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This study aims to detect preschool and primary school student–teachers’ (STs) views about the social pillar of urban sustainability and particularly about the importance they attach to various social aspects of urban sustainability, and the perceived effectiveness of education in influencing these aspects.

A custom-designed questionnaire comprising eight literature-based social aspects of urban sustainability was developed and administered to 207 STs during the spring semester of 2015-2016, in the school of education, of a university located in northern Greece.

The highest levels of importance were attached to the aspect of “Health”, whereas aspects related to “Policy and Governance” were considered as the least important of all social aspects of urban sustainability. The aspect considered most easily influenced through education was that of “Human Relations”, in contrast to the aspect of “Housing” in which education was considered as the least effective. Also, STs considered every aspect of social urban sustainability to be more important than able to be influenced by education, revealing that they are somewhat sceptical of the effectiveness of education in this field.

The participation of only student-teachers and the use of quantitative research tools are among the main limitation of the study. Future research should include teachers, both in-service and pre-service, from various disciplines and educational levels, and should employ a combination of quantitative with qualitative methods of analysis.

Insight into STs’ views can serve as a useful guidance for teacher education programs, providing information about necessary actions that have to be taken for the improvement of both pre- and in-service teacher educations.

There is a great lack of research around pre- and in-service teachers’ views about the importance of sustainability and the role of education in influencing it. Existing research is further scarcer when it comes to the investigation of the social pillar of urban sustainability, as literature usually focuses either on the environmental pillar of sustainability or on the concept of sustainable development in general.

Sustainability, especially in terms of development and growth, has been in the agenda of the world community for several decades. However, apparently not all the aspects of sustainability are given equal importance. Ecologic and economic components of sustainability have been in the focal point of many theoretical and practical works, as the social aspect has been mostly left out of emphasis. The purpose of this paper is to examine the social aspects of sustainability and its relation to architecture, with respect to the strong connection between the society and the built environment.

The core of the paper consists of a case study conducted at a design studio course for third-year architecture students whereas the outcomes of the student works on the design problem are evaluated as examples for design approaches to reflect the effects of the built environment on social sustainability. The case study is supported with a literature review and examination of existing approaches to similar subjects regarding social sustainability.

The findings resulted in a better understanding of social sustainability in architectural education which is reflected on the built environment through several architectural strategies.

This paper contributes to the literature by providing a holistic understanding of sustainability including its social aspects and creating an awareness for the importance of social sustainability in architectural education.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the implementation of corporate social responsibility (CSR) related activities in small to medium sized construction enterprises within Australia. Reasons behind the implementation level are also evaluated.

Quantitative and qualitative company level data from 28 Australian small to medium sized construction enterprises were collected using an in-depth questionnaire. Levels of CSR implementation in three aspects, namely, environmental, social and ethical, were measured. Each aspect was broken down into sub-areas and implementation scores were aggregated and normalised. Awareness level and concern for economic aspect, the two hypothesised reasons for level of implementation, were also measured. Non-parametric correlation analyses were used to examine the hypotheses.

The findings suggest small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) incorporate some aspects of CSR into their business activities even though they do not refer to the practices as CSR, as none of them have a formal CSR policy in place. Most SMEs in the construction industry implement ethical and economic aspect of CSR; however implementation across environmental and social issues is limited. Non-parametric correlation analyses show that higher awareness of CSR issues leads to higher levels of implementation and that concern about economic aspect is not a reason why CSR is not implemented into business practices.

Everett Rogers’ diffusion paradigm can also be applied to CSR implementation, but more research works are required to theoretically and empirically examine the relationships between CSR implementation and economic aspect.

It is apparent that there is a significant gap in the research regarding Australian SMEs and sustainability issues as the majority of the literature is focused upon large organisations even though the approaches taken by SMEs towards CSR are very different to those of large corporations. The SME business sector is a significant sector in terms of its environmental, economic and social impacts. Hence recognition of this sector is growing and is now becoming the focus of an agenda to promote the implementation of CSR practices in SMEs. This paper aims to provide useful and detailed information to add to what is currently an underdeveloped body of knowledge in this area.

The purpose of this paper is to disentangle the different and sometimes controversial aspects of Generation Y workers’ behavior at the workplace and to provide real-life answers to human resource management and the study of employee relations.

The study makes use of an empirical research framework to assess dominant preferences, values and patterns of behavior in workplaces where Generation Y employees have demographic relevance. The main research questions that this paper will address are: RQ1: What are the main features of organizational culture that are deemed functionally important to their job satisfaction by Generation Y workers? RQ2: Which are the general societal and generational values that affect most prominently their behavioral responses to duties and tasks in the workplace? RQ3: How do millennial workers perceive the gap between a real and an ideal organization in which they work in interactional and behavioral terms? The methodology includes a survey and interviews conducted in a multinational corporation based in Budapest. The theoretical framework is the one developed by Margaret Mead (1970) on value preferences and their generational change.

When generational values and behavioral patterns are not in harmony with the proper organizational cultural aspects of the company high attrition rates become manifest. Generation Y workers can be defined as cofigurate culture (Mead, 1970) in the sense that this generation encapsulates innovative aspects in some bridging features to the previous generation (Generation X). This is one of the aspects that may account for the conflicting social and work values that characterize work relations between Generation Y and X employees. Moreover, because of the three different domains on which work satisfaction is built (social, organizational and cultural) Generation Y workers will aim to strike a balance between expectations, ideas about what a good organization should look like and real-life experiences.

Since the research concerns only one company case study, its scope is limited. In particular, empirical approaches to the study of employee relations with Generation Y workers are still few and more research is needed to fill this gap.

Millennial workers are not simply part of a different generation, as they actually share some value aspects and orientations of the previous generation. The practical implication is that the behavioral and organizational features that bridge Generation X and Y preferences should be detected in order to improve employee relations. Second, paying attention to the social, cultural and organizational features that Generation Y workers deem as important when describing their daily work experiences, it is possible to limit miscommunication and reduce attrition rates.

The study of generational features and tendencies at the workplace is an important social field since it brings new insights into work relations and leadership. Treating the Generation Y as a cofigurate culture helps to bring together cultural and social preferences with values built on the workplace and in the social context of belonging.

The paper provides an original contribution to the study of generational, social and organizational aspects concerning the daily work experience of millennials in a corporation. The study builds an empirical framework in which the value aspects that shape the everyday reality of employee relations are measured and triangulated with qualitative data from ethnographic interviews. This paper can be of interest both to academic and to practitioners, thanks to its strong practical application to human resource management.

In this study, we critically examine how students enrolled in a combined engineering and teacher education program given at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden, understand the concept of sustainable development (SD) and the professional responsibilities of engineers versus teachers in contributing to this goal. A questionnaire was used to collect and analyze data based on five research questions: (1) How do students conceptualize the notion of SD? (2) What aspects of SD are students interested in? (3) Are there any gender differences in what aspects of SD students are interested in? (4) How do students perceive the roles and responsibilities of engineers versus teachers in contributing to SD? and (5) How confident are students in their abilities to address SD issues vocationally? The data indicated a conventional view of SD among the students; a clear interest in sustainability issues, especially for ecologically linked questions; a tendency to ascribe significant but differentiated responsibilities to engineers/teachers; and a low degree of confidence in their own ability to adequately address SD issues vocationally. The data also indicated differences between male and female students when looking at interest in different aspects of SD. Overall, female students were found to be slightly more interested in SD than the male students. This gender difference is larger in relation to social aspects than ecological or economic aspects. It is suggested that future sustainable development education needs a shift of focus from what separates female and male students to what unites them. The observed “confidence gap” that exists between stated degree of interest in, and perceived importance of, sustainability issues, suggests the potential for significant improvement of the design of the Master of Science in Engineering and in Education program (CL-program).

Economics and sociology are two different theoretical disciplines dealing with one and the same subject. The aim of the paper is to integrate the two paradigms into one framework of interpretation and analysis.

Economics is presented as a science that approaches human behaviour being subject to the omni‐present phenomenon of scarcity, assuming rationality and social independence of human actors. Sociology is presented as a science that interprets human behaviour as group behaviour. Groups are motivated to rank one another in terms of status. Integration must take place by relating the two analyses based on these paradigms.

The basic economic framework is about the relationship between preferences and scarce resources, determining the structure of allocation of goods. The basic sociological framework is about the relationship between the distribution of socially valued goods and the culture that gives goods their social meaning. A socio‐economic framework is about the relation between allocation, distribution, culture and preferences.

When applying the socio‐economic framework to real‐life phenomena both the economic and the social motives play a role in the explanation, which is not the case in applied economics and applied sociology.

Forest industries affect cultural sustainability profoundly, but little information exists on integration of cultural sustainability aspects into their Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) management. Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) guidelines comprising assessments of economic, ecological and social aspects are one of the most comprehensive CSR frameworks applied widely also in forest industries. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate, how the GRI guidelines encompass cultural sustainability when assessing forestry and forest industry operations in a global context and to recognize the cultural sustainability themes that need additional information in forest industry companies’ CSR reporting.

In the qualitative analysis, expert interview material on indicators identified for assessing the cultural sustainability of forest bioenergy production in North Karelia was compared with the contents of the GRI guidelines. The focus on classifying the cultural indicators according to GRI contents was to recognize in the context of forest bioenergy production, the links between cultural sustainability and other sustainability dimensions and to illustrate the new themes that cultural sustainability integration would bring to CSR management of the business. In addition, information was acquired from the general themes of cultural sustainability which are currently lacking from the GRI guidelines.

The results of the show that most of the cultural indicators in the expert interview material were associated with aspects of economic, environmental or social sustainability when classified according to the GRI guidelines. Despite this, it seems that a more profound integration of cultural sustainability evaluations in CSR management is required. The analysis of this study showed that the themes “Impacts on landscape,” “Timeline of impacts,” “Spiritual values,” “Persistence of traditions” and “Adaptability to cultural change” are not approached in the GRI guidelines at all. All of the identified themes approach issues, which have been found to be crucial in forest industries’ operations not only in a local, but also in a global context.

The analysis of this study was limited to cultural characteristics of forestry and forest industries especially in the case of forest bioenergy production in North Karelia, Eastern Finland. Due to this, the results cannot be generalized directly into other CSR management contexts of forest industries in different geographical areas. Despite this, the results of this study indicate that when aiming to enhance the acceptability of forest industries in energy production as well as in other branches of forest industries, new insights are needed on the integration of cultural aspects in CSR management.

The pressures toward using local forest resources are increasing internationally. As a result of this, the managers and politicians responsible for making decisions on forest sector are less seldom familiar with local traditions and the ways of balancing different needs related to forests in various geographical contexts. In enhancing the environmental, social and economic sustainability of forest resource usage it is crucial to ensure that the decisions made do not conflict with cultural values of localities traditionally dependent on forests. Despite this, general information on cultural sustainability issues related to forests and especially CSR management in forest sector is scarce.

Restructuring a business process (BP) model may enhance the BP performance and improve its understandability. So-far proposed restructuring methods use either refactoring which focuses on structural aspects, social network discovery which uses semantic information to guide the affiliation process during its analysis, or social network rediscovery which uses structural information to identify clusters of actors according to their relationships. The purpose of this paper is to propose a hybrid method that exploits both the semantic and structural aspects of a BP model.

The proposed method first generates a social network from the BP model. Second, it applies hierarchical clustering to determine the performers’ partitions; this step uses the social context which specifies features related to performers, and two new distances that account for semantic and structural information. Finally, it applies a set of behavioral and organizational restructuring rules adapted from the graph optimization domain; each rule uses the identified performers’ partitions and the business context to reduce particular quality metrics.

The efficiency of the proposed method is illustrated through well-established complexity metrics. The illustration is made through the development of a tool that fully supports the proposed method and proposes a strategy for the application of the restructuring rules.

The proposed method has the merit of combining the semantic and structural aspects of a Business Process Modeling Notation model to identify restructuring operations whose ordered application reduces the complexity of the initial model.

This study aims to propose a theoretical model to determine factors affecting an individual’s intentions to use social commerce (SC) in generating and sharing information on a vendor’s products and services. This, however, involves the application of three fundamental aspects including social interaction, social technology and personal trait used in constructing SC to propose these factors.

A cross-sectional time approach of the quantitative field study was used with the data collected from 874 users of SC in Indonesia using questionnaires.

The results showed social technology to be the dominant aspect influencing users’ intention to use SC followed by social experience and personality traits while, in detail, perceived enjoyment was discovered to have the most influence and this is in line with the findings of previous studies. Moreover, new results were also identified based on direct, indirect and moderating effects of gender, age and experience.

This research is different from previous ones because of its proposal of an extensive model that combines three main perspectives used in constructing SC and its emphasis on the theoretical and practical importance of studying not only the direct but also the indirect and moderating effects.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate elements of socio-academic-related sustainability in educational institutes and propose a structure of an advising system that can aid the most critical stakeholders in such educational institutes, i.e the student. Hence, after reviewing the contemporary University Social Responsibility (USR) Venn diagram, the paper focuses on the need to develop a social and academic responsibility advisor (SARA) system as a catalyst toward fulfilling social responsibility to the most important stakeholder and alternatively leads to enhanced sustainability of such educational institutes.

A combination of research methods used in this paper, defined as by identifying the need for SARA from a literature survey. By distributing a questionnaire to students investigating their desire of an academic advisor system and by establishing a focus group to study the academic and social aspects and its implications to students’ “quality of life” as an essential aspect toward the educational institutes' sustainability. Various issues related to the features of the SARA discussed.

Literature review shows only a few articles combine both aspects of advising activities (social and academic), most of which are not interrelated to the sustainability of educational institutes. This paper highlights the need and connectivity of SARA to contemporary USR sustainability. The descriptive statistics of the questionnaire showed about 86 per cent of student participants interested in applying the proposed features. The outcome of the focus group resulted in more detailed features of academic and social aspects of the expected SARA system.

The proposed features of SARA described where the inter-related social and academic activities could be managed, logged and used by students. The proposed “heterogeneous study group” was investigated by observation implemented in four different courses in two different semesters. The result was not conclusive, and further study recommended. Even though this experimentation was not conclusive, the lesson learned from this study highlighted different issues associated with “study groups” within a course.

Applicability of SARA would enhance the quality of life of students in general and provide a mechanism to motivate low aptitude students to get engaged with study and projects with high-aptitude students.

Avoiding the “feel” of isolation by some students due to the inability to find study partner who can also act as mentor to a study group. The proposed “Heterogeneous study group” would provide a mechanism for “Practiced student-to-student Social responsibility”.

The paper highlights and proves the need for SARA in contemporary USR where SARA can act as a catalyst for enhancing the socio-academic zone of the reviewed USR Venn diagram. Features of SARA identified as an outcome of the study in this paper. Proposal of “Heterogeneous Study Group” was proposed as mechanism of “social learning”. “Group health” testing was proposed as a criteria resulted from a balance between collaboration, social affinity and project effort.