scholarly journals Advancing STEM-Based Business Sustainability: Mending the Curricular Gap

2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 82-93
Author(s):  
Elizabeth L. Petrun Sayers ◽  
Christopher A. Craig ◽  
Susan Gilbertz ◽  
Song Feng ◽  
Rita T. Karam ◽  
...  

Businesses are increasingly facing economic, social, and environmental sustainability challenges. Science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) are needed to address business sustainability needs, yet such competencies are noticeably absent from academic literature and business curricula. To mend the curricular gap, we make the case for developing cross-disciplinary STEM-based business sustainability curricula that enhance students’ sustainability literacy and cognitive abilities related to STEM and sustainability. A literature review is provided that documents curricular gaps specific to STEM and sustainability in the academic literature and in business sustainability program offerings. We then present a framework that can be used to integrate STEM and sustainability across the curricula and to evaluate curricular implementation. This review provides timely and relevant information that can help business management educators, instructors, and administrators justify, design, develop, implement, and evaluate STEM-based business sustainability curricula.

Author(s):  
Marc J. Stern

Social science theory for environmental sustainability: A practical guide makes social science theory accessible and usable to anyone interested in working toward environmental sustainability at any scale. Environmental problems are, first and foremost, people problems. Without better understandings of the people involved, solutions are often hard to come by. This book answers calls for demonstrating the value of theories from the social sciences for solving these types of problems and provides strategies to facilitate their use. It contains concise summaries of over thirty social science theories and demonstrates how to use them in diverse contexts associated with environmental conflict, conservation, natural resource management, and other environmental sustainability challenges. The practical applications of the theories include persuasive communication, conflict resolution, collaboration, negotiation, enhancing organizational effectiveness, working across cultures, generating collective impact, and building more resilient governance of social-ecological systems. Examples throughout the book and detailed vignettes illustrate how to combine multiple social science theories to develop effective strategies for environmental problem solving. The final chapter draws out key principles for enhancing these efforts. The book will serve as a key reference for environmental professionals, business people, students, scientists, public officials, government employees, aid workers, or any concerned citizen who wants to be better equipped to navigate the social complexities of environmental challenges and make a meaningful impact on any environmental issue.


Author(s):  
Jonathan M. Casper ◽  
Brian P. McCullough ◽  
Danielle M. Kushner Smith

Political ideology is one of the most powerful predictors of perceptions about environmental sustainability and related behaviors. The purpose of this study was to investigate how sport fans’ sustainability-specific values, perceptions, and norms related to awareness, engagement, and influence of USA collegiate sport sustainability efforts based on political affiliation, accounting for age and gender. Data were collected using an online survey distributed to season ticket holders after the 2019 college football season that featured three sponsored sustainability initiatives at each home game. Multivariate analysis of variance and chi-square difference tests found that self-identified Democrats reported significantly higher pro-environmental values and norms, but sustainability program engagement, sponsored initiatives awareness, and influence of initiatives on behavior were politically neutral. Path analysis found that ascription of responsibility was a significant predictor of sustainability-related engagement and behaviors for both Independents and Republicans. The results and discussion sections highlight how academics and practitioners can account for political affiliation when creating campaign messaging for environmental initiatives.


Sustainable energy is described as energy that meets the present demand without jeopardizing the needs of future generation. Sustainable development of energy has become the main focus of recent national policies, strategies and development plans of many countries. Renewable energy (RE) is brought to play as it is deemed sustainable and has the potential to thrive in the vastly competitive market of contemporary business. Growing deployment of RE resources in businesses will provide an impetus to accelerate the drive towards clean energy as well as interest and funding for research and development works. In Malaysia, RE was introduced into the energy mix through the Five Fuel Diversification Policy in 2000 and its share has been growing ever since. This article offers a critical analysis of the developing theories linking environmental sustainability to businesses practice, and discusses their implications on Malaysia’s policy development toward RE. The extensive review presented in this work offers a useful reference for policy makers, corporate managers and researchers who have vested interest in business sustainability and renewable energy related studies.


Author(s):  
Zakia Z Haque ◽  
Ranshikha Samandra ◽  
Farshad Alizadeh Mansouri

The concept of working memory refers to a collection of cognitive abilities and processes involved in the short-term storage of task-relevant information to guide the ongoing and upcoming behaviour and therefore describes an important aspect of executive control of behaviour for achieving goals. Deficits in working memory and related cognitive abilities have been observed in patients with brain damage or neuropsychological disorders and therefore it is important to better understand neural substrate and underlying mechanisms of working memory. Working memory relies on neural mechanisms that enable encoding, maintenance and manipulation of stored information as well as integrating them with ongoing and future goals. Recently, a surge in brain stimulation studies have led to development of various non-invasive techniques for localized stimulation of prefrontal and other cortical regions in humans. These brain stimulation techniques can potentially be tailored to influence neural activities in particular brain regions and modulate cognitive functions and behaviour. Combined use of brain stimulation with neuroimaging and electrophysiological recording have provided a great opportunity to monitor neural activity in various brain regions and non-invasively intervene and modulate cognitive functions in cognitive tasks. These studies have shed more light on the neural substrate and underlying mechanisms of working memory in humans. Here, we review findings and insight from these brain stimulation studies about the contribution of brain regions, and particularly prefrontal cortex, to working memory.


Author(s):  
Jean Marie Ip-Soo-Ching ◽  
Suzanne Zyngier

This chapter articulates a conceptual framework to analyse the management of environmental sustainability knowledge in tourism that is underpinned by both the knowledge-based view of the firm (Grant, 1996; Spender, 1996) and the KM Life Cycle (Liebowitz & Beckman, 1998; Salisbury, 2012). This deliberate management of knowledge enables NTOs to build a knowledge-base about the natural environment and to use that knowledge for environmental sustainability, business sustainability, and local community education. Ten NTOs in Australia, Malaysia, Thailand, and Vietnam were investigated to analyse their KM of environmental sustainability. In supporting the knowledge-based view and KM of environmental sustainability knowledge, a further conceptual framework is also advanced for the analysis of how Information Technology enables environmental sustainability knowledge to be created, captured, shared, and applied at NTOs among their staff, customers, and communities.


Procedia CIRP ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 72 ◽  
pp. 845-849
Author(s):  
Demetris Petrides ◽  
Alexios Papacharalampopoulos ◽  
Panagiotis Stavropoulos ◽  
George Chryssolouris

2022 ◽  
pp. 243-270
Author(s):  
Faheem Ahmad ◽  
Qamar Saeed ◽  
Syed Muhammad Usman Shah ◽  
Muhammad Asif Gondal ◽  
Saqib Mumtaz

2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (16) ◽  
pp. 4450
Author(s):  
Vanessa Hull ◽  
Christian J. Rivera ◽  
Chad Wong

The world’s oceans face unprecedented anthropogenic threats in the globalized era that originate from all over the world, including climate change, global trade and transportation, and pollution. Marine protected areas (MPAs) serve important roles in conservation of marine biodiversity and ecosystem resilience, but their success is increasingly challenged in the face of such large-scale threats. Here, we illustrate the utility of adopting the interdisciplinary telecoupling framework to better understand effects that originate from distant places and cross MPA boundaries (e.g., polluted water circulation, anthropogenic noise transport, human and animal migration). We review evidence of distal processes affecting MPAs and the cutting-edge approaches currently used to investigate these processes. We then introduce the umbrella framework of telecoupling and explain how it can help address knowledge gaps that exist due to limitations of past approaches that are centered within individual disciplines. We then synthesize five examples from the recent telecoupling literature to explore how the telecoupling framework can be used for MPA research. These examples include the spatial subsidies approach, adapted social network analysis, telecoupled qualitative analysis, telecoupled supply chain analysis, and decision support tools for telecoupling. Our work highlights the potential for the telecoupling framework to better understand and address the mounting and interconnected socioeconomic and environmental sustainability challenges faced by the growing number of MPAs around the world.


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