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To highlight ESG litigation risks and present an overview of the present landscape of ESG disputes in Europe – with a particular focus on England – and globally.

This article provides an overview of ESG factors, how they impact on companies, and potential claims that can arise from ESG issues. It also provides recommendations on how companies can prepare for, respond to, and ultimately resolve ESG disputes.

The number of ESG cases that are being brought (and won) by claimants in various courts around the world is rapidly increasing. There is a need for companies to prepare for, respond to, and resolve ESG disputes that they may become party to.

Companies need to take notice of the growing trend of ESG disputes and claims being brought, and in particular prepare for, respond to, and resolve them.

Expert analysis and guidance from experienced dispute resolution and environmental lawyers.

This paper aims to examine the impact of health and other exogenous shocks on stock markets in Africa. Particularly, the authors examined the resilience of the major stock markets in 12 African economies during the recent global pandemic.

This paper uses the recent panel vector autoregressive model, which enables us to capture the response of stock markets to shocks in COVID-19, commodity markets and exchange rate. For robustness, the authors also analysed the panel Granger causality test. Data was obtained for the period ranging from 2 January 2020 to 31 December 2020.

The results show that the growth in COVID-19 cases and deaths do not have any substantial impact on the stock market returns of these economies. In terms of commodity markets, the authors find that gold price has a negative contemporaneous effect on stock returns, but the effect fizzles out around the fifth day while crude oil price, on the other hand, has a significant positive simult aneous impact on stock returns and also converges around the fifth day. The authors further find that the exchange rate has a contemporaneous and nonlinear effect on stock returns and seems to be more dramatic when compared with the other variables. Overall, the results show that stock markets in Africa appear to be flexible and resilient against the COVID-19 outbreak but are affected by other exogenous shocks such as volatile commodity prices and the foreign exchange market. The effect is, however, short-lived – between one to five days.

Following the study’s findings, policies should be put in place to support financial markets by way of hedging against commodity instability and securing domestic currency financing. Policymakers are also recommended to concentrate on managing the uncertainties around their exchange rate markets and develop robust and efficient domestic financial markets to encourage local and foreign investors.

Several studies have been carried out on the effects of disasters (such as the COVID-19 pandemic) on stock markets, but only a few studies have examined the resilience of stock markets to health and other exogenous shocks. This study’s attempt is not only to examine the impact of COVID-19 health shocks on stock markets but also to analyse the resilience of the sampled stock markets. The authors also analyse the resilience of stock markets to commodity markets and exchange rates shocks.

This chapter presents a qualitative investigation of lecturers’ perceptions of critical thinking and how this influenced how they taught. All of the participants taught the same first-year university chemistry course. This case study provides insights about how there may need to be fundamental shifts in lecturers’ perceptions about learning and the development of critical thinking skills so that they can enhance knowledge and understanding of chemistry as well as advance the students’ critical thinking. Recommendations are made for professional learning for lecturers and for changing the “chemistry” of the design of learning experiences through valuing critical thinking in assessments and making critical thinking more explicit throughout the course. The authors argue that critical thinking must be treated as a developmental phenomenon.

In this chapter, Arendt’s reflections on the question of personal responsibility are taken as a discussion of ‘interrupting the legal person’. Examining trials that took place after World War II, Arendt observes in ‘Some Questions of Moral Philosophy’, ‘What the courts demand … is that the defendants should not have participated’ (pp. 33–34). Following Arendt, the author argues that thinking could have enabled possible perpetrators of great evil to meet this demand, for when a person stops to think, whatever they are doing is interrupted. What is more, the person who stops to think is themselves interrupted by thinking. In brief, becoming aware of the possibility that they exist as a person in a mode other than what Ngaire Naffine calls ‘the responsible subject’, thinking disrupts the legal person. A discussion of thinking as interrupting the legal person thus illuminates not only what may turn a person away from participation in the life of a criminal state, but also what that turn means for responsibility.

Traceability of food is of paramount importance to the increasingly sustainability-conscious consumers. Several tracking and tracing systems have been developed in the AgriFood sector in order to prove to the consumers the origins and processing of food products. Critical challenges in realizing food's traceability include cooperating with multiple actors on common data sharing standards and data models.

This research applies a design science approach to showcase traceability that includes preharvest activities and conditions in a case study. The authors demonstrate how existing data sharing standards can be applied in combination with new data models suitable for capturing transparency information about plant production.

Together with existing studies on farm-to-fork transparency, our results demonstrate how to realize transparency from field to fork and enable producers to show a complete bill of sustainability.

The existing standards and data models address transparency challenges in AgriFood chains from the moment of harvest up to retail (farm-to-fork) relatively well, but not what happens before harvest. In order to address sustainability concerns, there is a need to collect data about production activities related to product quality and sustainability before harvesting and share it downstream the supply chain. The ability to gather data on sustainability practices such as reducing pesticide, herbicide, fertilizer and water use are crucial requirements for producers to market their produce as quality and sustainable products.

This study aims to examine the mediating effect of four antecedents of competitive advantage on the linkage of risky strategy to firm performance, measured by revenue dynamics. It considers the roots of competitive advantage to highlight different patterns and foundations of achieving superior performance. It investigates whether pursuing a risky strategy fosters revenue dynamics growth and whether different mediators are included in that relationship.

Path analysis (structural equation modeling) method is used to analyze data from 122 companies of various sizes and industries. All respondents were responsible for executing strategic management processes. The paper used the subjective perspective, which is based on the individual opinion of senior company managers and owners.

The authors find a positive relationship between risky strategy and firm performance, but no evidence of a mediating role of competitive advantage and dynamic growth in this relationship. Competitive advantage should be perceived as a set of integrated factors that can be analyzed from an aggregated perspective. Integrating all antecedents requires a holistic and systematic approach and the development of a particular mindset. Aggregated competitive advantage is related to setting dynamic growth as a priority. However, no relationship between risky strategy and achieving competitive advantage, or between implementing a risky strategy and setting dynamic growth as a priority, is observed, which was assumed to explain the revenue dynamics growth.

Secondary data should be analyzed to explore how risky strategies are manifested, and which managerial decisions are reflected in high-level risk. A multidimensional scale could be developed to check how risk shapes the constructs’ interdependence. Therefore, the dynamic capabilities approach could be further expanded.

This research offers insights into the short-term relationship between risky strategy and revenue dynamics, although competitive advantage does not mediate that relationship. Special attention should be paid to the selected antecedents of competitive advantage, as they influence dynamic growth.

This work provides insights into different antecedents of competitive advantage, which is not necessarily based on making risky decisions, and into factors that facilitate firm performance measured by revenue dynamics.

The present study predicts attitude towards entrepreneurship among the students of Thailand through the entrepreneurial attitude orientation (EAO) model.

A quantitative approach is used, based on cross-sectional data from public sector universities of Thailand. The respondents are bachelor's and master's students who are acquiring entrepreneurship education. A random sampling technique was used to approach students to participate in the survey. A total of 392 useable questionnaires were returned, providing data for analysis.

Using structural equation modeling, the results show a positive and significant impact of achievement, personal control and innovation on attitudes towards entrepreneurship. Self-esteem, however, has a non-significant impact on attitudes towards entrepreneurship.

This study may be helpful for university policymakers wishing to know more about students' entrepreneurial attitudes, as there is a strong need to divert more students towards entrepreneurship. This study may contribute to the entrepreneurship literature and the EAO scale, particularly in developing and Asian contexts.

This study offers evidence of the development of entrepreneurial attitudes among the students of Thailand, which ensures the further validation of the EAO scale in a developing country.

This study aimed to analyse if significant pedagogical transitions occurred from Pre-Covid-19 to Covid-19 period concerning applied teaching methods, course content, assessment strategies, technical support and faculty's readiness.

This is a quantitative study wherein perceptions of 116 faculty (from higher education institutions) from 22 countries were collected through an online survey. The authors classified the responses by five measurement characteristics and treatment, that is, Pre-Covid and during Covid. ANOVA test identified the differences between the ten groups. The authors also conducted ANOVA test for five Pre-Covid groups and five Covid groups and found meaningful differences among those groups.

The authors compared the differences by the treatment, that is, Pre-Covid and Covid, and found the significant difference in teaching methods, assessment strategies and faculty's readiness while there was no significant difference found in course content and technological support.

The findings and recommendations have a practical application for higher education leaders, curriculum managers and faculty working within this academic environment of online learning either completely remote or hybrid.

The interpretive analysis suggests key improvement areas where education policymakers and higher education strategists need to pay attention to developing strategies and be proactive to cope with any future emergencies whilst maintaining high standards of teaching and learning. This includes devising strategies to prepare faculty competencies to teach in a virtual learning environment, to revamp the assessment strategies and teaching methods.