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The research aims to evaluate whether this educational approach is being implemented in a Portuguese public university and looking for explicit references to education for sustainable development (ESD) in the online descriptions of course units (CU).

The research design adopted for this qualitative research follows the principles of a case study with exploratory, multiple and collective features.

It was possible to find direct matches with key ESD expressions in fifteen of CU. In addition, nine CU were identified in the second stage of analysis of the teacher training master programmes.

One of the limitations of this study which the authors identified, and which was responsible for considerably reducing the probability of finding matches, was that only results in which the key expressions appeared in the description of the CU in exactly the same form as in the research instrument were recorded.

The need for an educational programme for teachers to be developed and implemented in the near future.

A training workshop will be proposed with the main aim of supporting teaching staff in making the necessary shift in their pedagogical practices to include a ESD orientation in their CU.

The instrument eveloped that appears in Appendix - Analysis Tool with key ESD expressions.

We present a critical literature review debating Brazilian research on social and environmental accounting (SEA). The aim of this study is to understand the role of politics in the construction of hegemonies in SEA research in Brazil. In particular, we examine the role of hegemony in relation to the co-option of SEA literature and sustainability in the Brazilian context by the logic of development for economic growth in emerging economies. The methodological approach adopts a post-structural perspective that reflects Laclau and Mouffe’s discourse theory. The study employs a hermeneutical, rhetorical approach to understand and classify 352 Brazilian research articles on SEA. We employ Brown and Fraser’s (2006) categorizations of SEA literature to help in our analysis: the business case, the stakeholder–accountability approach, and the critical case. We argue that the business case is prominent in Brazilian studies. Second-stage analysis suggests that the major themes under discussion include measurement, consulting, and descriptive approach. We argue that these themes illustrate the degree of influence of the hegemonic politics relevant to emerging economics, as these themes predominantly concern economic growth and a capitalist context. This paper discusses trends and practices in the Brazilian literature on SEA and argues that the focus means that SEA avoids critical debates of the role of capitalist logics in an emerging economy concerning sustainability. We urge the Brazilian academy to understand the implications of its reifying agenda and engage, counter-hegemonically, in a social and political agenda beyond the hegemonic support of a particular set of capitalist interests.

After a diagnosis of the existing management control systems (MCS) at a wind‐farm company, the paper seeks to develop a balanced scorecard (BSC) in order to enable the organization to compress and streamline management decision making and to show what is to be taken into account for a successful implementation of this framework.

An action research study, using Otley's performance management framework – to get a comprehensive view of MCS, identify strengths and weaknesses of the systems in place, and then develop a BSC – was conducted to the attainment of useful empirical knowledge, and to help achieve effective change within the organization.

The paper identifies the main issues related to performance measurement and presents a BSC designed for a wind‐farm company.

A comprehensive guide of the balanced scorecard methodology is described, including how the concept can be customized to the wind‐farm industry. The paper is especially of interest for practitioners.

The contribution of this paper is threefold. First, the paper describes how the BSC concept can be improved through customizing the normal four perspectives, by including additional perspectives that provide awareness about stakeholders, such as suppliers, community and government. Second, the research provides practical guidelines to design a performance measurement model, considering the organization's stakeholders and the strategies to ensure that value is created for them. Finally, and for the first time, the paper provides a systematization of the key performance indicators for a wind‐farm organization.

Because that the crime in a wide way impacts the life of the people in the big metropolis, researchers have treated the question from several angles. The purpose of the paper, under the umbrella of operational research, is to develop a model of the ordering of police strategies, in the fight against crime in general, according to a certain criminal demand.

For the construction of the impact matrix of the strategies under the reduction of crime rates, considering a portfolio of crimes, a questionnaire applied to specialists was used. In a second moment, defined the criteria and strategies to be ordered, the multicriteria ELECTRE IV method was used, which with the help of the J-Electre software emulated the systematized data in the impact matrix and produced the final ordering of the most efficient strategies, in the fight against crime, in the perception of decision-makers.

As a result, the research revealed that policing strategies directed at solving specific crimes are the most effective in the perception of decision-makers after the emulation of data with the ELECTRE IV method.

As research implications, it can be inferred that the use of multicriteria methods in the modeling of problems in the area of public security can contribute to rationalization of the use of the means available in the fight against crime in large cities. The research showed that it is possible to use customized policing strategies to a certain reality.

The method presented in this research is directly related to the major strategies: problem-oriented policing and hot spot policing. This method allows public safety managers to consider the possibility of combining different law enforcement strategies in each context. In this sense, the use of the multiple-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) (ELECTRE IV) method allows the evaluation of a large set of alternatives according to a set of established criteria, speeding up the process and reducing subjectivity, allowing the manager to analyze several scenarios with greater clarity and impartiality and choosing an alternative that best solves the proposed problem. The expected result is the rationalization of the available means applied in the search for the reduction of crime rates.

The customization of policing strategies, according to criminal demands, implies the efficient way to reduce criminal charges. Reducing criminal rates enables the development of the local economy, tourism and the quality of life of people by exercising their freedom to the full.

The originality lies in filling a gap in the literature with the elaboration of the impact matrix of policing strategies in reducing criminal indices, and in their associated use in ordering strategies through a multicriteria method.

The purpose of this paper is to develop a method for the discovery of knowledge in emergency response databases based on police incident reports, generating information that identifies local criminal demands that allow the selection of the appropriate policing strategies portfolio to solve the problem.

The developed model uses a methodology for the discovery of knowledge involving text mining techniques using Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) integrated with the ELECTRE I multicriteria method.

The developed method allowed the identification of the most common criminal demands that occurred from January 1 to December 31, 2016, in the policing areas studied. One of the crimes does not occur homogeneously in a particular locality. In this study, it was initially observed that 40 per cent of the crimes identified in the Integrated Public Safety Area 5, or AISP-5, (historical city center of RJ) had no correlation with AISP-19 (Copacabana - RJ), and 33 per cent of crimes crimes in AISP-19 were not identified in AISP-5. This finding guided the second part of the method that sought to identify which portfolio of policing strategies would be most appropriate for the identified demands. In this sense, using the ELECTRE I method, eight different scenarios were constructed where it can be identified that for each specific criminal demand set there is a set of policing strategies to be applied.

The collected data represent the social dynamics of neighbourhoods in the central and southern zones of the city of Rio de Janeiro during the specific period from January 2013 to December 2016. This limitation implies that the results cannot be generalised to areas with different characteristics.

The developed methodology contributes in a complementary way to the identification of criminal practices and their characteristics based on reports of police occurrences stored in emergency response databases. The knowledge generated through the identification of criminal demands allows law enforcement decision makers to evaluate and choose among the available policing strategies, which best suit the reality they study, and produce the reduction of criminal indices.

It is possible to infer that by choosing appropriate strategies to combat local crime, the proposed model will increase the population’s sense of safety through an effective reduction in crime.

The originality of the study lies in the integration of text mining techniques, LDA and the ELECTRE I method for detecting crime in a given location based on crime reports stored in emergency response databases, enabling identification and choice, from customized policing strategies to particular criminal demands.

The main goal of this paper is to analyse the impact of political connections and gender diversity shaping Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) components’ effects on the performance of Iberian companies.

To achieve this aim, we have used panel data methodology, specifically the generalized method of moments system estimation method by Arellano and Bond (1991), using data from listed Iberian companies for the period between 2015 and 2020.

Our findings suggest that, although ESG components positively influence company performance, the presence of political connections weakens ESG commitments, compromising ethical standards and suggesting a lack of transparency or inadequate regulations. Our results also highlight that the presence of women on boards of directors has a nuanced impact on firm performance, as measured by the Market-to-Book ratio. While gender diversity interacts with ESG scores, external investors' perceptions may not always reflect immediate performance improvements.

This work faces some limitations associated with challenges in securing comprehensive data for all variables, along with the complexity of acquiring information about political connections. Often, we had to rely on multiple sources and cross-reference the data to enhance its reliability. Another limitation for potential consideration or exploration in future research pertains to the omission of distinct industry sectors due to the limited number of companies, particularly notable in the context of Portugal.

Although there is a large volume of literature on the relationship between ESG and companies’ performance, as far as the authors are aware, this article is original and covers an important gap in the literature when considering political connections and board gender diversity impact on ESG components as determinants of the performance of Iberian companies.

Police officers’ attitudes toward criminals are critical to the justice system’s response to crime. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the attitudes toward offenders (ATOs) among police officers.

To assess police officers ATOs, the authors adapted the Attitudes Toward Prisoner scale to produce the ATO scale. The scale was completed by 431 male police officers in a Portuguese police institution.

The results revealed that police officers hold more negative ATOs than correctional officers and graduate students. Moreover, the results revealed significant differences in average ATO scores according to police officers’ age, years of service, marital status and education; namely, police officers who were older, married, less educated, and with more years of police service had more positive ATOs. However, the results revealed that these demographic factors had a limited value in predicting attitudes, as none of them emerged as a predictor of ATOs.

Nonetheless, considering the relevance of attitudes in law enforcement procedures, the implications for training police officers are provided, specifically using critical incident technique strategies.

Even though the implementation of lean in health care environments is relatively recent, it has been receiving a lot of attention in recent years. Partly because of the fact that it is a recent field of practise and research and partly because the number of works developed in this field has grown rapidly, it is important to frequently update the perspectives on this field of investigation. Thus, this study aims to review the implementation of lean tools and techniques applied to hospital organizational areas in a five-year period, between 2014 and 2018, complementing some of the most relevant reviews already published. The most important criteria such as tools, methods and principles, hospital areas intervened, improvements and difficulties were assessed and quantified.

As starting point for this systematic literature review (SLR), a set of selected pre-existing review publications was used to support the current study and as the ground base for the expansion of the studies about lean health care. The current study contemplated 114 articles from a five-year period between 2014 and 2018. A subset of 58 of these articles was critically assessed to understand the application of lean tools and methods in different hospital areas.

The thorough analysis of selected articles show a lack of works in continuous improvement approaches when compared to the application of production organization methods, visual management and diagnosing and problem-solving tools. The reported improvement results demonstrate alignment with the principles and foundations of lean philosophy, but such results are presented in isolated initiatives and without robust evidence of long-term maintenance. Moreover, this study shows an evolution in the number of articles referring to lean implementation in hospital areas, but in its great majority, such articles report isolated implementations in different areas, not spreading those for the global organization. Thus, some of the main recommendations are the need to implement studies on complete flows of patients, drugs and materials, instead of isolated initiatives and strive to promote the cultural change of hospitals through structural changes, following new visions and strategic objectives, supported by real models of continuous structural and sustained improvement.

The current study develops a new perspective of the articles published under the thematic of lean health care, published in a recent period of five years, which are not completely covered by other works. Additionally, it explicitly applied, in an innovative way, an approach that used a set of previous reviews as the starting point for this SLR. In this way, it integrates approaches and categories from different SLRs, creating a framework of analysis that can be used by future researchers. Finally, it shows the most recent implementations of lean health care, exposing the current trends, improvements and also the main gaps.

The main goal of this paper is to study the specific characteristics of the performance of companies in the metallurgical sector, in the northern region of Portugal.

To achieve this aim, the authors have used data from 325 companies manufacturing metal products, except machinery and equipment (CAE Rev.3 25) and 27 companies that manufacture machinery and equipment (CAE Rev. 3 28). The models were estimated by using the panel data methodology for the period between 2011 and 2019. Specifically, the estimation method of the generalized method of moments system (GMM system) proposed by Arellano and Bover (1995) and Blundell and Bond (1998) was used.

The results show that the main decisions on the performance of metallurgical companies in Northern Portugal depend on the dimensions of sales in the domestic market (SDM), sales in the community market (SCM), and sales in the foreign market (SFM) and also highlight that the signal and significance of the specific variables depends on how the different stakeholders understand performance.

As far as the authors know, this is the first study to comparatively analyze the two metallurgical databases in Portugal. Despite the huge difference in the size of the sample, this study’s results show that in an era of paradigm shift about what business objectives should be, stakeholders are still not environmentally aware and the social dimension is only considered by shareholders, but not yet by the manager and the general community.

The purpose of this research is to establish a robust numerical framework for the calibration of macroscopic constitutive parameters, based on the analysis of polycrystalline RVEs with computational homogenisation.

This framework is composed of four building-blocks: (1) the multi-scale model, consisting of polycrystalline RVEs, where the grains are modelled with anisotropic crystal plasticity, and computational homogenisation to link the scales, (2) a set of loading cases to generate the reference responses, (3) the von Mises elasto-plastic model to be calibrated, and (4) the optimisation algorithms to solve the inverse identification problem. Several optimisation algorithms are assessed through a reference identification problem. Thereafter, different calibration strategies are tested. The accuracy of the calibrated models is evaluated by comparing their results against an FE2 model and experimental data.

In the initial tests, the LIPO optimiser performs the best. Good results accuracy is obtained with the calibrated constitutive models. The computing time needed by the FE2 simulations is 5 orders of magnitude larger, compared to the standard macroscopic simulations, demonstrating how this framework is suitable to obtain efficient micro-mechanics-informed constitutive models.

This contribution proposes a numerical framework, based on FE2 and macro-scale single element simulations, where the calibration of constitutive laws is informed by multi-scale analysis. The most efficient combination of optimisation algorithm and definition of the objective function is studied, and the robustness of the proposed approach is demonstrated by validation with both numerical and experimental data.