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This chapter explores the implications of acknowledging one's own excessive entitlement and living contradictions in contributing to Living-Educational-Theory Research. The analysis emphasises the importance of accepting one's educational responsibility for one's own continuing professional development in inquiries of the kind that address this query: ‘How do I improve my professional educational practices in education with values of human flourishing?’ This responsibility includes making public evidence and values-based explanations of educational influences in learning, in contributing to the global knowledge base of education.

The notion of excessive teacher entitlement was coined by Ratnam to characterise the putative deficit view of teachers that is projected onto them. Craig (2013) developed Schwab's concept, the teachers' ‘best-loved self’, to embrace teachers' input in promoting the learning and well-being of all in the institutions they serve (Ratnam & Craig, 2021). My experiences of being a living contradiction are grounded in a tension between my best-loved self and my experience of excessive entitlements. Living educational theories research in which individual practitioner-researchers generate their validated, evidence- and values-based explanations of educational influences in their own learning, in the learning of others and in the learning of the social formations that influence their practice with values of human flourishing, have helped me leverage the potential for growth afforded by this tension. The perspective draws insights from the disciplines of education including Habermas's Critical Theory. It also includes insights from other methodologies such as autoethnography, action research, phenomenology, self-study and narrative inquiry.

This paper aims to explore the links between being lonely and isolated, and increased risks of abuse for adults with care and support needs.

Thematic analysis was used to explore features of loneliness and social isolation present in South Yorkshire Safeguarding Adults Reviews (SARs) published since 2014.

Ten out of fifteen SARs indicated there had been issues of loneliness and/or social isolation for the person who was the subject of the SAR.

The limitations of this paper are that it only included SARs from the South Yorkshire area. Future research should explore national and international perspectives on these issues.

Safeguarding Boards should include actions to address loneliness and social isolation as part of prevention strategies and services to develop approaches that can minimise or prevent abuse before it occurs. Practitioners should routinely explore whether the people they work with feel lonely and/or isolated and support people to take appropriate action to mitigate these risks.

This paper uses the existing body of literature about loneliness and social isolation to explore the risks of abuse and neglect for adults with care and support needs.

This paper aims to provide insights into the environment needed for advancing a digitally enabled circular plastic economy in Africa. It explores important technical and social paradigms for the transition.

This study adopted an interpretivist paradigm, drawing on thematic analysis on qualitative data from an inter-sectoral engagement with 69 circular economy stakeholders across the continent.

The results shows that, while substantial progress has been made with regard to the development and deployment of niche innovations in Africa, the overall progress of circular plastic economy is slowed due to relatively minimal changes at the regime levels as well as pressures from the exogenous landscape. The study highlights that regime changes are crucial for disrupting the entrenched linear plastic economy in developing countries, which is supported by significant sunk investment and corporate state capture.

The main limitation of this study is with the sample as it uses data collected from five countries. Therefore, while it offers a panoramic view of multi-level synergy of actors and sectors across African countries, it is limited in its scope and ability to illuminate country-specific nuances and peculiarities.

The study underlines the importance of policy innovations and regulatory changes in order for technologies to have a meaningful contribution to the transition to a circular plastic economy.

The study makes an important theoretical contribution by using empirical evidence from various African regions to articulate the critical importance of the regime dimension in accelerating the circular economy transition in general, and the circular plastic economy in particular, in Africa.

The prevalence of pediatric anxiety disorders is on the rise but youth have challenges in accessing specialty evidence-based mental health care. As a result, families turn to their pediatric primary care provider (PCP) for assessment and management of anxiety. To increase PCPs’ abilities to manage anxiety, the Extension for Community Healthcare Outcomes (“Project ECHO”) was used. The purpose of this study is to explore the impact of Project ECHO on participating PCPs’ knowledge, self-efficacy and interventions surrounding the assessment and management of anxiety.

Data were collected pre- and post-course across five cohorts. Participants completed a clinical knowledge test, ratings of self-efficacy and self-reported frequencies of in-office interventions. Satisfaction was also measured.

Attendance remained strong, and participants rated high satisfaction. From pre- to post-course, participants demonstrated increased knowledge on almost all objective questions. Participants reported increased self-efficacy across all domains. Finally, participants endorsed increased use of several in-office interventions.

This study highlights the importance of Project ECHO as a continuing education model to enhance PCPs’ abilities and confidence in the assessment and management of anxiety. Future continuing education endeavors should consider Project ECHO as a means of increasing PCPs’ capacity to manage mental health conditions.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study that applied the Project ECHO model to pediatric anxiety as a mechanism of increasing knowledge, self-efficacy and in-office interventions with PCPs.

Nurse leaders are challenged by ethical issues in today’s complex health-care settings. The purpose of this study was to describe and analyze key elements of moral distress identified by nurse leaders from health-care systems in the USA, Germany, Austria and Switzerland. The aim was to develop an understanding of distressing ethical issues nurse leaders face in the USA and three German-speaking European countries.

This descriptive cross-sectional study surveyed a convenience sample of nurse leaders in the USA, Germany, Austria and Switzerland. The voluntary, anonymous survey also included qualitative questions and was distributed using the Qualtrics® platform. A thematic analysis of the qualitative data in each country was carried out and a comparative analysis identified similarities and differences between the groups of nurse leaders comparing the US data to that from three German-speaking European countries.

The survey was completed by 316 nurse leaders: Germany, Austria, and Switzerland (n = 225) and the USA (n = 91). Similar themes identified as causing all nurse leaders moral distress included a lack of individual and organizational integrity, hierarchical and interprofessional issues, lack of nursing professionalism, patient care/patient safety concerns, finances negatively impacting care and issues around social justice. Within these six themes, there were also differences between the USA and the three German-speaking European countries.

Understanding the experiences associated with distressing ethical situations can allow nurse leaders and organizations to focus on solutions and develop resilience to reduce moral distress in the USA and three German-speaking European countries.

This paper aims to tentatively explore the benefits of placing art’s knowledge-building tradition, with its capacity to disrupt and reframe, at the centre of how we look at alternative organizing and alternative economic spaces, positioning lived experience, its uncertainties intact, at the heart of researching and practicing social enterprise (SE).

The paper explores indeterminacy through two case-study narratives, one of an academic arts-based research project and the other of a unique organization it encountered.

The paper describes the way juxtaposition, encounter and drift value indeterminacy as central to generative processes, challenging the control central to management and its research.

The paper proposes that adopting an arts-based approach that challenges control can create a research instrument sensitive to similar tendencies in case studies, thus highlighting what is different and alternative about them. This responds to concerns about the diminishing centrality of SE’s democratizing ethic expressed in its scholarship, about creativity in its research and about its socially transformative potential.

The practice, by SEs of an approach welcoming chance, encounter, meandering paths and place-making with porous boundaries, proliferates transformative possibilities and is linked to democratization and participation.

Though dangerously challenging to accepted notions of academic rigour, this paper proposes an unusual thought experiment tied in with lived experiences, in themselves experimental in practice.

This chapter introduces classical ideas of leadership, from Homer's Iliad and Odyssey and Xenophon's Anabasis, posing questions that challenge the ethical and value-based stance of the contemporary literature on authentic leadership. Do leaders in all spheres need to be versatile in the classical sense? Is the use of ruses legitimate if they succeed? Do literature and history provide greater insight into the execution of leadership than conventional business school courses? Pieper urges researchers to investigate the qualities that a leader needs and the values espoused by proponents of authentic leadership and what coherent theory that recognises the leadership imperatives exemplified by the heroic classical accounts could replace the model of authentic leadership.