Search Results (227)

Rural areas are facing major challenges and profound changes that directly affect the quality of life of rural populations. In this context, new ideas and opportunities are emerging, where social innovation initiatives are leading to solutions that attempt to revitalize the social fabric of rural areas. Considering this, the aim is to conduct a productivity measurement and a bibliometric analysis that examines the research landscapes of social innovations in rural areas. With a comprehensive analysis of 178 publications, this study examines main authors, countries, journals, research areas, and key themes in the field. The results show the relevance of principal areas such as agriculture, digitalization, and forestry. Alongside these, new organizational models are being developed, such as rural hubs, living labs, and community cooperatives. Future research could explore the role of these organizations in rural areas in greater depth. Full article

This study examines the impact of job commitment on the adoption of strategic entrepreneurship within organizations, with leadership support considered as a moderating variable. Focusing on information technology companies in Jordan, we integrate perspectives from organizational behavior and strategic management to explore how employees’ commitment (affective, normative, continuance) influences their engagement in entrepreneurial initiatives, and whether supportive leadership environments amplify this effect. This study draws on social exchange theory and organizational support theory to propose that committed employees will reciprocate the organization’s support by innovating and taking initiative, especially when they feel backed by leadership. A quantitative survey was conducted, gathering 384 valid responses from employees across Jordan’s IT sector. Data were analyzed using structural equation modeling. The findings reveal that all three forms of commitment positively affect the propensity to engage in strategic entrepreneurship, with affective commitment showing the strongest link. Notably, leadership support significantly moderates these relationships: in high-support contexts, committed employees exhibit substantially greater entrepreneurial behavior. These results indicate that committed employees are more likely to pursue innovative ideas and strategic opportunities, especially when leaders encourage and back their efforts. Theoretical implications include an enhanced understanding of commitment’s role in corporate entrepreneurship and the contingent value of leadership, while practical implications suggest actionable steps for IT firms and others in emerging economies to stimulate innovation. This research contributes to the literature by highlighting human and leadership factors as key drivers of strategic entrepreneurship in organizational settings, and by providing empirical evidence from the Middle East context. Full article

Despite widespread recognition of Confucianism’s cultural importance among Malaysian Chinese communities, little is known about how its philosophical principles are reinterpreted and visually transformed by contemporary artists navigating postcolonial realities. This research addresses this gap through a mixed-method approach, combining quantitative data from 227 fine arts students, qualitative interviews with five representative Malaysian Chinese painters, and visual analysis of 50 key artworks. The results show that Confucianism functions not as a fixed doctrinal system but as a vital meta-framework that allows for the reimagining of core concepts, such as Ren (Benevolence) and He (Harmony), into tools for social critique and cultural negotiation. These ideas are expressed not through illustrative methods but via innovative symbolic and material strategies—ranging from fractured composition to technical experimentation—leading to a variety of personal styles rooted in a shared cultural logic. The study introduces a “critical translation” model for understanding the modernization of traditional philosophies within diaspora contexts, offering both theoretical insights and practical avenues for decolonizing arts education and fostering globally relevant, culturally authentic artistic practices. Full article

Innovation is a driving force in terms of enhancing individual core competencies, fostering social progress, and promoting economic growth. Innovation behavior encompasses all actions involved in the generation of innovative ideas, through to their realization. This study employs a meta-analytic approach to examine the relationship between personality traits and innovation behavior, as well as the potential moderating factors involved. A systematic search of relevant literature in both Chinese and English was conducted, and a total of 91 papers met the inclusion criteria. In total, 399 correlations with a combined sample size of 32,786 were analyzed using the metafor package. The results showed that the four dimensions of the Big Five personality model—agreeableness, extraversion, openness, and conscientiousness—were significantly and positively correlated with innovation behavior. Neuroticism was weakly and negatively associated with innovation behavior. Moderator analyses revealed that the sample type (student vs. employee) and the personality measurement instrument (BFI vs. IPIP) significantly influenced the relationship between openness and innovation behavior. These findings underscore the strong connection between core personality traits and innovation behavior, particularly emphasizing the importance of openness. Full article

With the rapid evolution of social computing, online sentiments have become valuable information for analyzing the latent structure of social networks. Sentiment leaders in social networks are those who bring in new information, ideas, and innovations, disseminate them to the masses, and thus influence the opinions and sentiment of others. Identifying sentiment leaders can help businesses predict marketing campaigns, adjust marketing strategies, maintain their partnerships, and improve their products’ reputations. However, capturing the complex sentiment dynamics from multi-hop interactions and trust/distrust relationships, as well as identifying leaders within sentiment-aligned communities while maximizing sentiment spread efficiently through both direct and indirect paths, is a significant challenge to be addressed. This paper pioneers a challenging and important problem of sentiment leader identification in social networks. To this end, we propose an original solution framework called “SentiRank” and develop the associated algorithms to identify sentiment leaders. SentiRank contains three key technical steps: (1) constructing a sentiment graph from a social network; (2) detecting sentiment communities; (3) ranking the nodes on the selected sentiment communities to identify sentiment leaders. Extensive experimental results based on the real-world datasets demonstrate that the proposed framework and algorithms outperform the existing algorithms in terms of both one-step sentiment coverage and all-path sentiment coverage. Furthermore, the proposed algorithm performs around 6.5 times better than the random approach in terms of sentiment coverage maximization. Full article

The accelerated growth of scientific publications in renowned databases such as Scopus (Elsevier) and Web of Science (Clarivate) has made the identification of unresolved research problems increasingly complex. This challenge is exacerbated by the vast amount of information that must be analyzed, highlighting the imminent need for the application of big data techniques to extract relevant information for researchers, stakeholders in innovation and development, and regulatory policymakers. To address this challenge, this article presents an innovative, structured, and systematic methodology for conducting bibliometric analyses of scientific publications. The proposed approach is designed for researchers who only have an initial research idea, a broad problem context, or a general study area and require methodological tools to precisely define their research problem. The methodology follows a recommended flowchart-guided process, leveraging open-source tools such as Bibliometrix (R), spreadsheets, and text processing techniques to conduct a comprehensive bibliometric study. This enables the analysis of the intellectual, conceptual, and social structures of a research field, facilitating the identification of research gaps and emerging trends. As a practical application, the proposed methodology was implemented for the 2004–2024 period, within the framework of an applied research project in engineering. This case study aimed to answer key research questions formulated during the study design phase, demonstrating the effectiveness of the approach in systematically analyzing scientific production. Beyond the energy sector and energy systems, this methodology has proven to be adaptable to diverse disciplines, such as health sciences, industrial management, construction, and urban development, provided that relevant databases are accessible. Through this structured approach, researchers can better define their research problems and identify future challenges in various areas of knowledge. Full article

Sustainable development is an inevitable derivative outcome of the advancement of social productive forces and the innovation of science and technology. In the current era, a multitude of global issues are intertwined. Sustainable development provides ideas and approaches of crucial value for resolving these difficult situations. This study constructs a micro-level indicator system to assess the quality of foreign direct investment and measures the quality of FDI in China from 2011 to 2022. Using the two-way fixed effects panel model, this study empirically tests the impact of FDI quality on China’s sustainable development and deeply examines the industry heterogeneity. The findings reveal that (1) micro-level FDI quality indicators avoid aggregation bias and lagged responses inherent in macro-level analyses, enabling precise and timely detection of foreign firms’ reactions to macroeconomic shifts. (2) Enhancing FDI quality exerts a positive and significant effect on China’s sustainable development, with notable variations across industries. (3) Further analysis shows that, first, in eastern coastal provinces, well-functioning market mechanisms amplify the positive externalities of high-quality FDI on resource allocation. Second, the moderating role of intellectual property protection in FDI’s human capital effects exhibits significant heterogeneity across industries. Full article

Social innovation is crucial to tackling the challenges faced by contemporary societies. Universities are rich in resources that, through their active involvement in social innovation, can solve social problems. However, the ambiguity of the term social innovation is a concern and has implications for academic social innovation initiatives. A deeper understanding of the role of universities in society is needed, particularly in leveraging social innovation to address unmet social needs. This paper combines conceptual and empirical literature to explore how universities are evolving in their approach to managing social innovation. While there is a wide variety of initiatives and approaches that explore the challenges of universities in promoting social innovation in their communities, the broader capacity of the universities’ engagement in social responsibility and sustainable development is also presented. This paper highlights that the notion of a world-class university is outdated; what is needed is (i) the alignment of social innovation with universities’ core teaching and research activities to increase legitimation and recognition of social innovation practices; (ii) the idea of a sustainable management system promoting dynamic coordination of social and private interests, positioning engagement centrally; and (iii) the idea of a culture that is tolerant of error and manages it in a way that incentivizes academic involvement in social innovation activities. This paper also emphasizes the relevance of introducing incentives for university staff involvement in problem-solving activities and in delivering social services via service-learning. Full article

More than half the world’s population live in cities¹. According to UN Habitat, we are rapidly approaching the time when five billion people will live in cities, and by 2050 this could be 7.5 billion, with much of the growth concentrated in the global south. The context for this paper is how urban growth is linked to notions of community values which cross-link to concepts of heritage. Urban places are where the majority of the world’s population lives and will increasingly do so. Inextricably linked to this proposition is that urban places are where community memories, identity and sense of place are inherent, and here is the link with heritage. What do these paces mean to us? Are there regional, national and international differences? Parallel with these ideas of urban heritage is the sense of place and attachment people have for green spaces in cities and the incremental loss of green spaces. This prompts the question of how this phenomenon has stimulated scholarly and professional attention on the concept of greening cities. Underpinning the inquiry is an understanding of how urban green growth has become regarded as critical to the well-being of people in urban areas. Central to such concerns is the role of people and their social and cultural values which shape how they see their cities. Notable also is how there has been growing concern for urban conservation since the 1990s and the need to understand cities as people spaces, not just collections of buildings. Discourse on cities as spaces for people has its roots in, and builds on, a paradigm shift in innovative thinking and concepts in the twentieth century which has continued into the twenty-first century. Mindful of this background, the paper opens with a review of the historical background to these concerns on the premise that the past is not always a foreign country². It then moves into consideration of heritage values and the role of landscape and what we mean by values. This consideration is central to the paper and moves into an overview of the Historic Urban Landscape (HUL) approach as new approaches and tools for urban conservation came into play. Full article

An orientation towards strengthening the competitiveness of enterprises through an effective response to market expectations is nowadays associated with sustainable development. Despite the articulation of the role of innovative solutions in this respect, the literature has not sufficiently explored this issue. Hence, the aim of the article was to analyse the impact of innovation on the sustainable development of enterprises in the pharmaceutical sector operating in the market in Poland. For the purposes of this study, the scope and spectrum of reference for innovative solutions in pharmaceutical entities was diagnosed based on the results of a diagnostic survey. In part of the in-depth study, an assessment of the impact of innovation on the sustainable development of the surveyed enterprises was conducted. The above was performed using appropriately selected methods of a qualitative and quantitative nature, including economic analytical techniques (cause-effect analysis, dependency analysis). The research sample was made up of companies operating on the pharmaceutical market in Poland; therefore, the results of the research refer only to these entities and there are no grounds for transferring them to the general population of enterprises in this sector in the country under study. This paper’s findings indicate that the idea of creating added value, growing out of a broad concern for social, environmental and economic aspects, is determined by an innovative approach that enhances environmental security, responding to societal expectations, while at the same time aiming to maximise the economic impact on activities. Companies that invest more heavily in innovation achieve better results in sustainable development, as confirmed by research. Companies are aware of this and are directing development expenditure into solutions that strengthen their ability to respond effectively to market expectations, with the strongest implementation of the above based on product innovation. Full article

Being both a driver and a manifestation of the current ecological, climate, and social crises, urban sustainability has become a major contemporary issue. Rather than framing the challenges that populations are confronted to as external factors, especially in deprived and segregated neighborhoods, we collected narratives about their experience of their living environments. Our work assumed an innovative interdisciplinary perspective in response to the complex interconnexions of the issues at stake. We aimed to highlight the significance of a situated perspective and an experience-based approach to fully embrace the idea of a research engaged with and for the communities, especially those suffering from marginalization and social deprivation. Our empirical results, rooted in expressions of place attachment (or not), in four disadvantaged neighborhoods in France, are presented in the form of a heuristic device, a non-normative framework that iteratively produced a representation with six dimensions that we called feelings. Together, they can be used to explore the manifestations of well-being, through place attachment related to one’s living environment, in a relational and open way, as people make sense of their place and possibly engage in its defense. We suggest further attention should be directed to concepts such as agency, freedom, and social recognition, as major conditions of the possibility of well-being or leading a good life. These dimensions could be major targets for policies trying to respond to the current sustainability challenges, such as social and environmental justice in the face of an unequal and changing world. Full article

Is there a qualitative difference between apes’ and humans ‘ability to estimate others’ mental states’, a.k.a. ‘Theory-of-Mind’? After opting for the idea that expectations are empty profiles that recognize a particular content when it arrives, I apply the same description to ‘vicarious expectations’—very probably present in apes. Thus, (empty) vicarious expectations and one’s (full) contents are distinguished without needing meta-representation. Then, I propose: First, vicarious expectations are enough to support apes’ Theory-of-Mind (including ‘spontaneous altruism’). Second, since vicarious expectations require a profile previously built in the subject that activates them, this subject cannot activate any vicarious expectation of mental states that are intrinsically impossible for him. Third, your mental states that think of me as a distal individual are intrinsically impossible states for me, and therefore, to estimate them, I must estimate your mental contents. This ability (the original nucleus of the human Theory-of-Mind) is essential in the human lifestyle. It is involved in unpleasant and pleasant self-conscious emotions, which respectively contribute to ‘social order’ and to cultural innovations. More basically, it makes possible human (prelinguistic or linguistic) communication, since it originally made possible the understanding of others’ mental states as states that are addressed to me, and that are therefore impossible for me. Full article

This review analyses the evolution of digital creativity from 2000 to 2022, defining it as a dynamic process where digital technologies foster collaboration, inclusion, self-expression, and automation. Based on 29 studies from databases such as Dialnet, UOC, Scopus, the Web of Science, and PsyINFO, and utilising the PRISMA and SPIDER methodologies, the research provides a comprehensive overview of the field. Digital creativity is described as the generation of new and valuable ideas, products, or solutions through digital tools that combine cognitive and socio-emotional skills in collaborative environments. Intuition, understood as the ability to make quick and effective decisions based on pattern recognition and prior experiences, plays a crucial role in the creative process. The study highlights its impact on education, enabling students to explore self-expression and solve problems creatively, merging analogue and digital creativity. In the professional realm, it optimises innovative processes, promoting efficiency and collaboration. The integration of emerging technologies, such as programming and 3D animation, in educational curricula is emphasised to prepare students for future challenges. Additionally, interdisciplinary research is advocated to ensure that digital tools amplify creativity, addressing ethical issues such as intellectual property and the social implications of automated creativity. Finally, the current trends such as game-based learning, innovation driven by social networks, and artificial intelligence are examined, proposing directions for future research. Full article

This study conducts a Critical Discourse Analysis of the masculinities of male characters in Doraemon, a famous Japanese manga series. It explores the masculinities in Doraemon from three perspectives by utilising the following Critical Discourse Analysis framework: text, process and society. Five male characters in Doraemon were selected as the main research objects. Firstly, the text analysis of the male characters in terms of their appearances, characteristics, behaviours and values reveals major masculine traits such as the maintenance of patriarchy, the pursuit and yearning for fame and fortune, competition and aggression. Analysing these masculinities can help remind audiences and consumers to be cautious about works that seemingly do not convey gender stereotypes to viewers. The process analysis identifies corresponding masculinities of the creator of Doraemon through his life experiences. Innovative spirit led him to create characters and manga that could both reflect and confront social reality and promote new gender concepts and ideas that were different from the mainstream at the time. The social analysis of Doraemon attributes the masculinities in the manga to Japanese culture, which has been deeply influenced by the culture of the salaryman, Confucianism, androcentrism and Bushido. For audiences in Japan, anime is a way of spreading and consolidating traditional Japanese cultural ideas, at the same time provoking reflection on whether these inherent gender roles are reasonable and should be perpetuated in the contemporary era. For audiences outside of Japan, this manga and cartoon is equivalent to a typical case of the export and recreation of Japanese culture to the world. This study conveys gender equality values, especially in children’s TV programmes. Full article

Optimal functioning of agri-food systems is essential for food security and sustainability. In this sector, Europe faces many issues, such as promoting sustainable and healthy food production in the context of social and economic inequalities. To deal with these issues, we propose a conceptual framework relating to the idea of a regional innovation system considering power relations, called the hierarchical regional innovation system (HRIS). This framework is based on the concepts of eco-innovation, inclusive innovation, and transition as its theoretical foundations. The findings show that the framework can be helpful in European rural contexts. Full article