The Uncertain Future of Antarctica’s Melting Ice

A new multidisciplinary, international research program aims to tackle one of the grand challenges in climate science: resolving the Antarctic Ice Sheet’s contribution to future sea level rise.

Proactive Corporate Sustainability via Social Innovation—A Case Study of the Hennes & Mauritz Grand Challenge in Bangladesh

The purpose of the study is to explore how a multinational enterprise can use social innovations to drive change and solve grand challenges in an emerging market context. This paper brings market-shaping literature into a sustainability context, particularly by studying the implementation of social innovations in an emerging market context. Specifically, the study involves an in-depth qualitative study of H&M’s fair living wages program in Bangladesh. We find that H&M is tackling utterances of grand challenges revealed by orchestrating social innovation in collaborations with local stakeholders. Social innovation is carried out in ongoing projects involving multiple stakeholders. The study contributes to current literature by revealing that multinational enterprises indeed can use social innovation to drive change in emerging markets, although this requires long-term commitment, an ability and willingness to shape the surrounding business environment, and a prominent standing among key stakeholders.

Useful Servant or Dangerous Master? Technology in Business and Society Debates

This review argues that the role of technology in business and society debates has predominantly been examined from the limited, narrow perspective of technology as instrumental, and that two additional but relatively neglected perspectives are important: technology as value-laden and technology as relationally agentic. Technology has always been part of the relationship between business and society, for better and worse. However, as technological development is frequently advanced as a solution to many pressing societal problems and grand challenges, it is imperative that technology is understood and analyzed in a more nuanced, critical, and comprehensive way. The two additional perspectives invite a broader research agenda, one that includes questions, such as “Which values and whose interests has technology come to emulate?”; “How do these values and interests play out in stabilizing the status quo?”; and, importantly, “How can it be contested, disrupted, and changed?” Any research that endorses green, sustainable, environmental, or climate mitigating technologies potentially contributes to maintaining the very thing that it seeks to change if questions such as these are not being addressed.

Bioinspired Networks of Communicating Synthetic Protocells

The bottom-up synthesis of cell-like entities or protocells from inanimate molecules and materials is one of the grand challenges of our time. In the past decade, researchers in the emerging field of bottom-up synthetic biology have developed different protocell models and engineered them to mimic one or more abilities of biological cells, such as information transcription and translation, adhesion, and enzyme-mediated metabolism. Whilst thus far efforts have focused on increasing the biochemical complexity of individual protocells, an emerging challenge in bottom-up synthetic biology is the development of networks of communicating synthetic protocells. The possibility of engineering multi-protocellular systems capable of sending and receiving chemical signals to trigger individual or collective programmed cell-like behaviours or for communicating with living cells and tissues would lead to major scientific breakthroughs with important applications in biotechnology, tissue engineering and regenerative medicine. This mini-review will discuss this new, emerging area of bottom-up synthetic biology and will introduce three types of bioinspired networks of communicating synthetic protocells that have recently emerged.

Smart Decarceration

After a period of mass incarceration that spanned the 1970s through the 2010s, the United States remains the leading incarcerator in the world. Incarceration rates in the United States outpace those of other countries by several hundred per 100,000. Incarceration rates began to decline slightly in 2009, when there was a loss of fiscal, political, and moral will for mass incarceration policy and practices. First, the onset of smart decarceration approaches, the historical context from which smart decarceration stems, and the societal momentum that led to the conceptualization of smart decarceration are described. Smart decarceration is a lead strategy in social work that has been adopted by the American Academy of Social Work and Social Welfare as one of the 12 Grand Challenges for Social Work for the decade 2015–2025. Finally, an overview of the current status of smart decarceration and details shifts and initiatives to pursue at the intersection of social work and smart decarceration is provided.