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This study aims to understand how businesses can contribute to the achievement of the UN sustainable development goals (SDGs) by implementing Local Agenda 21 (or equivalent) plans in partnership with other organizations situated in their city. To this end, the present study examines drivers and outcomes from the perspective of business partners, as well as their relationships to the SDGs.

Through a mixed-methods approach this research studies 71 businesses from four large cross-sector partnerships formed to achieve local sustainability goals. Data were collected through a survey to determine why firms partner and what outcomes they obtain from partnering. Qualitative content analyses are used to determine the relationships between business drivers and outcomes from partnering for local sustainability and the SDGs.

From a resource-based view (RBV) perspective, findings show the value of local sustainability partnerships in relation to the SDGs. Many SDG targets are aligned with the top reasons why businesses join large community sustainability partnerships. Also, through the outcomes achieved by participating in the partnership businesses can further the SDGs.

This research contributes to the literature and to practice through the understanding of businesses partnering for local sustainability, and its relationships to global sustainability. Firstly, the connections of business partners to local and global sustainability are better understood. Of note is the contribution made to the literature on sustainability-related drivers and outcomes expanding and refining RBV literature. Secondly, a positive connection has been established between businesses and the SDGs, proposing a virtuous model of relationship that summarizes the findings from this research. And thirdly, large cross-sector social partnerships are better understood.

Small- and medium-sized enterprises and large corporations with local offices can further both local and global sustainable development by engaging in local cross-sector sustainability partnerships.

These research findings are crucial for those leading sustainability initiatives, so they can engage businesses actively in light of the important role they play in society improving their contributions and the chances for sustainability partnerships to achieve their goals.

This research contributes to the scale conversation by exploring community sustainability partnerships as a means to understand how business engagement in sustainability at the local level can contribute to the achievement of the SDGs and, ultimately, to global sustainability.

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.

The planning of massive vaccination campaigns often falls to nongovernmental organizations that have to face the critical challenge of vaccinating the largest number of people in the shortest time. This study aims to provide an easy tool for minimizing the duration of mass vaccination campaigns in rural and remote areas of developing countries.

This paper presents a linear mathematical model that combines location, scheduling and routing decisions that allows determining where to locate the vaccination centers, as well as the schedule/route that each medical team must follow to meet the target demand in the shortest time possible. In addition, the paper proposes an heuristic approach that can be integrated in a spreadsheet.

As the numerical experiments show, the proposed heuristic provides good solutions in a short time. Due to its simplicity and flexibility, the proposed approach allows decision-makers to analyze and evaluate several possible scenarios for decision-making by simply playing with input parameters.

The integration of the heuristic approach in a spreadsheet provides a simple and efficient tool to help decision-makers while avoiding the need for large investments in information systems infrastructure by user organizations.

Motivated by a real-life problem and different from previous studies, the objective of the planning is to reduce the length of the vaccination campaigns with the available resources and ensure a target coverage instead of planning for minimizing costs or maximizing coverage. Furthermore, for helping implementation to practitioners, the heuristic can be solved in a spreadsheet.

This study aims to explore gender performance in entrepreneurial pitching. Understanding pitching as a social practice, the authors argue that pitch content and body gestures contain gender-based norms and practices. The authors focus on early-stage ventures and the hegemonic masculinities and femininities that are performed in entrepreneurial pitches. The main research question is as follows: How is gender performed in entrepreneurial pitching?

The authors carried out the study with the post-structuralist feminist approach. The authors collected and analyzed nine online pitches with the reflexive thematic method to depict hegemonic masculinities and femininities performed at the pitch.

The authors found that heroic and breadwinner masculinities are dominant in pitching. Both male and female founders perform hegemonic masculinities. Entrepreneurs are expected to be assertive but empathetic people. Finally, there are connections between what entrepreneurs do and what investors ask, indicating the iteration of gender performance and expectations.

While the online setting helps the authors to collect data during the pandemic, it limits the observation of the place, space and interactions between the judges/investors and the entrepreneurs. As a result, the linguistic and gesture communication of the investors in the pitch was not discussed in full-length in this paper. Also, as the authors observed, people would come to the pitch knowing what they should perform and how they should interact. Therefore, the preparation of the pitch as a study context could provide rich details on how gender norms and stereotypes influence people's interactions and their entrepreneurial identity. Lastly, the study has a methodological limitation. The authors did not include aspects of space in the analysis. It is mainly due to the variety of settings that the pitching sessions that the data set had.

For social practices and policies, the results indicate barriers to finance for women entrepreneurs. Women entrepreneurs are rewarded when they perform entrepreneurial hegemonic masculinities with a touch of emphasized femininities. Eventually, if women entrepreneurs do not perform correctly as investors expect them to, they will face barriers to acquiring finance. It is important to acknowledge how certain gendered biases might be (re)constructed and (re)produced through entrepreneurial activities, in which pitching is one of them.

Practitioners could utilize research findings to understand how gender stereotypes exist not only on the pitch stage but also before and after the pitch, such as the choice of business idea and pitch training. In other words, it is necessary to create a more enabling environment for women entrepreneurs, such as customizing the accelerator program so that all business ideas receive relevant support from experts. On a macro level, the study has shown that seemingly gender-equal societies do not practically translate into higher participation of women in entrepreneurship.

For theoretical contributions, the study enhances the discussion that entrepreneurship is gendered; women and men entrepreneurs need to perform certain hegemonic traits to be legitimated as founders. The authors also address various pitching practices that shape pitch performance by including both textual and semiotic data in the study. This study provides social implications on the awareness of gendered norms and the design of entrepreneurial pitching.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a Clarke-Groves Tax (CGT) type as a remedy to the criticism that the implementation of Eurobonds has raised regarding the risk of undermining fiscal discipline. In this model, a government minimizes its sovereign debt-to-GDP ratio in a given period and decides whether to join a common sovereign debt club. In doing so, it exposes itself to a positive or negative tax burden while benefiting from the liquidity premium involved in creating a secure asset. The authors found that the introduction of this tax may prevent free riding behaviours if Eurobonds were to be implemented. To illustrate this, the authors provide some numerical simulations for the Eurozone.

In the model presented, a government which optimizes a social utility function decides whether to join the common debt club.

The adoption of the proposed tax could prevent free-riding behaviours and, therefore, encourages participation by those countries with lower debt levels that would have not otherwise taken part in this common debt mechanism. Under certain circumstances, we can expect the utility of all members of this club to improve. The bias in the distribution of gains might be mitigated by regulating the tax rule determining the magnitude of payment/reward. The proportion of the liquidity premium, arising from the implementation of a sovereign safe asset, has a decisive impact on the degree of the governments’ utility enhancement.

The adoption of a CGT would require Eurobonds club members to reach an agreement on “the” theoretical model for determining the sovereign debt yield. One of the limitations of this model is considering the debt-to-GDP ratio as the sole determinant of public debt yields. Moreover, the authors assumed the relationship between the debt-to-GDP ratio and funding costs to be identical for all countries. Any progress in the implementation of the proposed transfer scheme would require a more realistic and in-depth analysis.

A new fiscal rule based on compensating countries with lower public debt levels could be a way to mitigate free-riding problems if a Eurobond mechanism is to be established.

This fiscal rule has not been proposed or analysed before in a context such as that considered by this paper.

Within education, the online forum is becoming a preferred mode of study across the globe and the COVID-19 era highlights its importance. Research around online education has concentrated on the USA and Europe, and this study sought to redress the Western bias by exploring and comparing the perceptions of six post-graduate East-African students and lecturers at Pan Africa Christian University in Kenya on learning leadership online versus on-campus. It is debatable whether leaders are born or made; however, post-industrial theories embrace the concept that leadership is teachable. Semi-structured interviews were conducted, recorded, transcribed and thematically analysed, using a top-down approach, from a critical realist perspective. The results show that participants’ leadership ideals synthesised Afrocentric perspectives of communality, with Western ideals of transformational and servant leadership. Furthermore, there are differences between perceptions of East- African students and lecturers on online leadership learning. Students preferred the online avatar experience, whilst lecturers preferred on-campus or blended methods of leadership studies. Face-to-face connection was deemed important by students and lecturers but impeded by the inability to see facial reactions using the current online platform. This exploratory study gives insight into an East-African experience and sends a clear message to Kenyan institutions to invest further in video technology. Future research could include a longitudinal study of destinations and successes of Kenyan University online leadership alumni. The impact of the global coronavirus pandemic, with lockdowns and social distancing, further underlines the importance of ongoing online leadership research and education across the world.