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This chapter shares the experiences of two graduate students as they navigated higher education during the pandemic. Engaging in graduate study during the pandemic shaped their socialisation experiences, challenged their understanding of themselves as scholars and impacted their relationships with mentors. This chapter shares personal reflections of their experiences and explores their sense of professional identity and aspirations for the future.

As participation in higher education widens with concomitant increases in the number and diversity of commencing students, so does the need for programs that will support their transition and retention. In response to this need, a growing awareness of the value of mentorship in Australian universities has resulted in the introduction of peer mentoring programs for students in many institutions. Mentorship, however, can take many different forms. This chapter reports on a model of academic (faculty) mentorship for commencing science students belonging to a range of defined disadvantaged groups. The program was initially funded by an internal grant, with voluntary participation by eligible students. At the end of the first semester, participants overwhelmingly endorsed the program as having enhanced their transition experience and improved their prospects for academic progress and retention. Despite reduced funding, the program was retained over two subsequent years with slight modifications based on student feedback, together with consideration of its most effective elements. The success of this academic mentorship program demonstrates the potential value of such approaches in the university retention and success of disadvantaged students.

This chapter aims to help redirect Business and Society (BAS) scholarship to embrace the unprecedented challenges of the Anthropocene era including climate collapse and ecological breakdown. The existential risk presented by the new reality of the Anthropocene requires a radical rethinking of the purpose of business and its dominating working models. This chapter discusses the main problems of efficiency and growth and shows that business efficiency often results in aggregate ecological overshot. It is argued with Herman Daly that frugality, that is, substantial reduction of the material throughput, should precede business efficiency for achieving ecological sustainability. This chapter suggests new directions for BAS scholarship by highlighting three major issues, namely the scale of business activities relative to the ecosystem of the planet, short termism that is the discrepancy between the time horizon of business decisions and that of ecological processes, and inequality which is the result of current business models that are all about accumulation of wealth and not paying enough attention to distribution of wealth. The chapter concludes that the Anthropocene era represents a clear disjuncture and discontinuity from the past and business needs to find a new realignment to achieve a sustainable world. That realignment requires a drastic modification of business-nature relations.

The encyclical letter of Pope Francis, “Praised Be: On the Care of Our Common Home” (Laudato si’), presented an excellent opportunity to spark a conversation between economics and faith-based discourses on sustainability. The encyclical underlined the human origins of the ecological crisis and proposed fundamental changes in organizing our economic life. Among the important suggestions put forward by the Pope are increased frugality in consumption and acknowledging the intrinsic value of nature.

Frugality implies rebalancing the spiritual and material values in economic life. This may lead to the rehabilitation of the substantive meaning of the “economic” and the revival of the corresponding logic of sufficiency. Despite their different ontological and anthropological conceptions, the ecological position of the Pope’s encyclical has close links with Deep Ecology and Buddhist Economics. Both Deep Ecology and Buddhist Economics point out that emphasizing individuality and promoting the greatest fulfillment of the desires of the individual together lead to destruction. Happiness is linked to wholeness, not to personal wealth.

Mainstream economics fails to acknowledge the intrinsic value of nature. It is happy to put value on environmental goods and services merely on the basis of a market value determined by competing economic actors. But price, for sure, is an inappropriate model for assessing the value of natural entities. There is no algorithmic solution to nature’s allocation problems. Decisions and policies related to nature require making qualitative and multiperspective considerations and the proper use of our wisdom, knowledge, and experience.

Purpose: The global financial services business has been transformed by Blockchain technology, making it safer and more efficient. Keeping this fact in mind, the authors will study how Blockchain technology improves financial services, including the banking and insurance sectors. The risks and roadblocks in the path of Blockchain adoption in financial services will also be discussed.

Need of the Study: Blockchain operates without any central authority. Instead, it could be understood as a transaction-containing ledger shared among many users. The adoption of Blockchain is gaining traction in every field, but still, a sense of doubt about its reliability can be observed among ordinary people. Thus, an investigation of the operational intricacies and technicalities could assist in clarifying the confusion associated with this technology.

Methodology: To achieve the aims mentioned above, an exploratory research design involving a review of the secondary data linked with the implementation and impact of Blockchain technology in the domain of finance is conducted.

Findings: The mode of operation of Blockchain technology is thoroughly explained, along with the influence it has exercised in the financial domain in recent years.

Practical Implications: The findings of this study can mainly assist global investors and users worldwide by clarifying the concept and operations of Blockchain technology. Also, it could guide future studies assessing the role of Blockchain in the financial domain.

Through the example of a “regulatory ranking” – an index produced with the aim to regulate the pharmaceutical market by pushing companies in the direction of providing greater access to medicine in developing countries – this chapter focuses on indexing and ranking as infrastructural processes which inscribe global problem spaces as unfolding actionable territories for market intervention. It foregrounds the “Indexal thinking” which structures and informs regulatory rankings – their aspiration to align the interests of different stakeholders and to entice competition among the ranked companies. The authors detail the infrastructural work through which such ambitions are enacted, detailing processes of infrastructural layering/collage and patchwork through which analysts naturalize/denaturalize various contested categories in the ranking’s territory. They reflect on the consequences of such attempts at reconfiguring global topologies for the problems these governance initiatives seek to address.

Purpose – This chapter asks whether the current economic crisis, precipitated by defaults in subprime mortgages, could have been postponed or perhaps even avoided?

Design/methodology/approach – I begin by exploring an aspect of American culture that I call the moral philosophy of “just deserts.” The term “just deserts” is derived from the title of Alperovitz and Daly's (2008) book, Unjust Deserts: How the Rich Are Taking Our Common Inheritance and Why We Should Take It Back. To argue for greater equity in the distribution of wealth, the authors return to the 17th century writings of John Locke who helped establish the rules of property ownership that determine who is entitled to get what in the way of material goods. Locke's writings, infused with Protestant theology, became the basis of Western law and morality. Economic theory, on which the policies that led up to the latest crash and the responses to it, draws heavily on Locke's ideas.

Findings – Holders of subprime mortgages who have lost their homes, according to this thinking that has become intrinsic to our culture, did not deserve to be given mortgages or to obtain homes. Paying these mortgages for them might have postponed or even prevented the crash and the collapse of the financial system. Rational as this seems, it was not even proposed, because it would have given people something they had not earned and hence were not believed to deserve.

Research limitations/implications – The chapter is based on cultural and historical analysis. It cannot be tested empirically since this would require policy makers to change the assumptions on which its economic programs rest.

Practical implications – The practical implications of the chapter are to stimulate examination and discussion of the cultural value of just deserts and the assumptions on which it is based.

Originality/value – The reintroduction of culture and its assumptions into debates over public policy will improve understanding and enable us to avoid repeating social practices that have had negative effects.

This paper presents new evidence that the error in estimating the economic welfare of a transport scheme can be very large. This is for two reasons. Firstly when cost changes are large the income effect can be significant. This means the change in consumer surplus is no longer a good estimate of the compensating variation — the true measure of welfare benefit. Secondly, in the presence of large cost changes estimating the change in consumer surplus using the Rule of Half can lead to large errors. The paper uses a novel approach based on stated choice and contingent valuation data to estimate the size of this error for the situation of the provision of fixed links to islands in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland.