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The main data used to develop this case were remote, synchronous interviews with the three characters in the case. The authors conducted two interviews with the main character in the case, Geoff Brown, specifically: (1) an initial 30 min interview to determine the fit and focus of the case and to help create the interview protocol for the full case interview (this initial interview was conducted on March 12, 2024); and (2) an hour-long interview to ask targeted questions to fully develop the case narrative (this interview was conducted on March 28, 2024). Geoff Brown was also involved in reviewing drafts of the case, approving the final version of the case and reviewing the assignment questions in this instructors’ manual (IM).

This case focuses on Geoff Brown, Executive Director at Alberta Chicken Producers (ACP), which is a not-for-profit organization in Alberta, Canada, that is responsible for representing 250 regulated chicken producers. Brown is grappling with what to do with the remote/hybrid work policy at ACP. Part of the impetus for reconsidering this policy was the comments from ACP’s long-tenured Office Manager and Executive Assistant, who had been asking Brown to bring this policy forward to a staff meeting for discussion throughout the past year. Brown now feels ready to move these discussions forward but is unsure of how to proceed and what the best practices would be to ensure that the policy in place for remote work is beneficial for work engagement, individual and organizational work performance, work–life balance, employee relationships and fairness perceptions.

The target audience for this case is undergraduate and graduate students taking a course in the disciplines of human resources management or organizational behavior. This case will be especially relevant for a human resources management course when studying the topics of employee benefits (e.g. work–life balance), health and safety (e.g. stress) and work design (e.g. telecommuting), and this case will be especially relevant for an organizational behavior course when studying the topics of motivation (e.g. fairness), communication, organizational culture and decision-making.

Higher education institutions (HEIs) are crucial in sustainable development. To this end, they must infuse sustainability into all their endeavors. This study aims to delve into the unique vertically integrated project (VIP), a project-based learning approach and its impact on students’ skills and the surrounding community.

The research design was collaborative, reflecting the spirit of the VIP. Step 1 involved an action research approach, where students and instructors worked closely with municipal representatives to identify challenges and devise solutions for local economic development. In Step 2, students' voices were heard through a survey. Step 3 encompassed presentations in scientific and nonscientific events, capturing the community’s perception as a valuable feedback loop.

The authors identified the most effective policies implemented by municipalities that excelled in indices related to the business environment. VIP enhanced students’ soft skills, including critical thinking, teamwork and community spirit. The outcomes of the VIP were effective in identifying public policies aimed at social transformation.

This study’s findings offer significant insights for HEI managers, guiding them in adopting interdisciplinary pedagogical practices. These practices, in turn, foster sustainable development within both internal and external communities. Furthermore, the empirical study’s focus on improving local community governance can potentially enhance the local business environment.

Literature emphasizing the social dimension of sustainability in HEIs is scarce, particularly those practices related to teaching, research and extension linked to projects aimed at community sustainability. This study introduces interdisciplinary practices encouraging student involvement in addressing tangible issues and searching for solutions to community problems.

The paper explores the notion of worker voice in terms of its implications for supply chain justice. The paper proposes the value of the recognition perspective on social justice for framing workers’ experiences in global supply chains and identifies opportunities for the advancement of the worker voice agenda with recognition justice in mind.

The paper adopts a conceptual approach to explore the notion of worker voice in supply chains in terms of the recognition perspective on social justice.

Sustainable supply chain management (SSCM) scholarship has considered worker voice in terms of two key paradigms, which we term communication and representation. To address recognition justice for workers in global supply chains, the worker voice agenda must consider designing worker voice mechanisms to close recognition gaps for workers with marginalised identities; the shared responsibilities of supply chain actors to listen alongside the expectation of workers to use their voice; and the expansion of the concept of worker voice to cut across home-work boundaries.

The paper offers conceptual clarity on the emerging notion of worker voice in SSCM and is the first to interrogate the implications of recognition justice for the emergent worker voice agenda. It articulates key opportunities for future research to further operationalise worker voice upon a recognition foundation.

This project represents an exploratory qualitative investigation of the connection between undergraduate students’ experiences of positive emotions in academic leadership courses and their self-reports of leadership learning.

Our research team conducted a qualitative analysis of 298 post-course survey comments from students in academic courses focused on leader development over three academic years. These surveys included prompts inviting students to report dominant emotions they repeatedly felt within the classroom environment and how these salient emotions helped or hindered their learning over the course of the semester.

Our results suggest a complex interplay between the ways students’ self-reported experience of positive emotions during a leadership class influenced their leadership learning and course engagement. Overall, student responses revealed positive emotions through their course engagement, with interest, joy and serenity/contentment being the most frequently reported positive emotions. Participants attributed these emotions to influencing their willingness to attend class, participate in class activities, deepen their learning about leadership topics and apply their leadership learning beyond the class.

Educational research has long shown that emotions are relevant to specific learning processes. However, this research has not yet been applied to leadership-focused classrooms. Our novel study focused on the connections between emotional reactions to leadership courses and student learning and was designed to help unlock the primary mechanisms by which young people learn to lead through formal academic coursework.

The hoped-for “just recovery” from the COVID-19 pandemic has not occurred. This chapter examines socioeconomic disparities laid bare by the pandemic in the United States. They have left a marked impression, suggesting that the concept of “American exceptionalism” has negative as well as positive connotations especially when compared with other high-income countries. Strikingly, democracy is not delivering for many Americans, and yet that is not a new situation, as much scholarship shows. These findings challenge received wisdom about how this country is in the aggregate labeled “developed” when many Americans live in conditions similar to or worse than those the World Bank categorizes as “developing.” Against this background, the chapter assesses experiential learning models for engaging students on the SDGs to assess these disparities. While researching social justice gaps in Pittsburgh and Atlanta with Carnegie Mellon students, however, the lack of disaggregated data emerged as a human rights issue and major barrier to fulfilling the SDG principle to “leave no one behind” (LNOB). These findings suggest a paradigm shift is needed, using the SDGs to advance human rights, elevating socioeconomic rights, localizing issues, generating disaggregated data to drive policy recommendations, and scaling up the community of practice that is engaged in this paradigm shift. Field building these aspects of sustainable development has the possibility to positively shape policies, outcomes, and help this democracy actually deliver for all, not just for some. For the United States to lead and bolster human rights and democracy around the world, inequalities at home must be addressed.

The purpose of this article is to meet Professor Paul T.P. Wong, PhD, CPscyh, who is based at the Department of Psychology, Trent University, Peterborough, Ontario, Canada. Wong represents an interesting case of how a racial/cultural minority could achieve success in a hostile environment consisting of the systemic biases of injustice, discrimination and marginalization. His life also epitomizes how one can experience the paradoxical truth of healing and flourishing in an upside-down world through the positive suffering mindset (PSM).

This case study is presented in two sections: a positive autoethnography written by Wong, followed by his answers to ten questions. The core methodology of positive autoethnography allows people to understand how Wong’s life experience of being a war baby in China, a constant outsider and a lone voice in Western culture, has shaped a very different vision of meaning, positive mental health and global flourishing.

Wong reveals how to live a life of meaning and happiness for all the suffering people in a difficult world. He has researched the positive psychology of suffering for 60 years, from effective coping with stress and searching for meaning to successful aging and positive death. According to Wong’s suffering hypothesis and the emerging paradigm of existential positive psychology (Wong, 2021), cultivating a PSM is essential for healing and flourishing in all seasons of life.

An expanding literature has been developed to illustrate why the missing link in well-being research is how to transcend and transform suffering into triumph. Wong reveals how this emerging area of research is still not fully embraced by mainstream psychology dominated by the individualistic Euro-American culture, and thus why, in an adversarial milieu, existential positive psychology is limited by its inability to attract more researchers to test out Wong’s suffering hypothesis.

The wisdom and helpful tools presented here may enable people to achieve mature happiness and existential well-being even when they have a very painful past, a very difficult present and a bleak future.

This autoethnographic case study offers new grounds for hope for all those who are injured by life, marginalized by systemic biases or tormented by chronic illnesses and disorders. It also provides a road map for a better world with more decent human beings who dare to stand up for justice, integrity and compassion.

Meaning as reflected in suffering is according to Wong the most powerful force to bring out either the worst or the best in people. The new science of suffering shows us how the authors can achieve positive transformation through cultivating a PSM, no matter how harsh one’s fate may be.

March 2020 signaled school closures and moves online for many institutions, but an online EdD program at a midsize, Christian university featured fewer than-expected programmatic changes. Because of its modality, program operations continued with relatively few changes. Although COVID-19-related campus closures did not interrupt these students’ scheduled courses, they substantively impacted their personal and professional lives. As a result, the authors in the program-specific writing center serving these students found themselves helping them navigate not only stresses related to the already-strenuous task of writing a dissertation but also personal and professional anxieties related to the COVID-19 pandemic. The purpose of this study is to explore and reflect on the strategies employed by a program‐specific writing center to support doctoral students during the COVID‐19 pandemic, focusing on relaxed scheduling policies, emotional support beyond writing, and fostering deeper interpersonal connections to address the unique challenges students faced during this period.

The authors conducted an autoethnographic exploration of their experiences to consider and examine effective strategies for supporting students in times of stress. The authors guided this inquiry by reviewing logs, notes and video recordings of sessions held or rescheduled in Spring 2020.

The authors identified three major themes in how they adjusted their approach to considering the pandemic: relaxed scheduling policies, emotional support beyond the writing process by permitting students to set the writing aside while they focused on the more immediate concerns emerging from the rapid onset of pandemic life and intentionally using the opportunity to form deeper interpersonal connections with students in their home environments.

As institutions reflect on lessons learned during pandemic stresses, closures and mandates, intentional exploration and reflection allow for a greater understanding of what improvements the authors can make to future practice. This uniquely positioned study offers a valuable perspective on supporting students through crisis.

This paper examines how rank-and-file practitioners react to and negotiate uniformized professional standards imposed by the elites of their profession in order to embody their professional ideal.

We explore this topic through the specific case of the Canadian independence rule. We mobilize Freidson’s and Becker’s conceptual tools to make sense of our data, generated through 55 interviews with rank-and-file practitioners.

We found that most rank-and-file practitioners override the (spirit of the) independence rule and engage in a process of secret deviance to pursue their professional ideal of accompanying their client in their business. Specifically, our analysis underlines how they find pleasure in fulfilling their professional ideal, seek to protect the secrecy that allows them to pursue this ideal while avoiding sanctions, and convince themselves of the morality of breaking the (spirit of the) rule in order to embody their conception of professionalism.

Our analysis expands fieldwork on rank-and-file practitioners by offering an analysis of struggles they experienced in their daily practice and by bringing to light their path to secret “professional” deviance.

Our study points to the necessity for better consideration of the realities of professional segments when developing rules or standards.

Our study develops a distinctive conceptual construct – the professionalism conception gap – to explain how secret “professional” deviance can unfold within a profession. This construct could be mobilized to further understand the divergences that can exist within broader professional spheres.

Whereas belongingness and its proximate constructs have been explored in various contexts, an understanding of what it actually is in organisational contexts remains elusive. This paper aims to explore employees’ experiences of belongingness at work to better understand what belongingness means in a work context.

Data were collected from in-depth interviews with 12 participants in the United States and New Zealand over two time periods. Grounded theory methodology was used to develop themes and categories to understand the structure of the data.

The data revealed an overarching theme of “self” represented by three categories: identified as the “unveiled-self,” the “relational-self” and “the seen-self.” The data further reveals how employees covertly survey the organisational environment for cues of belongingness and moderate their behaviour accordingly.

This study’s small, culturally homogenous sample may limit generalisability. Future research could explore cross-cultural differences in belongingness at work using diverse samples. Examining belongingness and self-concept could provide further insights into authenticity and fitting in at work.

Organisations should promote authentic interactions, meaningful recognition and psychological safety for self-expression. Informal conversations strengthen relationships, but efforts must feel genuine. Encouraging authenticity, recognising contributions sincerely and creating opportunities for organic social interaction can cultivate a culture of belonging.

The three dimensions of “self” illuminate the importance of authenticity, meaningful workplace relationships and recognition as unique components of belongingness at work.