This paper examines the Business Model (BM) from a socioeconomic system perspective to discern key factors, and understand its interactions resulting in the Scaling of Social Impact (SSI) in Social Entrepreneurship (SE). Previously, studies have explained the importance of BM in relation to SE. However, there is a lack of empirical studies on how BM’s transitions through participation of various actors result in SSI. This research applies qualitative analysis on a single case study of a Japanese social startup, “mymizu”, the first water refill application platform in Japan. The findings show that collaboration amongst different stakeholders on the initial phase of the BM could increase awareness of responsible consumption, convert into actual users for sustainability, and change their behavior. Secondly, members of the society could take on dual roles, both as users and collaborators in the BM, which results in an exponential scaling effect of the social impact. This paper contributes towards adding a participatory stakeholder (PS) to the ecosystem of SSI and building a “regenerative” BM that is relevant in SE towards sustainability.

This research critically examines the dichotomies in urban public space and discussions on city evolution over the past two centuries. The original discourse identified amplifies the importance that inclusivity needs to address issues deeper than physical accessibility. The growing diversity and changes seen in urban public open spaces are followed throughout history along a timeline of important socio-political and planning injectors in the Western world. These public spaces are the important spine connecting all the private and semi-private parts of the city. Urban public spaces have seen population changes due to globalisation, resulting in mobility and changes due to the different needs of its diverse user base. In this paper, a rigorous quasi-chronological investigation is presented. Firstly, the context of the evolution of space is established. Secondly, a closer focus on inclusion research provides a thorough analysis of the utopian city plans, the development of Haussmann's Paris and the later plans of the Centrist and the Decentrist. Thirdly, a critical and analytical understanding of the effect these precursors have had on the city's public spaces, and the hierarchies it established in a nuanced manner are made explicit. The culmination of this research process is the identification of outcomes associated with inclusivity. Findings are established across three significant themes—a) Understanding public space as social space, b) Components of inclusivity, and c) Values of inclusivity including accessibility, sense of place, conviviality and resilience. Key insights and guidance for inclusivity as a key constituent of social sustainability are the unique contribution.

The global steel industry is a major contributor to greenhouse gas emissions, and the adoption of green hydrogen in Direct Reduced Iron (DRI) production has the potential to significantly reduce CO2 emissions and support climate targets. This review explores the environmental, economic, technological, and social implications of using green hydrogen in DRI processes. The findings suggest that green hydrogen can reduce emissions by up to 90% compared to traditional methods, enhance energy security, and stimulate local economic development. However, high initial costs, energy efficiency concerns, and social acceptance issues remain significant barriers. The review also highlights the importance of integrating carbon capture and storage technologies, addressing logistical challenges, and considering the geopolitical implications of a shift towards green hydrogen. Green hydrogen presents a promising solution for decarbonising the steel industry but continued research, investment in infrastructure, and strategic planning are essential to overcome the challenges and drive widespread adoption.

Recent policies’ changes in sustainability reporting, such as the ones related to the new European Directive on non-financial disclosure, the standards issued by the American Sustainability Accounting Standard Board (SASB), the G4 guidelines issued by the Global Sustainability Standard Board (GSSB-GRI) and the framework of the International Integrated Reporting Council (IIRC) are stressing about the importance of extending the disclosure of ethical, social and environmental risks within social and environmental reporting. Institutional pressure has notably increased among organizations, in setting-up risk management tools to understand sustainability risks within managerial and reporting practices. Given such institutional pressure, the corporate reaction in providing additional sustainability risk disclosure call for attention and scrutiny. Therefore, this study aims at addressing such issues from an exploratory perspective. We based our analysis on a sample of organizations that issued sustainability disclosure in accordance with the GRI G4 guidelines, and we tested the relationship between risk disclosure and other relevant variables. Consistently with the literature, we found that “experienced” sustainable reporters provide a significant volume of disclosure, and that disclosure quality on risk is positively influenced by their international presence and reporting experience. However, when accounting for specific risk-related areas of disclosure, only few of them seems to adopt a management accounting perspective linking strategy, risk metrics and disclosure.

In recent years, change in behaviour towards the environment has gained prominence as a policy tool to influence positive environmental value. Simultaneously, the role played by social identity in promoting pro-environmental action is gaining recognition. Within this work, the intersection between collective group identity and environmental behaviour has received very little attention. Group norms are considered a strong predictor of pro-environmental behaviour, yet the influence of social identity and collective action on environmental action has not been adequately investigated in a multi-ethnic setting. Within this context, this study examines the affective component of social identity influence on pro-environmental action. More succinctly, this study demonstrates how outgroups and in-groups’ relations and broader socio-cultural structures, values, interest, and norms impact environmental and sustainability transitions behaviours. Through interviews with participants across the four dominant social groups in South Africa, this study provides compelling evidence that country wide expressions of social identity and in-group dynamics shapes the individual behaviour regarding environmental and sustainability concerns and further strengthen the individual’s perspective for social environmental transformation. This study advances the need for a social-identity centred approach to foster pro-environmental and sustainability outcomes.

The present paper investigates the 'soft' determinants of social environmental sustainability of the country. A three-dimensional research approach, covering the education system and educational culture; socio-economic integration; and the legal system and the importance of public administration and citizenship, was utilized. A cross-sectional survey of 1,021 respondents and a structural equation modelling were selected as main research tools. Lithuania served as an empirical basis for the research. It was revealed that the most important factors in shaping the modernisation of the country through the lens of social environmental sustainability are the participation of citizens in social communities and social activities. Factors that need improvement are public participation and tolerance for the disabled.

Although social sustainability plays a crucial role in the sustainable development agenda, there is a scarcity of research that clearly defines and fully operationalizes this concept. This study seeks to fill this gap in the literature by creating a comprehensive measurement scale to evaluate social sustainability in the context of urban parks. According to the literature review, social sustainability is identified as a multidimensional concept, encompassing eight key dimensions in urban parks: identity, place attachment, cohesion, safety, equity, facilities, comfort, and accessibility. The validity, reliability, and dimensions of the social sustainability scale for urban parks are examined using factor analysis. To explore the idea that user evaluations of urban parks can be employed as a method to ensure social sustainability, user feedback was collected for the study. The article evaluates data from 120 participants in Alaeddin Hill Park, located in Konya, Turkey—a site selected for its potential to best reflect the identified dimensions. This study reveals the relationships between different dimensions of social sustainability that influence the park's social sustainability performance at the urban park scale. Additionally, it provides insights aimed at improving park design quality. The findings of the study indicate that the park’s social sustainability is at a moderate level, with identity identified as the most influential dimension. On the other hand, the dimension that most negatively impacts sustainability performance is safety, primarily due to low perceptions of safety caused by inadequate lighting, the predominant use of the park by people from lower socioeconomic backgrounds, and a general lack of security.

The corona (COVID-19) pandemic offers an opportunity for dealing with persistent problems, through a transformative recovery process. It is a crisis that offers opportunities for dealing with three interrelated crises: the ecological crisis (climate change, loss of biodiversity, resource depletion, pollution and ecosystem destruction), the confidence crisis (people losing trust in government, politics, companies, regular news channels, science, each other and the future), and the inequality crisis (the widening of the gap between rich and poor). Our argument is that sustainability transitions will not succeed without a different economy and another social contract with the associated rights and duties of care (for the environment and the well-being of others, including future generations). A different social contract is not only desirable from the point of view of sustainability and fairness, justice and equality, but is also necessary to restore citizens' trust in politics, government, companies and each other. In the paper we discuss mechanisms towards a Natural Social Contract, systemic leverage points for system transformations and possibilities for co-evolutionary governance by actor coalitions interested in transformative change. The combination of those three elements helps to synchronize different agendas and reduce the chance that they will work against each other.

This article aims to understand the domains and conceptual uses of contagion, its modalities and its effects, in its different historical contexts and meanings, as an expression of the process of interdependence between the positions and the different points of view of different actors involved in multiple scientific, moral, social and political challenges. Another objective focuses on understanding the process of collective management of contagion, disease and health, where prevention is an essential element of its objectives and justifications, its discursive order, as well as its practical activities.

Academic interest in social and human capital is growing significantly. Similarly, their relationship with sustainability is increasing, especially compared to sustainability’s relationship with natural capital and financial and economic capital. Bibliometric and visualization research on these relationships is nonetheless insufficient. This study analyzes the evolution of the literature on natural capital, financial and economic capital, and social and human capital related to sustainability. On the other hand, the study presents a bibliometric analysis on social capital and human capital (SHC) related to sustainability. The article studies 635 references collected from the Web of Science (WoS) Core Collection database and utilizes visualization of similarities (VOS) viewer program to graphically map the material. The analysis involves co-occurrence of keywords, co-citation, and co-authorship. The results reveal not only the state of the art and the leading trends, but also the evolution regarding impact, main journals, documents, topics, authors, institutions, and countries. The study provides researchers and practitioners with a visual and schematic frame of the research on this topic.

Healthcare crises occur occasionally are very disruptive and resource consuming. The Covid-19 pandemic provided an example of inefficient wasteful resource management that would be unsustainable in the long term. This paper presents a framework for sustainable crisis management that will be applicable for future crises. The methodology is also applicable to other pandemics, wars, multi-casualty natural disasters, industrial disasters, etc. Attention focuses on rapid crisis resolution such as lockdowns. Despite unprecedented investments in healthcare, lack of capacity and timeliness are still problems affecting every country, even the wealthier ones. During the Covid19 pandemic, some healthcare systems around the world have collapsed. For example, Brazil, Spain, Italy, and more. This is due to the lack of a clear methodology for handling such crises. This paper presents a resource-based methodology to cope with healthcare crises considering three scenarios: “Peace”, “War” and “Tsunami”. The paper outlines a methodology for identifying the system bottlenecks for coping with the crisis in each scenario by using established simple tools. These tools assure significant resource frugality that will enhance sustainability. The paper also analyses where the system constraint should be and prescribes how to prepare for such scenarios. A large medical center case study demonstrates our approach. During “peace” times, evolutionary strategies should be used exclusively. During “war” times, a hybrid – evolutionary/disruptive (revolutionary) strategy. During the “Tsunami” scenario, one should rely only on the disruptive (revolutionary) strategy. This methodology can be extended to other scenarios and other lines of research.

Sustainability experienced significant global momentum in recent decades. The emergence of the sustainability movement in the Financial Sector was prompted by the increasing global climate change resulting from environmental deterioration. Primarily associated with the Financial Sector, it has increasingly been recognised that Financial Institutions are significant contributors to global climate change, both via direct and indirect means. This has resulted in a heightened emphasis and demand from stakeholders for the implementation of Sustainability Principles on a worldwide scale. This study presents a methodology that utilises the various dimensions of Sustainable Finance through the concept of Triple Bottom Line to determine the factors influencing the Sustainability Performance of Financial Institutions. The suggested approach is grounded and supported by the current body of literature. The study presents a hypothesis to investigate the correlation between factors of Green Finance Practices and Sustainability Performance of Banking Sector. The suggested framework can be utilised by regulatory bodies and individual financial institution of a country to identify the elements that influence the Sustainability Performance of Banking Sector.

This article aims to identify the relationship between sustainability and strategic management to determine whether sustainability can be considered a strategic management research fashion. This involves a bibliometric analysis of recent academic literature from 2021 to 2023 to identify the latest academic research, key trends, collaboration and keyword networks within this relationship. The analysis was conducted using two datasets from the Scopus database. These datasets focus on English-language journal articles on business, management and accounting. The first covers academic research on strategic management, while the second expands to sustainability and sustainable development. The results show that strategic management research focusing on sustainability has recently grown faster (24.70%) than the whole strategic management research area (14.30%). Furthermore, the geographical analysis of co-authorship identified articles from 88 countries, suggesting a broad interest in this relationship. Notably, the strategic management network mapping revealed a unique, sustainable development, corporate social responsibility and sustainability cluster. Moreover, extended mapping revealed four clusters covering crisis management, strategic and creative sustainable development, operational and regulatory sustainability, sustainable supply chains, and resource management. The results thus confirm the rapid growth and widespread coverage of research on sustainability and strategic management, highlighting sustainability as a strategic management research fashion.

There is a strong need and demand from the United Nations, public institutions, and private sector for classifying government publications, policy briefs, academic literature, and corporate social responsibility reports according to their relevance to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). It is well understood that the SDGs play a major role in the strategic objectives of various entities. However, linking projects and activities to the SDGs has not always been straightforward or possible with existing methodologies. Natural language processing (NLP) techniques offer a new avenue to identify linkages for SDGs from text data. This research examines various machine learning approaches optimized for NLP-based text classification tasks for their success in classifying reports according to their relevance to the SDGs. Extensive experiments have been performed with the recently released Open Source SDG (OSDG) Community Dataset, which contains texts with their related SDG label as validated by the community volunteers. Results demonstrate that especially RoBERTa achieves very high performance in the attempted task, which is promising for automated processing of large collections of sustainability reports for detection of relevance to SDGs.

Retails and shopping centers have become essential to today’s lifestyle. Furthermore, as modern shopping venues, retail centers' social role contributes to its popularity and profitability. The social motive of customers for shopping is beyond acquiring their crucial purchases. These advantages favor retail centers and improve the level of social sustainability and its relevant concepts. Given that relatively little study has been studied on the impact of retail centers' social role as places for interactional and recreational activities on customers' behavior in these centers and its relation to social sustainability. Two hypotheses were raised that show the effect of time travel duration and shop variety on increasing the percentage of users who spend their leisure time and recreational activities in two analogous retail centers. The result of research regarding the first hypothesis reveals that there is an interaction between time travel duration and shoppers' motivation. Furthermore, the results revealed that half of both retail center goers who spend more than 10 minutes to arrive at the retail centers prefer to do leisure activities and browsing than shopping. Therefore, the majority of individuals are from further distances, indicating longer trips can be one of the factors for willing to spend more leisure time and recreational activities. The second hypothesis reveals that shop variety can be one of the main reasons for attracting users to spend their leisure time and browse in both retail centers. There is a significant correlation between shop variety and customers’ motivation.

The purpose was to reflect on the sustainability of artisanal and informal mining in the Peruvian Andean zone by 2022. The type of research was basic, non-experimental design, ex post facto scope. The sample consisted of: statistics on crime prevention due to socio-environmental conflicts from the National Prosecutor's Office and the Ombudsman's Office, reports of interventions targeted at artisanal and informal miners. The procedure focused on gathering secondary information for a documentary review analysis that is based on proven and disseminated past facts. Artisanal and informal mining is strengthened in the Peruvian Andean zone by incidence and force: 1) the social license and agreements by community assembly, 2) the flexibility in compliance with the formalization, preventive and environmental protection laws, 3) the 50% increase in socio-environmental conflict due to mining activity, 4) a 25% progressive increase in the production costs of agricultural and livestock activities. The direct consequences on environmental sustainability are: 1) the delimited reconversion of the change in agricultural land use in a third of the communal territories in basin headwaters; 2) displacement of environmentally friendly economic activity by 20% in basin headwaters; 3) the impossibility of modification or intervention in water surfaces, bofedales by communal agreements.

Both the sustainability discourse and the debate on citizen science are strongly focused on the natural and technical sciences. Yet, numerous participatory research activities can be identified in the social sciences and humanities that address sustainability issues of various kinds. These have hardly been studied so far, and their contribution to addressing sustainability challenges is poorly known. The study investigates which sustainability topics are taken up by citizen science in the humanities and social sciences, which factors influence the choice of topics, and its implications. For this purpose, the concept of Citizen Social Science (CSS) is taken up and sustainability is operationalized via the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) and its specific Targets. Based on a collection of CSS activities in Germany, the addressed sustainability topics are identified accordingly. It is then analyzed how these patterns depend on the main characteristics of CSS projects. The findings indicate a focus on three SDGs related to education, sustainable cities and partnerships for the Goals, while at the same time the project consortia are very heterogeneous. CSS shows particular strengths here through its multi-stakeholder approach. Going forward, the linkage of Citizen Science to the SDGs needs to be further formalized so that its transformative effects can be incorporated into SDG monitoring and the scientific institutions need additional incentives to participate in CSS.

This paper introduces a theory for the evolution of corporates in which the growth and sustainability strategies are developed simultaneously. Since the introduction of corporate sustainability, it has been an extra cost for risk mitigation and making ‘compensating’ positive impact. The world has reached a tipping point of volatility, mainly due to climate change but also by emergence of COVID-19, so that the applicability of existing corporate structures is under question and these poses high risk to the existence of our planet. On the other hand, the technology cost for sustainable investment has reached a parity in comparison with non-sustainable alternatives. Therefore, our proposed Organic Grow Theory introduces a step-by-step approach so that corporates can grow and be profitable without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs. It is concluded that, a new structure for corporate, called Founcorp, would be needed to direct corporates to evolve being a responsible legal entity.

Investments in digital infrastructure in marginalised communities are set to increase in the next decade. These are premised on the potential of digital technologies to contribute towards solving societal problems, including the fragility of food value chains in rural areas. Although there are mixed empirical findings on the impact of these digital infrastructure investments, huge investments are continuing amid changing ICT policies in most developing countries. This paper, using a case study of a local livestock value chain in a rural community in Zimbabwe, argues for the application of non-conventional approaches towards digital infrastructure transformation impact assessment. Using selected theories and frameworks (socio-ecological systems framework, choice framework and technology affordances theory) as well as empirical data from a project in a rural community, the paper shows that real-time impact assessment using context-specific metrics may reveal hidden digital infrastructure transformation impacts, positive and negative, that are often overlooked when traditional impact assessment approaches are employed. The findings of this study contribute towards improving approaches towards ICT impact assessment. Practitioners engaging in impact assessment are challenged to move beyond dependence on traditional metrics (e.g. access) to the adoption of participatory processes to decipher context-appropriate metrics.

In response to ever-increasing concerns regarding ecological degradation and societal impact, numerous stakeholders such as non-governmental organisations, government officials, end-users, the mass media, and community activists have compelled business organizations, particularly multi-national companies to lessen harmful greenhouse gases emissions associated with their production activities. Energy sector is one of the biggest harmful greenhouse gases emission producer, hence, decision-makers within the energy sector are forced to promote and build environmental friendly and sustainable power generation plants. To this end, the concept of sustainability in the electricity sector has attracted so much attention from academics and industrial practitioners over the last three decades. Albeit, an important number of sustainability assessment frameworks for electricity generating technologies are found in the current literatures, three major drawbacks have emerged from those frameworks. Firstly, there is a lack of a holistic and comprehensive sustainability assessment framework for different power generation plants. Secondly, from economic aspect, the most used model (Levelised Cost of Electricity) to measure the cost performance of various electricity generating technologies is biased and is not inclusive enough, because, it only considers the capital, Operations and Maintenance, and fuel costs. Hence, snubbing crucial elements to business decision. Lastly, in the current literature, there is no a single sustainability assessment model that considers all the phases of electrical energy’s lifecycle. Considering these flaws, the novelty of this study is the development of a new, holistic theoretical sustainability assessment framework for power generation plants. The developed theoretical model includes 19 impact categories, 52 potential indictors, and 10 end points environmental, economic, and social aspects.

This qualitative research explores the influence of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) on supply chain sustainability within the renewable energy sector. Through a comprehensive review of existing literature, key themes and patterns are identified, shedding light on the complex dynamics and interrelationships inherent in CSR practices and their impact on supply chain sustainability. The findings highlight the critical role of CSR in driving environmental sustainability, social equity, economic viability, governance mechanisms, and technological innovation across renewable energy supply chains. Environmental sustainability emerges as a priority, with CSR initiatives focusing on reducing carbon emissions, promoting clean energy technologies, and adopting sustainable sourcing strategies. Social equity is emphasized through stakeholder consultation, transparent decision-making, and investments in community development. Economic viability is addressed through considerations of brand reputation, financial performance, and regulatory compliance. Governance mechanisms and regulatory frameworks play a crucial role in shaping CSR practices, with collaborative partnerships and policy advocacy driving industry-wide change. Technological innovation, particularly the integration of blockchain, IoT, and AI, enhances transparency, traceability, and accountability in supply chains. The study concludes by discussing theoretical implications, practical insights, limitations, and avenues for future research, highlighting the importance of CSR in promoting sustainable development in the renewable energy sector.

This article analyzes the emergence of partnerships between corporations and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) through voluntary product labeling schemes. The economics, management, and business literatures are reviewed to highlight cross-checking, consistencies, and complementarities among these disciplines. The objective is to identify and analyze the motives, risks, and joint benefits of partnering via voluntary product labeling, using examples from the agri-food sector. This study is an attempt to offer a framework of corporate-NGO partnerships by showing that the drivers and risks of each partner merge because each takes a step into the sphere of the other. The main risks – namely, a loss of profitability, credibility and legitimacy – are related to the financial and existential dependency and the asymmetric information between the partners in favor of corporations, inducing an ``NGO-capture'' risk.

Microfinance banks and Institutions must simultaneously provide micro financial loans to unprivileged and poor people as well as self-sustaining, which means covering enough costs to eliminate the need for subsidies. To ascertain if Micro-finance Institutions can successfully navigate the double challenge of financial self-sustainability (FSS) as well as outreach to poor clientele and women borrowers i.e. outreach. There is no other alternative but to analyse the balance between FSS and outreach indicators of MFIs. The research goal is to see whether there was any compromise between the self-sustainability and outreach towards poor and female customers. The study used data of 100 MFIs driven from the database of microfinance information’s exchange (MIX) market with the objective to determine trade off between financial sustainability and outreach. The study found financial performance variables are positively and significantly related with average loans size which shows a mission drift, in which MFIs serve wealthy clientele. However, Indian MFIs have a extremely high outreach with their female clientele, confirming MFI's social commitment to objective of women’s empowerment. The research recommends to the Policy-makers that MFIs are compromising their financial services to underprivileged people and women in order to be financially sustainable. To guarantee that institutions are focused on outreach to underserved people in rural areas, the government should reform the policies regarding governing MFIs.

Businesses use technological and social media marketing to respond to the Covid-19 pandemic. This study aims to understand better the factors that impact the spread of new technologies, the effectiveness of social media advertising, and the longevity of businesses. The study used a quantitative strategy based on partial least squares structural equation modeling to learn about the phenomenon of interest as much as possible. Dhaka, Bangladesh, small and medium-sized businesses participated in the survey. According to the findings, the popularity of internet and e-business technologies may be attributed to their apparent usefulness and ease of use. It is connecting internet/e-business technology, social media marketing, and the long-term success of small and medium-sized enterprises. Still, the expense factor was insufficient to prove that SMEs engage in social media advertising. Mediating effects between components may be better understood via internet/e-business technology and social media marketing, as shown by this study. This study is the first of its kind in Bangladesh and sheds light on the resilience of SMEs in the face of the Covivirus-19 pandemic, notwithstanding its focus on the capital city of Dhaka.

This research explores and analyzes the challenges and opportunities due to globalization's impact on sustainable strategic management. The research uses a mixed-method design, combining primary and secondary data collection methods. Secondary data is sourced from various credible publications and analyzed through an extensive literature review. A case study approach is adopted, involving semi-structured interviews with six experienced managers from Tazweed Venture Capital in Jordan. The study employs a qualitative, descriptive, and analytical approach to develop a conceptual framework by exploring managers' experiences and perspectives on Globalization and its impact on Sustainable Strategic Management. The findings identify challenges of environmental degradation, economic inequality, transportation and logistics pressures, and compliance challenges for sustainability. While implementing sustainable practices incurs upfront costs, accessing renewable energy markets and financial support presents opportunities. Tazweed successfully implements sustainable strategic management, emphasizing stakeholder engagement and collaboration across departments. This research offers valuable insights and guidance for companies navigating globalization's impact on sustainability strategic management.

During the last 20 years, with the development of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), an emerging interest has appeared in Digital Community Engagement (DCE) in the process of cultural heritage management. Due to a growing need to involve a broader community in the Historic Urban Landscape approach, social media are considered one of the most important platforms to promote the public participation process of urban heritage conservation in the context of rapid urbanization. Despite the growing literature on DCE, which has delivered a general overview of different digital technologies and platforms to enhance heritage conservation, little research has been done on taking stock of the utilization of social media in this process. This study aims to fill the research gap by providing a more comprehensive picture of the functionalities of social media platforms and impacts on sustainable urban development through a systematic literature review. As a result, 19 out of 248 DCE relevant articles are selected as objects to illustrate the contribution of social media. The study identified the characteristics of these applied social media tools, explores their roles and influences in cases. The article concludes with directions for further research.

Logistics in urban areas are currently suffering a radical transformation due to increasingly population concentration and the massive use of cars as the preferred transport mode. These issues have resulted in higher pollution levels in urban environments and traffic congestion impacting the world globally. Facilitating the use of sustainable transport modes is widely regarded as a necessity to cope with these adverse effects on citizens’ life quality. Hence, some regions, as the European Union, are encouraging bus transport firms to make their business models more environmentally and socially sustainable. The aim of this research is thus to explore how practices adopted by urban bus companies can improve cities’ sustainability. With this in mind, a combined Importance Performance Analysis (IPA)-Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) method was applied. In this way, both environmental and social sustainability effects of developed practices were represented through hierarchical structures separately. Subsequently, importance and performance ratings of practices in each sustainability dimension were estimated, and thus two IPA grids were generated. These grids support managers in the establishment of more effective action plans to improve logistics sustainability in cities. Findings also provide guidance to governments on the practices that should be promoted in future urban mobility plans.

The Directive 2014/95, in force in 2017, is the first European step that requires mandatory non-financial information to undertakings (all “public interest entities” with more than 500 employees). The regulation is concerning sustainability information as environmental, social and employee, human rights and anti-corruption and bribery matters and disclosure of diversity policy for board members. The study, in the strand of the regulation of accounting, part of the broader field of research into accounting regulation, contributes to the debate on the quality of regulation, in this specific case referred to sustainability disclosure. The regulation of sustainability matters is studied in literature broadly in a post-implementation phase and at national level. This research, instead, aims to analyse, through the causal chain of regulatory policy, in the ex-ante stage, the quality of the regulation and, at least, the usefulness of the normative pressure. The Oil & Gas sector is chosen as sample of the study, because it is one of the most advanced sectors in sustainability disclosure. The examination of the law, in terms of content requirements (what) and location of information (where), is the basis to apply the disclosure-scoring system, a partial form of content analysis, to the reports of the sample. The findings reveal a good level of completeness of non-financial information, however, there are some areas that have to be improved to reach the requests of the Directive. Results show also the presence of overlap between financial reports and sustainability ones. In conclusion, the regulation is useful to prompt undertakings to reflect on their reporting and so doing improve their sustainability approach.

This study investigates the relationship between Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) dimensions and employees' satisfaction and retention for sustainability in banks. Carroll (1991) proposed a theoretical approach that consists of four components (economic, legal, ethical, and philanthropic) to analyze CSR activities and their effects on employee’s satisfaction and retention in the company. Simple random sampling was used to get the information from 221 participants. The entire form of the dataset is utilized to execute regression and correlation analysis using SPSS. In order to find out the relationship between economic, legal, ethical, and philanthropic factors and employee's satisfaction and retention, regression beta coefficient and correlation coefficients were used to analyze. This study also examines the relationship between job satisfaction and intentions to retain with an organization. The findings demonstrate that the CSR aspects of ethical and philanthropic have a considerable and favorable influence on employee's satisfaction. The outcome also demonstrates a good and prominent influence of legal CSR on the satisfaction of employee's to retain with the firm. Moreover, this study demonstrates that economic aspect of CSR has no significant impact on employee's retention and satisfaction. Correlation analysis depicts that economic CSR is positively and significantly connected with employee's retention and satisfaction. This research came to the conclusion that enhancing employees view regarding CSR activities such as economic, legal, ethical, and philanthropic will increase employee's satisfaction. Therefore, executives and managers in the banks should take steps to influence how employees see CSR areas in order to raise employee's satisfaction and retention in the banks for sustainability.

Raw rubber production is the sole foundation for the rubber product industry, rendering raw rubber to manufacture essential commodities to mankind such as tires, condoms, surgical gloves, and so forth. Raw rubber production involves various stakeholders; however, literature focusing on the social impacts of raw rubber production and its supply chain has hereto been limited. Social life cycle assessment, a popular tool to assess the social impacts of a product or process and was deployed herein to assess the social profiles of three Sri Lankan raw rubber supply chains (crepe rubber, concentrated latex, and ribbed smoked sheets). The Social Hotspots Database v4 on Sima Pro v9.3 was used for the analysis. Results indicated that Governance and Labour rights & decent work had been affected in its supply chain of fertilizers due to Corruption and Freedom of association & collective bargaining issues, mainly in Belarus, and China. Proposed improvement options to address these touchpoints were found to be effective. For instance, if the importation of K-fertilizer shifted into low risk countries, overall social risks associated with Corruption and Freedom of association & collective bargaining in the supply chains could be reduced by ca. 36% and 25%, respectively. As a result, social risks in the aforesaid impact categories, i.e., Governance and Labor rights & decent work, were reduced by ca. 35-41% and ca. 17-20%, respectively. Such improvements may help positioning the Sri Lankan rubber industry in the sustainability-conscious-world rubber market. Further, the methodical hierarchy developed herein is suggested to adopt in any industry to measure social sustainability subjected to the relevant refinements to the supply chains.

We examined how combinations of corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities lead to high performance in Korean companies. This study addressed two related questions to expand our limited knowledge in this area. The first was what combinations of CSR activities achieve high performance. The second was to identify how CSR activities form an interdependent system, depending on different corporate situations. Korean Economic Justice Institute index data, from 2012 to 2018, were used with fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis, and the results revealed several effective CSR activity factor combinations under given strategies and management environments. Companies with high performance exhibit complementarity between social contribution, environmental management, fairness, and employee satisfaction. By contrast, companies with low corporate performance show no complementarity between relatively unrelated activity factors. For companies whose CSR activities lead to low financial performance, most of the causal pathways focused only on activities at the primary stakeholder level, with weak diversity of CSR activities’ combinations at the primary and secondary stakeholder levels. These results indicate not only the appropriateness of CSR activity factor combinations for companies’ strategy and management environment contexts, but also their effectiveness, and are expected to provide companies with significant implications for CSR activities.

This paper investigates if Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) reports published by a selected group of Nordic companies are aligned with the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) standards. To achieve this goal, several natural language processing, and text mining techniques were implemented and tested. We extracted strings, corpus, and hybrid semantic similarities from the reports and evaluated the models through the intrinsic assessment methodology. A quantitative ranking score based on index matching was developed to complement the semantic valuation. The final results show that Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) and Global Vectors for Word Representation (GloVE) are the best methods for our study. Our findings will open the door to the automatic evaluation of sustainability reports which could have a strong impact on the environment.

The present qualitative study delves into the sustainability practices within supply chain management, emphasizing insights garnered from leading global firms. With sustainability becoming an imperative across industries, understanding how top firms integrate sustainable practices within their supply chains offers valuable lessons for broader implementation. The investigation draws on interviews, case studies, and existing literature to identify key strategies, challenges, and outcomes associated with sustainable supply chain management. Findings reveal a comprehensive approach involving the adoption of green technologies, ethical sourcing, and stakeholder engagement, all of which contribute to enhanced environmental and social performance. The discussion highlights the critical role of leadership, innovation, and collaboration in driving sustainability, underscoring the need for continuous improvement and adaptation. Ultimately, the study concludes that while significant progress has been made, ongoing efforts and commitment are essential for achieving long-term sustainability goals in supply chain management.

This qualitative study explores consumer perceptions of supply chain sustainability and its impact on buying decisions. Through in-depth interviews and focus groups, the research investigates the multifaceted factors influencing consumer behaviors towards sustainable products. Findings reveal that environmental impact, social responsibility, transparency, economic considerations, and cultural influences are pivotal in shaping consumer attitudes. While consumers express strong motivations to support sustainability, practical barriers such as higher costs and limited availability often hinder consistent adoption of sustainable practices. Effective communication strategies, including transparency reports and sustainability certifications, emerge as crucial in bridging the gap between consumer intentions and actions. The study underscores the importance of aligning corporate sustainability initiatives with consumer expectations to build trust and foster sustainable consumption patterns. Insights suggest a need for targeted interventions and policy measures to address barriers and promote broader adoption of sustainable behaviors. By understanding and responding to consumer concerns, businesses can enhance their sustainability strategies and contribute to a more environmentally and socially responsible marketplace.

A significant number and range of challenges besetting sustainability can be traced to the actions and interactions of multiple autonomous agents (people mostly) and the entities they create (e.g., institutions, policies, social network) in the corresponding social-environmental systems (SES). To address these challenges, we need to understand decisions made and actions taken by agents, the outcomes of their actions, including the feedbacks on the corresponding agents and environment. The science of Agent-based Complex Systems—ACS science—has a significant potential to handle such challenges. The advantages of ACS science for sustainability are addressed by way of identifying the key elements and challenges in sustainability science, the generic features of ACS, and the key advances and challenges in modeling ACS. Artificial intelligence and data science promise to improve understanding of agents’ behaviors, detect SES structures, and formulate SES mechanisms.

This paper investigates the physical/virtual dynamics when constructing an immersive environ-ment for medieval courtyard houses in Historic Cairo. Using a VR Lab at a university campus, the paper analyzes a courtyard that symbolizes social resilience and community bonding at the newly rehabilitated Bayt Yakan. The courtyard is reconstructed as a Mixed Object through 3D documentation and scanning the space to develop a photogrammetry and VR experience. The results show that the sense of presence is perceived through a combination of factors and juxta-positions of the real and the virtual including: 1) architectural aesthetics, 2) intangible elements and 3) socio-cultural activities in space. Based on the pilot case study, the paper concludes with proposing a “Geospatial Framework for Immersive Environments and Social Sustainability” that is transdisciplinary, pluralistic and expansive in nature to encompass the multiple narratives of the contested past, and overlay the material and immaterial sustainable features embedded in historical contexts, where the Mixed Reality paradigm becomes an enabler for multiple voices, tools and mediums.

The corporate strategic planning of businesses in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) largely focuses on immediate financial performances with minimal credence to social sustainability. Thus, studies on the linkage between corporate governance and sustainability reporting have focused on developed economies. This study therefore investigated the role of institutional ownership in the impact of board committee characteristics on social sustainability reporting. The study involved strongly balanced panel data with 1,969 observations of 275 publicly listed non-financial firms in SSA within the timeframe of 2012 to 2021. Data was analyzed using STATA 14.1. The hypotheses were tested using the two-step system of the generalized method of moment (GMM) using the Arellano-Bond dynamic panel-data estimation method. The rate of social sustainability reporting was 39.4%. Relatively, Mauritius and South African firms had the most effective board committee characteristics and higher levels of social sustainability reporting. Institutional ownership had no significant effect on social sustainability reporting. Institutional ownership moderated the effect of sustainability committee independence and sustainability committee gender diversity on social sustainability reporting negatively. The paper presents a new perspective on corporate governance and social sustainability literature by examining the effect of institutional ownership on board committee characteristics and social sustainability reporting in SSA.

The textile and clothing (T&C) industry is not usually viewed as an exemplar of sustainable de-velopment and the circular economy, as the industry has hitherto made its products in linear fashion, with relatively little recycling of the finished goods. This article examines the industry’s approach to the core sustainability concept and the circular economy in particular, through a re-view of the available academic literature, evidence from corporate sustainability reports and websites, and feedback from an online survey of industry professionals. The role of digital technology deployment in engendering sustainability and the circular economy in the industry is also explored. The study finds that whilst sustainability is now firmly embedded at the strategic level in the vast majority of companies studied, attitudes towards the circular economy remain fickle. The use of digital technologies in support of sustainability objectives is also limited at present, but the article concludes that the need to meet compliance requirements and new cus-tomer perceptions of sustainability will speed the transition to circular economy activities, facili-tated by greater exploitation of digital technologies. Building upon the research findings, existing models and an initial conceptual framework, a simple operational model for initiating such a transition for small-to-medium sized enterprises in the T&C industry is put forward.

In this age of global warming, academics and policymakers are increasingly concerned about firm environmental sustainability success. Therefore, this study aims to investigate whether Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) performance impacts sustainability performance through the mediating effect of firm innovation. To this end, Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) was deployed to analyze data collected from the employees of manufacturing industries in an emerging economy like Bangladesh. The results revealed that ESG performance significantly enhances the innovation and sustainability performance of manufacturing industries, indicating that the higher the ESG performance of a firm, the greater its innovation and sustainability performance. Furthermore, the results confirmed that firm innovation performance fully mediates the relationship between ESG initiatives and sustainability performance. The findings of this study provide policymakers and industry authorities with valuable insight into the role of ESG and innovation performance in improving sustainability performance. Specifically, the study sheds knowledge on how firm ESG initiatives and innovation performance impact sustainability performance in the manufacturing sector of an emerging economy like Bangladesh.

This review article explores the convergence of virtual reality (VR) and architectural design from an inclusive lens. It underscores the crucial role of virtual reality (VR) in serving as a catalyst for the incorporation of social and cultural sustainability principles in architectural projects. The exploration is guided by inclusive design principles, which encompass several aspects such as accessibility, cultural sensitivity, diversity and inclusivity, user-centered design, and empathy. These concepts serve as the basis for further investigation into the potential of virtual reality (VR) technology to enhance and heighten these features within architectural design, therefore promoting the progress of social and cultural sustainability. The review article highlights the profound impact that virtual reality (VR) may have, going beyond mere visualisation to generate architectural experiences that are immersive, interactive, and empathetic. These experiences are designed to take into account diverse perspectives and needs.

Textile and clothing is one of the most important industrial sectors, not only due to the significant number of jobs generated, but also because it addresses one of the people’s fundamental needs (clothing). It is, however, a sector with a huge environmental impact, all over the world, and also an important social impact, especially in developing countries. Sustainability in the Textile & Clothing value chain is a known issue, concerning both environmental, and economical-social facets of sustainability. One way to improve sustainability in this sector is by measuring the environmental, economic and social impacts of value chain activities and, ultimately, computing an Environmental and Circular score for each batch of textile and clothing product, and an Economical and Social score for each involved firm, reflected in their products. The consumer will then have the opportunity and responsibility for selecting products with the least negative environmental, economical and social impact. This article presents the results of STVgoDigital project - PPS1, developed in Portugal with the aim of implementing the traceability of textile and clothing products, boosting sustainability in this sector, and preparing the ground for the implementation of the circular economy. More exactly, a blockchain-based textile and clothing value-chain traceability platform is presented, for tracing textile product lots and activities, along the value chain, classifying them with a score, which measures their environmental and social impact. The environmental, economic and social impact scores are based on a set of proposed indicators. The results are assessed through the presentation of a case study of a face towel (home textile) and a case study of a T-shirt (clothing).

Sustainable development can only be realised when the social, economic and environmental dimensions are considered altogether. Social capital and local wisdom offer important contributions to the development process and the capabilities of individuals and groups as development actors. This study analyses the role of social capital and local wisdom in managing business partnerships between farmers and palm oil plantation companies in North Konawe, Indonesia. Data were collected via in-depth interviews, field observations and focus group discussions and were analysed descriptively and qualitatively. Results underscore the importance of social capital and local wisdom in organising institutional programmes for strengthening palm oil business partnerships. Trust, social networks and participation negatively affect the sustainability of these partnerships, whilst local wisdom and social solidarity positively influence institutional strengthening. Inconsistency and lack of openness by companies can lead to a trust crisis that can threaten the sustainable operations of palm oil companies. Building a good cooperative commitment and maintaining collaboration play key roles in enhancing community welfare and increasing company profits. The social capital and local wisdom of farmer institutions in villages are expected to significantly contribute to the establishment of sustainable palm oil business partnerships.

In the current socio-economic context, pension systems have become a crucial topic in the agenda of governments and international bodies. In this paper, an empirical study regarding the economic and social sustainability of pension systems in Central and Eastern European Countries was performed. The goal of the research is to establish the sustainability of pension systems with econometric modeling techniques on three dimensions as the research hypotheses are revealed: first, by strengthening the financial soundness of pension systems; second, consolidating the economic environment of pension systems; third, increasing the degree of social security systems with a direct effect of reducing poverty. The results led to relevant insights emphasizing the need for more inclusive economic, financial, and social reforms. From a policy perspective, these findings could be a starting point for the enhancement of the financial adequacy and economic and social sustainability of pension systems in Central and Eastern European Countries. The econometric techniques in this study highlight those modern pensions systems that need to be addressed in a more complex and empirical context that must encompass the main technical aspects. The conclusions suggest that in the future it needs judicial, economic, and social adjustments for the enhancement of the financial soundness of the pension systems.

The main goal of the study is to assess the Decision criteria, and the determining factor for the sustainability of entrepreneurial startups in order to contribute towards social inclusion and capacity building. Both concepts are in the development phase and are the outcome of entrepreneurial ecosystem and individual behavior and traits. The current study observed the research problem as entrepreneurship and the entrepreneurial startups are the continuous phenomena required for every economy. The lack of an efficient ecosystem and incompetent trait of an entrepreneur drags the entrepreneurial startup to a failure. Therefore, an assessment on decision criteria and determining factors categorizing them with their importance may provide requisites to lead a successful entrepreneurial startup contributing to the social inclusion and capacity building. The study solved the research problem by statistical assessment of decision criteria and determining factors and categorizing them with their importance may provide requisites to lead a successful entrepreneurial startup. The research is built on research questions, objectives, conceptual model, and hypothesis which are tested based on the data collected. The collection of data was done through a survey questionnaire on a sample of established entrepreneurs. The study concludes that five components of decision criteria are Region, Competition, Funding Opportunities, Tax System, and Country Economic Situation, whereas the eight components Consciousness and Reliable, Pursuit Results, Flexibility, Stress Resistance, Skills Identification Exploitation Potential Market Opportunities, Leadership, Creativity and Innovation, and Delegation Decision Making of determining factor are required for a successful entrepreneurial startup to be able to work towards social inclusion and capacity building.

Since the beginning of the 21st century, Romanian migrants have become one of the most significant national groups doing agricultural work in Spain, initially coming via a temporary migration program and later under several different modalities. However, despite their critical importance for the functioning of Europe’s largest agro-industry, the study of this long-term circular mobility is still underdeveloped in migration and agriculture literature. Thanks to extensive fieldwork carried out in the provinces of Huelva and Lleida in Spain and in the counties of Teleorman and Buzău in Romania, this paper has two main objectives: first, to identify some of the most common forms of mobility of these migrants and second, to discuss whether this industrial agriculture, hugely dependent on migrant work, is socially sustainable. The case of Romanian migrants in Spanish agriculture will serve to show how a critical sector for the EU and for the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development of the United Nations, operates on an unsustainable model based on precariousness and exploitation.

Supplier selection (SC) product life cycle cost (SCPLCC) is an important consideration among corporations, SCPLCC problem has become associated with deciding how one supplier should be selected from possible alternatives. In this study, we applied two types of goal programming, multiobjective linear programming and revised multichoice goal programming to develop a PLCC-based concept to solve the SCPLCC problem and construct a decision-making tool for application to a case of supply chain management in a Taiwanese light-emitting diode company in the high-tech industry. Our study main contribution Company managers can easily use the two approaches of the SCPLCC model with different parameters to solve SCPLCC model problems. Finally, we comparing five models found RMCGP with weighted linear goal programming had an adequate effect for application to the PLCC concept for high-technology company; this cloud makes company decision–makers focus on low PLCC and select a better supplier in sustainable supply chains goal.

In the dynamic interplay between people and their physical environments, the Global South stands as a mosaic undergoing a multitude of transformative influences in architecture and urbanism where examining social sustainability becomes imperative. While prevailing attention remains on environmental and economic sustainability, this study addresses a persistent gap in the urban literature by focusing on the dynamic and manifold nature of social sustainability. Positioning itself within the context of sustainable development, the study links the pursuit of social aspects of sustainability with selected unique urban contexts from the Global South. Five cases that include Alexandria (Egypt), Tripoli (Libya), Basra (Iraq), Lilongwe (Malawi), and Accra (Ghana) are discussed through multi-layered investigations that involve attitude surveys, interviews, focus groups, participatory systematic observations, and behavioral mapping, engaging directly with inhabitants and stakeholders. Uncovering people-place narratives in the identified contexts, the cases are developed into five knowledge typologies that serve as practical tools for planning and design decision-making, policy formulation, and academic discourse. Discussions are conceived to demonstrate the transformative role people-place narratives play in fostering a more sustainable and equitable urban future. Conclusions are drawn to offer practical insights for stakeholders involved in various capacities in shaping the urban landscape of the Global South.

Pre-Western contact Hawaiʻi stands as a quintessential sustainability example of a large human population that practiced intensive agriculture, yet minimally displaced native habitats that comprised the foundation of its vitality. An explicit geospatial footprint of human-transformed areas across the pre-contact Hawaiian archipelago comprised less than 15% of total land area, yet provided 100% of human needs, supporting a thriving Polynesian society. A post-contact history of disruption of traditional Hawaiian land-use and its supplanting by Western land tenure and agriculture based on ranching, sugarcane, and pineapple, culminated in a landscape, in which over 50% of native habitats have been lost, while self-sufficiency has plummeted to 15% or less. Recapturing the ʻāina momona (productive lands) of ancient times can be accomplished through study of pre-contact agriculture, assessment of biological and ecological changes imposed on Hawaiian social-ecological systems, and conscious planned efforts to increase self-sufficiency and reduce importation. Impediments include the current tourism-based economy, competition from habitat-modifying introduced species, a suite of agricultural pests severely limiting traditional agriculture, and changes in climate rendering some pre-contact agricultural centers suboptimal. Modified agricultural methods will be required to counteract these limitations, and diversified agriculture to broaden the production base, without contributing to further degradation of native habitats.

The adoption of environmental conservation agriculture (ECA) in Nepal is aligned with the country's goal to achieve carbon neutrality by 2045, as ECA practices have been proven to effectively reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Nepal's agricultural sector faces numerous challenges, including labor shortages, climate change impacts, and the necessity for environmentally friendly farming methods, making the adoption of ECA practices even more crucial. This paper thus explored farmer perspectives on the sustainability of ECA practices in Namobuddha municipality, Nepal, which is renowned as a leading hub of organic farming. A cross-sectional survey was conducted, together with key informant interviews and onsite observations. By analyzing various farmer perspectives, the study presents an analytical framework that highlights the economic, environmental, and social pillars of ECA's sustainability. The findings underscore the significance of economic viability for farmers, as damages to crops and farm products negatively drive their perception of ECA sustainability. Conversely, factors such as increased agriculture-related income, favorable prices, and sustainable productivity positively shape farmers' perceptions. In terms of environmental sustainability, farmers prioritize enhancing the local and global environment, viewing their farming methods as climate-smart and actively working towards reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The study emphasizes the importance of strategic communication to effectively convey the benefits of ECA to rural communities. Overall, this research contributes to filling the knowledge gap concerning farmers' perceptions of ECA sustainability. The insights gained from this study have the potential to inform policy decisions and promote the widespread adoption of environmentally friendly farming practices in Nepal.

The textile and clothing (T&C) industry, despite its significant contribution to the European economy, is one of the most polluting industries globally. Therefore, the EU's Green Deal has identified the T&C sector as a strategic area for allocating public funding and transitioning towards a circular economy (CE). In this context, the “Circular Design for Natural Fibers” project, financed by the PNRR MICS “Made in Italy Circolare e Sostenibile” programme, focuses on enhancing the use of natural fibrous material, related by-products and waste from local production chains. In the research, a crucial aspect is the evaluation of the effectiveness of circularity through life cycle approaches, such as LCA, LCC, S-LCA and LCSA, for environmental, economic and social sustainability evaluation, respectively. A systematic review was carried out, to provide a synthesis of the available scientific evidence regarding the life cycle approaches in the international/national context within the production, processing, and post-consumer supply chains of natural fibers. The study identifies gaps in the literature on life cycle evaluation approaches for natural fibers. Specifically, the LCA approach appears preponderant compared to the others. The paper offers insights for researchers and professionals interested in improving the sustainability of natural fiber production processes and the evaluation of their overall sustainability.

Background (1) In the time of the 4th Industrial Revolution or Industry 4.0, a conglomerate of technical and social inventions, political contexts, socio-cultural circumstances, environmental policies, business models, and economic policies has emerged. Sustainability policy in theory and practice aims to deal with the effects of all these factors and to try to make decisions that ensure both social and economic development sustainably. The question is how to familiarize oneself with the current knowledge about the relationship between Industry 4.0 and sustainability?; (2) Methods: This research utilizes an automated content analysis method to analyses scientific journals, newspapers and magazines. The comparison of results of both research group shows that the scientific literature focuses more on changes in business models, production processes and technologies that enable sustainable development; (3) We found that the scientific literature focuses more on changes in business models, production processes and technologies that enable sustainable development. Newspapers and magazines articles write more about sustainable or green investment, sustainable standards and sustainable reporting. Newspapers and magazines articles write more about sustainable or green investment, sustainable standards and sustainable reporting. Newspapers, as well as some latest research journals, include articles of the COVID-19 outbreak and its effect on the economy and the environment. Indeed, the outbreak of the virus brings a new thought to the reorganization of the complex relationships between consumers, businesses and the state; (4) Conclusions: According to the comparison of the analyses of the results, it can is that the analyses of both types of literature, both scientific and professional, shows that there are common topics they write about, which are related to the field of clean production, emissions, renewable energy, climate change, sustainable investments and corporate sustainability. An urgent global issue that extends all over the world is the promotion of energy-saving technologies and reduction of carbon dioxide emissions.

This research investigated the effects of social isolation on frailty and health outcomes and tested whether these associations varied across different levels of frailty. We performed a multivariate analysis of data from the first wave of the FRéLE study among 1,643 Canadian older adults aged 65 years and over. We assessed social isolation using social participation, social networks, and support from various social ties, namely, friends, children, extended family, and partner. Frailty predicted disability, comorbidity, depression, and cognitive decline. Less social participation was associated with IADLs, depression, and cognitive decline. The absence of friends was associated with depression and cognitive impairment. Less social support from children and partner was related to comorbidity, depression, and cognitive decline. Overall, social isolation is linked to mental health, rather than physical health. The associations of having no siblings, receiving less support from friends, and participating less in social activities with ADL limitations, depression, and cognitive decline were higher among frail than pre-frail and robust older adults. This study corroborates the pivotal role of social connectedness, particularly the quality of relationships, on the mental health of older adults. Public health policies on social relationships are paramount to ameliorate the health status of frail older adults.

This study, which investigates the impact of foreign bank entry on the efficiency and sustainability of domestic banks in developing countries using a Meta-Frontier analysis to estimate efficiency scores, presents findings of significant importance to banking and finance. By incorporating financial, social, and environmental sustainability proxies—such as efficiency, loan portfolio composition, and macroeconomic conditions—this study assesses whether foreign competition enhances or undermines the long-term stability of domestic banking sectors. The results show that while foreign banks can improve financial efficiency, they may destabilize domestic banks, notably smaller or less capitalized institutions. Additionally, the findings suggest that banks with higher investments in SME lending and green projects demonstrate better social and environmental sustainability. Policymakers and financial institutions must consider these dual effects when promoting foreign bank entry.

The introduction of social commerce ushered in a new era in business-consumer interaction. As a result, more power has passed from the vendor to the buyer, primarily fueling e-commerce acceptance. As a result, understanding consumer behaviour in the context of social commerce adoption has become essential for businesses looking to persuade customers by using the power of social ties and support.Furthermore, such social ties will facilitate trust as the most promising benefit while reducing perceived risk, which has always been a critical problem with online commerce. This study proposes a paradigm for understanding the impact of social commerce on the stages of the consumer decision-making process: need recognition, information search, alternative evaluation, purchase decision, and post-purchase behaviour, with a focus on social support. In this respect, relevant literature in the subject of social commerce either (1) lacks an adequate explanatory model, (2) has a solid theoretical base, or (3) contains practically complex theories with insufficient empirical data. The research model applies the Social Commerce Constructs (SCC): recommendations and referrals, forums and communities, and ratings and reviews to study the respective influence on the consumer decision-making process phases. This paper aims to understand the influence of social commerce on an integrative model that incorporates all customer choice phases while expecting new knowledge. Furthermore, it is advised that this conceptual model be empirically verified to evaluate the practical consequences.

This study explores the current landscape of social value (SV) research in the construction industry, analyzing global trends and identifying future research directions. Using bibliometric analysis, research published in Elsevier Scopus database from 2013 to 2023 was extracted using the keywords "social value" AND "construction industry." Results indicate a focus on social value indicators, socioeconomic impacts, project management, innovative practices, and cross-sector collaborations. The study also reveals a lack of attention to SV in African countries' construction sectors. By highlighting research areas and identifying gaps, this study contributes to academic literature, suggesting the need for guidelines, particularly in developing countries, and advocating for further research on SV in the built environment and strategies for global social value creation.

Social connectedness connection is a core dimension of health and wellness among all populations, yet the experience of moving to, and living in, a new country makes social and community-level influences particularly salient for immigrants. We interviewed 38 Latino immigrants living in a nontraditional migration area to explore the social and community foundations of health and wellness. Illustrated in a model of socioecological connectednesssocial connection, Using hybrid (inductive/deductive) qualitative analysis, we identified seven themesdomains of social connection from the perspective of the interviewed participants: 1) Lens of the individual is a filter for the social world; 2) Immigrant experience colors everything; 3) Interpersonal support enhances quality of life; 4) Community belonging fosters a sense of connectedness; 5) Community capital boosts security; 6) Community navigation promotes integration; and 7) Social acceptance strengthens inclusion. In the healthcare field, we lack conceptual clarity of the distinct connectedness domains that drive positive health outcomes in immigrant populations. Social connection domains generated by participants are consistent with the scientific literature, but this study identifies the specific social factors that immigrants describe as most salient to their own health and wellness. Our community-generated understanding of socioecological connectednesssocial connection can be used by healthcare providers to reduce risks and build on assets that will improve the health of immigrants living in nontraditional migration areas. health. Additionally, our model of socioecological connectednessthese results might serve as a foundation for a quantitative measure that can be used by providers to more accurately and comprehensively assess connectedness social connection of their patients and by researchers to evaluate the effectiveness of community-level interventions for immigrants.

Human language and social cognition are two key disciplines that have traditionally been studied as separate domains. However, emerging research from detailed studies of comparative animal behavior, human social behavior, language acquisition in children, social cognitive neuroscience, and the cognitive neuroscience of language suggest that language and social cognition are two deeply interrelated capacities of the human species. For instance, recent developmental studies on the acquisition of language in infants and young children, draw attention to the important crucial benefits associated with several different aspects of social stimulation for youngsters, including the quantity and quality of linguistic input, dyadic infant/child-to-parent verbal and non-verbal social interactions, and other important social cues integral for facilitating language learning and social bonding. Studies of the adult human brain further suggest a high degree of specialization for sociolinguistic information processing, memory retrieval, and comprehension, suggesting the function of these regions may link language with social cognition and social bonding. In effect, the social brain and social complexity hypotheses may jointly help to explain how neurotypical children and adults learn language, why autistic adults and children exhibit simultaneous deficits in language and social cognition, and why nonhuman primates and other animals with significant computational abilities do not acquire the capacity for language. But perhaps most critically, the following article argues that this and related research will allow scientists to generate a holistic profile and deeper understanding of the healthy adult social brain, while developing more innovative and effective diagnoses, prognoses, and treatments for maladies and deficits also associated with the social brain.

In this study we were interested in the behaviors of individuals who preserve the social and organizational environment by ensuring sustainability. More specifically we are interested in allegiants behaviors. Numerous studies have highlighted the normative character of allegiance. To confer an object the status of social norm means to assign value (in terms of desirability and utility) to that object. Therefore we questioned the value attributed to allegiance. 170 employees were questioned on the desirability and utility they attribute to a future work colleague (future peer or future subordinate) starting from the answers the latter was supposed to have given to a questionnaire on allegiance. It was observed that desirability and utility make reference to two independent dimensions, utility being often more important. It was also noted there is greater severity assigned to endo-group targets (future peers) than to exo-group targets (future subordinates). Finally, it was noted there was not so much a valuation of allegiant targets, but rather a rejection of rebel targets, which raises the question of the bi-dimensionality of the valuation-devaluation process.

Social Economy institutions seek to provide answers to social problems, given that they naturally have a socially responsible mission. This study aims to answer the research question: how sustainable practices, namely environmental behaviour, have been adopted by Portuguese Private Social Solidarity Institutions (IPSS) with the purpose of contributing to Sustainable Development? To achieve this objective, qualitative research was carried out in 31 IPSS, which was framed within the scope of the TFA project (Theoretical framework for promotion of accountability in the social economy sector: the IPSS case). Semi-structured interviews were conducted, with a script based on the literature review, from May to July 2019, with those responsible for the management of these entities. A content analysis was conducted, using the NVivo12 Version 12.6.0 software, which enables data to be coded and categorised, reducing any researcher bias. The results indicate that most entities carry out activities of an environmental nature, related to the reuse of materials, the recycling of waste, the sale of materials for recycling, and user awareness. Several entities expressed financial limitations to the implementation of Environmental Management Systems and their accomplishment. However, the objections presented are not impossible to overcome, according to studies presented in other countries.

This research mapped significant social networks of victims of childhood sexual abuse, identifying relationships between childhood trauma and social bonds in adult life. Ten adult women, aged between 20 and 40 years, in psychiatric care for the consequences of trauma suffered in childhood participated in the research. For data collection, the map of significant social networks was used and analyzed through the structure, functions and attributes of the bonds. The network is composed of people from the Friendship, Family, Community, Work/Study and Health Teams group. The networks of friendships, family, co-workers or studies play a predominant role of emotional support, while the Health Teams also offer emotional support, but primarily provide clinical support in overcoming trauma and its consequences. The network of relationships has specific functions that maintain psychosocial integrity and help women to overcome the abuse suffered.

Social networks have become an ubiquitous aspect of adolescents' life, providing new ways to connect and communicate with peers. However, little is known about the impact of social net-works on adolescents' emotional intelligence (EI), a crucial skill for social and identity development. The aim of the present study is to explore the time spent and reasons for using social net-works and their relationship with emotional intelligence in adolescents and young adults (15-19 years). After signing informed consent, participants completed a battery of questionnaires offered via secure online form. The results showed that teenagers spend more than 3 h/day on Whatsapp, more than 2 h/day on Instagram and less on Facebook (26m per day); girls prefer to use Whatsapp and Instagram, boys opt for Facebook. Most participants use social media when bored and/or to communicate with friends. Moreover, time spent on social media has a relationship with stress management with some aspects of EI (assertiveness, self-actualization, optimism, etc.). EI and social desirability have a significant relationship, especially in the sphere of adaptability. Based on the results obtained, future perspectives and training are suggested with the aim of adapting to the constant changes in the new technological reality.

In this paper, we analyze data from the 2012 Encuesta de Integración Social y Salud (Social Integration and Health Survey) of the Instituto Nacional de Estadística (Spanish National Institute of Statistics) to obtain profiles created by combining disability, poverty and social exclusion. We hypothesize that the probability that people will experience social exclusion increases if they have a disability, chronic illness or limitation in conducting everyday activities, and that this probability is greater for women than for men. To conduct our analysis, we constructed a social exclusion model based on a series of social determinants that acts as a dependent variable. In this context, social exclusion is understood to go beyond the concept of financial poverty. We performed bivariate analyses, in which we calculated the Odds Ratios (OR) for certain variables considered to be predictors of social exclusion. We also performed a means comparison test and an ANOVA test to observe differences between individuals with recognized disability and those without. Finally, we conducted logistic regression analysis to determine which vulnerability profiles are most likely to experience a situation of social exclusion. We also discuss the limitations of our study, and suggest areas in, which the relationships between health, social exclusion and disability can be further investigated.

Background: Social Anxiety Disorder (SAD) is among the most common anxiety disorders worldwide with data largely emerging from the Euro-American and Pacific Rim populations. In contrast, there is a dearth of studies among the populations of Arabian Gulf countries including Oman. This study has two interrelated aims: (i) to explore the prevalence of SAD among Omani adults, and (ii) to tease out the links between sociodemographic factors and SAD in Oman. Methods: A cross-sectional study via an online survey was conducted among 1019 adult Omani nationals residing in Oman. The presence of SAD was assessed using the Arabic version of the Liebowitz Social Anxiety Scale (LSAS). Result: Nearly half the participants (45.9%, n=468) endorsed themselves as having features of SAD as defined by LSAS. In the multivariate logistic analysis, participants below 40 years of age were 1.6 times (OR=1.568, p=0.026) more likely to have SAD than those who were 40 and older. Women were 1.3 times (OR=1.348, p=0.038) more likely to endorse SAD than men. Participants who had secondary or undergraduate education were respectively 1.5 times (OR=1.45, p=0.014) and 2.5 times (OR=2.509, p<.001) to have SAD than who were postgraduates. Conclusion: The present data suggest that 45.9% of the participants reached the cut-off for case-ness in LSAS, which is high compared to reports from other populations. As online survey respondents tend to belong to similar demographics, the current results need not be representative of the Omani adult population, which calls for studies that adopt more inclusive survey methods.

Children's ability to adjust to the social rules and expectations in the educational environment is of major concern to researchers and practitioners alike. Accordingly, the main purpose of the present study was to examine predictors of children's social functioning in kindergarten with a specific focus on (a) maternal factors; and, (b) children's social cognition. Using a multi-method (self-reports and direct assessments), multi-informant (child, mother, teacher) design, we collected data from 306 kindergarten children and their mothers tapping the mother's social cognitions (general and child-related) and parenting style, and children's social cognition (social information processing) and functioning in kindergarten. We found direct associations between the mother and child's social cognitions, between the mother's authoritarian parenting style and her child's less competent social cognition and behavior, and between the child's social cognition and social functioning. Finally, as hypothesized, we found a number of interesting mediated effects. Most notably, we found that the association between the mother's social cognition (her tendency to attribute hostile intent to unknown others) and the child's social cognition (his/her tendency to generate less competent responses) is fully mediated by the mother's higher levels of authoritarian parenting style. The important theoretical and clinical implications of our findings are discussed.

Health and social needs exist along a dynamic continuum. Recognizing that health status is inextricably impacted by social determinants of health, community paramedicine has opportunities and a responsibility to reduce inequities. The objective of this scoping review was to investigate peer-reviewed and grey literature to explore how community paramedicine supports community needs along a health and social continuum. We conducted a scoping review of English language literature using the JBI Scoping Review methodology. We searched CINAHL, EMBASE, MEDLINE, Google Scholar, and organisational websites. 30 peer-reviewed and 13 grey literature articles met inclusion criteria. The findings describe the ways community paramedicine models evolved from minimising system pressures on emergency health services to addressing health and social needs. A key recommendation across the literature was the need to meaningfully engage communities early in program development to understand how best to implement and co-design integrated service models addressing specific community needs, though there was a lack of evidence to guide this approach. There is a notable lack of evidence pertaining to optimising technologies in program design and implementation. Results highlight opportunities to determine best practices for conducting holistic community needs assessments that include equitable stakeholder engagement and enhancing education to prepare paramedics for expanded roles. Community paramedicine provides opportunities to better meet the needs of structurally marginalised communities. There is a social responsibility and opportunity to engage communities to co-design service delivery, advance paramedic education, and enhance interprofessional collaboration to better support community needs and generate upstream solutions for individuals and communities

The present study focuses on the investigation of fatigue, social support and quality of life that characterizes social workers. Furthermore, the study aims to highlight the effect of demographic and occupational characteristics on the above factors. A total of 400 social workers with an average age of 39.05 years took part in the research. Most were women, single, residents of cities of more than 100,000, and health care workers. Participants were asked to answer online questionnaires (FAS for fatigue, MSPSS for social support and GHQ-28 for quality of life). From the analysis of the data, it was found that the level of fatigue of the social workers is at low levels. At the same time, the level of occurrence of negative symptoms is also low, with physical symptoms appearing more often than the rest. Participants receive a high level of support from their environment, and more so from the "significant other" in their life. Finally, it was found that the fatigue, social support and quality of life of social workers is affected by the age of the social workers, the total years of service, gender, marital status, place of residence, employer and position of responsibility.

The development of mobile internet technology has enabled companies to use social media for E-commerce. Some companies use personified images and languages to communicate with consumers in this context. How does personified communication affect consumer behavior in social commerce? Are consumers willing to accept this new form of communication under social commerce? To answer these questions, this paper explores consumers' willingness to take per-sonified communication in the context of social commerce. It investigates the role of cognitive needs in regulating the internal mechanism and proposes some suggestions for enterprises to improve social media communication. Specifically, this paper presents an improved model based on the TAM model. In our model, perceived interaction is introduced as a new independent variable, and cognitive need is added as a regulatory variable, which is more suitable for social commerce. We conduct a questionnaire survey on the Internet and analyze data using AMOS and SPSS. The results show that perceived usefulness and perceived interaction positively im-pact attitude, which influences consumers' willingness to purchase. Furthermore, the cognitive need as the regulatory variable significantly affects the influencing path from perceived use-fulness to attitude and purchase intention.

Customers make purchases through a multi-stage, omnichannel process, which now extends to social media. A loyalty loop can be achieved when an existing customer bypasses the initial stages –consider and evaluate– to make a direct purchase. However, to build that loyalty loop, a retailer must embrace techniques and software across social media marketing, social CRM, and omnichannel CRM. Reviewing literature from academic researchers and industry practitioners, this paper identifies emerging industry trends and discusses an illustrative case study of a UK digital retailer. The importance of social media for omnichannel retailing and building loyalty is highlighted and discussed.

We introduce a new, and quite general variational model for opinion dynamics based on pairwise interaction potentials and a range of opinion evolution protocols ranging from random interactions to global synchronous flows in the opinion state space. The model supports the concept of topic “coupling”, allowing opinions held by individuals to be changed via indirect interaction with others on different subjects. Interaction topology is governed by a graph that determines interactions. Our model, which is really a family of variational models, has, as special cases, many of the previously established models for the opinion dynamics. After introducing the model, we study the dynamics of the special case in which the potential is either a tent function or a constructed bell-like curve. We find that even in these relatively simple potential function examples there emerges interesting behavior. We also present results of preliminary numerical explorations of the behavior of the model to motivate questions that can be explored analytically

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) has become increasingly important for companies in recent years. On the one hand, regulatory frameworks require the disclosure of measures for sustainable management. On the other hand, for long-term corporate success, stakeholders must be strategically engaged in the dialog on sustainability aspects. Social media, and Twitter in particular, offer the potential to foster a meaningful stakeholder dialogue on CSR topics. Due to Elon Musk's acquisition in the fall of 2022, this strategic disruption provides an opportunity to systematically capture the platform's past activities and strategies to synthesize practical information that can guide Twitter usage decision making and be used for research to serve as the basis for future comparative longitudinal studies of changes in usage. We conducted a literature review including 42 papers to contribute to the body of evidence on CSR communication strategies on Twitter across industries and countries by deriving interdisciplinary suggestions for strategic CSR-related stakeholder management. Results cover relevant CSR topics, prioritized stakeholder groups for CSR communication on Twitter and successful communication strategies for companies to obtain beneficial results, such as generating social media capital. The results contribute to the strategic planning and implementation of CSR stakeholder management on Twitter and offer starting points for future studies on social media mining and CSR communication strategies.

The concept of a Social License to Operate (SLO) has become increasingly important in the sustainability literature in recent years. Having its origins in the business discourse of the mining industry with respect to limiting opposition to mining projects, the notion of a social contract above and beyond legal requirements has since become applied across a number of different industries. Despite the concepts adoption confusion exists over the practices and outcomes of SLO, and particularly the nature of engagement. Given this situation it is surprising that not more attention to the role of marketing, and social marketing in particular, in operationalizing the concept. The paper discusses the potential of social marketing to contribute to SLO. Economic, political and social relations are complex in SLO and exchange is intricate in such relational environments. A community-based social marketing orientation is proposed as a means to improve exchange relations and enhance engagement. Seven models of SLO related social marketing models are discussed with community-based social marketing and adaptive co-marketing models being regarded as the most positive for the achievement of an SLO. Potential barriers to adoption of these approaches are noted.

The role of Social Media Marketing (SMM) in marketing strategies is rapidly growing. Because the use of social media is growing, the industry of SMM will grow bigger in the coming years; the pace of this growth is faster than ever. To survive in the modern competitive world, effective use of SMM for a firm is a must; for that, every SMM channel needs to be used to its full potential. For a marketing campaign to be effective, there is a need for some metrics to measure the success of the SMM campaign. These metrics measure if the campaign is successfully implemented or not. This would help firms understand the market, gain a competitive advantage, and ultimately get a positive impact on the overall business. This study categorizes SMM strategy into 4 dimensions and associates 10 broad categories of SMM metrics to these dimensions. The proposed model of this study suggests the application of Social Media Analytics (SMA) ineffective use of metrics to measure SMM campaigns. There are so many SMA Tools available for free and time-efficient data analysis that can lead to faster and better results than manual analysis. Following this model, the importance of SMA tools in devising an effective SMM strategy is highlighted. The implication of this research is towards a better understanding of the application of SMA for any firm to have a solid SMM Strategy, especially small and medium-sized enterprises that have limited resources.

This study examined the connection between teenage social skill development and social media use, with an emphasis on both male and female participants. Data were gathered from 101 teenagers using a snowball sampling technique in descriptive survey research. The purpose of the study was to investigate the relationship between social skill development and social media usage, as well as the frequency and intensity of social media use. The results showed that there was no statistically significant difference (ꭕ2 =1.983, p < .05, .01) in the amount of time male and female teenagers spent on social media. Furthermore, there were no statistically significant differences (t=1.29, p > α) in the impact of social media on the development of social skills between genders. Gender did not appear to be a significant impact (ꭕ2 =1.143, p > α) in the way social media affected the development of social skills, even though a higher number of females saw more significant advances in social skills, especially at higher levels of influence. The study also revealed a stronger correlation between increased social skill improvement and moderate social media use, especially in the "more than one hour" category. Excessive use, such as spending the entire day online, did not, however, considerably aid in the development of social skills. Overall, the results indicate that, when used moderately, social media can typically improve teenage social skills, with little variation in the effects observed between boys and females.

This article is an early draft on a proposed alternative to the current Marxist mode of thought; one that seeks to reject the generally ill-conceived and dogmatic proposals formulated by Marx in favour of another predicated on the more unwavering emotional ideals of the philosophy that preceded it. It eliminates that dogmatic mode in favour of a wholly social society, one that is founded upon the Marxist superstructure and intends hence to capture that humanity and re-form particularly economic principles that are used to construct the utopia into what is instead an entirely socially idealised frame of living.

Knowledge of the motivations of managers to practice Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is a critical issue for those who promote its adoption. The understanding of these reasons is complicated by the fact that there are different ways of defining this responsibility, raising the question of whether there is any relationship between reasons for adopting it and how to define it. To address this issue, a classification of these reasons was constructed and related to a classification of the different ways of defining CSR. A self-administered questionnaire was applied to a non-probability sample of Social Responsibility managers, which included indicators for both classifications. It was found that these managers present all types of motives, with proactive outweighing reactive motives and that there is a significant degree of correlation between the ways of defining CSR and the reasons for doing so. This suggests that managers present coherence in their objectives (motives) and means (practices of Social Responsibility.

In this research, we are attempting to review the relationship between users' models of using internet and bonding social capitals in Iran. The theoretical framework of the research are based on theoretical approaches of Dearnly and Feder, Velleman, Katz in the field of internet and models of using it and views of Putnam, Woolcock regarding social capital. The method used in this research is a qualitative – quantitative mixed method and the sampling method which has been used in the qualitative method is the purposive sampling method (theoretical sampling) and in the quantitative method, a combination of clustering, systematic and stratified sampling method in proportion with age and gender has been used. The statistical population of all persons who are 15 years old and more in Kerman city has been estimated to be 515114 persons in 2019 and the research sample has been estimated to be about 400 persons. Research results indicate that the rate of citizens' usage of internet in Kerman city is very low (less than 5 hours per week). Other results of the research indicate that regarding the model based on information associated with news, mostly filtered and unpermitted news sites such as VOA, BBC and other networks have been used. Research data regarding social identity is indicative of formation of identity evolutions in the contemporary society of Iran. The results of the path model test of the research indicate that news and economic information based models have about (0.11) direct and positive impact and ethnic identity has a direct and positive impact (0.189) and group identity has about (-0.131) impact and entertainment based model has about (0.130) impact on social capital. The results of variables' indirect impacts have also been expressed in the research

The present high-tech landscape has allowed institutes to undergo digital transformation in addition to the storing of exceptional bulks of information from several resources, such as mobile phones, debit cards, GPS, transactions, online logs, and e-records. With the growth of technology, big data has grown to be a huge resource for several corporations that helped in encouraging enhanced strategies and innovative enterprise prospects. This advancement has also offered the expansion of linkable data resources. One of the famous data sources is social media platforms. Ideas and different types of content are being posted by thousands of people via social networking sites. These sites have provided a modern method for operating companies efficiently. However, some studies showed that social media platforms can be a source for misinformation at which some users tend to misuse social media data. In this work, the ethical concerns and conduct in online communities has been reviewed in order to see how social media data from different platforms has been misused, and to highlight some of the ways to avoid the misuse of social media data.

Social capital creates a synergy that brings many benefits to members of a community. Thus, the main objective of this article was to examine whether social capital can improve a society's food security. If yes, how? To answer these questions, a systematic literature review was conducted using the Prisma approach. The output of this method led to finding 39 related articles. Precise studying these articles illustrated that social capital improves food security through two mechanisms of knowledge sharing and product sharing (i.e., sharing food products). It revealed that social capital through improving the food security pillars (i.e., food availability, food accessibility, food utilization, and food system stability) affects food security. In other words, the interaction among the members of the community results in sharing food products and information among community members, and this facilitates food availability and access to food. There are many shreds of evidence in the literature that sharing food and food product among the community member decreases household food security and provides the healthy nutrition to the vulnerable families and improve the food utilization pillar of food security. In addition, it is disclosed that belonging to the social networks increases the resilience of the community members and decreases the vulnerability of the community that subsequently strengthens the stability of a food system. This study contributes to the common literature on food security and social capital by providing a conceptual model based on the literature. In addition to researchers, policymakers can use the finding of this study to provide solutions to address food insecurity problems.

(1) To analyse the potential association between school social support CECSCE and school social climate CASSS and experiences of dating violence among adolescents in Europe; (2) Cross-sectional design. We recruited 1,555 participants age 13-16 from secondary schools in Spain, Italy, Romania, Portugal, Poland and UK. The analysis in this text concerns student with dating experience (n=993) (57.2% of girls and 66.5% of boys). The association of the exposure to physical and/ or sexual dating violence, control dating violence and fear was measured by calculating the prevalence ratios (PR) and their 95% confidence intervals (CI), estimated by Poisson regression models with robust variance. All the models were adjusted by country and by sociodemografic variables; (3) The results show that the average values of all types of social support are significantly lower in young people who have suffered any type of dating violence or were scared of their partner. The likelihood of suffering physical and/or sexual dating violence decreased when CECSCE increased [PR (CI95%): 0.96 (0.92; 0.99)]. In the same way, the likelihood of fear decreased when CASSS classmates increased [PR (CI95%): 0.98 (0.96; 0.99)]; (4) There is an association between school social support and school social climate and experiences of dating violence among adolescents in Europe. Our results suggest that in the prevention of dating violence, building a supportive climate at schools and building / using the support of peers and teachers should be important.

The aim of the present research to identify the differences between the social acceptance, attention, and emotional and social loneliness feeling in women suffering from Alzheimer's and normal. The sample was analyzed in this study included 39 women age 51 to 69 years with the scope of that 19 of them with Alzheimer's disease (AD) and 18 people had normal cognitive function and healthy in the city of Gorgan in the winter 1395 in the study. Identification of Alzheimer's sufferers and healthy based on the diagnosis of the physician and cognitive status questionnaire (SPMSQ) and they were asked to answer the social acceptance of the scale questionnaire Marlow and Craven, affective and social adults alone feel scale (SELSA-S), Spotlight questionnaire (FAQ). The data using analysis of variance, multivariate factor test method (MANOVA) were studied. The results of this test indicate that it is totally focused attention between petty scale, the Spotlight focused on the notion of social acceptance of social interaction and social-emotional feeling lonely scale in women suffering from Alzheimer's and normal according to the analysis of the one-way variance of a significant difference in the context of manova level (P < 0.001). But in the other scale retail spotlight focused on his research, a significant difference was not observed. According to the results of the research in general can be found stating that to provide family-centered care and the implementation of the health-welfare interventions by relevant organs with different educational, supportive, emotional and consultation approaches, can be effective on health promotion of public health and the actual need in the community.

Horses’ ability to adapt to new environments and to acquire new information plays an important role in handling and training. Social learning in particular would be very adaptive for horses as it enables them to flexibly adapt to new environments. In the context of horse handling, social learning from humans has been rarely investigated but could help to facilitate management practices. We assessed the impact of human demonstration on spatial problem-solving abilities in horses using a detour task. In this task, a bucket with a food reward was placed behind a double-detour barrier and horses (n = 16) received a human demonstration or no demonstration. Horses were allocated to two test groups of 8 horses each, which experienced the two treatments in a counterbalanced order. We found that horses did not solve the detour task faster with human demonstration. However, both test groups improved rapidly over trials. Our results suggest that horses prefer to use individual rather than social information when being confronted with a spatial problem-solving task.

The social criteria of sustainable development have remained underexplored. Moreover, a large number of green building assessment tool and social sustainability documentations have been developed which, has had a direct impact on social criteria issues, but there seems to be a substantial gap in the study of social criteria in green building assessment tools. In examining the problem facing social sustainability, taking into consideration social sustainability in sustainable development reviews and green building assessment tool towards social aspects. This paper through analysis identified a centripetal conceptual framework composed of seven key components equity, education, participation & control, social cohesion, health & safety, accessibility & satisfaction, and cultural values. The interpretation of the social sustainability in green building assessment tool would impact building practitioners towards implementing social criteria in GBAT. The aim was to identify social categories as well as consider a starting point for the development of an effective social criteria assessment tool for green building.

Social media platforms have been entirely an undeniable part of the lifestyle for the past decade. Analyzing the information being shared is a crucial step to understanding human behavior. Social media analysis aims to guarantee a better experience for the user and risen user satisfaction. For deriving any further conclusion, first, it is necessary to know how to compare users. In this paper, a hybrid model has been proposed to measure Twitter profiles’ similarity and quantifies the likeness degree of profiles by calculating features considering users’ behavioral habits. For this, first, the timeline of each profile has been extracted using the official TwitterAPI. Then, in parallel, three aspects of a profile are deliberated. Behavioral ratios are time-series-related information showing the consistency and habits of the user. Dynamic time warping has been utilized to compare the behavioral ratios of two profiles. Next, the audience network is extracted for each user, and for estimating the similarity of two sets, Jaccard similarity is used. Finally, for the Content similarity measurement, the tweets are preprocessed respecting the feature extraction method; TF-IDF and DistilBERT for feature extraction are employed and then compared using the cosine similarity method. Results have shown that TF-IDF has slightly better performance; therefore, the more straightforward solution is selected for the model. Similarity level of different profiles. As in the case study, a Random Forest classification model was trained on almost 20000 users revealed a 97.24% accuracy. This comparison enables us to find duplicate profiles with nearly the same behavior and content.

Delay-tolerant networks (DTN) is an approach to deal with scarce network connectivity found in sparse mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs) which makes the problem of routing messages a challenging task. DTNs have find their usefulness in many challenging environments such as tactical networks, underwater sensor networks, wildlife monitoring, disaster recovery etc. Pocket Switched Networks (PSNs) have emerged as a new application of the delay tolerant networks where network nodes are computing devices carried by humans. Hence, the study of how humans interact in their day-to-day life, the places they visit frequently, the people they meet frequently, the social groups in which they participate on regular basis etc. can help improve routing process in PSNs. This type of routing inspired from the way humans interact with each other is referred to as social based routing and had been a recent topic of research in the field of DTNs. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of the various social-based algorithms that have been designed for Delay Tolerant Networks.

Introduction: The care of dependent people is eminently family-oriented, and often, there is a high level of dedication to this family care. Constant and continuous care leads to a series of negative psychological consequences. Social support has been related to improved mental health in family caregivers. We found heterogeneous results regarding the relationship between the types of social support received and the perceived level of support. In addition, to our knowledge, no reviews analyze this relationship among family caregivers. Therefore, we aimed to systematically syn-thesize the relationships between perceived and received social support in informal caregivers. Methodology: We have carried out a quantitative systematic review with meta-analysis, regis-tered in PROSPERO (id: CRD42023470047); the systematic search was carried out in the following databases: PubMed, CINAHL, PsycINFO, and Scopus, until November 2023. After the selection and review of the results, 12 studies were obtained, two of which were eliminated due to a high risk of classification bias. Regarding the results, a medium size positive statistical association was found (r = 0.43). The results were consistent, accurate, and robust. The Trim and Fill test showed a vari-ation of 7%. Subgroup analysis indicated no differences in the age group of the people cared for (adults or children), selection bias, and confounding bias. In conclusion, perceived social support is related to more social support received by family caregivers.

In 2023, the World Economic Forum reported the existence of high-severity global risks in both the short and long term, including climate change, natural disasters and biodiversity loss. In response, Clive L. Spash, a scholar specializing in ecosocial issues, has proposed a paradigm shift that considers the interconnection between ecological, economic, and social challenges, advocating for approaches that go beyond the positivistic approach of orthodox economics. He refers to this approach as Social Ecological Economics (SEE), a school of thought that has received limited attention, evident from the scarcity of publications on the subject. In light of this, the objective of this paper is to provide an overview of the key elements that define Social Ecological Economics as an alternative field within ecological thought. To achieve this, a literature review was conducted, employing open and in vivo coding using Atlas.ti 9 software. The findings identify the core components of Social Ecological Economics, organized into categories such as background, characteristics, dimensions, problems, criticisms, foundations, and proposals. These categories highlight the distinctive identity of this school. As this study is exploratory in nature, a future research agenda is proposed to further examine the relevance of this approach in tackling pressing global issues.

Anxiety in older adults is a prevalent yet under-recognized condition associated with significant societal and individual burdens. This study used a machine learning approach to compare the relative importance of 57 risk and protective factors for anxiety symptoms in a population-representative sample of middle-aged and older European adults (N = 65,684; ages 45–103 years; 55.7% women; 15 countries represented). Results revealed loneliness and self-rated poor health as primary risk factors (Nagelkerke R2 = .272), with additional predictive contributions from country of residence, functional limitations, financial distress, and family care burden. Notably, follow-up analysis showed that none of 16 social network variables were associated with loneliness; rather, cohabitating with a partner/spouse was most strongly associated with reduced loneliness. Further research is needed to elucidate directional associations between loneliness and anxiety (both general and sub-types). These findings underscore the imperative of addressing loneliness for mitigating anxiety and related mental health conditions among aging populations.

This article presents the development of a Faith-Informed Advocacy Model that integrates faith-based principles and values into advocacy efforts within Christian social work. Drawing from the intersection of Christian ethics and social work principles, this model provides a framework for Christian social workers to engage in advocacy work that is grounded in their faith and guided by ethical principles. The article includes case studies that illustrate the application of the model in real-world scenarios.

Social networks are experiencing great popularity, with Instagram currently being the most intensively used network. On these platforms, users are continuously exposed to self-relevant information that fosters social comparisons. A distinction is made between ability-based and opinion-based comparison dimensions. To experimentally investigate the influence of these comparison dimensions on users' subjective well-being, an online exposition experiment (N = 409) was conducted. In a preliminary study (N = 107), adequate exposition stimulus material was selected in advance. The results of the main study indicated that exposition of ability-related social comparisons in the context of social media elicited lower well-being than exposition of opinion-related social comparisons. Theoretical and practical implications of the findings were discussed and suggestions for future work were outlined.

Cost-effective community engagement is needed to address causes of mental illness related to social issues (i.e. isolation, stigma and lack of purpose) that are typically outside the scope of healthcare. This pilot study evaluated the relationship between clinical healthcare resources and a community-based social engagement organization in a medium-sized community in the midwestern US. Analyses were based on a retrospective longitudinal comparison of clinical visit frequency from two cohorts that joined the Momentum Center for Social Engagement (MC) and either frequently participated (Engaged; n = 9) or had extenuating circumstances limiting participation (Non-engaged; n = 3). The frequency of >1800 visits to the member’s primary mental healthcare provider were compared during the period from November 2016 - May 2021. Engaged MC members reduced frequency of regular visits to their primary mental healthcare provider by 50%, while Non-engaged MC members maintained clinical visit frequency. The financial value of reduced healthcare visits and associated wellbeing improvements was estimated to be $1.0 million, 95% CI: [$0.6-1.4 million], or roughly four times the budget received by the MC from the healthcare provider. Thus, the MC appears to be a valuable approach to improving mental health in conjunction with existing community healthcare services. Clinical implications include considering the unique MC-style community-based support as a component of practice.

(1) Background: Loneliness, little studied in Nursing Homes (NHs), can affect physical and mental health. We aimed to verify the prevalence of loneliness in 5 NHs and its associated factors. (2) Methods: Cross-sectional study. Older adults aged 65 or over with preserved cognitive status were included. The De Jong Gierveld Loneliness Scale was used to assess overall, social, and emotional loneliness; sociodemographic and health-related variables were collected. The chi-square (or Fisher’s) test and logistic regression were used for bivariate and multivariate analysis respectively. (3) Results: The final sample consisted of 65 participants (81.5% female) with a mean age of 84±7.13. Prevalence of overall loneliness was 70.7% (95%CI:58.2-81.4), social loneliness 44.6% (95% CI: 33.1-56.6) and emotional loneliness 46.2% (95% CI: 34.5–58.1). Overall loneliness was associated with lower perceived quality of life (Odds Ratio-OR= 5.52, 95% CI:1.25-24.38) and NH with state subsidized places (OR=0.19, 95% CI: 0.05-0.74); social loneliness with having 0-1 children (OR=0.25, 95% CI: 0.08-0.77), and emotional loneliness with depression (OR=4.54, 95% CI: 1.28-16.08) and urinary incontinence (UI) (OR=4.65, 95% CI: 1.23-17.52). (4) Conclusions: Loneliness was present in almost 71% of residents and was associated with the type of NH and poorer quality of life, emotional loneliness with depression and UI and social loneliness with having less than 2 children.

COVID-19 has been a global healthcare concern impacting multiple aspects of individual and community wellness. As one moves forward with different methods to reduce the infection and mortality rates, it is critical to continue to study the impact that national and local ‘social distancing’ policies have on the daily lives of individuals. The aim of this study was to examine loneliness in relation to risk assessment, measures taken against risks, concerns, and social media use, while adjusting for sociodemographic variables. The cross-sectional study collected data from 3469 individuals from USA, UK, Norway, and Australia. Loneliness was measured with the de Jong Gierveld Loneliness Scale. Multiple linear regression was used in the analysis of associations between variables. The results showed that concerns about finances were more strongly associated with social loneliness, while concerns about the future was more strongly associated with emotional loneliness. Longer daily time spent on social media was associated with higher emotional loneliness. In conclusion, pandemic-related concerns seem to affect their perceptions of loneliness. While social media can be used productively to maintain relationships, and thereby prevent loneliness, excessive use may be counterproductive.

This paper reports on in-depth qualitative interviews conducted with 69 disabled people in England and Scotland, and with 28 key informants from infrastructure organisations in the voluntary and statutory sectors, about the impact of COVID-19, and measures taken to control it. Participants were recruited through voluntary organisations. As with everyone, the Pandemic has had a huge impact: we discuss the dislocations it has caused in everyday life; the failures of social care; the use of new technologies; and participants’ view on leadership and communication. We conclude with suggestions for urgent short term and medium term responses, so that the United Kingdom and other countries can respond better to this and other pandemics, and build a more inclusive world.

Abstract The aim of our study is to analyse the perception of the families and concerned social workers. The research was conducted in an underprivileged and disadvantaged microregion in North Hungary. The main focus was the perception on the available health, educational, child welfare and social services and supports. The starting point was to enquire the target group’s knowledge of these services. The study examines the extent to which social work is able to provide support to disadvantaged, marginalized families with children, and the way how the dysfunctional operation of the system contributes to the perpetuation of the clients’ life conditions. Analysing the quality of these services and supports is crucial to understand the social mobility chance of the children living in this microregion. The results show that without capability and talent development for the children and given the lack of welfare services, the mobility chance and opportunities of these families are extremely low in Hungary.

In this age of Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, there is rapidly growing interest in understanding network-enabled opinion dynamics in large groups of autonomous agents. The phenomena of opinion polarization, the spread of propaganda and fake news, and the manipulation of sentiment is of interest to large numbers of organizations and people. Whether it is the more nefarious players such as foreign governments that are attempting to sway elections or it is more open and above board, such as researchers who want to make large groups of people aware of helpful innovations, what is at stake is often significant. In this paper, we review opinion dynamics including the extensions of many classical models as well as some new models that deepen understanding. For example, we look at models that track the evolution of an individual’s power, that include noise, and that feature sequentially dependent topics, to name a few. While the first papers studying opinion dynamics appeared over 60 years ago, there is still a great deal of room for innovation and exploration. We believe that the political climate and the extraordinary (even unprecedented) events in the sphere of politics in the last few years will inspire new interest and new ideas. It is our aim to help those interested researchers understand what has already been explored in a significant portion of the field of opinion dynamics. We believe that in doing this, it will become clear that there is still much to be done.

This study examines the relationship of fear of missing out (FOMO) with heavy social networking among Turkish university students (aged 17 - 55). The perception of the possible role of parental supervision on online activities is also investigated. Factor analysis of FOMO scale led us to evaluate the construct under two dimensions as (1) fear of missing experience and (2) fear of missing activity. The results revealed that fear of missing activity increases social media intrusion while fear of missing experience is found to have no significant effect. The reverse relationship is also valid: an urge to use social media predicts fear of missing out (activity and experience). Fear of missing experience is associated with problematic social media use (PSMU) and a high desire to use social media. The results additionally demonstrate that students aged 30 and older believe more in the requirement of parental control than those aged 17-22.

Apart from their obvious educational mission, public schools provide health, psychological, emotional, and social development grounding for students. Thus, the educational system is special in that it combines multiple integrated responsibilities and duties beyond the scope of any other social welfare program. As such, social workers are a very important constituent of this system, and they ostensibly serve to attend to the wellbeing of students while ensuring educational system performance. In light of this extremely steep set of demands, this work assesses and compares social workers’ authentic roles in UAE schools during and after the COVID-19 pandemic so that we may contribute to the improvement of educational systems worldwide. The results are nuanced and will better illuminate the important capabilities of social workers in the continually changing educational system, as well as the challenges they face and ameliorate during emergency scenarios.

Many people with enduring mental health difficulties (EMHD) have reduced social connections and subsequent experiences of isolation and loneliness. This paper outlines the development and trial of a manualised social-identity-based group therapy intervention to increase social connection and develop social skills to build connections outside of healthcare settings. This intervention was developed in line with the quality intervention development (6SQuID) methodology. The paper describes initial data from a feasibility study (which was ceased prematurely due to COVID-19 restrictions). Semi-structured outcome interviews were conducted with the participants and analysed using thematic analysis. Uptake, retention and acceptability of participants was high. Four primary themes were identified across the dataset: Therapeutic Process, Social Identity, Generic Components of Group Therapy and Impact of COVID-19. Participants experienced positive changes in their social behaviour, mood and avoidance. Some were unsure of the concept of social identity while reporting positive changes. A theoretically coherent manualised treatment was developed and tested on a small scale. This study supports social identity-based CBT groups as a potentially effective way of increasing social connection in those with EMHD. Social identity theory supported participants to positively integrate an area of potential social threat into their self-concept and may offer a positive addition to current psychological interventions

This paper analyzes the relationship between corporate social responsibility (CSR) and social impact within the oil industry in an emerging market (Peru). Following the emerging literature on the social impact field, and using the case study methodology, the findings show that the expected positive relationship is diverse depending on several factors. Specifically, the results reveal that companies must focus on community and environmental responsibility, together with stakeholders' involvement to achieve social impact. However, when companies are weak in any of the previous factors, then the social impact is only partially accepted or even withdrawn.

The Social Economy (SE) emerges as an interesting alternative to deal with social problems that often cannot be met by the services provided by the State. However, one of the concerns relates to the ability of these institutions to meet the demands of stakeholders concerning accountability. In this sense, the present work aimed to determine if the IPSS are prepared to meet the management requirements by increasing their accountability. For that purpose, we conducted qualitative research, with an exploratory focus, with 31 Portuguese Private Social Solidarity Institutions (IPSS). The interviews took place between June and July 2019, with those responsible for managing the entities. The interviews were guided on a semi-structured script based on the literature review. After Content Analysis, it was found that, in most of the institutions interviewed, the board does not use management tools, such as performance analysis, social impact assessment, strategic planning and quality management systems, even recognising the importance of using them. The fact is due to the lack of access or knowledge about its use. In addition, the majority of the IPSS interviewed showed concern about the transparency and ethics of managers. Current strategic management practices are remarkably targeted at companies in the for-profit sector and can compromise the principle of investments in human and social issues. Thus, the introduction of new activities can further reinforce the pressure felt by these institutions in carrying out operational activities.