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The current relationship between humans and nature is complex and tense. Overexploitation of natural resources, pollution, climate change and biodiversity loss present the main challenges for modern society. In particular, the issue of climate change is being intensely debated, and the interest in protecting natural resources by adopting sustainable practices is growing. Therefore, this chapter examines a brief history and concept of climate change, reviewing relevant theories and authors from Svante Arrhenius and Guy Stewart Callendar to Charles David Keeling and Mikhail Budyko. This chapter explores the first measurements and warnings regarding climate crisis and reviews international treaties and policy development at local, national and global levels. Furthermore, adverse consequences of the climate crisis are described, and ecologism, eco-imperialism and climate change denialism are explained.

This article proposes diffractive vignettes as a new analytical approach that can sensitize organizational communication research to extra/linguistic forces in the communicative constitution of major societal challenges such as the climate crisis. The critical feminist concept of diffraction examines how diverse forces interact, interfere and produce new patterns of meaning and difference through entangled, performative relations.

Diffraction as an analytical tool is illustrated based on fieldwork on organizing the climate crisis in the tourist destinations in the Tyrolean Alps and Venice. We analytically attune to how extra/linguistic forces move and resonate with us, how we read them through each other in a diffractive experiment and how they allow us to attend to materialization differently through crafting diffractive vignettes.

We account for how the analytical work required us to experiment with juxtaposing, weaving, dividing and melting data and theories together through non-representational, post-qualitative ways of analyzing. Through a diffractive vignette, we then unfold how the extra/linguistic forces became agentic for the constitution of the climate crisis.

Through diffractive vignettes, we extend a fast-developing body of work on materialization within organizational communication to analytically exploit communication’s performativity, including its extra/linguistic forces in a post-qualitative, non-representational sense. With diffraction, we expand the analytical potential of organizational communication scholarship with a sensitivity to difference in materialization.

We know how to structure violence. The military industrial complex and its auxiliary institutions, such as the private weapons and securities industries, are prime examples. When we use the Galtungian lens and add ecoviolence to Johan Galtung’s classic direct–structural–cultural violence triangle, we get a violence diamond, or perhaps more accurately, a web of violence (see Turpin & Kurtz, 1996). To what we often think of as violence (which is direct), we must add the institutions structured to harm individuals, groups, cultures, and the ecosphere itself. We could, however, build sustainable development with direct, structural, cultural, and ecological nonviolence. We already have institutions that structure nonviolence – or often both violence and nonviolence in contradictory simultaneous ways: families, faith and cultural institutions, and friendship networks. We also have numerous peaceful societies, economies, and cultures that provide models such as Bhutan’s Happiness and Well-being paradigm. Jennifer Turpin and I wrote about the Web of Violence in 1996, which we collectively weave from micro to macro levels of life, but we also need to attend to and weave a Web of Nonviolence. This chapter investigates how we can be more intentional and systematic in weaving a nonviolent web, following a three-step Gandhian process: research, analyse, and mobilise.

Human society is going through an interesting period in terms of the challenges it faces. The most interesting problems are environmental problems. In support of protection of the environment in which we live, we must find efficient and clean (ecological) solutions, at the same time, for the materials and technologies that are the basis of the goods production. In this context, the problem of means of transport, in general, and land road transport, in particular, will remain one whose solution will probably mark multiple stages in the attempt to abandon fossil fuels. Even if this problem will be solved, the travel routes – roadways – represent an additional challenge in terms of construction materials and technologies but also in terms of maintenance and rehabilitation technologies. In the context of Industry 4.0, the concerns in the field of road execution and repair are more and more obviously aimed at elements of the circular economy. Solutions are sought and experimented for: reuse of degraded asphalt material, incorporating reused/reusable materials into the asphalt mixtures and the implementation of ecological execution technologies. In this work, it is intended to carry out an analysis regarding the technical and technological solutions implemented or in the proposal/experiment stage that respond to the desired "Sustainable technologies for road maintenance and rehabilitation".

This paper explores if the firm’s strategic orientation can be associated with differences in cost behavior activity.

Using Compustat data from 1979 to 2012, the archival study examines if there are differences between differentiation and cost leadership strategies on the firm’s cost stickiness.

The main finding provides evidence that firms pursuing a differentiation strategy exhibit greater cost stickiness, on average, as compared to firms pursuing a cost leadership strategy. This relationship is moderated by the optimistic or pessimistic expectations of managers for future sales.

This paper contributes to the literature on cost management by explaining how strategic positioning affects firms’ cost behavior using the framework of asymmetric cost behavior. The study encompasses both product and period costs and documents the impact on earnings.

The major goals of this study are to investigate the existing state of affairs concerning daylighting, glare and thermal comfort in the building, which will be the focus of the investigation, particularly in connection to the building’s energy efficiency considering student task performances. EnergyPlus, which is a software for building energy modeling, is applied to evaluate the energy consumption of buildings under a variety of circumstances related to their design. With the use of a variety of simulations, the goal of this study is to provide building design options that are both the most efficient and the most cost-effective for the case study building.

There are three distinct categories that can be applied throughout the entire process. The first thing that has to be done is to choose a building to use as a case study and then conduct an analysis of the current situation to address the existing problem. In the following step, several passive design measures are implemented and simulated in order to solve the challenges that are currently being faced. A detailed cost analysis is carried out as the final step in the process of determining whether or not it is feasible.

According to the findings: A cantilevered 3’ drop wall as a shading system, an east-facing model, and a window with a height of 4.5 is the ideal configuration. The annual energy can be saved by 22.5%. The payback period is 11 years. Benefit/Cost >1 makes it a feasible and economical solution.

The work is completely original. No one have done this before.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the connection between earnings management, business strategy, and market competition.

The study utilizes data from non-financial companies listed on the Indonesia and South Korea Stock Exchange between 2017 and 2021, involving 2,598 firms from Indonesia and 3,256 firms from South Korea. We use data panel analysis to explore the relationships between variables.

Firms using cost leadership are prone to earnings management, while differentiation strategies are less inclined to do so. Market competition negatively correlates with earnings management in Indonesia and South Korea. Market competition moderates the relationship between differentiation strategy and earnings management in both countries. When profitability is considered, the results remain consistent, particularly in Indonesia.

This research enriches previous studies on earnings management and business strategy by examining the extent of industry competitiveness in developed and developing markets.

This finding is significant for managers, guiding them in the selection of an appropriate business strategy within a competitive environment.

This study is unique in that it examines the subject matter in both developed and developing countries, specifically Indonesia and South Korea, to compare the differences.

Building upon the working notion of Southern green victimology, the presentation explores the case of Andalgalá, Province of Catamarca, Argentina, where international corporations have been trying to develop a mining project that would affect the environment and the health of the local population. Facing the lack of support from the state, the organised local community tried to prevent their actual environmental victimisation and they committed to stop this damaging undertaking. Following these intents, the Argentinean criminal justice system acted to the detriment of these local actors (over-criminalisation) and favour mining corporations that can cause irreparable damage to the local water and air resources (under-criminalisation). In short, the case study will shed light on the common features of Southern green victimisation: (1) attempts to consolidate corporate investments involving extensive environmental harms in forms already banned in the Global North, (2) a committed resistance by the local environmental groups, (3) the harsh selectivity of the criminal justice system, and (4). immunity of corporate environmental harms/crimes.

The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence (AI), particularly within the last decade and the application of ‘deep learning’, has simultaneously accelerated human fears of the changes AI provokes in human behaviour. The question is not any more if the new phenomena, like artificially-induced consciousness, empathy or creation, will be widely used, but whether they will be used in ethically acceptable ways and for ethically acceptable purposes.

Departing from a diagnosis of the state humans have brought themselves to by (ab)use of technology, the present chapter investigates the possibility of a systematic study of adaptations human society will have to consider in order to guarantee the obeyance to the fundamental ethical values and thus its spiritual survival. To that end, a new discipline – epharmology (from the Greek epharmozein = to adapt) is proposed, together with its aims and methodology.