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This study aims to explore how sustainable business models (SBM) can be developed within agri-innovation systems (AIS) and emphasize an integration of the two with a systemic understanding for reducing food loss and value loss in postharvest agri-food supply chain.

This study conducted longitudinal qualitative research in a developing country with food loss challenges in the postharvest supply chain. This study collected data through multiple rounds of fieldwork, interviews and focus groups over four years. Thematic analysis and “sensemaking” were used for inductive data analysis to generate rich contextual knowledge by drawing upon the lived realities of the agri-food supply chain actors.

First, this study finds that the value losses are varied in the supply chain, encompassing production value, intrinsic value, extrinsic value, market value, institutional value and future food value. This happens through two cumulative effects including multiplier losses, where losses in one model cascade into others, amplifying their impact and stacking losses, where the absence of data stacks or infrastructure pools hampers the realisation of food value. Thereafter, this study proposes four strategies for moving from the loss-incurring current business model to a networked SBM for mitigating losses. This emphasises the need to redefine ownership as stewardship, enable formal and informal beneficiary identification, strengthen value addition and build capacities for empowering communities to benefit from networked SBM with AIS initiatives. Finally, this study puts forth ten propositions for future research in aligning AIS with networked SBM.

This study contributes to understanding the interplay between AIS and SBM; emphasising the integration of the two to effectively address food loss challenges in the early stages of agri-food supply chains. The identified strategies and research propositions provide implications for researchers and practitioners seeking to accelerate sustainable practices for reducing food loss and waste in agri-food supply chains.

Through Bourdieusian sociology, this study aims to interpret a globalized symbolic environment ward by the States and dominated by organizations through the States’ Nobilities enticing and the Euro-American influences disseminated by the cultural circuit of capitalism in the inculcation and incorporation of a class habitus conniving with this logic of domination.

This study has developed a theoretical essay based on the contributions of Bourdieusian sociology to discuss and understand the following concepts and their respective relationships: symbolic environment, globalization, organizations, State, State Nobility, Euro-American influences, cultural circuit of capitalism and class habitus.

The arguments built throughout this theoretical essay recognized how class habitus on environment contributes to organizations establishing themselves as a space that consolidates and replicates the domination logic. As indicated, the State Nobility is an intermediary element between dominant organizations and the State, as dominated.

This theoretical essay signals that less harmful alliances between organizations, the State Nobility and the State could culminate in social, environmental and economic scenarios provided with more inclusion, diversity and preservation.

This study presents an in-depth conceptual analysis to hold power structures responsible as direct and indirect drivers of environmental problems, with their different proportions and severity levels, affecting the planet.

This study proposes an alternative lens to debate and question how much the results presented by the contemporary world order compensate (if in any way) the damage that invades and deteriorate environmental assets.

This study aims to fill this research gap by providing a comprehensive exploration of the transnationalization of higher education in China and Asia, with a particular focus on how institutions maintain quality assurance and how student learning experiences are reported.

The transnationalization of higher education involves educational programs and services provided by institutions or universities in a country other than their home country where students from diverse countries are trained. The goal of transnational education is to offer higher education to students who face obstacles in physically entering the host country of a transnational program, encourage globalization, enhance cross-cultural communication and improve the quality of education by expanding students' learning opportunities, providing diverse educational experiences and elevating academic standards. The transnationalization of higher education has become a crucial endeavor in Asia, especially in countries such as China, Malaysia and Singapore, where rapid economic development and globalization have prompted the need to evolve into knowledge-driven economies to meet the increasing demand for higher education. The factors driving the expansion of transnational higher education in China and Asia include the desire for top-quality education, the allure of international students, the establishment of worldwide collaborations and aspirations to be recognized as centers of academic distinction. The rapid expansion and increasing importance of transnational higher education has underscored the vital role of quality assurance. To guarantee educational quality, maintain institutional reputation and improve overall student outcomes, several agencies and frameworks have been established to uphold international standards.

Based upon extensive literature reveiw and case analysis, our findings indicated the quality assurance assessment varies and is primarily influenced by host countries and provider polices. However, students in transnational higher education programs report satisfaction with their experienes and the quality of their programs, which tends to meet their expecations.

This study presents the first comprehsensive literatrue rewiew and case analysis of how transnational higher education in China, Sinapore, Malaysia and Vietnam uphold quality assurance and report students learning experiences. Additionally, the findings highlight why future researceh on this topic is crucial and why forestering colloboration among countries in Asian regions is imporant in term of growing geo-politics.

Ahmet Kuru, in his book, suggests that the explanation for the lack of social and political development in the modern world can be traced back to a historical ‘state-ulama alliance’ from the 11th-century Saljuq empire or earlier. From the perspective of an historian, however, this dating displays some empirical problems. It is certain that the state eventually did gain the upper hand over the Muslim intellectuals, at least in the centre of the Ottoman empire. But the process to that point was different. In this comment, a different explanation is proposed that points instead to two crucial factors: the loss of a homogeneous Muslim state with the fall of the caliphate, and the rise of a unified Muslim world, an umma, through the independence, not subservience, of the class of scholars in the mediaeval period of Islam. Thus, a model is proposed that focuses on two turning points: the replacement of the effective caliphate with a fractious system of sultanates in the mid-tenth century, coinciding with the solidification of Islamic thought in a more strictly regulated form both in theology, law and in Sufism. The second moment is ca. 1500, when the period of political fragmentation comes to an end with the Ottoman state unifying the Middle East, flanked by Morocco and Iran, while challenges to the religious orthodoxy begin to grow at the margins. Such a model thus sees the ulama as actors for change as well as for orthodoxy throughout Muslim history, responding to changing developments in social and political contexts.

The purpose of this research is to identify novel ways of tackling health inequalities of underserved populations. It explores the opportunities presented by the changes in health and social care legislation to employ historically underused services, such as police custody healthcare providers, in addressing health inequalities.

This research analyses the policy approaches to tackling health inequalities in the UK in the past 40 years with an emphasis on those experienced by the people detained in English police custodies. It analyses the current model of healthcare in police custody and proposes a novel integrated model of care and joint commissioning opportunities in funding it.

Policies to tackle health inequalities have largely failed, as they became entrenched. But recent changes in the health and social care legislation in England offer opportunities to address them by employing historically underused healthcare services, such as those operating in police custodies.

The research does not touch upon ethical considerations related to the patient privacy aspect of integrated care. Interventions by and interactions with police custody healthcare providers would be visible to all professionals with access to the patient’s health record. As with all novel interventions or innovative models of care, the effectiveness of such clinical interventions remains to be established by further research. It opens a new line of research on quality improvement through integration of care and explores understudied aspects of joint commissioning of integrated care.

It offers health commissioners and public health leaders the opportunity to employ police custody healthcare services in reaching their population health management objectives and meeting their health inequalities objectives at local level. It also gives police and crime commissioners the opportunity to address the health drivers of criminal behaviour that overlap with health inequalities. It offers funding opportunities presented by jointly commissioning services at lower costs to both police and health commissioners alike. It improves the health outcomes of historically underserved populations by facilitating access to health and social care services and facilities.

Reducing health inequalities and disparities in health outcomes can decrease the costs of the healthcare services over the long term and might contribute to reducing criminality by addressing inequities and some health drivers of criminal behaviour.

The paper explores understudied opportunities offered by the recent changes in health and social care legislation in England and includes underused resources to tackle health inequalities.

In this article, the authors analyse a complex social process affecting historic public paths in rural areas in southern Spain. Despite the fact that urban populations are demanding the enhancement of this type of natural heritage for tourism, sports and recreational use, some parts of the network have been abandoned or usurped.

The study is multidisciplinary, comprising three interlinked studies. The cartographic study comprises an inventory of public paths in rural areas based on administrative sources. The legal study analyses local, regional and national regulations governing agricultural, environmental, heritage, sports and tourism uses of the infrastructure. The sociological study analyses social discourses on the uses of public paths, and identifies conflicts between farmers, landowners, environmentalists, sportspeople and tourists.

The preliminary results identified an important public paths network in Andalusia, approximately 160,000 km. The legal study found that there are laws regulating use, although local authorities do not monitor compliance or provide solutions to enhance management. The sociological study determined the attribution of environmental, cultural and economic value to public paths, but also the existence of conflicts between rural and urban populations.

Given that this is ongoing research, only state of the art and some preliminary albeit sufficiently consistent results are presented.

The results could help to guide public policy and governance of public paths.

Public paths promote rural development and a green/sustainable economy.

The research results and conclusions are original.

Decentralization has profound implications for many health systems. This study investigates the effect of health system decentralization in Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries on public health security capacity and health service satisfaction.

Multiple linear regression analyses were employed for variables related to the level of health security capacity and satisfaction with the healthcare system while controlling for all socio-demographic variables from the European Social Survey, including over 44,000 respondents from 25 OECD countries. The Health Systems in Transition series of countries were used for assessing the decentralization level.

The result of multiple linear regression analyses showed that the level of decentralization in health systems was significantly associated with higher health security capacity (ß-coefficient 3.722, 95% confidence interval (CI) [3.536 3.908]; p=<0.001) and health service satisfaction (ß-coefficient 1.463, 95% CI [1.389 1.536]; p=<0.001) in the study. Countries with a higher level of decentralization in health policy tasks and areas were significantly likely to have higher health services satisfaction, whereas this satisfaction had a significant negative relation with the lower level of decentralization status of secondary/tertiary care services in OECD countries (ß-coefficient −5.250, 95% CI [−5.757–4.743]; p = 0.001).

This study contributes to a better understanding of the extent to which decentralization of health services affects public health safety capacity and satisfaction with health services, whereas the level of decentralization in OECD countries varies considerably. Overall, the findings highlight the importance of public health security and satisfaction with health care delivery in assessing the effects of decentralization in health services.

The purpose of this study is to analyze the nonlinear effects of corporate philanthropy on the responses of both internal and external stakeholders as well as its impact on corporate financial performance.

Based on the stakeholder theory, the authors developed a conceptual model to examine the nonlinear effects of corporate philanthropy on company performance. For the empirical analysis, data from 397 company-years was analyzed using a using a Heckman two-stage model. The robustness of the findings was also confirmed through panel regression analysis.

The study revealed a linear relationship between corporate reputation and corporate philanthropy, whereas job satisfaction exhibited a nonlinear relationship with corporate philanthropy.

This research bridges the gap in extant literature by scrutinizing the nonlinear associations between corporate philanthropy and financial performance. Additionally, it addresses an emerging scholarly demand to uncover the “dark side” of corporate philanthropy through an investigation into its adverse impacts on employee satisfaction. Moreover, the study augments existing understandings of stakeholder theory and corporate philanthropy, positing that the influence of corporate philanthropy, as conceptualized through stakeholder theory, hinges on perceived fairness in multilateral relationships.

Collaboration in agricultural value chains (AVCs) has the potential to increase smallholders’ participation in international value chains and increase their benefits from participation. This scoping review explores existing collaboration models among stakeholders of AVCs in developing countries, examines enablers and constraints of collaboration and identifies policy gaps.

We systematically searched three databases, CAB Abstracts, Econlit (EBSCO) and Agricola, for studies published between 2005 and 2023 and included 59 relevant studies on AVC collaboration.

The primary motivations for collaboration are to enhance market access and improve product quality. Key outcomes of collaboration include improvements in farmers’ welfare, market participation and increased production; only a few studies consider improved risk management as an important outcome. Robust support from government and non-governmental entities is a primary enabler of collaboration. Conversely, conflicts of interest among stakeholders and resource limitations constrain collaboration possibilities. Collaboration involving high-value crops prioritizes income increases, whereas collaboration involving staple crops focuses on improving household food security.

This study may have publication bias as unsuccessful instances of collaboration are less likely to be published.

This study is unique in highlighting collaboration models’ characteristics and identifying AVC policy and programmatic areas where private firms, farmers’ groups, local governments and donor agencies can contribute.

This study explores the relationship between economic freedom and gender ideologies on the allocation of women’s opportunity-to-necessity entrepreneurship across countries. Opportunity entrepreneurship is typically understood as one’s best option for work, whereas necessity entrepreneurship describes the choice as driven by no better option for work. Specifically, we examine how economic freedom (i.e. each country’s policies that facilitate voluntary exchange) and gender ideologies (i.e. each country’s propensity for gendered separate spheres) affect the distribution of women’s opportunity-to-necessity entrepreneurship across countries.

We construct our sample by matching data from the following country-level sources: the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor’s Adult Population Survey (APS), the Fraser Institute’s Economic Freedom Index (EFI), the European/World Value Survey’s Integrated Values Survey (IVS) gender equality index, and other covariates from the IVS, Varieties of Democracy (V-dem) World Bank (WB) databases. Our final sample consists of 729 observations from 109 countries between 2006 and 2018. Entrepreneurial activity motivations are measured by the ratio of the percentage of women’s opportunity-driven total nascent and early-stage entrepreneurship to the percentage of female necessity-driven total nascent and early-stage entrepreneurship at the country level. Due to a first-order autoregressive process and heteroskedastic cross-sectional dependence in our panel, we estimate a fixed-effect regression with robust standard errors clustered by country.

After controlling for multiple macro-level factors, we find two interesting findings. First, economic freedom positively affects the ratio of women’s opportunity-to-necessity entrepreneurship. We find that the size of government, sound money, and business and credit regulations play the most important role in shaping the distribution of contextual motivations over time and between countries. However, this effect appears to benefit efficiency and innovation economies more than factor economies in our sub-sample analysis. Second, gender ideologies of political equality positively affect the ratio of women’s opportunity-to-necessity entrepreneurship, and this effect is most pronounced for efficiency economies.

This study offers one critical contribution to the entrepreneurship literature by demonstrating how economic freedom and gender ideologies shape the distribution of contextual motivation for women’s entrepreneurship cross-culturally. We answer calls to better understand the variation within women’s entrepreneurship instead of comparing women’s and men’s entrepreneurial activity. As a result, our study sheds light on how structural aspects of societies shape the allocation of women’s entrepreneurial motivations through their institutional arrangements.