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Research focusing on psychological capital (PsyCap) has been mainly conducted at the individual level. However, recent research has expanded investigations to the collective level with a greater focus on team-level PsyCap. Although, as demonstrated by recent systematic reviews and meta-analyses, the relationships between individual-level PsyCap and the desirable/undesirable outcomes are fairly established in the literature, less is known about such relationships for team-level PsyCap. One of these important, yet least investigated, research areas is the research stream that focuses on the relationship between team-level PsyCap and the outcomes of health, Well-Being, and safety. This chapter aims to highlight the role of individual-level PsyCap as an important predictor of employees’ health, Well-Being, and safety outcomes, but also to go beyond that to provide insights into the potential role of team-level PsyCap in predicting such outcomes at both individual and team levels. To do so, the chapter first draws upon relevant theories to discuss the empirical research findings focusing on the relationship between individual-level PsyCap and the outcomes of health, Well-Being, and safety. It then focuses on team-level PsyCap from theoretical, conceptualization, and operationalization perspectives and provides insights into how team-level PsyCap might be related to health, Well-Being, and safety outcomes at both individual and team levels. Thus, this chapter proposes new research directions in an area of PsyCap that has been left unexplored.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on doctoral education. Pandemics throughout history have generated new educational theories and practices, accelerated some trends and signalled the abrupt end of others. The unpredictable effects of the COVID-19 pandemic have particularly impacted upon First Nations and transcultural communities and People of Colour throughout the globe. A second significant recent global trend that occurred at the height of the pandemic was the reignited #BlackLivesMatter (#BLM) protest campaign. This campaign drew attention to the vast inequities faced by black, transcultural (migrant, refugee, culturally diverse and international) and Indigenous peoples and triggered rapid action in higher education institutions against racism and unconscious bias.

This conceptual paper draws upon postcolonial/decolonial theory to demonstrate how the COVID pandemic and #BLM movement prompts us to revitalise doctoral education.

These two issues have created renewed urgency around the need to decolonise higher education and a desire to transform the “business-as-usual” geopolitical power dynamics that continue to privilege Northern knowledge over culturally diverse knowledge systems from First Nations and transcultural contexts. A key site where special opportunities exist to effect this transformation lies in doctoral education. Doctoral education is a significant location of new knowledge creation and the development of the world’s future researchers.

Applying post/decolonial theory enables one to rethink how doctoral education should be changed to work towards greater decolonisation.

This study applies Santos’ ideas about “the sociologies of emergence” in the global South to think about how doctoral education should be reconstructed as a liberated zone of decolonisation and epistemic justice.

This paper aims to explore the potential relationship between internal corporate social responsibility (CSR) and the decline of organised labour in countries of the global North. Given the opposing trends since the late 20th century and the widespread adherence of internationally recognised labour standards in CSR codes, standards, and reporting frameworks, questions arise about the disparity between CSR rhetoric and practice regarding the collective rights of in-house employees. The paper further explores the tendency in CSR scholarship to overlook violations of collective rights for in-house employees in the global North.

To examine whether there is an elective affinity between the rise of CSR and the decline of organised labour, the paper uses a discursive institutionalism approach, providing a meta-theoretical analysis of academic literature on internal CSR. A scoping review methodology was used to identify relevant literature and compile it into an empirical corpus for a metatheoretical analysis. The empirical corpus, consisting of 38 articles, was generated through a Google Scholar (GS) search guided by the following questions: (1) What are the dominant conceptual framings of internal CSR? (2) What are the dominant roles and practical aspects of internal CSR?

The paper identifies two key disparities in the literature: (1) between rhetoric and practice regarding the collective rights of in-house employees in the global North and (2) between the extensive CSR research on violations of collective rights of value chain workers and the limited attention to in-house employees’ collective rights. The analysis highlights two factors contributing to these disparities: the integration of internal CSR into the corporate managerial toolbox and the distinction in CSR discourse between core labour standards and workplace issues. The analysis shows that internal CSR has an elective affinity with the decline of organised labour.

While scoping reviews are often standalone studies, this paper used the methodology for its stated purpose. Limitations include the broad span of internal CSR across various academic fields and reliance solely on GS. Measures taken to enhance inclusivity were unlimited review period, refined inclusion criteria and keywords during the selection process and cross-checks of cited articles.

Considering the implications of the decline of organised labour on workers’ collective voice, poverty and the distribution gap in wealth and income, this paper suggests that for CSR to play a significant role in advancing sustainable social justice, scholars and practitioners should look at ways to reduce the disparity between rhetoric and practice regarding employees’ voice and collective rights.

The paper lays the foundation for a better understanding of the potential links between internal CSR and the decline of organised labour. It addresses a gap in the literature on the interrelations between CSR and organised labour in the global North and proposes root causes of this gap. This contribution enriches the scarce literature exploring the potential elective affinity between CSR and transformations in the global economy and labour markets since the late 1980s. Finally, the paper deepens the understanding of the implications of CSR for employees’ collective rights and voice as well as for organised labour.

The current study evaluated (1) characteristics of the community leadership development program associated with successful participant recruitment, (2) active ingredients that promoted fellow engagement and program completion and (3) how the program addressed blackness and racism.

Individual interviews were conducted with a representative subset of former program fellows.

Results indicated that offering training in small cohorts and matching fellows with individual mentors promoted program interest. Program strengths and unique ingredients included that the program was primarily led by people from the Black community, program malleability, and that the program was a partnership between fellows and leadership. Additionally, the program was responsive to fellows’ needs such as by adding a self-care component. Fellows also noted dedicated space and time to discuss race and racism. Results offer a unique theoretical perspective to guide leadership development away from the uniform or standardized approach and toward one that fosters diversity and equity in leadership.

Altogether, this work demonstrates how leadership development programs can be participant-informed and adapted to participants’ social and cultural needs.

Political Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), based on ideas about deliberative democracy, have been criticised for increasing corporate power and democratic deficits. Yet, deliberative ideals are flourishing in the corporate world in the form of dialogues with a broad set of stakeholders and engagement in wider societal issues. Extractive industry areas, with extensive corporate interventions in weak regulatory environments, are particularly vulnerable to asymmetrical power relations when businesses engage with society. This paper aims to illustrate in what way deliberative CSR practices in such contexts risk enhancing corporate power at the expense of community interests.

This paper is based on a retrospective qualitative study of a Canadian oil company, operating in an Albanian oilfield between 2009 and 2016. Through a study of three different deliberative CSR practices – market-based land acquisition, a grievance redress mechanism and dialogue groups – it highlights how these practices in various ways enforced corporate interests and prevented further community mobilisation.

By applying Laclau and Mouffe’s theory of hegemony, the analysis highlights how deliberative CSR activities isolated and silenced community demands, moved some community members into the corporate alliance and prevented alternative visions of the area to be articulated. In particular, the close connection between deliberative practices and monetary compensation flows is underlined in this dynamic.

The paper contributes to critical scholarship on political CSR by highlighting in what way deliberative practices, linked to monetary compensation schemes, enforce corporate hegemony by moving community members over to the corporate alliance.

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.

Several businesses have begun to use memes as part of social media marketing. Although memes have been independently explored through various theories, their use in social media marketing has not yet been explored. This study analyzes theories used to study memes and suggests popular marketing theories to do the same for memes in social media marketing.

This study employed a mixed methodology. We used the Scopus database and the SPAR-4 protocol to gather, organize, and evaluate the literature. A bibliometric analysis was performed to understand the themes explored in the literature. Manual content analysis was performed to identify the theories used to elucidate study memes.

We profiled meme research through a bibliometric analysis. Relevance theory, Rhetoric theory, Theories of humor, Evolutionary theory, and the theory of conceptual blending are the most frequently used theories in meme literature. Furthermore, we found that the marketing theories used to study memes are limited.

The findings of this study will benefit academia, marketers, and social media managers by offering a comprehensive picture of theories used in meme research. It also suggests new avenues for conducting future research on memes based on identified theories.

This is one of the first known studies to employ both bibliometric and content analyses to review theories in meme literature. Furthermore, we suggest marketing theories and research questions to explain meme marketing.

Work-study programmes aim to support young adults transitioning from tertiary education to work and contribute to enhancing their employability. The purpose of this study is to provide a detailed analysis of the learning experiences of trainees in work-study programmes within the broad field of engineering.

The data gathering procedures used interviews with participants of a specific work-study programme and conducting thematic analyses to identify and understand the motivations of these adults for enrolling in work-study programmes and their associated workplace learning experiences. Fifty-two alumni of electrical and logistics engineering programmes completed 12 months of a separate work-study programme and consented to participate in an hour-long interview. They elaborated upon their work-learn experiences to explicate their work-learn needs and challenges in those interviews.

Findings include workplaces facilitated skills development through providing combinations of work tasks comprising both routine and novel work assignments; challenging circumstances at the workplace provided trainees with opportunities to develop adaptive capacities; and engaging in non-routine work processes fosters integration into the engineering workplace community.

The findings contribute to the existing literature by exemplifying how routine engineering activities are practical affordances through which engineering trainees construct knowledge and dispositions for engaging in challenging, non-routine engineering work. Such experiences are crucial in preparing trainees for advanced roles in logistics or electronic sectors.

The purpose of this study is to assess how higher education anchor institutions (HEIs) voluntarily report their non-economic impacts. Its goals are to quantify the ease of public access to this information; strengthen the conceptual foundation for HEI impact reporting; and provide guidance for making HEI voluntary disclosures more accessible, comparable and systematic.

Using an exploratory mixed methods design and purposeful sampling, this study analyzed voluntary public disclosures of 41 anchor institution universities in the USA to assess how they communicate their public value creation to stakeholders. Data sources included impact reports, donor reports, annual reports and sustainability reports. The study also analyzed the accessibility of this information by timing how long it took to locate.

The sampled US anchor institutions communicate their non-economic impact to stakeholders in myriad ways using a variety of formats. Time required to find the reports ranged from 37 to 50 min, with an average of 42.30 min. Disparate reporting formats inhibit comparability.

Only 41 anchor institutions were examined. The small sample may not be representative of the broader landscape of higher education institutions.

Findings offer guidance for improving voluntary nonfinancial disclosures to increase public confidence in higher education institutions while advancing community and global resilience. To strengthen voluntary disclosure practices, the study recommends using a standardized reporting format, framing HEI impact through socio-ecological resilience indicators, integrating reports and obtaining some form of assurance. These changes would enhance the credibility and comparability of the disclosures.

This research provides some of the first empirical insight into how US higher education anchor institutions report their value creation to the public. Its application of socio-ecological systems theory outlines an actionable conceptual foundation for HEI reporting by linking organizational, community and global resilience.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a review of contemporary perspectives, policies, and practices relating to reported vocational education and training (VET) teacher recruitment and retention challenges, with a particular focus on England and Australia.

This position piece discusses the topic from a transnational perspective by reviewing the relevant literature and examining the impact of policies and practices in England and Australia.

The paper finds that there is a paucity of empirical research relating to VET teacher shortages, but that globally, experience in the sector suggests there are challenges in recruiting and retaining the qualified VET teaching workforce required to address current and future training needs. It recommends that further research is undertaken with an international approach to better understand the problem from the perspective of VET teachers, leaders, and education institutions, and to identify potential solutions.

The paper does not report on empirical research but suggests that further studies are required to better understand the problem and identify potential solutions based on the respective socioeconomic, demographic, and policy contexts.

While there are studies examining VET and VET teaching from the perspectives of quality, reputation, and esteem, few examine the issue and impact of VET teacher shortages, or the challenges of VET teacher recruitment and retention in the contemporary and comparable contexts of Australia and England.