Search results

Climate change poses risks to society and the demand for carbon literacy within small and medium-sized enterprises is increasing. Skills and knowledge are required for organizational greenhouse gas accounting and science-based decisions to help businesses reduce transitional risks. At the University of Copenhagen and the University of Northern British Columbia, two carbon management courses have been developed to respond to this growing need. Using an action-based co-learning model, students and business are paired to quantify and report emissions and develop climate plans and communication strategies.

This paper draws on surveys of businesses that have partnered with the co-learning model, designed to provide insight on carbon reductions and the impacts of co-learning. Data collected from 12 respondents in Denmark and 19 respondents in Canada allow for cross-institutional and international comparison in a Global North context.

Results show that while co-learning for carbon literacy is welcomed, companies identify limitations: time and resources; solution feasibility; governance and reporting structures; and communication methods. Findings reveal a need for extension, both forwards and backwards in time, indicating that the collaborations need to be lengthened and/or intensified. Balancing academic requirements detracts from usability for businesses, and while municipal and national policy and emission targets help generate a general societal understanding of the issue, there is no concrete guidance on how businesses can implement operational changes based on inventory results.

The research brings new knowledge to the field of transitional climate risks and does so with a focus on both small businesses and universities as important co-learning actors in low-carbon transitions. The comparison across geographies and institutions contributes an international solution perspective to climate change mitigation and adaptation strategies.

Although there is a growing body of work on immigrants' information behavior, little is known about the pre-arrival information experiences of immigrants who consult formal information sources such as immigration agents. Drawn from a larger study on the information behavior of immigrants, this paper mainly reports the semi-structured interview findings on the pre-arrival information experiences of Bangladeshi immigrants who used formal information sources with discussion on how that affected their post-arrival settlement into Canada.

The study used a mixed method approach with semi-structured interviews (n = 60) and surveys (n = 205) with participants who arrived in Canada between the years of 1971 and 2017. Data were collected from May 2017 to February 2018.

Although the overall scope of the original study is much larger, this paper features findings on the pre-arrival information experiences derived mainly from an analysis of interview data. This study provides insights into the pre-arrival information experiences of Bangladeshi immigrants consulting formal information sources such as immigration firms, individual immigration consultants and more formal government agencies. The author introduces a new concept of “information crafting” by exploring the negative consequences of selective information sharing by immigration consultants/agents in newcomers' settlements in Canada, primarily positive information about life in Canada, sometimes with exaggeration and falsification. The interview participants shared story after the story of the settlement challenges they faced after arriving in Canada and how the expectations they built through the information received from immigration consultants and government agencies did not match after arrival. This study emphasizes the importance of providing comprehensive information about life in Canada to potential newcomers so that they can make informed decisions even before they apply.

The findings of this study have theoretical and practical implications for policy and research. This study provides insights into the complicated culturally situated pre-arrival information experiences of Bangladeshi immigrants. Moreover, the study findings encourage researchers in various disciplines, including psychology, migration studies and geography, to delve more deeply into newcomers' information experiences using an informational lens to examine the information newcomers receive from diverse sources and their effects on their post-arrival settlement in a new country. The study challenges the general assumptions that formal information sources are always reputable, useful, and comprehensive, and it provides some future directions for research that seeks to understand the culturally situated information behavior of diverse immigrant groups.

The purpose of this study is shed light on the underlying forces behind entrepreneurship within a regional innovation system (RIS) in a remote rural region. The authors examine the following questions: Which are the main underlying forces behind the entrepreneurial process in a rural RIS characterized by traditionally low-tech, small-scale businesses? How can the development of a low-tech regional innovation system be conceptualized?

The design of the study is based on entrepreneurship theory. Data analysis followed practices used in phenomenography, a research approach used to analyse and identify commonalities and variations in populations' perceptions of a certain phenomenon. Data are composed using semi-structured interviews and a database composed of company information of all firms in the population.

A proactive mobilization of regional stakeholders and resources can be an important driving force behind the entrepreneurial process and generation of a rural RIS. Innovation can be generated within low-tech industries turning the rural context into an asset. An RIS in a remote rural context can be initiated and orchestrated by regional authorities, but knowledge brokering and orchestration can also be managed by networks of small-scale businesses brought together by mutual benefit and common interests.

Regional innovation systems theory is most often used to study high-tech industries. But by combining regional innovation systems with rural entrepreneurship and entrepreneurship context theory is a fruitful avenue to understand the role of rural entrepreneurship in regional development, even in remote and peripheral regions. Innovation does not need to entail high-tech international environments; it can appear as the result of efforts in low-tech industries in rural and remote environments. The authors’ findings need to be scrutinized; therefore, the authors call for more research on regional innovation systems in rural environments.

It is possible for regional authorities to orchestrate a development process through the actions of a strong regional agent but also by supporting the creation of networks of small businesses that are built on trust and common interests.

This study contributes to the literature with a new perspective to the study of entrepreneurship and of regional innovation systems. Entrepreneurship research with focus on rural contexts most often highlight limits to entrepreneurship and see entrepreneurship as “just running a business”. A perspective that starts from innovation and innovative behaviour, despite the rural context and embedded resources, helps to generate new knowledge that can enrich the understanding of entrepreneurship and also be the foundation for more precise business development policies in rural settings.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the gendered ideas and ideals attached to an imagined ideal Entrepreneur in a post-industrial rural community in Sweden. While research has not yet clearly explained how the ideal entrepreneur is constructed, the result, i.e. the gendered representations of entrepreneurs, is well-researched. Previous results indicate a prevalent portrayal of entrepreneurship as a predominantly masculine construct characterised by qualities such as self-made success, confidence and assertiveness.

Ethnographic fieldwork was conducted in a community that is attempting to re-brand itself through garden tourism. Through inductive reasoning, this study analyses the gendered ideas and ideals regarding the community’s imagined ideal Entrepreneur who is to help the community solve its problems.

This study finds that the community forges the Entrepreneur into an imagined masculine ideal as holy, a saviour and a god and is replacing its historical masculine ironmaster with a masculine Entrepreneur. This study develops forging as a metaphor for the construction of the masculine ideal Entrepreneur, giving the community, rather than the entrepreneur himself, a voice as constructors. From social constructionism, this study emphasises how gendered ideas and ideals are shaped not only by the individual realities but more so in the reciprocal process by the realities of others.

The metaphor of forging adds an innovative theoretical dimension to the feminist constructionist approach and suggests focusing on how the “maleness” of entrepreneurship is produced and reproduced in the local. Previously, light has been shed on how male entrepreneurs perform their identities collectively; the focus of this study is on the social construction of this envisioned Entrepreneur within a rural community. The development of forging thus contributes as a way of analysing entrepreneurship in place. The choice of an ethnographic study allowed the authors to be a part of the real-life world of community members, providing rich data to explore entrepreneurship and gender.

In this study, the authors sought to investigate how the implicit social ties of both project owners and potential backers are associated with crowdfunding project success.

Drawing on social ties theory and factors that affect crowdfunding success, in this research, the authors developed a model to study how project owners' and potential backers' implicit social ties are associated with crowdfunding projects' degrees of success. The proposed model was empirically tested with crowdfunding data collected from Kickstarter and social media data collected from Twitter. The authors performed the test using an ordinary least squares (OLS) regression model with fixed effects.

The authors found that project owners' implicit social ties (specifically, their social media activities, degree centrality and betweenness centrality) are significantly and positively associated with crowdfunding projects' degrees of success. Meanwhile, potential project backers' implicit social ties (their social media activities and degree centrality) are negatively associated with crowdfunding projects' degrees of success. The authors also found that project size moderates the effects of project owners' social media activities on projects' degrees of success.

This work contributes to the literature on crowdfunding by investigating how the implicit social ties of both potential backers and project owners on social media are associated with crowdfunding project success. This study extends the previous research on social ties' roles in explaining crowdfunding project success by including implicit social ties, while the literature explored only explicit social ties.

This study aims to examine the co-creation of customer experiences at different levels in service ecosystems, analyzing the case of a tourist destination.

A questionnaire was designed based on previously validated scales. The questionnaire was distributed through the social media platforms Facebook and Instagram. The survey yielded 1,476 valid responses for three types of destinations. Structural equation modeling and multigroup analysis were performed to test the hypotheses.

Aggregate service experience and memorable customer experience (MCE) in service ecosystems are determined by customer experiences at a dyadic level. Service experience at the ecosystem level is formed from ordinary experiences at the actor level, while MCE is formed from extraordinary experiences at the dyadic level. The type of ecosystem moderates the relationships between the variables but does not alter the importance of each of them.

The relationship between the co-creation of customer experiences at different levels of service ecosystems (dyadic vs aggregate) is addressed. A relationship is established between the ordinary and extraordinary character of experiences and their memorability at the ecosystem level.

Develop a comprehensive framework for assessing the knowledge organization systems (KOSs), including the taxonomy of Wikipedia and the ontologies of Wikidata, with a specific focus on enhancing management and retrieval with a gender nonbinary perspective.

This study employs heuristic and inspection methods to assess Wikipedia’s KOS, ensuring compliance with international standards. It evaluates the efficiency of retrieving non-masculine gender-related articles using the Catalan Wikipedian category scheme, identifying limitations. Additionally, a novel assessment of Wikidata ontologies examines their structure and coverage of gender-related properties, comparing them to Wikipedia’s taxonomy for advantages and enhancements.

This study evaluates Wikipedia’s taxonomy and Wikidata’s ontologies, establishing evaluation criteria for gender-based categorization and exploring their structural effectiveness. The evaluation process suggests that Wikidata ontologies may offer a viable solution to address Wikipedia’s categorization challenges.

The assessment of Wikipedia categories (taxonomy) based on KOS standards leads to the conclusion that there is ample room for improvement, not only in matters concerning gender identity but also in the overall KOS to enhance search and retrieval for users. These findings bear relevance for the design of tools to support information retrieval on knowledge-rich websites, as they assist users in exploring topics and concepts.

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.

This study aims to explore how university language students evaluate different sustainability themes and examine the overall relevance of ecological, social, cultural and economic sustainability dimensions in language education.

A questionnaire was designed to study Finnish university language students’ (n = 55) order of priority for sustainability dimensions and their sub-themes and the justifications for the priority orders using a mixed methods design. Qualitative content analysis was conducted using NVivo software, and weighted rankings were used to analyse the quantitative data.

The findings of the study showed that language students evaluated the social and cultural dimensions as the most relevant in language teaching. In all dimensions, students approached sustainability mainly by prioritising larger issues and advancing towards smaller ones. Most non-directional responses appeared in the economic dimension. In addition, individual prioritising and justification approaches varied between different sustainability dimensions.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, no previous studies have examined language students’ evaluations of and justifications for all four sustainability dimensions. The results highlight the need to use multiple, holistic approaches and systems thinking to incorporate education for sustainable development.