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Balcony solar panels are popular and widespread in most EU Member States, except in Hungary, where their use is currently banned. However, the lifting of this strict ban is expected to be approved in the near future. The aim of this research is to investigate which factors influence residents’ intention to use balcony solar panels in Hungary and how strong these impacts are.

Unified theory of acceptance and use of technology 2 (UTAUT2) is applied to predict which factors may influence residents’ behavioral intention to use this technology. Six components are tested: performance expectancy, effort expectancy, social influence, facilitating conditions, hedonic motivation and price value. Data were gathered in Hungary in 2023 using an online survey. A quota sampling method was employed during the data-collection process.

Our results confirm the importance of all components except effort expectancy. In addition to the economic benefits that can be achieved, citizens consider energy independence and a sense of freedom to be important in the adoption of such systems.

Despite the large share of positive responses (expressed intention) that is identified, a gap between intention and action can be expected.

To increase the rate of acceptance, transparent regulation, simplified administration and the application of nudges may be crucially important. However, the widespread use of balcony solar systems is hindered by the lack of a modern, energy-efficient building stock, emphasizing the urgency of deep renovation in the Hungarian household sector.

This research is the first to use the UTAUT2 model to analyze the technology acceptance of balcony solar systems in a late-adopter country.

The purpose of this research is to explore core contributions from two different approaches to complexity management in organisations aiming to improve their sustainability,: the Viable Systems Model (VSM), and the Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS). It is proposed to perform this by summarising the main insights each approach offers to understanding organisational transformations aiming to improve sustainability; and by presenting examples of applied research on each case and reflecting on the learning emerging from them.

An action science approach was followed: the conceptual framework used in each case was first presented, which then illustrates its application through a case study; at the first one the VSM framework supports an organisational transformation towards sustainability in a community; the second one is a quantitative case study of intended greening of two firms in the supermarket industry, taken from a CAS perspective. The learning from each case study on how they support/explain organisational learning in transformations towards more sustainable organisations was illustrated.

It wase found that the VSM and the CAS approaches offer internally consistent and complementary insights to address issues of self‐organisation and adaptive management for sustainability improvement: while CAS explains empowerment of bottom‐up learning processes in organisations, VSM enables a learning context where self‐organised networks can co‐evolve for improved sustainability.

The main aspects of both theories and examples of their explanatory power to support learning in practical applications in organisations were introduced. The initial findings indicate that it will be worth studying in greater depth the contributions to organisational learning from both conceptual models and more widely comparing their applications and insights.

The paper offers some guidance to both researchers and practitioners interested in using complex systems theories in action research‐oriented projects, regarding the usability and applicability of both approaches.

It is considered that, by better understanding organisational ability to adapt and self‐regulate on crucial issues for sustainability, it may help to develop one path through the ongoing socio‐ecological crisis. While much has been written about sustainability initiatives and governance from conventional perspectives, much less is known about how a complex systems framework may help to address one's pressing sustainability needs. These issues from two innovative complexity approaches as well as the value of using them in action research were illustrated.

Gender equality is an important issue targeted all around the world, see, for example, the Gender Equality Strategy articulated by the European Union (EU). These goals were hindered by COVID-19, which caused a well-documented she-cession: females were hit harder than males. This paper shows that a “sisterhood behaviour” can mitigate the effects of the she-cession: female decision-makers were more likely to favour other females in recruitment and retention.

Motivated by theories from psychology and industrial demography, we hypothesise a so-called sisterhood effect or homophily: female decision-makers are more likely to favour other females in recruitment and retention. We use firm-level survey data from 19 European countries collected before and during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, and we apply a difference-in-differences methodology to test the hypothesised sisterhood behaviour.

Our study finds that in firms where the top manager was a woman, gender discrimination was less likely or even not at all presented, i.e. COVID-19 did not decrease the proportion of female employees.

The results suggest that promoting gender equality in leadership dimensions can also moderate discrimination at the level of the employees. Therefore, in a wider context, gender equality goals are interrelated.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, this paper is the first attempt to analyse the existence of the theories mentioned before in a manager – employee relationship using firm-level data from the COVID-19 period.

Kidney transplantation (KT) is the treatment of choice for end-stage chronic kidney disease (CKD) and is well known to improve the clinical outcome of patients. However, the impact of KT on comorbid psychological symptoms, particularly depression and anxiety, is less clear, and recipients of living-donor (LD) organs may have a different psychological outcome from recipients of dead-donor (DD) organs.

In total, 152 patients were included and analyzed using a cross-sectional design. Of these patients, 25 were pre-KT, 13 were post-KT with a LD transplant and 114 were post-KT with a DD transplant. The patients were tested for a variety of psychometric outcomes using the Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale, the 12-Item Short Form Health Survey (assessing physical and mental health-related quality of life), the Resilience Scale, the Coping Self-Questionnaire and the Social Support Questionnaire.

The mean age of the patients was 51.25 years and 40 per cent of the patients were female. As expected, the post-KT patients had significantly better scores on the physical component of the Short Form Health Survey than the pre-KT patients, and there were no significant differences between the two post-KT groups. There were no significant differences among the groups in any of the other psychometric outcome parameters tested, including anxiety, depression and the mental component of health-related quality of life.

KT and the origin of the donor organ do not appear to have a significant impact on the psychological well-being of transplant patients with CKD. Although the diagnosis and early treatment of psychological symptoms, such as depression and anxiety, remain important for these patients, decisions regarding KT, including the mode of transplantation, should not be fundamentally influenced by concerns about psychological impairments at the population level.

CKD is a serious condition involving profound impairment of the physical and psychological well-being of patients. KT is considered the treatment of choice for most of these patients. KT has notable advantages over dialysis with regard to the long-term physical functioning of the renal and cardiovascular system and increases the life expectancy of patients. However, the data on the improvement of psychological impairments after KT are less conclusive.

Elevating the human experience (HX) through research collaborations is the purpose of this article. ServCollab facilitates and supports service research collaborations that seek to reduce human suffering and improve human well-being.

To catalyze this initiative, the authors introduce ServCollab's three human rights goals (serve, enable and transform), standards of justice for serving humanity (distributive, procedural and interactional justice) and research approaches for serving humanity (service design and community action research).

ServCollab seeks to advance the service research field via large-scale service research projects that pursue theory building, research and action. Service inclusion is the first focus of ServCollab and is illustrated through two projects (transformative refugee services and virtual assistants in social care). This paper seeks to encourage collaboration in more large-scale service research projects that elevate the HX.

ServCollab seeks to raise the aspirations of service researchers, expand the skills of service research teams and build mutually collaborative service research approaches that transform human lives.

ServCollab is a unique organization within the burgeoning service research community. By collaborating with service researchers, with service research centers, with universities, with nonprofit agencies and with foundations, ServCollab will build research capacity to address large-scale human service system problems. ServCollab takes a broad perspective for serving humanity by focusing on the HX. Current business research focuses on the interactive roles of customer experience and employee experience. From the perspective of HX, such role labels are insufficient concepts for the full spectrum of human life.

The aim of this study is to explore the constructions of startup masculinity as a cultural ideal in the specific context of Hungary, a semi-peripheral country in Central and Eastern Europe. Drawing on Connell’s concept of hegemonic masculinity, the paper examines how the construction of startup masculinity, considered hegemonic in a given space and time, subordinates “others”.

The study employs a critical discourse analysis of 143 media articles published in the Hungarian print and online Forbes magazine. It builds upon the concepts and theoretical models of hegemonic masculinity, entrepreneurial masculine identities, discursive identity construction and semi-peripherality.

The study highlights two key findings. Firstly, it reveals that the normative figure of the successful startup founder is not gender-neutral but discursively constructed as masculine, thereby excluding women. Secondly, it emphasises the hierarchical relationship between hegemonic startup masculinity and other masculinities rooted in the semi-peripheral, specifically Hungarian context, which are subordinated in the discourse. Thus, it discursively reproduces not only the hierarchical gendered relations in society, but the symbolical hierarchical relations between the core and the semi-periphery as well.

By examining hegemonic startup masculinity as a subordinating concept within a particular entrepreneurial and geographical context and by illuminating the significance of semi-peripheral locationality in hegemony construction, this paper contributes to both the understanding of masculinity in entrepreneurship literature and the decolonisation of masculinity studies.