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Identity, positioning and possibilities intersect differently for South Asian women in white academia. Within a broader migrant community that defines Australian life, these identities and positioning imply great possibility, but pursuing such pathways within academia is a walk on the last strand of resilience. This paper explores this tension of possibilities and constraints, using hope theory to highlight the cognitive resistance evident in the narratives of three South Asian women in Australian academia.

The authors use collaborative autoethnography to share their narratives of working in Australian universities at three different stages of careers, utilising Snyder's model of hope theory to interrogate their own goal-setting behaviours, pathways and agentic thinking.

The authors propose that hope as a cognitive state informs resistance and enables aspirations to contribute within academia in meaningful ways whilst navigating the terrain of inequitable structures.

The authors' use of hope theory as a lens on the intersectional experiences of career making, building and progression is a new contribution to scholarship on marginalised women in white academe and the ways in which the pathways of resistance are identified.

This study aims to explore the potential of social enterprises (SEs) in promoting sustainable practices, focusing on their role in reshaping corporate environmental performance (CEP) through sustainable business model innovation (SBMI). Specifically, it examines the impact of SBMI on CEP and the moderating effect of external collaboration (EC).

This study analyses the influence of SBMI on the CEP of 500 Canadian SEs. Chi-square tests, structural equation modelling, correlation analysis and regression analysis were used to assess the relationships between SBMI, CEP and EC.

Results reveal that SBMI positively influences CEP by enabling SEs to offer environmentally sustainable products and services. In addition, collaboration with diverse stakeholders significantly enhances the effectiveness of SBMI in achieving environmental objectives.

By incorporating ecological modernization theory and institutional theory, this study provides fresh insights into the environmental impact of SEs. It underscores the importance of SEs addressing regulatory, social and cultural factors to support their sustainability and legitimacy.

Autonomous vehicles (AVs) have the potential to transform the infrastructure, mobility and social well-being paradigms in New Zealand (NZ) amid its unprecedented population and road safety challenges. But, public acceptance, co-evolution of regulations and AV technology based on interpersonal and institutional trust perspectives pose significant challenges. Previous theories and models need to be more comprehensive to address trust influencing autonomous driving (AD) factors in natural settings. Therefore, this study aims to find key AD factors corresponding to the chain of human-machine interaction (HMI) events happening in real time and formulate a guiding framework for the successful deployment of AVs in NZ.

This study utilized a comprehensive literature review complemented by an AV users’ study with 15 participants. AV driving sprints were conducted on low, medium and high-density roads in Auckland, followed by 15 ideation workshops to gather data about the users’ observations, feelings and attitudes towards the AVs during HMI.

This research study determined nine essential trust-influencing AD determinants in HMI and legal readiness domains. These AD determinants were analyzed, corresponding to eight AV events in three phases. Subsequently, a guiding framework was developed based on these factors, i.e. human-machine interaction autonomous driving events relationship identification framework (HMI-ADERIF) for the deployment of AVs in New Zealand.

This study was conducted only in specific Auckland areas.

This study is significant for advanced design research and provides valuable insights, guidelines and deployment pathways for designers, practitioners and regulators when developing HMI Systems for AD vehicles.

This study is the first-ever AV user study in New Zealand in live traffic conditions. This user study also claimed its novelty due to AV trials in congested and fast-moving traffic on the four-lane motorway in New Zealand. Previously, none of the studies conducted AV user study on SUV BMW vehicle and motorway in real-time traffic conditions; all operations were completely autonomous without any input from the driver. Thus, it explored the essential autonomous driving (AD) trust influencing variables in human factors and legal readiness domains. This research is also unique in identifying critical AD determinants that affect the user trust, acceptance and adoption of AVs in New Zealand by bridging the socio-technical gap with futuristic research insights.

This study aims to address the growing challenges posed by consumerist behavior in ecosystems, leading to increased waste production and escalating costs in waste management. The goal is to investigate the waste management efficiency of Italian municipalities and the factors affecting their efficiency levels.

A two-stage bootstrap Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) is used to assess the waste management efficiency level of a selected sample of 147 Italian municipalities. Additionally, a truncated regression model is used to investigate the factors affecting waste management efficiency.

This study reveals a medium-high level of waste management efficiency across Italian municipalities. Additionally, it highlights the negative effect of unemployment rates on waste management efficiency within Italian municipalities, alongside the positive influence of the council’s political ideology and electoral turnout.

The novelty of this study is the unique application of combined methods in the Italian context, providing a nuanced perspective on municipal waste management efficiency. This approach contributes novel insights to the existing literature in this field.

In light of the growing importance of digital communication within higher education institutions, this study aims to explore the key factors influencing social media usage in Italian universities. Specifically, through the lens of stakeholder theory and within the framework of university-driven ecosystems, this study examines how public status, university size, Internet visibility, and internationalization influence the use of these digital platforms within a university ecosystem setting.

This study employs a quantitative research design, using data from 92 Italian universities. A regression model is applied to analyze the determinants of social media usage, which is measured as a composite score across three platforms: Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube.

The results, within the broader university-driven ecosystems, indicate that public and larger institutions are more likely to utilize social media, while Internet visibility and internationalization do not have a significant impact on the use of these platforms.

This study offers several unique contributions to the academic literature. It enriches the ongoing debate on digital technologies supporting university-driven ecosystems by examining how universities utilize social media platforms to enhance transparency and facilitate dialogue with stakeholders within their ecosystems. Furthermore, it contributes to knowledge on the key determinants of social media adoption and extends the application of stakeholder theory, offering insights into how universities engage with diverse stakeholder groups within their ecosystems through digital platforms.

The study investigates how sustainability reporting constructs a narrative about an organization that provides its members with a reality they can accept, with the consequence of producing organizational stability.

The article reports a research engagement concerning the “backstage” of sustainability reporting in one Spanish savings bank, which the researchers engaged with for more than three years.

The article describes how sustainability reporting operates as a boundary object occupying the space between the organization’s loosely coupled systems and facilitating the cooperation of members with different interpretations of the organization. Different translations of discourses and actions ensure that the sustainability report conveys a ductile narrative that can be tailored to specific interpretations. At the same time, the editing inherent in sustainability reporting ensures that any narrative that may challenge the organization’s dominant perspective is ignored and marginalized. In this way, sustainability reporting produces a discourse that inscribes a narrative of the organization and eventually ensures organizational inertia.

The article highlights the relevance of investigating sustainability reports by exploring the backstage of their production rather than solely the final document.

In contrast to prior research that has been concerned with exploring the extent to which sustainability reporting is associated with organizational change, this study applies different lenses to show how and why sustainability reporting is implicated in the construction of the organization and the maintenance of its stability and inertia.

This paper introduces a revenue efficiency DEA model with weight restrictions and variable returns to scale, designed to evaluate the efficiency of 38 ports in the Asia–Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) region.

The methodology used is the analysis of the data envelope, where the technical, cost and allocative efficiency is calculated with the incorporation of weight restrictions aimed at preventing the generation of unrealistically high efficiency scores.

The findings indicate that the implementation of weight restrictions successfully eliminated outliers. However, there was a general decrease in efficiency across three key measures: technical, revenue and allocative. In the realm of allocative efficiency, none of the ports reached a perfect score.

The major contribution of this research is that despite numerous studies on port efficiency utilizing DEA methodology, none have integrated weight restrictions into overall efficiency assessments. Therefore, the study’s objective is to gauge revenue efficiency, dissected into technical and allocative efficiency, across 38 ports in the APEC region. This is achieved through the implementation of weight restrictions alongside variable returns to scale.

The major contribution of this research is that despite numerous studies on port efficiency utilizing DEA methodology, none have integrated weight restrictions into overall efficiency assessments.

This study investigates how corporations navigate the increasingly prominent field of environmental, social and governance (ESG) through the lens of resource dependence theory (RDT). It aims to elucidate the strategic responses of companies to media-driven public sentiment on ESG, examining the alignment of their operations and competitive strategies – specifically differentiation and cost leadership – to the external resource of media ESG sentiment.

Employing Python software, this research extracted over two million ESG-related news articles from Baidu News. Using machine learning and text analysis, the study assesses the media ESG sentiment and its correlation with the competitive strategies of China’s A-share listed companies over a period from 2007 to 2022. The approach leverages RDT to understand how firms adjust their strategies in response to media-driven public sentiment on ESG.

The findings indicate that positive media ESG sentiment acts as a crucial external resource, significantly influencing firms’ strategic alignment toward minimizing ESG public sentiment risks and enhancing competitive positioning, especially in the social (S) and governance (G) domains. This alignment is evident in firms’ adoption of differentiation and cost leadership strategies, affirming the study’s theoretical prediction within the RDT framework.

This paper provides a novel contribution by integrating RDT with the analysis of media-driven ESG sentiment to explore corporate strategic adjustments. It offers empirical evidence on the theory’s applicability in contemporary strategic corporate management, particularly in the context of ESG challenges. The research deepens the understanding of the interplay between media ESG sentiment and corporate strategy, highlighting the strategic importance of positive media sentiment in the ESG landscape.

This study seeks to enhance productivity, motivation and well-being of workers by improving decision-making processes. Using inner knowledge management (IKM), this study aims to identify, manage and transform unconscious beliefs and negative emotions that limit decision-making processes.

The methodology used is empirical research, analyzing multiple cases qualitatively and using the T-test statistical model to analyze the hypotheses. The study tests the relation between different limiting beliefs and negative emotions that influence decision-making processes.

This study shows that IKM is positively related to the productivity, motivation and well-being of workers.

The study is limited to workers who are mentally healthy, who work in teams and who seek professional help to achieve their goals.

The results indicate that there is a lot of potential to be explored applying IKM in companies and organizations. Specifically, this study proves that there are several inner knowledge assets that constrain the workers’ potential and therefore affect the efficiency of businesses.

The results have strong implications for how companies and organizations can create great value for themselves and their workers.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first data-based study using an IKM model. The importance of this study opens the door to further exploration of the effects on IKM on productivity, motivation and the general well-being of workers.

We explore the skills required for digital leadership for reshaping existing business models toward digital models. Digital leadership is pivotal in gaining a competitive advantage and achieving successful digital transformation. However, little is known with regard to the underlying mechanisms related to digital leadership and transformation.

Data are collected through semi-structured interviews involving 20 participants from five Pakistani textile companies. Thematic analysis was employed as a data analysis tool.

Findings show that certain skills such as technological know-how, innovativeness, adaptability, ability to lead and steer, honesty, integrity, transformative vision, communication and collaboration are conducive to successful digital transformation in textile manufacturing firms. Similarly, digital leaders can significantly enhance business model innovation, create value for the firm, help develop new products (value proposition) and create Ecosystem partnerships (value network).

This article bridges gaps between existing literature on digital transformation and leadership. Digital leadership skills for digital transformation and the role of digital leaders in business model innovation have not been explored before. The conceptual framework is put forth, propositions are proposed and the findings offer some future research directions.