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The chapter discusses the preliminary evidence for the state of Vocational Education and Training (hereafter VET) for social entrepreneurship and organizations and especially for European Social and Solidarity Economy (SSE). Drawing upon a European project, and gathering information from five countries; Croatia, Czech Republic, France, Greece and Italy, this study aims to demonstrate that educational programmes are encompassed among the necessary SSE support mechanisms in the EU's socio-economic framework. Moreover, this chapter shows that this connection between SSE and adult education is not coincidental, but is founded on the converging principles of these fields, as well as in their common belief in society's transformational potential. This evidence tends to fill a gap in the literature of European SSE given that it is a recent, under-researched subject in general and especially in linking it to VET. This is all the more important in view of ongoing crises (e.g. financial, COVID-19, environmental), which highlight that social economy perspectives can no longer abstain from the political agendas across the world.

This paper aims to propose a new genetically evolved fuzzy cognitive mapping approach as a decision-making framework for analyzing the relationships between the drivers and strategies for green computing adoption.

A focus group discussion among stakeholders in the Philippines is used to establish the relationships between the drivers and strategies of green computing adoption.

The proposed approach significantly reduces the time complexity for developing the fuzzy cognitive maps and provides a basis for comprehensively clustering drivers and strategies that share similar characteristics.

This paper’s results provide insights into how the drivers and strategies of green computing adoption facilitate the intention of adopting stakeholders. Moreover, it provides a framework for analyzing structural relationships that exist between factors in a compliant manner.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, the paper is the first to analyze the drivers and strategies of green computing under a complex systems’ perspective. Moreover, this is the first study to offer lenses in a Philippine scenario.

There has been a substantial increase in the implementation of programmes that aim to enhance the livelihoods of rural people by organizing them into groups, emphasizing women towards achieving women empowerment, which is one of the key goals of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This study aims to assess the impact of participation in self-help groups (SHGs) under the National Rural Livelihood Mission (NRLM) on the political empowerment of rural tribal women in India.

This study is based on primary data collected using a multistage random sampling method. Field research is conducted in the state of Jharkhand, primarily focusing on women belonging to the scheduled tribe category. The propensity score matching technique derives the results using the psmatch2 command in STATA.

The results show a significant positive change in women's access to voting rights, awareness of various government schemes and entitlements, political awareness and participation, campaigning during elections and leadership positions after participation in SHGs under NRLM.

The existing literature indicates that research on the empowerment of tribal women through participation in SHGs is scant. This study makes a novel contribution by examining the effectiveness of participation in SHGs under NRLM on the political empowerment of tribal women in rural India. This study will provide significant insights to the government, policymakers, practitioners and researchers working on SHGs and tribal women’s empowerment.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/IJSE-06-2023-0489

The purpose of this paper is to explore the properties of the variable elasticity of substitution (VES) production function, and examine the dynamics of growth associated with it.

The VES production function is incorporated into an otherwise standard Diamond overlapping generations model.

Depending on parameter combinations, the economy can achieve a unique and stable steady state akin to that observed in the Solow-Swan model, reach a poverty trap or transition towards an upper bound of per capita capital stock. A special case of the VES production function is also consistent with unbounded growth.

The paper is theoretical in nature. Further empirical analysis could shed deeper insights into the results presented in this study.

The VES production function, when applied to the context of the Diamond model, can capture a variety of growth experiences observed in the empirical literature.

In the context of the Diamond model, a higher value of a particular parameter in the production function leads to greater intergenerational income and consumption inequality. Hence, the study provides a potential explanation for intergenerational inequalities observed in practice.

The study demonstrates the empirical value of the VES production function in explaining observed differences in factor shares, rewards and elasticities within and between countries over time.

The purpose of this study is to examine whether the elasticity of substitution (ES) varies between developed and developing countries.

The author derives the growth regressions from the Solow model under the constant elasticity of substitution production function by using the first-order Taylor series expansion and estimate them for each country group classified based on time-varying behavior of income per worker using the data-driven algorithm.

The ES is not unitary and varies among country groups. Developed countries generally have a higher ES than developing countries.

For the first time, the author uses the first-order Taylor series expansion to linearize the steady-state value of income per worker, as the author considers this approach to be relatively more straight-forward and tractable. Furthermore, the author estimates the equations using both cross-section and panel data techniques and employs the data-driven algorithm proposed by Phillips and Sul (2007) to classify countries.

Analyzing factors of delays in construction projects and determining their impact on project performance is necessary to better manage and control projects. Identification of root factors which may lead to project delay and increased cost is vital at the early or planning stage. Better identification of delay factors at the early stage can help the practitioners to reduce their impacts over the long run. Hence, the purpose of this paper is to propose an intelligent method to analyze causal relationships between delay factors in construction projects. The proposed approach is further validated by a real case study of the construction projects in West Azerbaijan province in Iran.

During the first phase, the fuzzy cognitive map (FCM) is drawn to indicate the causal relationships between the delay factors and the evaluation factors. For this purpose, the causal relationships between 20 delay factors and four evaluation factors are considered. Afterward, the effect of each factor on management goals is evaluated by using a hybrid learning algorithm. Delay factors are further prioritized by applying fuzzy data envelopment analysis (FDEA). In the second phase, an interpretive structural modeling (ISM) is employed to determine the root causes of delay factors.

Results of the first phase show that “supervision technical weaknesses for overcoming technical and executive workshop problems” and “Inaccurate estimation of workload, required equipment and project completion time” are the most significant delay factors. In contrary, “non-use of new engineering contracts” has the lowest impact on the management goals. Meanwhile, the results of the second phase conclude that factors like “Inaccurate estimation of workload, required equipment and project completion time” “weakness of laws and regulations related to job responsibilities” and “lack of foreseen of fines and encouragements in the contracts” are the most significant root factors of delay in construction projects.

This paper integrates three methods including FCM method, FDEA and ISM. In the first phase, FCM is drawn according to the experts’ opinions and concerning management goals and delay factors. Later, these factors are prioritized according to the results of running the algorithm and using the FDEA model. The second phase, the seven-step in the ISM methodology, is done to identify the root factors. To ensure that the root factors of the delay are at a lower level of hierarchical structure, delay factors are partitioned by drawing the ISM model.

The chapter presents the implementation of ethics education via challenge-based learning (CBL) in three European settings. At TU Eindhoven (the Netherlands), a mandatory first-year User, Society, and Enterprise course on the ethics and history of technology offers a CBL alternative on ethics and data analytics in collaboration with internal student and research teams. The University of Lübeck (Germany) initiated the project CREATE – Challenge-based Learning for Robotics Students by Engaging Start-Ups in Technology Ethics, which enables 60 students in Robotics and Autonomous Systems to integrate ethical and societal considerations into technological development processes, in cooperation with start-ups from a local accelerator. In Spain, CBI-Fusion Point brings together 40 students from business and law (ESADE), engineering and technology (Polytechnic University of Catalonia), and design (IED Barcelona Design University) for an innovation course focused on the application of CERN-developed technologies to real-world problems. The chapter documents the process of setting up three CBL courses that engage students with grand societal topics which require the integration of ethical concerns from the design stage of technological development. The authors also reflect on the challenges of teaching ethics via CBL and the lessons they learned by delivering experiential learning activities rooted in real-life challenges and contexts marked by high epistemic uncertainty. The contribution reflects the transition to remote teaching and presents strategies employed to enhance online communication and collaboration. The chapter thus provides guidance for instructors interested in teaching ethics via CBL and recommends further lines for action and research.

The ten-year economic crisis and the ensuing fiscal adjustment that Greece experienced between 2009 and 2018 has had a major impact on patient access to health-care services and resulted in an increase in unmet population health needs. The present study aims to assess the impact of economic crisis and ensuing austerity on HIV patient access to health-care services.

A cross-sectional study was carried out between February and April 2019 to assess barriers in access to HIV care faced by people living with HIV. A total of 329 HIV positive individuals participated in the study. An online, self-reporting questionnaire was developed and adapted to the specific clinical and societal characteristics of HIV.

A total of 94.2% of respondents were male and 67.80% lived in Athens. Most of them were diagnosed with HIV-1 10 years ago. Out of the total respondents, 37.40% reported obstacles in accessing HIV care over the past year. A total of 24.30% reported they were not tested for viral load in the past six months and received a result. Individuals, who self-evaluate their financial status as very bad or bad, were more likely to be unaware of their viral load (55.60%) than those with better financial status (33.5%) (P < 0.01). Only 33.3% of uninsured participants were aware of their viral load, and this figure rose to 63.30% (P <0.01) amongst insured participants.

The ten-year economic crisis that Greece experienced in the period 2009–2018 had significant effects on the quality of services of the National Health System. This study attempts to fill the research gap regarding the impact of one of the severest economic crises during the past century with complex social extensions, in one of the most vulnerable patient groups. In this context, the study assesses barriers to access to optimal care of people living with HIV in Greece after a decade of austerity and the variables that impact on such access.

Although the importance of the elasticity of substitution between capital and labour (σ) has been recognized in many areas in economics, this parameter has not received enough attention in economic growth. The purpose of this paper is to review the recent development in the importance of σ in economic growth.

This paper specifically reviews the possibility of perpetual growth and slowdown, and the asymptotic behaviour of the balanced growth path for different values of σ. It also reviews the determinants of the aggregate σ.

Based on the empirical evidence that the value of σ significantly departs from the Cobb‐Douglas value of unity, the paper recommends employing the constant elasticity of substitution (CES) production function in both theoretical and empirical growth research.

This paper offers a new perspective on the elasticity of substitution between capital and labour due to its evaluation of various factors, methods and approaches.

It is crucial to transform current enterprises to greener versions of them to reach the sustainable development goals. The first step of this transformation can be understanding comprehensively environmental performances of enterprises. This study presents a practical analysis for evaluation of factors affecting environmental performance of enterprises to call them as a “dark green.”

For this purpose, a detailed factor search was primarily performed and then the weights of them on environmental performance of the enterprises to support sustainable development were analyzed using fuzzy cognitive map (FCM) that incorporates the casual relationships between factors and represents the dynamics of the complex systems. The FCM was also supported with extended great deluge algorithm (EGDA), which is an evolutionary algorithm with high performance to increase robustness of the study.

The findings indicated that the most influential factors on environmental performance of an activist enterprise are “loyalty to regulations,” “digitalization level,” “tendency to produce environmentally friendly products/services,” “productivity efforts” and “fossil fuel consumption,” respectively. While the first four of them affect the environmental performance positively, fossil fuel consumption affects it negatively.

The results of this study can help companies to prioritize the critical points for their environmental perspectives, observe at which factors they are good or lacking and find where to start improvement.

This study is one of the pioneering studies to investigate the importance of criteria for a dark green business, considering 21 factors from different sources to make a detailed representation of corporate environmental sustainability.