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Working together in groups is a common and emphasized feature in today's society, and higher educational settings often utilize group assignments to enable students to develop collaborative skills. Therefore, the purpose of this article is to describe and analyze applied strategies and the patterns that emerge during students online collaborative writing in higher education group assignments. The research questions that this article aims to answer are (1) which patterns of students online collaborative writing emerge in higher education group assignments and (2) what strategies of online collaborative writing do higher education students apply in group assignments?

This study's design builds on Conversation Analysis to explore visualizations of Google Docs revision history of online collaborative writing documents. Documents from 25 student groups were the basis of the analysis. The visualizations used in this project are produced with the DocuViz Chrome extension.

The findings suggest that visualizations can provide a quick and fairly accurate estimate of collaborative strategies used when students write together online. Three patterns of document growth were identified, two of which could be directly linked to strategies for collaboration. Cramming patterns are indicative of low collaboration and concentrating patterns with high levels of collaboration.

The findings provide useful insight for teachers regarding the nature of collaboration taking place during online collaborative writing tasks. By visualizing the revision history, much can be learnt about the nature of the collaboration and of the individual group member's contributions in a student group that otherwise remains largely invisible to the teacher.

Prior studies have combined visualizations with extensive analysis of document content. This investigation shows that an examination of the visualization of the document's revision history can be used to draw conclusions about the nature of collaboration during the online writing process.

Reviews the latest management developments across the globe and pinpoints practical implications from cutting‐edge research and case studies.

This briefing is prepared by an independent writer who adds their own impartial comments and places the articles in context.

It is not everyone who wants or needs a lemon squeezer. But many people do, so it goes without saying that other people earn money making and selling them and that before all this commercial and customer activity happens, somebody has been paid to design them.

Provides strategic insights and practical thinking that have influenced some of the world's leading organizations.

The briefing saves busy executives and researchers hours of reading time by selecting only the very best, most pertinent information and presenting it in a condensed and easy‐to digest format.

This chapter examines the association between corporate governance and environmental performance. The purpose of governance mechanisms is to build trust by ensuring that corporate responsibilities, including environmental responsibilities, are met. We obtain corporate governance data from the Investor Responsibility Research Center, Inc’s (IRRC’s) governance and director database and additional corporate governance and environmental performance data from Kinder, Lydenberg, and Domini’s (KLD’s) database. Our analyses document a significant positive association between corporate governance and environmental performance. Moreover, we find that corporate governance is positively related to environmental strengths, and negatively related to environmental concerns. Our findings contribute to and extend our understanding of the relationship between governance and performance and have important implications for policy makers, managers, investors, and others.

Numerous empirical studies have been conducted to analyze the impact of board gender diversity (BGD) on firm performance without being able to establish a clear relationship. In this paper, we reassess the relationship between BGD and firm performance by using a quantile regression approach. Our results indicate that BGD matters only across a subset of the firm performance distribution. Moreover, when the possible endogeneity of the relationship between BGD and firm performance is taken into account, there are some conditions under which a positive and significant relationship is observed for the eight lowest quantiles.

This paper uses a stakeholder framework to review the empirical literature on corporate social performance (CSP), focusing particularly on studies attempting to correlate social with financial performance. Results show first that most studies correlate measures of business performance that as yet have no theoretical relationship (for example, the level of corporate charitable giving with return on investment). To make sense of this body of research, CSP studies must be integrated with stakeholder theory. Multiple stakeholders (a) set expectations for corporate performance, (b) experience the effects of corporate behavior, and (c) evaluate the outcomes of corporate behavior. However, we find that the empirical CSP literature mismatches variables in terms of which stakeholders are relevant to which kind of measure. Second, only the studies using market‐based variables and theory show a consistent relationship between social and financial performance, particularly those showing a negative abnormal return to the stock price of companies experiencing product recalls. Although this paper shows that the CSP construct is not yet well‐specified enough to produce stronger results, recent research suggests that much progress is being made both empirically and theoretically in developing valid and reliable measures of corporate social performance.

In this chapter, we reexamine the notion that socially responsible behavior by firms will lead to increased financial performance. By identifying the underlying processes, institutional settings, and actors involved, we present a framework that is more attentive to the multiplicity and conditionality of the mechanisms operating in the often tenuous connection between firms’ social behavior and financial performance. Building and expanding upon existing analyses of the CSP–CFP linkage, our model helps to explain the mixed results from a wide range of empirical studies which examine this link. It also provides a novel theoretical account to help guide future researches that are more attentive to conditionalities and contextual contingencies.

Do socially responsible funds, as a whole, perform as well as the average of all mutual funds in their respective categories? This paper examines fund characteristics as well as risk and performance measures of all available socially responsible funds (SRFs) in the U.S. mutual fund industry over the last fifteen years. The contribution of this paper is two unique findings. First, although SRFs have had a relative advantage in terms of lower expense ratios, lower annual turnover rates, lower tax cost ratios, and lower risk, SRFs also exhibit lower returns, and two risk‐adjusted return measures indicate SRFs have inferior reward‐to‐risk performance. In particular, domestic stock SRFs have not generated competitive returns relative to conventional funds in the same categories over the past ten to fifteen years. These results contrast those found in the extant SRI literature which suggest socially responsible investing has little or no cost. Second, a finer partitioning by fund type reveals not all SRFs have similar relative performance. SRFs in balanced fund and fixed‐income fund categories, especially during the past three years, have performed better than the category averages with lower risk, higher returns, and higher risk‐adjusted returns. This suggests the costs of socially responsible investing are not homogenous.

In today’s hypercompetitive, digital-first, knowledge-based economy, organizational creativity has never been more important as a potential source of competitive advantage. The foundation stone for every innovation is an idea and all ideas are born of creativity. The innovation process thus starts with creativity and the new ideas it yields are ideally based on insights that will lead ultimately to novel outcomes (such as new products, services, experiences or business models) and thereby to a sustainable competitive advantage. In established businesses, until relatively recently, creativity was called on only for specific, often high-profile occasions, for ‘hackathons’ or for major ‘innovation jams’, but today it is an essential, everyday necessity of routine work. However, attaining the right level of creativity from within is a challenge for many organizations and so they need to establish an appropriate and effective way to import it into their teams, projects and, ultimately, culture. The arts are a pure, unadulterated form of creativity. Mindsets, processes and practices from the arts can give organizational creativity a significant boost and can potentially offset the creative deficit in an organization. Here, the illustrative cases and practices that demonstrate how the arts can have a positive impact on business are examined.

New actors have emerged in the food supply chain in response to the increased awareness of food waste and the need to distribute surplus food. The purpose of this study is to analyse the different supply chain structures that have emerged to make surplus food available to consumers.

This study adopts a qualitative multiple-case study of three new surplus food actors: a surplus food platform, an online retailer and a surplus food terminal. Data sources included interviews, documentary evidence and participatory observations.

Three different types of actor constellations in surplus food distribution have been identified: a triad, a tetrad and a chain. Both centralised (for ambient products) and decentralised supply chain structures (for chilled products) have emerged. The analysis identified weak links amongst new actors and surplus food suppliers. The new actors have adopted the roles of connector, service provider and logistics service provider and the sub-roles of mediator, auditor and consultant.

This paper contributes to research on closed-loop or circular supply chains for the reuse of products in the context of surplus food distribution.

The purpose of this study is to establish the relationship between CSR, managerial discretion, competences, learning and efficiency and perceived corporate financial performance in order to establish the legitimacy and value of CSR, taking managers' perspectives in Uganda.

The study used quantitative, correlation and regression analyses and collected primary data through a structured questionnaire on a sample of 100 firms.

The results indicate that managerial discretion and competences, learning and efficiency are significant predictors of perceived corporate financial performance, but CSR is not. However, the results show serendipitously that managerial discretion's predictive potential of perceived corporate performance is moderated by CSR.

The study focuses on corporate social responsibility, a concept not very well appreciated and only understood as philanthropic and not really viewed as a means for improved financial performance in Uganda.

Our study implies that while upholding the ideals of CSR, companies in Uganda need to enhance managerial discretion in their contracting process and develop competences, learning and efficiency in order to impact positively on performance.

This study contributes to the dearth of CSR literature on the African experience by examining the perceptions of managers on CSR's predictive potential of corporate financial performance in Uganda.