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Climate change (CC) poses significant risks to society, but there are ways people can address it – including in their personal and professional lives. One professional context – higher education – has a unique role in tackling CC through educating future leaders and researching potential solutions. This study aims to identify the predictors that determine climate action in the university.

The predictors of climate action (including both personal behaviour change and academic subject choice) are examined amongst both university students and staff at a UK university. The authors present the results of an online survey (N = 3,326).

Climate education and research were associated with early and mid-career researchers, years working/studying and academic field, with engineering staff/students most involved. Climate anxiety and awareness of university climate emergency declarations and credible climate information sources significantly explain academic behaviour among students and academics. In addition, activities with substantial carbon footprints, such as driving and eating ruminant meat, could be associated with CC research and teaching.

These results highlight the importance of improving climate literacy, and sustainability initiatives within higher education. To address the urgent issues of CC, higher education institutions must integrate climate education, research and sustainable practices.

The aim of this study is two-fold: (1) to promote a model of youth participatory research and offer a window of understanding into how it can be enacted and (2) to understand youth perspectives on youth empowerment. This study asks: “how can youth help us understand youth empowerment?”

The study applies youth participatory action research (YPAR) and interpretative phenomenological analysis. The study illustrates how to enact a model of YPAR by engaging youth in the process of research in a youth-serving community non-profit organization.

This study sets out to make two important contributions, one methodological and one theoretical: First, the study contributes to our understanding of the opportunities and benefits of youth-engaged, peer-to-peer research. Specifically, this study promotes a model of youth participatory action research and knowledge making processes, and the associated social and formal benefits for youth. By extension, this study illustrates an approach to engage youth in formal contexts which has implications for both management and organizational studies and education. Finally, the study extends our understanding and conceptualization of the phenomenon of youth empowerment (as informed by youth perspectives).

The study offers insight into how to conduct youth participatory action research and specifically how to address two limitations cited in the literature: (1) how to authentically engage youth including how to share power, and (2) how to perform youth participatory action research, often critiqued as a black box methodology.

This study provides the critical masses (thresholds) at which the positive incidence of finance and economic growth will be dampened by the negative effects of income inequality and poverty on energy consumption in Sub-Saharan Africa for policy direction.

The study employed the two steps systems GMM estimator for 41 countries in Africa from 2005–2020.

The study found that for finance to maintain a positive effect on energy consumption per capita, the critical thresholds for the income inequality indicators (Atkinson coefficient, Gini index and the Palma ratio) should not exceed 0.681, 0.582 and 5.991, respectively. Similarly, for economic growth (GDP per capita growth) to maintain a positive effect on energy consumption per capita, the critical thresholds for the income inequality indicators (Atkinson coefficient, Gini index and the Palma ratio) should not exceed 0.669, 0.568 and 6.110, respectively. On the poverty level in Sub-Saharan Africa, the study reports that the poverty headcount ratios (hc$144ppp2011, hc$186ppp2011 and hc$250ppp2005) should not exceed 7.342, 28.278 and 129.332, respectively for financial development to maintain a positive effect on energy consumption per capita. The study also confirms the positive nexus between access to finance (financial development) and energy consumption per capita, with the attending adverse effect on CO₂ emissions inescapable. The findings of this study make it evidently clear, for policy recommendation that finance is at the micro-foundation of economic growth, income inequality and poverty alleviation. However, a maximum threshold of income inequality and poverty headcount ratios as indicated in this study must be maintained to attain the full positive ramifications of financial development and economic growth on energy consumption in Sub-Saharan Africa.

The originality of this study is found in the computation of the threshold and net effects of poverty and income inequality in economic growth through the conditional and unconditional effects of finance.

In this application brief I share a case study assignment I used in my Leadership in Complex Organizations classes to promote creativity in problem solving. I sorted Ph.D. students into two teams and trained them to use creative writing techniques to encode theory into their own cases. A sense of competition emerged. Later, teams swapped cases for analysis and decoding. The approach became known as “reverse case study.” Summative course evaluations revealed four important instructional themes: (1) students were able to apply and learn leadership and organizational theories, (2) students were able to build rapport and create bonds with fellow students, (3) students explored creativity, and (4) students explored the perspective of “the other.”

The paper investigates the production inefficiency of the US electricity industry in the wake of restructuring and emission reduction regulations.

The study estimates a multiple-input, multiple-output directional distance function, using six inputs: fuel, labor, capital and annualized capital costs of sulfur dioxide (SO₂₎, nitrogen oxides (NO_X) and particulate removal devices, two good outputs – residential and industrial-commercial electricity and three bad outputs – SO₂, carbon dioxide (CO₂) and NO_X emissions.

The authors find that restructuring in electricity markets improves deregulated utilities' technical efficiency (TE). Deregulated utilities with below-average NO_X control equipment tend to invest less in these devices, but above-average utilities do the opposite. The reverse applies to particulate removal devices. The whole sample spends more on NO_X, particulate and SO₂ control systems and reduces its electricity sales slightly. Increased investments in SO₂ and NO_X control equipment do not reduce SO₂ and NO_X emissions, but expansions of particulate control systems cut down SO₂ emissions greatly. Stricter environmental regulations have probably shifted the production frontier inwards and the utilities farther from the frontier over time.

Restructuring and environmental regulations do not make all utilities invest more in emission control systems. The US government should devise other schemes to achieve this goal.

The paper unveils heterogeneous reactions of US electric utilities in the wake of restructuring and emission regulations.

In many security domains, the ‘human in the system’ is often a critical line of defence in identifying, preventing and responding to any threats (Saikayasit, Stedmon, & Lawson, 2015). Traditionally, such security domains are often focussed on mainstream public safety within crowded spaces and border controls, through to identifying suspicious behaviours, hostile reconnaissance and implementing counter-terrorism initiatives. More recently, with growing insecurity around the world, organisations have looked to improve their security risk management frameworks, developing concepts which originated in the health and safety field to deal with more pressing risks such as terrorist acts, abduction and piracy (Paul, 2018). In these instances, security is usually the specific responsibility of frontline personnel with defined roles and responsibilities operating in accordance with organisational protocols (Saikayasit, Stedmon, Lawson, & Fussey, 2012; Stedmon, Saikayasit, Lawson, & Fussey, 2013). However, understanding the knowledge that frontline security workers might possess and use requires sensitive investigation in equally sensitive security domains.

This chapter considers how to investigate knowledge elicitation in these sensitive security domains and underlying ethics in research design that supports and protects the nature of investigation and end-users alike. This chapter also discusses the criteria used for ensuring trustworthiness as well as assessing the relative merits of the range of methods adopted.

This paper aims to adapt and computerize the Trail Making Test (TMT) to support long-term self-assessment of cognitive abilities.

The authors propose a divide-and-combine (DAC) approach for generating different instances of TMT that can be used in repeated assessments with nearly no discernible practice effects. In the DAC approach, partial trails are generated separately in different layers and then combined to form a complete TMT trail.

The proposed approach was implemented in a computerized test application called iTMT. A pilot study was conducted to evaluate iTMT. The results show that the instances of TMT generated by the DAC approach had an adequate level of difficulty. iTMT also achieved a stronger construct validity, higher test–retest reliability and significantly reduced practice effects than existing computerized tests.

The preliminary results suggest that iTMT is suitable for long-term monitoring of cognitive abilities. By supporting self-assessment, iTMT also can help to crowdsource the assessment processes, which need to be administered by healthcare professionals conventionally, to the patients themselves.