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This study furthers one’s understanding of the motivations of the crowdfunding crowd by empirically examining critical factors that influence the crowd's decision to support a crowdfunding project.

Backer's comments from a sample of the top 100 most funded technology product projects on KickStarter were collected. A latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) analysis strategy was adopted to investigate critical motivational factors. Three experts mapped those factors to the known theoretical constructs of social exchange theory (SET).

Although backers are motivated by value, they are also motivated by far less tangible social factors including trust and a feeling of psychological ownership. Findings suggest that the crowd is far more than a passive group of investors or customers and should be viewed as participatory stakeholders. This study serves as guidance for project owners hoping to motivate the crowd and for future investigators examining backer motivations in other types of crowdsourcing projects.

Online chatter in the form of user-generated comments is an excellent data source for researchers to mine for value and meaning.

Given strong feelings of psychological ownership, project owners should actively engage the crowd and solicit the crowd for advice and help in order to motivate them.

The study presents the first empirical exploration of backer motivations using LDA guided by theory and the knowledge of experts. A framework of latent motivational factors is proposed.

The study aims to consider the multiple affordances of micro-credentials as a means of creating agency and making a positive contribution to the human experience, through the voices of practitioners and stakeholders.

Multiple case study, narrative inquiry, using Reflexive Thematic Analysis to identify themes was the approach used. Qualitative Descriptive Research is employed to present and analyse the re-told tales.

Micro-credentials possess numerous characteristics which coalesce to create multiple affordances, which are identified as follows: Micro-credentials as: Urgent and Emergent, Critical and Transformative, Promoting Equity, Access and Participation, and Servicing Traditional Qualifications. These concomitant multiple affordances possess the core affordance of micro-credentials making a difference to the lives of learners. The more powerful affordances a micro-credential has, the more powerful it is and the greater the difference it can make to the human experience.

Practitioners will arguably do well to consider these multiple affordances in the future development of micro-credentials. Equally, those working in urgent or emergent spaces, in critical or transformative areas of practice, those engaged in a social justice environment or in the re-development of curricula, would do well to consider micro-credentials as a means of creating agency in the development and recognition of knowledge and skills. This study has focused on the voices of practitioners and their storied professional lives. However, the learner voice is limited to one and the employer voice is absent. Future research will benefit from a consideration of the employer voice in the development of micro-credentials as well as the voice of the end user, the learner.

It is hoped the study will assist practitioners in the judicious development of micro-credentials that possess agency and make a positive contribution to the human experience.

It is hoped the study will shed light on how micro-credentials can afford equity, access and participation to priority learners, and to all learners, in the development of cognitively manageable, affordable, time-achievable micro-credentials, that enable learners to see success quickly, whereby encouraging them to further their life-long and life-wide learning journeys.

This study unusually gives voice to practitioners and other stakeholders in the micro-credentials arena. Most studies to date have focused on the potential of micro-credentials. This study considers their actuality and new ways of ‘doing' micro-credentialing based on the voices of experience.

The teaching of cooking is an important aspect of school-based efforts to promote healthy diets among children, and is frequently done by external agencies. Within a limited evidence base relating to cooking interventions in schools, there are important questions about how interventions are integrated within school settings. The purpose of this paper is to examine how a mobile classroom (Cooking Bus) sought to strengthen connections between schools and cooking, and drawing on the concept of the sociotechnical network, theorise the interactions between the Bus and school contexts.

Methods comprised a postal questionnaire to 76 schools which had received a Bus visit, and case studies of the Bus’ work in five schools, including a range of school sizes and urban/rural locations. Case studies comprised observation of Cooking Bus sessions, and interviews with school staff.

The Cooking Bus forged connections with schools through aligning intervention and schools’ goals, focussing on pupils’ cooking skills, training teachers and contributing to schools’ existing cooking-related activities. The Bus expanded its sociotechnical network through post-visit integration of cooking activities within schools, particularly teachers’ use of intervention cooking kits.

The paper highlights the need for research on the long-term impacts of school cooking interventions, and better understanding of the interaction between interventions and school contexts.

This paper adds to the limited evidence base on school-based cooking interventions by theorising how cooking interventions relate to school settings, and how they may achieve integration.

Humans remain unsuccessful in their attempts to achieve environmental sustainability, despite decades of scientific awareness and political efforts toward that end. This paper suggests a fresh conceptualization, one that focuses on education, offers a fuller explanation for our lack of success and calls attention to alternatives.

The authors first critically review mainstream approaches that have been used to achieve environmental sustainability, then introduce an alternative that the authors call the cultural approach. The authors finally discuss how educational research should be re-articulated based on the cultural approach.

The authors identified three mainstream approaches – the technological, cognitive approach and behaviorist – all of which function to reproduce modern mainstream culture. In contrast, the cultural approach assumes modern mainstream culture as the root cause of environmental unsustainability and aims to rearticulate it. To elaborate a cultural approach, the authors recommend education scholars to (1) bring attention to the role of culture in sustainability and (2) identify education practices that are potentially useful for enacting a cultural shift, primarily developing richer synergies between qualitative and quantitative research.

Unlike many previous studies in the field of education, the authors’ account highlights how current mainstream approaches used for current global education policymaking often merely reproduces modern mainstream culture and accelerates the environmental crisis. It thus proposes to redirect educational research for a cultural shift, one that allows human society to move beyond the comforting rhetoric of sustainability and face the survivability imperative.

Crises such as the Coronavirus pandemic pose extraordinary challenges to the decision making in management teams. Teams need to integrate available information quickly to make informed decisions on the spot and update their decisions as new information becomes available. Moreover, making good decisions is hard as it requires sacrifices for the common good, and finally, implementing the decisions made is not easy as it requires persistence in the face of strong counterproductive social pressures.

We provide a “psychology of action” perspective on making team-based management decisions in crisis by introducing collective implementation intentions (We-if-then plans) as a theory-based intervention tool to improve decision processes. We discuss our program of research on forming and acting on We-if-then plans in ad hoc teams facing challenging situations.

Teams with We-if-then plans consistently made more informed decisions when information was socially or temporally distributed, when decision makers had to make sacrifices for the common good, and when strong social pressures opposed acting on their decisions. Preliminary experimental evidence indicates that assigning simple We-if-then plans had similar positive effects as providing a leader to steer team processes.

Our analysis of self-regulated team decisions helps understand and improve how management teams can make and act on good decisions in crises such as the Coronavirus pandemic.

Blockchain is expected to impact reporting and auditing processes. Indeed, the increasing use of blockchain could affect the nature and extent of information available to auditors and how audits are performed. This paper aims to investigate how auditors are assessing the relevance of the current auditing standards in light of the emergent use of blockchain technology.

Based on qualitative content analysis, this paper analyzed semi-structured interviews with auditors to understand their shared perception of how the current auditing standards address blockchain’s emergence.

The findings reveal a growing demand for information technology (IT) auditing standards, as well as a mismatch in timing between the quickly changing IT environment and the regulators’ slowness in releasing new standards or updating standards.

The findings reflect the external auditors’ points of view and cannot be generalized to all countries, but future studies should address the development of specific IT-related auditing standards to better fit the fast-evolving technology environment in ways that consider the other stakeholders’ points of view, including those of the standard setters.

The results of this study show that auditors consider the current auditing standards for IT to be too vague, and they need more guidance on both auditing blockchain and using technologies as audit tools.

The original contribution of this study lies in the in-depth understanding it provides of the adequacy of the current auditing standards to audit companies using blockchain, which is an under-researched topic.