little understood compared with the other library departments of the British Museum.

This study concerns how well stock market regulators prevent trading by using trading halts when they suspect asymmetric information in the market. Security trading halts in the Portuguese stock market are analysed to measure the effectiveness of trading halts imposed by market authorities as well as their timing in interrupting and restarting trading. Stock price returns, abnormal returns and volatility are used to compare the significance of differences for pre‐and post‐halt periods. First the global sample is used to analyse abnormal returns and then it is split into good and bad news halts. A GARCH (1,1) model is also applied and found to be a more sensitive instrument on justifying trading halts. Justification for trading halts tends to rise as event window size increases, suggesting that supervisory authorities tend to spot the dominant changes better. In fact, when very short time‐sampling periods are used weaker justifications for stock halting are found. The opportunity for market authorities to interrupt trading seems to be increasing. In terms of timing they seem, on the whole, to be delayed when imposing trading halts or anticipated when authorising the restart. Nevertheless, when considering good news, although the halt tends to be late the restart seems to be on time. It is concluded that all methodologies should be jointly applied by stock watch departments of supervision authorities for detecting trading under asymmetric information, but special attention is drawn to GARCH methodologies that show superior ability for detecting changes in stock characteristics.

This study aims to identify the key factors that influence the successful implementation of clean energy interventions in low‐income urban communities in South Africa.

The study took the form of three phases: an explorative, primary data‐gathering process through semi‐structured interviews where secondary data were made available by respondents in the form of official project reports; data analysis of the primary qualitative, explorative, semi‐structured interview data and the secondary documentary data obtained with consent; and identifying and describing the key factors which influence the implementation of clean energy interventions in low income‐urban communities.

The results indicated that although many important factors were identified throughout this research, the ultimate success of the implementation of clean energy interventions in these communities lies not only in the clean energy interventions themselves, but rather hinges on nine key factors: project planning and development; community participation; community employment; political buy‐in; communication and engagement; beneficiary criteria; installation and maintenance; project management; and technology and suppliers.

The findings from this study provide useful insights to all stakeholders involved in the development and implementation of clean energy interventions in low‐income urban communities.

The purpose of this paper is to examine, from the perspective of different theoretical approaches, the relationship that exists between different ontological supports of knowledge and knowledge itself (the way it is created and its characteristics).

The paper proposes two different types of knowledge (knowledge of concrete situations and abstract knowledge) and two approaches (the constructivist view and the cognitive view) and provides a general classification of the different knowledge types. Second, it examines the underlying ontological support‐knowledge creation, characteristics or types of knowledge relationship in different approaches. Finally, conclusions are drawn that show how the conception of ontological support conditions the way in which knowledge is conceived.

The results of the paper consist of making explicit the ontological support‐knowledge creation, characteristics or types of knowledge relationship in different approaches; and enabling understanding of the fact that the ideas one has about knowledge (how it is created or what its characteristics are) come from one's beliefs about the supports in, or in interaction with, which it is created.

The implications for the different approaches to knowledge theory are important. The study proposes a change with regard to how one considers the ontological supports of knowledge. The limitation of the paper lies in the fact that this proposal needs to be presented in a more extensive format, through a series of different papers and analyses.

The originality of the paper stems from the fact that it focuses on the ontological supports of knowledge and highlights the idea that the conception of these supports leads to a particular way of conceiving knowledge.

Previous research has revealed industry differences in respect of environmental reporting in South Africa. However, these studies concentrated on particular types of environmental reporting and therefore precluded many other types of environmental reporting in the annual reports surveyed. Past surveys also awarded equal credit to any reference to a particular type of environmental information, whether it comprised a single sentence or several pages. The annual reports of the top 100 companies, in terms of market capitalisation, were analysed and a sentence count of environmental disclosure was done with the use of the Hackston & Milne (1996) methodology. The group of energy companies was defined as comprising companies in energy‐intensive industries or companies that are producers of energy carriers. The survey revealed that these companies disclosed significantly more environmental information than other companies, in total and in each category These findings are consistent with the notion of legitimacy, which holds that companies cannot prosper if their aims and methods are not perceived to be in line with that of society. For this reason, companies that have the most obvious environmental impact tend to disclose more environmental information than other companies in an effort to legitimise their aims and methods in the eyes of society.