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In the new Sustainability 2.0 era of education for sustainable development (ESD) transforming, curriculum remains a high interest topic, including in the UK. Among influential factors for progress, lecturer views on sustainable development and ESD in curriculum are important. In particular, the relationship between espoused views on sustainability and development and these views institutionalized into the curriculum require further investigation. Existing qualitative interview studies of lecturers identify a range of views about sustainable development and ESD but rarely focus on postgraduate environments nor use thematic discourse analysis.

This active interview study enrolled a cohort of academics (n = 21) teaching into ten postgraduate UK taught masters degrees. Using active interviews and thematic discourse analysis, this study focused lecturer accounts of translating sustainable development into ESD, student attitudes and characteristics and course nature and content in relation to institutional, disciplinary, personal and other drivers and discourses. Thematic discourse analysis and NVivo 12 the study identified themes and discourses arising from the interview accounts.

In addition to identifying echoes of previously identified themes, this study focuses on the influence of interviewer–interviewee interaction and the interrelated nature of themes developed from 972 substantive codes. These themes identify the key influences as institutional, personal and disciplinary perspectives, institutional contrasts and tensions; pragmatic and passionate student characteristics; flexible sustainability principles and definitions; and social and personal ethics, ideology and equity, as key factors. Despite varying in length and depth, interviewees all show a deep appreciation for the challenges of defining and teaching sustainable development in complex institutional circumstances.

Faculty accounts of sustainable development and ESD practice depend on personal ethics and experiences, disciplinary discourses and institutional drivers and arrangements. Rather than focusing on simple categorizations of views in abstract, progress toward transformational ESD should acknowledge the need for dialogue about the importance of a plurality of views and discourses.

Thematic discourse analysis of a multi-institutional cohort affords closer analysis of contextual institutional and identity factors influencing approaches to HESD. Academic views cannot be easily subcategorized into broad conservative or radical positions. Final discussion of the relevance of institutional theory to sustainability change is also new.

This study aims to utilized the item response theory (IRT) rating scale model to analyze students’ perceptions of assessment practices in two universities: one in Jordan and the other in the USA. The sample of the study consisted of 506 university students selected from both universities. Results show that the two universities still focus on paper-pencil testing to assess students’ learning outcomes. The study recommends that higher education institutes should encourage their teachers to use different assessment methods to assess students’ learning outcomes.

The convenience sample consisted of 506 selected university students from the USA and Jordan, and participants were distributed according to their educational levels, thus: 83 freshmen, 139 sophomores, 157 juniors and 59 seniors. (Note: some students from both universities did not report their gender and/or their educational level). The USA university sample consisted of 219 students from three colleges at a major university in the southeast of the USA studying for arts and sciences, education and commerce and business qualifications, of whom 43 were males and 173 were females. The study used the Students Perception of Assessment Practices Inventory developed by Alquraan (2007), and for the purpose of this study, the RUMM2020 program was used for its rating scale model.

Both universities, in Jordan and the USA, still focus more on the developmental (construction of assessment tasks), organizational and planning aspects of assessment processes than they do on assessments of learning and assessment methods (traditional and new assessment methods). The assessment practices that are used frequently in both universities based on the teachers sampled are: “(I27) I know what to study for the test in this class”, “(I6) Teacher provides a good environment during test administration” and “(I21) My teacher avoids interrupting students as they are taking tests”. This indicates that teachers in the selected universities have a tendency to focus on the administrative and communicative aspects of assessment (e.g. providing a good environment during test administration) more than on using different assessment methods (e.g. portfolios, new technology, computers, peer and self-assessment) or even using assessment practices that help students learn in different ways (e.g. assessing students’ prior knowledge and providing written feedback on the graded tests).

This is a cross-cultural study focus assessment of students learning in higher education.

Capture, consumption and use of person-centred information presents challenges for hospitals when operating within the scope of limited resources and the push for organisational routines and efficiencies. This paper explores these challenges for patients with Acute Coronary Syndrome (ACS) and the examination of information that supports successful hospital discharge. It aims to determine how the likelihood of readmission may be prevented through the capturing of rich, person-specific information during in-patient care to improve the process for discharge to home.

The authors combine four research data collection and analysis techniques: one, an analysis of the patient record; two, semi-structured longitudinal interviews; three, an analysis of the patient's journey using process mining to provide analytics about the discharge process, and four, a focus group with nurses to validate and confirm our findings.

The authors’ contribution is to show that information systems which support discharge need to consider models focused on individual patient stressors. The authors find that current discharge information capture does not provide the required person-centred information to support a successful discharge. Data indicate that rich, detailed information about the person acquired through additional nursing assessments are required to complement data provided about the patient's journey in order to support the patients’ post-discharge recovery at home.

Prior research has focused on information collection constrained by pre-determined limitations and barriers of system design. This work has not considered the information provided by multiple sources during the whole patient journey as a mechanism to reshape the discharge process to become more person-centred. Using a novel combination of research techniques and theory, the authors have shown that patient information collected through multiple channels across the patient care journey may significantly extend the quality of patient care beyond hospital discharge. Although not assessed in this study, rich, person-centred discharge information may also decrease the likelihood of patient readmission.

The purpose of this study is the identification and analysis of key ethical issues of green procurement (GP) and the potential solutions to mitigate the issues in the Indian automobile sector.

Based on the literature review and expert elicitation, 23 ethical issues of GP in the Indian automobile industry and 11 solutions to mitigate these issues were identified. This paper explores the ethical issues based on an integrated method consisting of interpretative structural modelling fuzzy Matrice d'Impacts Croisés-Multiplication Appliquée á un Classement, analytical hierarchy process and the solutions to mitigate these issues using fuzzy VlseKriterijumska Optimizacija I Kompromisno Resenje.

The findings suggest that ethical issues such as favouritism towards suppliers and failure to fulfil business objectives by top management are identified as the most significant variables with the highest importance weights, while top management commitment for ethical behaviour is identified as the most potent solution for mitigating the issues.

This study is limited to the literature review and experts’ opinions.

The results may help practitioners and researchers to focus on major ethical issues of GP to strategize proactive solutions that may help to mitigate or eliminate the ethical issues.

This paper is an original contribution of the analysis of GP and provides an interesting insight into the Indian automotive industry.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a theoretically informed analysis of the evolution of environmental management accounting (EMA) and social and environmental reporting (SER), and the accompanying development of a sustainability programme, in a large family-owned, unlisted corporation.

A longitudinal case study based on semi-structured interviews and documentary data was conducted. The main periods of fieldwork were carried out in 2007 and between 2010 and 2012. Sustainability reports were collected until 2019 when SER appeared to cease. The case analysis draws on the concepts of organisational identity (OI) and internal legitimacy (IL) to examine the decision-making and actions of a range of key organisational actors as they engage with EMA and SER.

The study demonstrates that a gap between an organisation’s identity claims (“who we are”) and its enacted identity (“what we do”) can enable the adoption of constitutive, performative and representational EMA and SER. It illuminates the nature of the role of key actors and organisational dynamics, in the form of OI and IL, in adapting these practices. It also demonstrates that, in giving meaning to the concept of sustainability, organisational actors can draw on their organisation’s identity and construct the comprehensibility of an organisational sustainability programme.

More empirical work is needed to examine the applicability of OI and IL to other settings. It would also be beneficial to examine the potential for OI work to allow organisations to change and reinvent themselves in response to the evermore pressing environmental crisis and the role, if any, of EMA in this process.

The study enriches our understanding of why and how EMA and SER evolve by demonstrating that paying attention to OI and IL can provide further insight into the decision-making and actions of organisational members as they recognise, evaluate, support and cease these practices.

Information encountering is the serendipitous acquisition of information that requires low or no involvement and expectation of users. The purpose of this paper is to model the explicit process and the implicit factors of online information encountering, i.e. how and why it occurs.

The critical incident technique was adopted to collect qualitative data from 16 interview participants. They contributed 27 true incidents of online information encountering which were used to identify the key phases of the encountering process. They also commented on the factors that they thought had an influence on the chance of the occurrence of encountering.

The macro-process of information encountering is composed of three phases. First, browsing, searching, or social interaction provides the context for encountering; second, the encountering occurrence consists of three steps – noticing the stimuli, examining the content, and acquiring interesting or useful content; and third, the information encountered will be explored further, saved, used, or shared. The 14 influencing factors of information encountering obtained divide into three clusters. User-related factors include sensitivity, emotions, expertise, attitudes, intentionality, curiosity, activity diversity; information-related factors include type, relevance, quality, visibility, and sources; and environment-related factors include time limits and interface usability.

This study engenders useful implications for designing information encountering experience. The changeable nature of some influencing factors suggests that encountering can be elicited through the purposive design of encountering support features or even encountering systems, and the macro-process depicts the natural occurring mechanisms of encountering for the design to follow.

The purpose of this paper is to determine the extent to which social, ethical and environmental (SEE) disclosure is being integrated into institutional investment. The aim is also to investigate the interplay between private and public SEE disclosure.

The paper uses a grounded theory methodology involving interviews with 21 members of the UK institutional adjustment community.

The paper found that institutional investors did not consider that public SEE disclosure was adequate for their portfolio investment decisions, suggesting that SEE disclosure was decision‐useful. Consequently, this perceived market failure in public SEE disclosure has been supplemented by the development of sophisticated private SEE disclosure channels. Further, the interviews indicated that this private SEE disclosure process was becoming dialogic in nature, since not only were institutional investors initiating the engagement process with companies but also companies were starting to request information on the SEE disclosure required by institutional investors. This finding contrasts with previous work which found that the private disclosure process in financial reporting was essentially user‐oriented and uni‐directional.

This paper highlights the importance of SEE disclosure to a crucial user group, institutional investors. The research contributes to the SEE disclosure literature by revealing details of the evolving private SEE disclosure process for the first time.

This paper investigates the two-way relationship between foreign direct investment (FDI) inflows and higher education across 36 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries for 1998–2019 periods. To demonstrate this relationship, the authors take into account the total number of graduates as well as the number of graduates from different fields. Accordingly, the authors gathered graduates in four groups which are education, social sciences, technical sciences (tech) and health. In addition to investigating two-way relationship between FDI and graduates, the authors also examined the contribution of primary and secondary level education to FDI.

The authors use two models to investigate the bidirectional relationship between FDI inflows and graduates from four fields. In the first model, the dependent variable is FDI inflows, and in the second model, graduates from each field are the dependent variable. To investigate the dual relationship, the authors employ ordinary least squares (OLS) and two-step system generalized method of moments (GMM) developed by Arellano Bover (1995) and Blundell Bond (1998).

For the first model, the results show that secondary level and higher education have a positive impact on FDI. In terms of graduates by fields, it is seen that education and health graduates contributed the most to FDI. For the second model in which the authors analysed the effect of FDI on total graduates and graduates from different fields, the authors find that FDI positively affects the number of graduates from all fields, and the strongest effect is on graduates from the social science field.

Based on the results, the authors can say that well-educated people promote FDI inflows to OECD countries, and FDI is also a driving force in raising highly educated people. So, the authors think that the results will help design higher education policies in accordance with FDI and higher education connection.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this paper is the first to examine the impact of FDI inflows on graduates by fields and also to investigate the impact of graduates by fields on FDI.

This paper examines the relationship between marketing automation emergence and the marketers' use of heuristics in their decision-making processes. Heuristics play a role for the integration of human decision-making models and automation in augmentation processes, particularly in marketing where automation is widespread.

This study analyzes qualitative data about the impact of marketing automation on the scope of heuristics in decision-making models, and it is based on evidence collected from interviews with twenty-two experienced marketers.

Marketers make extensive use of heuristics to manage their tasks. While the adoption of new automatic marketing tools modify the task environment and field of use of traditional decision-making models, the adoption of heuristics rules with a different scope is essential to defining inputs, interpreting/evaluating outputs and control the marketing automation system.

The paper makes a contribution to research on the relationship between marketing automation and decision-making models. In particular, it proposes the results of in-depth interviews with senior decision makers to assess the impact of marketing automation on the scope of heuristics as decision-making models adopted by marketers.

The aim is to study the impact of schooling on between-groups wage inequality beyond the lens of the standard approach in the literature.

Simple econometric theory is used to make the main point of the paper. Supporting empirical evidence is also presented.

Disregarding the persistence of current earnings implies a bias in the estimation of the wage return to schooling both at labour-market entry and in the rest of the working life.

The use of current earnings as a dependent variable in wage-schooling models may be problematic and requires specific handling.

The impact of schooling on the between-groups dimension of wage inequality may be different than previously thought.

The paper is the first to show that, when current earnings are used as a dependent variable, the identification of a wage-schooling model with the standard (time-invariant external instrument-variable) approach may lead to misleading conclusions.