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The purpose of this study is to examine doctoral students’ developmental trajectories in well-being and disciplinary identity during the first three years of doctoral study.

This study relies on data from a longitudinal study of PhD students enrolled at a large, research-intensive university in the USA. A group-based trajectory modeling approach is used to examine varying trajectories of well-being and disciplinary identity.

The authors find that students’ physical health, mental health and disciplinary identity generally decline during the first few years of doctoral study. Despite this common downward trend, the results suggest that six different developmental trajectories exist. Students’ backgrounds and levels of stress, psychological needs satisfaction, anticipatory socialization experiences and prior academic success predict group membership.

Although there is emergent evidence of a mental health crisis in graduate education scant evidence exists about the way in which well-being changes over time as students progress through their doctoral studies. There is also little evidence of how these changes might be related to academic processes such as the development of disciplinary identity. This study reported varying baseline degrees of well-being and disciplinary identity and offers that stress and unmet psychological needs might be partially responsible for varying trajectories.

The purpose of this study is to examine whether there are differences in beginning doctoral students’ perceptions of the disciplinary knowledge required to be successful in doctoral education and identify pre-doctoral characteristics and experiences that explain these differences.

This study relied on survey data of first-year PhD students enrolled at a large, research-intensive university. Survey responses were matched to institutional information, missing data were imputed and responses were weighted to account for groups’ differential probabilities of being included in the analytical sample. The authors used regression analysis to examine the relationship between students’ background characteristics, anticipatory socialization experiences, academic performance and perceived levels of disciplinary knowledge.

The study findings indicated significant differences in doctoral students’ perceived levels of disciplinary knowledge. Students who identify as female or URM had significantly lower levels of perceived disciplinary knowledge than students who identify as male or non-URM. Moreover, several anticipatory socialization experiences were significantly and positively related to perceived disciplinary knowledge.

While there is evidence that doctoral students start graduate school with varying identities and experiences, little is known about how students perceive their abilities and knowledge. This study reported that students differ in their self-assessment of disciplinary knowledge as they embark on doctoral work with implications for academic identity development and student success.

This work examines the role of critical framing in using multimodal texts to engage English Language Learners (ELLs) in reading comprehension activities in the new language. A framework is presented to systematically elicit student perspectives on contemporary domestic and global issues, capitalizing on the affordances of using intermodal complementarity and criticality to enhance ELLs’ representation and autonomy in the classroom.

This framework emphasizes planning and preparation through an understanding of students’ backgrounds and linguistic repertoires, language scaffolding and cultural connections to multimodal texts during instruction and opening spaces for ELLs to critique multimodal texts to be aware of forces that produce and reproduce social inequities within these texts.

We provide instructional strategies to support critical discussion for new language development and a means for qualitative researchers to observe and discuss this dynamic process.

The research implications of this study highlight the importance of multimodal literacies in enhancing ELLs' engagement and critical thinking. The proposed framework can aid researchers in observing classroom practices, focusing on complementarity to develop a common metalanguage for analyzing texts. This approach empowers ELLs to articulate and critique multimodal texts, moving beyond traditional language instruction to foster authentic, culturally responsive language competence. It suggests that critical media literacy can bridge gaps between dominant and marginalized discourses, promoting social justice and empowering ELLs to participate in student-centered learning.

The practical implications of this study highlight the integration of multimodal texts in teaching ELLs to enhance their engagement and comprehension. By using a framework that emphasizes planning and preparation, educators can tailor instruction to students' linguistic backgrounds and cultural experiences. This approach encourages critical analysis of multimodal texts, fostering student autonomy and allowing them to critique social inequities. The framework also provides instructional scaffolds, enabling ELLs to develop language proficiency and critical thinking skills, ultimately making literacy practices more authentic and culturally responsive.

The social implications of this study emphasize the need for inclusive literacy practices that empower ELLs by recognizing and valuing their cultural and experiential diversity. By critically analyzing multimodal texts, ELLs can engage with content that challenges traditional power dynamics and promotes social justice. This approach allows students to interrogate and reimagine texts, fostering a deeper understanding of social structures and encouraging equitable discourse. The framework supports bridging the gap between dominant and marginalized discourses, enabling ELLs to connect their learning with local and global communities.

While qualitative researchers have explored the benefits of these elements, a framework that connects and reflects these complex pedagogical decisions of educators and researchers in the classroom is needed.

Seeking to contribute, from an academic perspective, to the construction of a better tomorrow that leaves no segment of society behind, this final chapter presents arguments for building sustainable futures that are possible through regenerative development. We talk about ‘futures’ in the plural, because there is more than one future that could be sustainable. We explain the importance of prioritising positive values involving the environment, society and markets, ethical considerations of doing no harm and the search for regenerative relationships that lead to collective action. We also explain that regeneration goes beyond restoration. This chapter is divided into four parts. First, we discuss regenerative capitalism. Then, we explain why climate action must be collective and must involve business, governments, academia and civic organisations. The third part presents a concise summary of the findings of the studies presented in this book. Finally, we explain why we need a new social contract to achieve the goal of sustainable futures through regenerative development.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate website quality in rural firms in four countries, by using Gonzalez and Palacios's Web Assessment Index (WAI). There is an assertion in the literature that quality is lower amongst rural firms than urban firms, and lower amongst small firms than large firms. The disadvantages of lack of access to skills and economic peripherality in rural areas are attributed to this. Concurrently, there is reason to surmise that the websites of firms in transition economies may be higher quality than those in market economies. The paper aims to explore websites in distinct rural regions to investigate if variation occurs.

To evaluate website quality the WAI was applied to a sample of 60 rural firms representing 15 each in Scotland, New Zealand, Southern Russia and Hunan Province in China. Analysis of the categorical data was performed using a variety of established methods.

The WAI is of use in terms of website quality management. Additionally, comparisons between the quality of websites in the sample of small rural firms with those of large firms in previous studies support the contention that large firms generally have better quality websites. Results also illustrate that there are some differences in website quality between rural small businesses in the different locations. In particular, small rural firms in Hunan Province in China had websites of observable better quality than those elsewhere. The authors conclude that skills, knowledge and infrastructure have a bearing on the sophistication of small firms' websites.

Implications include that variation in the rural economy by region prevails as the rural economy is not, as often implied, a homogeneous concept.

There are implications in terms of exploring the effects of regulation, culture and infrastructure on rural small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). The internet may indeed contribute to rural economies, but only insofar as it is facilitated by infrastructure and access to skills, and by culture and perceived usefulness by business owners.

The paper contributes to the understanding of rural entrepreneurship as a heterogeneous concept by comparing practice in four distinct rural regions. It also adds weight to the emerging identification of exogenous factors as being at least as much a factor in determining the use of ICT in rural SMEs as endogenous motivations, skills and resources.

This paper tries to find out the different research fronts that have recently defined the scientific area of organizational studies. These fronts represent the paradigms or theories that the current research in the most relevant journals is based on. A study of how trends develop in those journals is also done. Quite different from other typologies, this work has used an empirical method of analyzing the literature references found in the articles published in some of the most relevant journals in this field in recent years.

The year 2016 marked the 100th anniversary of Democracy and Education, one of John Dewey’s most widely translated and published books around the world still in the author’s lifetime. Nowadays, in a context in which pedagogy is bogged down in ‘economicism’ and suspicion towards any proposal that hints of value, Dewey’s ideas once again provide a ray of hope for a possible future. One of the contemporary authors that has fostered this hopeful reading of Dewey is Martha C. Nussbaum, whose appeal to bringing the humanities back to schools motivated a project on approaching the classic texts with the Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), which we have developed during the past years with secondary education students from three schools in Santiago de Chile, Madrid and London. The project is based on an open reading of Sophocles’s Antigone through an online application that enables students from the participating schools to interact. This chapter delves deeper into the theoretical bases of the project. In the first two sections, we analyse the interpretation that Nussbaum and Dewey each made of Antigone. Then, in the third, we present the Antigone project as a learning experience promoting a creative democracy, as Dewey called it.

Scholarship on workplace diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) is voluminous. Nevertheless, there is relatively little work that examines DEI from an organization development and change (ODC) or systems perspective. As a result, there is no unified framework ODC practitioners can use for DEI diagnosis and intervention. The purpose of this chapter is to review the ODC literature with respect to DEI and propose a diagnostic Context-Levels-Culture (CLC) framework for understanding and addressing diversity-related challenges in organizations. We also present a case example of how this framework can be used in DEI consulting, including implications for future research and practice.