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Vocational education and training (VET) in Australia has for some time been driven by an agenda of “reasonable adjustment”, in which practices are modified to ensure equitable access and participation by disadvantaged students. However, the growing marketization of VET has instead encouraged the use of more flexible approaches to attract and retain students from diverse backgrounds. They have thus paralleled and confounded reasonable adjustment practices for inclusive development. This study sought to identify the moral dilemmas experienced by VET teachers arising from implementing reasonable adjustment practices.

This phenomenological research project used in-depth conversational interviews with 19 experienced VET teachers from a diversity of teaching fields to identify moral dilemmas experienced as arising from changes in their workplace contexts.

One of the identified dilemmas was responding flexibly to heightened student diversity, to which study participants largely responded by prioritising the economic imperative over social inclusion. Well-intended actions thus led to unintentionally damaging outcomes, raising important ethical questions about the relative value of economic and social development outcomes and the role of reasonable adjustment in their attainment. The study also highlights the lack of appropriate VET teacher training in managing ethical conflicts to minimise risks to themselves and their employing organizations.

As a case study of inclusive development policies in practice, this research may be seen as a cautionary tale for inclusive development policies in other countries with similarly strong VET economic and socially inclusive development policies for sustainability. The paper thus opens a dialogue for critical reflection on the current problems in a reasonable development approach in the field of comparative and international education. Those two parallel agendas have presented VET teachers and trainers with ethically challenging situations in which the economic and social development imperatives are experienced as being conflict with each other.

The article examines the differences in the reception of international and Indigenous students to understand the challenges faced by the first students who identified as Indigenous, and to improve understanding of the 1950s, a pivotal decade in the development of university culture.

Drawing on archival sources and contemporary student magazines and newspapers, this article contrasts the attitudes towards international and Indigenous students at the University of Melbourne during the 1950s. It uses these populations to show that the idea of friendship specific to the populations of students and staff in the 20th century could both include and exclude groups within society.

The article shows that while students embraced the cultures of countries in Asia, and made friends with students who came to Australia to study, Indigenous students were less well received. This issue is explored in the context of the ongoing, earnest fundraising for scholarships for Indigenous students, and both the support and the backlash this engendered.

The article focuses on the University of Melbourne, which established the Aboriginal Scholarships committee, and where the first Indigenous student graduated, but more work is needed to understand parallels elsewhere.

The article has implications for understanding the way in which university communities embrace outsiders and adapt to foreign cultures. It also sheds light on intolerance, informing approaches to respond to these issues today.

The article reveals the many challenges faced by the first Indigenous students during the 1950s, the time when university education first became a priority. In this it helps to understand that the slow increase of numbers was not only caused by external factors but also originated within the academy.

This article makes a contribution to understanding the differences between the increasing acceptance in Australian universities of international students from Asia and the persistent resistance to accepting Indigenous Australian students.

The impact of extreme heat on prisons and carceral facilities is becoming increasingly visible, yet remains overlooked by scholars, practitioners and policymakers. Prisons are a unique type of infrastructure designed to severely limit and control the movement of hundreds and even thousands of individuals as a form of punishment. This leads to many significant challenges to mitigating the risk of heat-related illness in prisons and other carceral spaces that have remained overlooked across many disciplines including emergency management, disasters, corrections and public health.

For this study, we analyzed 192 surveys from incarcerated persons in state prisons throughout Texas to understand how incarceration and the punitive prison environment create challenges to managing extreme heat in prisons.

We found that characteristics of modern incarceration, including communal distribution of resources, crowded conditions and a lack of agency for incarcerated people, create barriers to accessing resources during periods of extreme heat. Furthermore, the punitive nature of the prison environment as manifested in the relationship between staff and incarcerated persons and certain prison policies also create barriers to incarcerated persons accessing resources to reduce their risk of heat-related illness and death.

These issues are particularly relevant to the health and safety of incarcerated persons during periods of extreme temperatures but also speak broadly to the implications of incarceration, disaster risk, and the advancement of human rights for incarcerated people.

This article addresses a gap in the literature by including the perspectives of persons incarcerated in Texas prisons experiencing extreme heat and implicates the characteristics of incarceration and punishment in the production of disaster risk.

Chocolate production and cocoa supply chains are rife with social and environmental challenges. Chocolate companies commonly make claims that their products are “sustainable”, giving little guidance on what this means. The aim of this paper is to conduct a scoping review to synthesise the accounting literature related to the chocolate industry and sustainability and develop a research agenda for accounting scholarship.

The scoping review followed Arksey and O’Malley’s (2005) five-stage framework for a scoping review. Nineteen accounting journals were searched for literature on “chocolate OR cocoa AND sustainability” from 2000 to 2023. A total of 171 papers were identified through the search, of which 18 were deemed relevant and included for thematic analysis. The themes are analysed using a conceptual framework on accountability.

Analysis of the relevant literature revealed three distinct perspectives on sustainability in the chocolate industry. These include critique on the problems related to top-down accountability approaches in the chocolate industry; that accountability mechanisms have fallen short in managing sustainability challenges; and that sustainability interventions are driven by profit motives. The themes further reveal a lack of accountability in the industry for marginalised voices.

The scoping review methodology used in this study offers insights into the diverse perspectives on sustainability in the chocolate industry. This research adds valuable knowledge to the field by uncovering nuanced issues around accountability and sustainability and highlighting the need for future research for accountability for sustainable chocolate production.

This paper explores the Entrepreneurial Well-Being (EWB) of expatriate entrepreneurs in China. Through the analysis of their contextualised lived experience across the entrepreneurial journey, the paper proposes a novel theorisation of EWB.

This study adopts an interpretivist approach of abductive reasoning to analyse the data from 50 in-depth interviews conducted with expatriate entrepreneurs in China. Expatriate entrepreneurs are confronted with enhanced challenges in their host country, leading to particular emotional engagement with the entrepreneurial journey.

Findings show the importance of life situations, emotions and relatedness in the entrepreneurial process and the EWB of expatriate entrepreneurs. Theorising from their lived experiences, the paper presents EWB as a dynamic process. It further theorises this process as a constant, ongoing interaction and integration between the self and world, in an interplay of being and becoming. Such theorisation contributes first to advancements in the EWB literature, with a stronger emphasis on the entrepreneurial aspect. The paper also contributes to discussions on contextualised entrepreneurship by stressing the role of emotions and relatedness in the pursuit of EWB.

Entrepreneurship is a global phenomenon, which is often presented as a suitable alternative career path for migrant and expatriate individuals. However, the importance of EWB for entrepreneurs requires further attention from policy-makers, support institutions and entrepreneurs themselves. By theorising EWB as a processual journey of being and becoming and the relation between the self and world, this paper opens avenues for innovative support policies and practices aiming at developing the full potential of individuals in entrepreneurship and promoting both the happiness index and the global index of society.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the factors influencing the development of social media marketing strategy in an international context. We specifically look at the potential drivers and barriers throughout the social media marketing strategy development process and how cultural differences shape social media marketing strategy decision-making among firms in international markets.

The study is conducted with an inductive research approach involving in-depth interviews with 32 firms from Finland, China and Brazil. Using inductive data analysis, we identify both internal and external factors that drive and hinder the development of firms’ social media marketing strategies. Moreover, we explore the essential elements in social media marketing strategy development based on the key practices observed among these firms, which enables us to conduct a comparative analysis of how cultural values influence the development of social media marketing strategies.

Our findings underscore the importance of both internal (i.e. resources and capabilities) and external (i.e. market-level and country-level) factors that influence the development of social media marketing strategy. Our analysis also unveiled four key practices throughout the social media marketing strategy development process: social selling, content marketing, risk management and relationship management. Additionally, we identified three distinct mindsets regarding firms’ social media selling objectives across companies in the three countries.

The comparative approach provides novel insight into firms' international social media marketing strategy. Our proposed conceptual model shows the development process of social media marketing strategy in the international context. The research propositions highlight the role of cultural values and open up new avenues for future research.

The main goal of the article is to determine the mediating role of HRM outcomes in the relationships between staffing the organization and company performance results and to establish whether there are any identifiable regularity in this scope in the pre-pandemic and pandemic period in the HQs and foreign subsidiaries of MNCs.

The empirical research included 200 MNCs headquartered in Central Europe. To capture the actual relations between the variables under study the raw data in the variables were adjusted with the efficiency index (EI). The Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM) was used to verify the research hypotheses and assess the mediating effects.

The research findings show that, with the exception of the HQs in the pandemic period, when staffing had a negative effect on the company performance results in quality, in other cases it had a positive effect on results in HRM, finance, innovativeness and quality, both in the pre-pandemic and pandemic period, although this effect was not always statistically significant. Furthermore, the company's performance results in HRM mediate positively the relationships between staffing and the other three categories of company performance results, regardless of the organizational level (HQs' or subsidiaries') and time period under consideration. Additionally, during the pandemic, the company's performance results in HRM mediate the relationships between staffing and the other company's performance results stronger than in the pre-pandemic time.

In addition to confirming the results of some other studies, the article also provides new knowledge. It determines the mediating role of HRM outcomes in the relationship between staffing and company performance results in finance, innovativeness and quality. Moreover, it identifies certain regularities in the four studied contexts, which is a novelty in this type of research. It also uses an innovative approach to including employee KPIs as the efficiency index in analyzing the relationships between the variables under study.