Search Results (7,489)

The future of Earth depends on the investment choices of companies and individuals. Over the past decade, investment decisions of individuals have been intensely studied by researchers in developed countries. Yet, very few studies focused on these investment decisions in developing countries using an experimental approach. This study adopts an experimental approach to examine the impact of ESG awareness on the sustainable investment decisions of undergraduate students in Egypt. In the experiment, subjects were asked to watch a video on investment basics (control) and investment and ESG basics (treatment). After that, the subjects were asked to choose between two choices, one sustainable (ESG choice) and one unsustainable with and without a return difference. After controlling for demographic characteristics, personal traits, financial knowledge, and risk tolerance, the results indicate that ESG awareness increases the probability of making sustainable investment decisions. Moreover, the findings indicate that sustainable investing among individuals is conditional on higher or equal returns than conventional investing. The study provides practical insights for professionals and policy recommendations. Full article

In early childhood initial teacher education, a growing number of mature-aged students with diploma qualifications and years of professional experience are undertaking their early childhood teacher degrees through online modes. Given the national staff shortage of early childhood teachers and the important role of higher education in professional development, it is crucial to support these students’ success in their online learning. Drawing on the critical reflection theory and the notions of “reflection-in-action” and “reflection-on-action”, this autoethnographic study examines a university lecturer’s perspective on the challenges of teaching mature-aged students in online Bachelor of Early Childhood Education programs. Four themes have been identified from the current study: the need for step-by-step technical support for the online learning system; acknowledgment of students’ practical experience contributes to online tutorial classrooms; the need for guidance for ethical and responsible use of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) in class discussions; and interactive dialogic guidance to support their assessment preparation. This study also included specific pedagogical adaptations to support these students, including offering technical support to assist mature-aged students in transitioning to university study, drawing on students’ professional knowledge to promote active engagement, providing interactive guidance to support understanding of assignment instructions, integrating open discussions about the use of GenAI in online class activities, and asking follow-up questions to encourage critical thinking. This study deepens our understanding of how university educators support mature-aged ECE students in their online learning through tailored pedagogical adaptations that align with their unique needs. Full article

The experiences of 48 U.S. journalists covering Donald Trump’s inaugural year as president in 2017 provide a contemporaneous account of being “enemies of the people” in a highly charged partisan environment. Using snowball sampling, participants were asked to respond via email during a period bookended by a Phoenix, Arizona, rally in which Trump berated news reporters for their coverage of demonstrations in Charlottesville, Virginia, and then, weeks later, posted disparaging “fake news” tweets. The social media barrage followed challenging news coverage of a devastating hurricane in the eastern United States. Responses came from journalists representing 41 news organizations (including broadcast, radio, cable, online, and print) in regions throughout the country. Qualitative reflexive thematic analysis surfaced deeply intertwined personal and professional concerns, suggesting a need to heighten awareness of the influence sustained trauma has on both personal and professional relationships. Their being labeled “fake” and “enemies of the people” might affect content and routine in ways that include self-censorship, sourcing, transparency, and degrees to which one would risk harm or emotional distress to cover a story. Toughing it out in the face of sustained and wounding attacks might create hidden psychological and professional time-bombs, putting journalists, journalism, and ultimately democracy, at risk. Full article

A key principle of the United States Roundtable for Sustainable Beef framework is striving for continuous improvement in grazing management operations, which includes a goal of having 385 million acres covered by written grazing management plans by 2050. However, the adoption of written grazing management plans (GMPs) is lagging behind expectations. The objectives of this analysis are to examine indicators of the adoption of GMPs and grazing patterns. Additionally, we examine the economic benefits associated with the adoption of GMPs and intensive grazing patterns. A National Grazing Management Survey was conducted during the summer of 2024, distributed electronically to cow-calf producers through cooperation with state membership associations. Producers were asked about operational demographics and grazing management. Respondents were provided definitions for the GMP hierarchy (no GMP, mental GMP, written GMP, written GMP with annual evaluation) and grazing patterns (continuous, rotational, adaptive multi-paddock). Respondents were also asked to rank GMP objectives, categorized as “economic” or “environmental”, in order of importance. Binary logit models were employed to examine the indicators of adoption of written GMPs and intensive grazing patterns. Findings indicate that producers utilizing intensive grazing patterns are more likely to adopt a written GMP, and producers with larger herd sizes are more likely to prioritize economic objectives. Results also indicate that producers who adopt a written GMP are more likely to earn positive returns over off-farm feed costs than those who do not adopt a GMP, providing evidence of the potential economic benefits associated with GMPs. Full article

In China, policy-driven rural renewal projects have transformed many village public spaces, but some renewed sites are still weakly integrated into villagers’ everyday routines. This study asks why some renewed public spaces sustain routine use and low-intensity social interaction, while others remain materially complete but socially weak. The study was conducted in a rural township in Puyang County, Henan Province. Twelve renewed public spaces across several villages were examined through structured spatial audits and 579 resident questionnaires. Five spatial conditions were assessed: visibility, stay support, activity accommodation, interaction-supportive arrangement, and experienced locational convenience. Two behavioral outcomes were used to describe post-renewal vitality: use frequency and social participation. The analysis combines necessary condition analysis (NCA) and fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA). NCA is used as a diagnostic tool for identifying upper-limit constraints, while fsQCA is used to identify sufficient combinations of conditions. The results suggest that experienced locational convenience is the clearest bottleneck condition for both outcomes. When a site is difficult to incorporate into residents’ daily walking routines, internal design quality has limited capacity to translate into sustained behavioral use. Among better-located spaces, high vitality is associated with several design configurations. The most stable recurrent pattern combines visibility, stay support, and locational convenience as core conditions, together with either interaction-supportive arrangement or activity accommodation. Low-vitality spaces follow a different logic, being characterized by the simultaneous absence of several supporting conditions rather than by the absence of one isolated feature. The paper therefore proposes a two-step diagnostic logic for rural public-space renewal: first checking whether a site is embedded in everyday mobility and then matching internal spatial conditions with local patterns of use. Full article

Forest bioenergy holds significant potential for North American decarbonization and energy security, yet persistently high logistics costs, feedstock quality variability, and geographic dispersion of biomass resources continue to constrain commercial viability. This review asks what it will take for forest bioenergy supply chains to achieve economic and operational lift-off, identifying key bottlenecks and the most promising pathways to scale. We systematically review 237 peer-reviewed studies and technical reports with the majority published between 2000 and 2025, covering feedstock types ranging from logging residues and woody biomass to short rotation woody crops, and end-products spanning solid biofuels, heat and power, thermochemical products, and sustainable aviation fuel. The literature consistently identifies delivered cost, feedstock quality control, and the geographic mismatch between biomass supply and conversion facility location as the three primary barriers to sector viability. Depot-based preprocessing, cascading utilization strategies, and participatory landowner contracting emerge as the most effective near-term solutions for improving supply chain economics and mobilizing economically recoverable biomass. At the frontier, AI-enabled optimization, digital twin modeling, and integrated biorefinery configurations show strong potential to manage spatial variability and unlock the scale economies on which commercial viability depends. Translating these advances into practice will require stable, long-term policy signals and coordinated investment across the full supply chain. Full article

This article examines how young Muslim women in contemporary France live, negotiate, and recalibrate the hijab within a differentiated secular order that distributes the conditions of public visibility unequally across institutional sites. Rather than treating the headscarf as a legal controversy or as a symbolic test of the compatibility of Islam with republican secularism, the analysis asks how visible Muslim femininity is rendered institutionally legible, conditionally tolerable, or professionally problematic across the ordinary spaces of school, work, leisure, and public life, and how women respond when the continuity between faith, body, and public presence is repeatedly subjected to regulation. Drawing on a reflexive thematic analysis of seven in-depth interviews with young Muslim-background women in Paris, the article shows that hijab emerges in the core narratives as an ethical form of composure, governed self-presence, and dignity; that schools, workplaces, and recreational sites act as visibility filters that classify which forms of Muslim femininity can appear as acceptable, neutral, and professionally credible; and that these pressures are negotiated aesthetically through ongoing acts of bodily calibration and respectable self-presentation. To capture this practical labor, the article develops the concept of embodied boundary-work and situates it explicitly in dialogue with Foucauldian accounts of disciplinary normalization and feminist scholarship on the ambivalence of agency under norm-governed conditions. The argument is that the French hijab question is most productively understood through the gendered management of Muslim visibility enacted through institutional norms of fit, neutrality, and appearance, whereby the female body becomes the site where secular governance, moral selfhood, professional sorting, and public belonging concretely intersect. Full article

Existing accounts of platform-mediated complementor growth rest on two limiting assumptions: that platform enablement constitutes a homogeneous environmental input and that firm growth is a unitary outcome. This double simplification obscures how distinct platform provisions generate qualitatively different forms of firm transformation. This study asks which combinations of mechanistically distinct platform enablement types and internal strategic response capabilities activate which forms of leapfrog growth among complementor firms operating under dual institutional governance. We employ fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA) on survey data from 374 complementor firms in China’s autonomous driving platform ecosystem. Five antecedent conditions are examined across two dimensions: platform enablement, comprising rule-based enablement (RE) and business platform enablement (BPE); and strategic response capabilities, comprising network linkage capability (NLC), organizational ambidexterity (OA), and policy responsiveness (PR). Three outcome variables capture three non-reducible leapfrog dimensions: technology-chain (TL), value-chain (VL), and institutional-chain (IL) transitions. A reverse-causality robustness check and a common-method-bias assessment corroborate the validity of findings. The analysis identifies equifinal configurational pathways with distinct dominant logics across the three chains. Technology-chain transitions are predominantly network-linkage-driven; value-chain transitions are policy-responsiveness-anchored; institutional-chain transitions exhibit genuine equifinality between network-linkage and policy-responsiveness pathways, both requiring dual-platform enablement as a universal structural precondition. No single enabling condition or capability suffices; leapfrog growth is irreducibly configurational and causally asymmetric. The study offers a dual-enablement, three-chain configurational framework for understanding platform-mediated firm growth under dual institutional governance. For complementor firms, findings support dimension-selective capability investment over uniform accumulation strategies. For platform orchestrators, differentiated governance design calibrated to specific complementor upgrading trajectories outperforms homogeneous resource provisioning. For policymakers, institutionalized consultative channels linking private platform governance with public regulatory processes are recommended to facilitate coordinated digital industrial transformation. Full article

Following the 2022 disruption of Russian pipeline gas, European countries shifted toward liquefied natural gas (LNG) at markedly different speeds; yet, the drivers of this variation remain poorly understood. This study asks what explains these differences. Using a balanced panel of eight major European gas importers over 2015–2024 (80 observations), the study models the share of LNG in total gas imports as the dependent variable, reversing the conventional approach that treats LNG as an explanatory variable for gas prices. The interaction between the post-2022 structural break and storage fill levels is negative and statistically significant (β = −0.006, p = 0.019 clustered; p = 0.002 Driscoll-Kraay), suggesting that countries with lower storage reserves tended to increase their LNG dependence more strongly. This result is robust across seven of eight specifications and survives time-trend controls and leave-one-country-out analysis. Marginal effects reveal that the storage–LNG relationship was absent before the shock and emerged only after the disruption. Renewable energy penetration emerges as a significant positive predictor. Full article

The shift to teleworking, defined as technology-enabled work arrangements in which employees perform organizational tasks remotely outside traditional office settings, has exposed the limitations of traditional performance management systems, including the lack of direct oversight, micromanagement risks, communication barriers, and employee isolation and well-being. These systems often rely on physical presence or intrusive surveillance rather than outcome-based evaluation. This paper asks how AI-driven performance management can be designed to address the documented challenges of teleworking while safeguarding employee autonomy, fairness, and well-being. The study integrates a comprehensive literature review on AI capabilities with empirical evidence from a sequential mixed-methods study of Canadian public servants, comprising machine learning analysis of over 205,000 tweets, document analysis of federal and provincial teleworking policies, a survey of 176 public servants analyzed using logistic regression, and semi-structured interviews with Government of Canada employees. Grounded in socio-technical theory and the Theory of Planned Behavior, the findings reveal that organizational support, workplace socialization, and attitudes are stronger predictors of teleworking success than digital skills or monitoring, while isolation functions as a measurable risk factor. These empirical patterns are mapped to specific AI capabilities to produce a socio-technical framework organized around three interdependent layers: technological, organizational, and human-centered. The paper contributes an empirically grounded alternative to purely speculative treatments of AI in performance management, offering design requirements derived from what teleworkers actually experience rather than from technological possibilities alone. While the framework is analytically grounded in empirical evidence, behavioral theory, and existing AI capabilities, it has not yet undergone full technical or longitudinal organizational validation. Accordingly, it should be understood as a theoretically and empirically informed design artifact intended to guide future implementation and evaluation efforts. It is worth acknowledging that the study’s key limitations include a Canada-specific public sector sample, modest survey and interview sizes, and the exploratory nature of several proposed AI capabilities; future cross-sectoral, comparative, and longitudinal research is needed to validate and extend the framework. Full article

Although small and medium enterprises (SMEs) anchor employment and output across Sub-Saharan Africa, their uptake of artificial intelligence (AI) lags global benchmarks, and prevailing explanations dwell on capital, infrastructure, and institutional voids while overlooking the leadership competencies that determine whether available resources are mobilised at all. Addressing this gap, the present study asks how the digital leadership capabilities of SME owner-managers shape their intention to adopt AI in Nigeria, and through what organisational mechanisms and under what boundary conditions this influence operates. Anchored in the Diffusion of Innovation Theory and the Tigre–Henriques–Curado model of digital leadership, a cross-sectional survey was administered to owner-managers of registered SMEs drawn from six states; a sample of 390 was derived from a population of 23,290 firms using the Taro Yamane formula with proportionate allocation, and 306 valid responses were retained. Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modelling (WarpPLS 8.0) was applied after confirming reliability (Cronbach’s $\alpha$: 0.69–0.84; composite reliability: 0.83–0.88), convergent validity (AVE: 0.56–0.67), and common method bias control. Strategic ($\beta$ = 0.298), interpersonal ($\beta$ = 0.245), and personal attribute ($\beta$ = 0.129) capabilities each significantly raised AI adoption intention. In contrast, delivery-related capabilities ($\beta$ = 0.090, p = 0.057) did not, indicating that pre-adoption intention is governed by cognitive-strategic and relational competencies rather than execution skills. Organisational innovation climate partially transmitted the effects of strategic and interpersonal capabilities, and firm size amplified the interpersonal pathway in medium-sized firms. The study contributes a leadership-centred account of AI adoption in an under-researched African setting and, by estimating mediation and moderation within a single framework, clarifies both why and when digital leadership translates into AI readiness, yielding capability-specific guidance for owner-managers and SME support policy. Full article

Environmental education projects can often be short-term or in extra-curricular spaces, rather than holistically nestled into a way of teaching and learning. Research has highlighted the importance of considering the emotional and active aspects of learning, arguing that we must address education for sustainability through the hands (doing) and the heart (feeling) as well as the head (thinking). Here we ask how this consciousness can be embedded into a school ethos. This paper reports on a co-created ethnographic case study, drawing primarily on observation data, aiming to understand how connectivity with nature is cultivated within a Steiner Waldorf school in the UK. We found that Steiner Waldorf Education cultivates connectivity with nature through play and creativity, the use of songs and verses, prevalence of natural materials, a reverence for Mother Earth and a focus on the rhythm of the seasons through festivals. Through this holistic practice, a strong connectivity with nature is fostered. Based on the evidence that connectivity with nature increases pro-environmental behaviours, we seek to contribute to the environmental education literature the potential of a holistic approach to education that foregrounds the hands and heart in the elementary stages of education rather than addressing environmental challenges head on. We argue that this approach can inspire change through strengthening our relationship to the natural world, thus empowering young people to shape a more sustainable future. Full article

This article examines how sacred vocabularies from Orthodox Christianity and Judaism function in racialised public discourse in Poland and Ukraine between 2020 and 2025. It asks how terms such as imago Dei/tselem Elohim, neighbour-love and chesed, holiness/purity, suffering/martyrdom, and exile/return are mobilised across pulpit, policy, and platform communication. Drawing on a corpus of 23 publicly available texts, the study applies comparative rhetorical discourse analysis informed by Burke’s concepts of identification and logology and Pernot’s account of the religious dimension of rhetoric, alongside a coding scheme focused on topoi, metaphors, frames, appeals, and boundary work. The findings show convergences in dignity claims, memorial warning, and care rhetoric under conditions of war and displacement but also clear divergences: Jewish discourse more often mobilises peoplehood as a rhetoric of continuity and communal protection, whereas Orthodox discourse more often ties sacred language to national-historical self-location, ecclesial autonomy, and opposition to russkii mir (“Russian world”). Across the retained corpus, dog-whistle-like discourse appears mainly as an object of quotation or denunciation, while explicit counter-speech is widespread. The article concludes that sacred language remains an active rhetorical resource for defining dignity, injury, solidarity, and belonging, although its function varies across arenas, traditions, and the corpus’s asymmetries. Full article

Under the dual impact of new urbanization and rural population mobility, divorced rural women in China face severe challenges in obtaining collective membership qualification for land expropriation compensation. The newly enacted Rural Collective Economic Organization Law (RCEOL) contains ambiguous provisions, hindering effective implementation. This study asks: How can collective membership qualification for divorced rural women be determined based on pre-enactment court judgments to refine the law’s ambiguities? Adopting a qualitative design, data were collected from China Judgments Online. Through systematic keyword search, 238 court judgments were retrieved and analyzed using a three-level coding procedure (open, axial, selective). The theoretical framework draws on Amartya Sen’s capability approach. Three main findings are briefly summarized. First, a concrete determination scheme is proposed: the “stable rights-obligations relationship” is operationalized via collective medical insurance purchase and non-abandonment of contracted land; “basic livelihood security” emphasizes land’s security function without requiring primary income reliance; the “stable production-living relationship” criterion should be discarded. Second, the household registration (hukou) condition is becoming ambiguous, but such ambiguity reflects governance adaptation to complexity, moving toward “de-hukouization.” Third, legal ambiguity, while challenging, creates a flexible space for adaptive rural governance. This study contributes by introducing Sen’s capability approach into the analysis of divorced rural women’s membership qualification and providing empirical grounds for clarifying Article 11 of the RCEOL. Future research may observe changes in case volume and litigant testimonies after the law’s implementation to evaluate its real effects, further enriching the discussion on institution—agency interaction. Full article

Machine-learned molecular force fields require many-body geometry, but obtaining it through Clebsch–Gordan tensor products is computationally expensive. For a strong no-Clebsch–Gordan backbone such as GotenNet, we ask whether the limitation in handling three-body geometry is one of representational capacity or one of training supervision, and separate the two factors with three controlled probes on a single-seed, paper-aligned rMD17 aspirin split. (i) While frame projection of tensor features is comparable to scalar cos-angle triplet cross-attention (SCTA) at pilot scale, algebraically its diagonal scalar collapses to a frame-independent inner product and the remaining channel is parity-odd, making SCTA’s cos-angle input the principled $\mathrm{O}\left(3\right)$ scalar choice. (ii) SCTA matches GotenNet’s converged force accuracy within ∼0.4% without independent gain, indicating that three-body representational capacity is not the binding constraint. (iii) A graph-level auxiliary loss on bond-angle and dihedral statistics gives the best force mean absolute error (MAE; $0.1280$ vs. $0.1303$ kcal/mol/Å) and reduces epochs-to-validation-target by 26–55%. Cross-molecule probes do not extend this finding; a paired salicylic acid comparison shows a directional degradation that, under a configuration-level paired block bootstrap, is significant and opposite in sign to the aspirin effect. Across three random seeds, the auxiliary force-MAE gain is small and seed-dependent but consistently reduces seed-to-seed variance and accelerates convergence, indicating that low-cost three-body supervision can be a more effective lever than added three-body capacity. Full article