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Instructors at Francis Marion University developed a recycling course in an attempt to satisfy the students’ goals of increasing campus awareness about sustainability and recycling, and the teachers’ goals of using problem‐based learning approaches in class. Students enrolled in the course designed their own experiment, completed the experiment and presented the results at several national meetings. The focal point of the experiment was student apartments, where some students were provided with recycling bins, some were not, and some were provided with both bins and education about the importance of recycling. Results show that students living in campus apartments significantly reduced their waste stream when given recycling bins and some education about recycling. Although ANOVA tests showed that while the presence of recycling education did not result in significantly more recycling, students who received bins (opportunity) recycled more as time went on. Positive student feedback indicated the success of using project‐based learning to teach sustainability.

The purpose of this paper is to review the acquisition of the Mark H. McCormack Collection by the University of Massachusetts, McCormack's role in marketing history and the significance of the collection to researchers.

The study is based on an examination of selected documents in the collection and interviews with University of Massachusetts archivists.

The McCormack Collection contains eight million pages documenting the history of IMG, McCormack's groundbreaking marketing and management company. Most documents cover the period 1960‐2000. IMG, which began as a golf company, became a key player in the marriage of sport and television, as well as the commercialization and globalization of sport and celebrity culture. The University Archives staff plan to make the collection a dynamic multidisciplinary research tool. The collection will be valuable to students of marketing, sport and other forms of popular culture. The availability of archival resources affects what topics researchers pursue. The McCormack Collection will make it possible to investigate a wide range of new topics and personalities.

The paper was written before University of Massachusetts had fully developed its collection access policies or plans for digitizing the collection.

This paper alerts scholars to a major new research resource.

Introduces the special issue on environmental sustainability initiatives in higher education. Highlights the work accomplished by students on college and university campuses around the world. Notes that the papers illustrate the challenges and success students have encountered while working toward sustainability.

With intellectual capital and intangible assets high on the agenda of executives around the world, and little practical evidence of good practice in measuring and managing these assets, there is a great need for help. This editorial to a special issue on the topic introduces the problem and highlights key issues. The special issue provides an overview of how management consulting companies acting in this space suggest tackling the problem. The purpose is therefore to bring together the approaches of different management consulting firms and to make their differences explicit.

All major general management consulting firms as well as specialist consulting firms focusing in the area of intellectual capital and intangible assets were directly invited to submit a paper for this special issue. The call for papers was also made publicly available in the journal and through e‐mail campaigns by Emerald. All submissions underwent a double‐blind refereed selection process.

Even though many submissions were received for this special issue, most of the authors were not able to demonstrate a sufficient understanding of the constructs nor were they able to justify the tools and methodologies developed. Reviewers were made aware of the practical background of many of the authors and it was ensured that sufficient and constructive feedback was provided. Even with various rounds of reviews many papers had to be rejected as they resembled marketing brochures rather then logical discussions. This unfortunately shows that there still is a massive skills gap in the industry and companies should be careful before they engage with any management consulting firm to help them measuring or managing their intangibles.

The focus of potential papers was not academic rigor (as opposed to the Special Issue Vol. 5 No 2) but the provision of an overview of the state of the art in intellectual capital consulting practice. The papers therefore provide practitioners with good insights into current practice.

This special issue is the first to bring together in a structured and rigorous format different management consulting approaches to the measurement and management of intellectual capital and intangible assets.

The purpose of this paper is to review the research into the relationship between human resource management (HRM) and business performance. The paper examines the change of the HR function into HRM taking on its current strategic role. Recent work on the links between HRM and business performance is reviewed highlighting the conclusion that while the links are not disputed by researchers using a variety of approaches, the ability to characterize definitive causal links has proved almost impossible. The techniques and resource‐based approach of intellectual capital (IC) may provide the key to quantifying the links but again, work to date has proved that it may not be possible to clearly separate HRM from other management actions to quantify the effects of HRM. A solution based on the IC approach involving rigorous measurement is suggested.

Social cognitive theory suggests that children may have more favorable attitudes toward food products promoted by media characters who are similar to them, in terms of factors such as age, gender and race-ethnicity. This paper aims to profile the characters in food and beverage websites and apps for children and examine whether the healthfulness of promoted products varies as a function of character background.

This study includes two parallel content analyses focused on websites and apps that were produced by America’s top selling food and beverage companies.

There were very few child-targeted websites and apps, but those that existed were replete with media characters. These websites/apps tended to feature media characters with diverse gender, age and racial–ethnic backgrounds. However, marketing featuring adult and male characters promoted particularly unhealthy foods.

American food companies, many of whom signed voluntary self-regulatory pledges through the Children’s Food and Beverage Advertising Initiative, should make a more concerted effort to refrain from featuring appealing media characters in child-directed new media marketing. Whether conscious or not, it seems as if food marketers may be leveraging characters to appeal to a wide audience of children of varied demographic backgrounds.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this manuscript is the only research to focus specifically on the demographic profiles (i.e. gender, age and race-ethnicity) of characters in food websites and the nutritional quality of the products they promote. It is also the first to systematically examine media characters in food apps in any capacity.

In this chapter, we explore gender equity issues in relation to the governance of sport in Wales. Our focus is primarily on Sport Wales (SW), the national agency responsible for developing and promoting sport and physical activity in Wales and for distributing National Lottery and Welsh Government funding. As a public authority, SW has a statutory responsibility to promote equality and eliminate direct and indirect discrimination. Their recent policy commitments express a desire to advance equality and promote inclusion and diversity within sports organisations in Wales. They also set the agenda for National Governing Bodies (NGBs) in Wales, in terms of providing a policy framework for understanding and pursuing gender equity in sport and sport governance. In this chapter, we present a snapshot of the governance and leadership policy landscape for Welsh sport, with a specific focus on gender equity. We present data collected from publicly available online policy documents relating to SW, and their NGB partners, relevant to gender equity provision. Based on the data, we suggest that there is evidence of progress in terms of the numbers of women on boards in Wales as well as the creation of gender equity policies within NGBs in Wales. We argue, however, that progress is inconsistent across the different NGBs in Wales, and it is less clear whether sport governing bodies can implement policies to effectively challenge organisational culture and ethos. We concluded by suggesting future Wales specific research priorities on this topic.

Working mothers experienced dramatic changes to their daily routines during the COVID-19 pandemic. Many began to work from home as they simultaneously tried to balance work demands with tending to their children. The purpose of the current study was to examine working mothers’ experiences during the pandemic.

In order to examine working mothers’ experiences of telework during the pandemic, we conducted a focus group study. 45 working mothers participated, and they answered questions about their experiences.

Three themes emerged from the focus groups: (1) motivation shifts amongst working mothers; (2) difficulty balancing roles as mother and employee; and (3) workplace expectations and support. Many mothers reported that their overall motivation as employees had decreased and that they experienced difficulty in fully attending to their work and their child(ren)’s needs. As mothers navigated the stress of working during the pandemic, they reported varying levels of workplace support and many credited working with other parents as a primary contributor to feeling supported.

The findings from the current study add to the growing body of literature documenting the dark side of teleworking for mothers who struggled immensely with work–life balance. This study builds on past research by allowing mothers to share their experiences in their own words and offering suggestions for how organizations can support mothers in navigating these ongoing challenges as teleworking continues to remain prevalent. The narratives collected hold important implications for practices and policies to best support the needs of mothers as they continue to work and care for their children within the home.

This study examines the barriers and drivers to student-led mobilization for sustainability in higher education institutions (HEIs) across Canada. Findings indicate that the most common barrier to student mobilization was a lack of political opportunities and social capital. In response, the findings indicate that the primary drivers that student-led sustainability groups used to overcome barriers included: sharing framing perspectives to inspire and motivate action across campuses, using social networks to borrow and leverage social capital from other stakeholders, and impacting campus stakeholder behaviors resulting in the creation of a culture of sustainability. Social movement theories have been applied to the barriers and drivers to student-led action in order to provide a deeper understanding of how students mobilize on campuses. The findings suggest that while students may struggle to elicit policy changes across HEIs due to common barriers, their efforts can successfully shift the campus culture of sustainability. This study addresses an identified need for more literature investigating sustainability activism in higher education more broadly and more specifically fills a gap in our understanding of how student activism may contribute to social change.

The long-term financial stability of hospital systems represents a “grand challenge” in health care. New ownership forms, such as private equity (PE), promise to achieve better financial performance than nonprofit or for-profit systems. In this study, we compare two systems with many similarities, but radically different ownership structures, missions, governance, and merger and acquisition (M&A) strategies. Both were nonprofit, religious systems serving low-income communities – Montefiore Health System and Caritas Christi Health Care.

Montefiore's M&A strategy was to invest in local hospitals and create an integrated regional system, increasing revenues by adding primary doctors and community hospitals as feeders into the system and achieving efficiencies through effective resource allocation across specialized units. Slow and steady timing of acquisitions allowed for organizational learning and balancing of debt and equity. By 2019, it owned 11 hospitals with 40,000 employees and had strong positive financials and low reliance on debt.

By contrast, in 2010, PE firm Cerberus Capital bought out Caritas (renamed Steward Health Care System) and took control of the Board of Directors, who set the system's strategic direction. Cerberus used Steward as a platform for a massive debt-driven acquisition strategy. In 2016, it sold off most of its hospitals’ property for $1.25 billion, leaving hospitals saddled with long-term inflated leases; paid itself almost $500 million in dividends; and used the rest for leveraged buyouts of 27 hospitals in 9 states in 3 years. The rapid, scattershot M&A strategy was designed to create a large corporation that could be sold off in five years for financial gain – not for health care integration. Its debt load exploded, and by 2019, its financials were deeply in the red. Its Massachusetts hospitals were the worst financial performers of any system in the state. Cerberus exited Steward in 2020 in a deal that left its physicians, the new owners, holding the debt.