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Our commitment to the goal of zero traffic fatalities and serious injuries requires consideration of innovative traffic safety thinking. There is growing recognition that this goal requires a change in our culture as it relates to traffic safety (traffic safety culture). And yet, there is no consensus about a definition for traffic safety culture, no explicit theory-based model to predict the effect of traffic safety culture, and no practical guidance for applying these models to develop effective culture-based strategies. This chapter seeks to address these omissions from both an academic and practitioner perspective.

This chapter proposes a standard definition of traffic safety culture based on a model that integrates relevant theories of willful and intentional behavior. Importantly, a set of 10 principles are identified that provide the context and foundation from which the definition and model are derived. An understanding of these principles provides the logic and purpose for developing strategies that can transform traffic safety culture:

• (1)

  Traffic crashes are a significant public health concern.

• (2)

  Most traffic crashes are caused by human behavior, not the roadway, vehicle, or environment (e.g., weather).

• (3)

  Human behavior is influenced by beliefs.

• (4)

  Beliefs develop based on experience (actual and vicarious) and socialization.

• (5)

  Socialization is the process whereby an individual develops beliefs which align with the culture of a group with which the individual identifies (social identity).

• (6)

  Individuals can form an identity with many different groups in their social environment, each with a different degree of bonding.

• (7)

  A stronger bond results in greater conformity and motivation to abide with the group culture.

• (8)

  The shared beliefs of a group that affect behaviors related to traffic safety are called traffic safety culture.

• (9)

  The traffic safety culture of a group emerges from actions taken by stakeholders across the social ecology.

• (10)

  Traffic safety culture strategies increase actions by stakeholders across the social ecology to improve traffic safety culture among various groups.

Traffic crashes are a significant public health concern.

Most traffic crashes are caused by human behavior, not the roadway, vehicle, or environment (e.g., weather).

Human behavior is influenced by beliefs.

Beliefs develop based on experience (actual and vicarious) and socialization.

Socialization is the process whereby an individual develops beliefs which align with the culture of a group with which the individual identifies (social identity).

Individuals can form an identity with many different groups in their social environment, each with a different degree of bonding.

A stronger bond results in greater conformity and motivation to abide with the group culture.

The shared beliefs of a group that affect behaviors related to traffic safety are called traffic safety culture.

The traffic safety culture of a group emerges from actions taken by stakeholders across the social ecology.

Traffic safety culture strategies increase actions by stakeholders across the social ecology to improve traffic safety culture among various groups.

For the academic, these principles can also serve as hypotheses that can be explored to expand our knowledge about traffic safety culture. For the practitioner, these principles represent the basic logic and impetus for transforming traffic safety culture. By effectively communicating these principles and their connecting logic, we can express the importance of traffic safety culture and the need for supporting resources with other stakeholders.

Social economy employees focus on personal fulfillment and social good rather than economic gains. They prefer to work in a sector that promotes satisfaction and makes them feel worthy. The purpose of this paper is to investigate employees’ motivations to engage in the social economy sector, especially in a period of financial downturn in Greece. Furthermore, the impact of specific demographic characteristics on employees’ work motivation is examined.

The research participants included 200 employees of worker cooperatives and social cooperative enterprises. A survey was conducted by collecting primary data and using a close-ended type questionnaire.

According to the findings, intrinsic forces motivate the employees to a greater extent toward social economy sector than economic ones. However, the replacement of the profit motivation from the main concern, it does not mean that the employees are not interested in financials. The survey also indicated that the most important barrier for starting to work in the social economy sector is the difficulty in finding partners. Finally, the findings showed that demographic characteristics partially influence work motivations of Greek employees on the social economy sector.

The results of this study may interest employers in finding new ways to motivate employees toward social economy sector under economic crisis conditions.

This study aims to explore the weightage rendered to corporate social responsibility (CSR) keywords in mission and vision (M&V) statements of public sector enterprises (PSEs) in India.

Analysing the contents of M&V statements of 230 PSEs, this study has the twin research objectives of seeking to illuminate the current use of CSR-related keywords in PSEs’ M&V statements that reflect organisational strategy and provide an understanding for how firm age, industry and firm size variables serve to influence CSR keyword reporting in these statements.

The findings of this study provide evidence that half of the Indian PSEs reported at least one CSR-related keyword in their M&V statements. These public enterprises predominantly use 38 different categories of CSR keywords in their M&V statements. Furthermore, the authors find that environment-related keywords were predominantly used by PSEs in their M&V statements. The results indicate that PSEs’ size and industries are significantly associated with the use of CSR-related keywords in M&V statements, suggesting that bigger PSEs and PSEs in extractive industries (e.g. mining, coal and petroleum) tend to report more CSR-related keywords in their M&V statements.

Findings imply that small public enterprises (those having a low annual turnover) lack CSR focus in their M&V statements. The authors argue that, irrespective of the size of the enterprise, CSR should be an integral part of these PSEs in framing their M&V statements.

This study systematically analyses CSR-related keywords in the M&V statements of all PSEs in India.

Scientific collaboration is becoming a common pattern in the social organization of knowledge production. The paper tries to figure out the relationship between scientific collaboration team size and scientific output.

Based on ESI database from year 2009–2019, the paper describes changes of collaboration team size from one author to more than 10 authors in 22 disciplines. Kernel density estimation and multidimensional kernel density estimation method are used to calculate optimal collaboration team size and appropriate collaboration team size in 22 disciplines. As bandwidth is one of the major issues in construction of kernel density estimation, the paper uses five different algorithms to calculate bandwidth. The method with the lowest mean absolute percentage error is chosen. Robustness test is conducted based on different sets of data.

The results show that scientific collaboration becomes more widely and deeply. As time goes by, collaboration team size is becoming larger and larger. Natural science disciplines have larger collaboration team size and faster growth rate than social science disciplines. Considering both qualitative and quantitative measures, the paper proves the universality of optimal and appropriate scientific collaboration team size among 22 disciplines and calculates the specific number.

The paper tries to investigate the law of scientific collaboration team size variation and provide a full picture of evolution of collaboration team size among 22 disciplines in 10 years. The paper first applies distribution method to figure out the relationship between scientific collaboration team size and scientific output and provides optimal collaboration team size and appropriate collaboration team size.

This article presents a longitudinal study of social responsibility themes in US bank advertising for the years 1992, 1997 and 2002. Content analysis is used to examine television commercials for socially responsible advertisements. Findings indicate that the communication of social responsibility in television commercials for banks has increased by 7 percent over the time period covered by the study.

The purpose of this study is to determine the funding ratio of BRICS nations in various research areas. The leading funding institutions that support research in the developing world have also been researched.

This study involves the funding acknowledgment analysis of the data retrieved from the “Clarivate Analytics' InCites database” under “22 specific research areas” to determine whether the publication was funded.

This study shows that China achieves the highest funding ratio of 88.6%, followed by Brazil (73.74%), Russia (72.93%) and South Africa (70.94%). However, India has the lowest funding ratio of 58.2%. For the subject areas, the highest funding ratio is by microbiology in Russia (86.6%), India (84.3%) and China (96.9%) and space science in Brazil (93.7%) and South Africa (94.82%). However, economics and business achieves the lowest funding ratio in Brazil (38.6%), India (20.1%) and South Africa (30.24%). Moreover, the regional funding agencies are the leading research sponsors in the BRICS nations.

This study implies increasing the funding ratio across various research areas, including arts, humanities and social sciences. The nations, particularly India, also need to gear up sponsoring the research to improve the funding ratio for scientific development, bringing overall good.

This study efforts to show the status of countries and research subjects in terms of funding ratio and reveals the prominent funders working toward scientific growth.

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).

Global climate change speeds up ice melting and increases flooding incidents. China launched a sponge city policy as a holistic nature-based solution combined with urban planning and development to address flooding due to climate change. Using Weibo analytics, this paper aims to study public perceptions of sponge city.

This study collected 53,586 sponge city contents from Sina Weibo via Python. Various artificial intelligence tools, such as CX Data Science of Simply Sentiment, KH Coder and Tableau, were applied in the study.

76.8% of public opinion on sponge city were positive, confirming its positive contribution to flooding management and city branding. 17 out of 31 pilot sponge cities recorded the largest number of sponge cities related posts. Other cities with more Weibo posts suffered from rainwater and flooding hazards, such as Xi'an and Zhengzhou.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to explore the public perception of sponge city in Sina Weibo.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate students’ understandings of ocean sustainability and the pedagogical influence of higher education on those conceptions.

The conceptions of ocean sustainability of 54 university students of various academic disciplines enrolled in the 2014/2015 semester course “Sustainable Oceans” were assessed through use of auto-photography. Data were collected at the beginning and end of the course. Inter-rater reliability was measured by percentage of identical coding outcomes by two coders.

Auto-photography is effective in assessing notions of sustainability. Social and economic dimensions were captured less frequently than environmental aspects in the students’ photographs. Overall, students demonstrated vague perceptual awareness about who should take responsibility concerning lifeworld-related issues. Also, their perceptions were affected by their choice of academic discipline. Engaging students in inter-/transdisciplinary learning, integrating the arts, science and community, helped develop a more balanced, action-motivated conception of sustainability. Post-test patterns of change in students’ vision and action were observed.

Implementing sustainability education in a university’s coordinating bodies is effective in constructing a campus-based learning network, and participation in local community empowerment promotes a substantial and multidimensional concept of sustainability, and teaching material that includes content from the fine arts, literature or music stimulates students’ awareness of, and sensitivity to, lifeworld issues.

This paper provides an innovative, auto-photography-based methodology, including an operational procedure, coding book and method of analysis, for assessing students’ conceptions of sustainability. It also develops an interdisciplinary course that serves a “threshold” intervention role in ocean sustainability education.

Soft total quality management (STQM) practices are essential for promoting value-added organizational citizenship behaviour (OCB) among employees in quality-focussed manufacturing firms. This study intends to investigate how STQM practices (empowerment, training, teamwork and involvement) affect OCB under the moderating influence of collectivism among employees for excellence in business performance using social exchange and social cognitive theories (SET-SCT).

A total of 245 useable surveys were gathered from manufacturers. Given the importance of the two-staged structural equation modelling–partial least squares–artificial neural networks (SEM-PLS-ANN) technique, this study used a two-staged SEM-PLS-ANN analysis to capture both linear and compensatory PLS models and nonlinear and noncompensatory ANN models.

The findings confirmed that empowerment, involvement and training had a significant impact on OCB. However, teamwork had no impact on OCB. Interestingly, collectivism was found to have a significant and positive moderating effect on training and OCB.

The study contributes significantly to the literature on TQM and human resource management. First, the study broadens researchers’ understanding of how to apply SET by including a collective value from SCT as positive reciprocity to foster positive workplace behaviour. Second, the authors offer a solid management strategy for organizations to assist them in understanding an STQM model that promotes OCB while including collectivism for superior business performance.