Dr Alfred Chinta

Sustainability and its implementation in all organisations has moved on from awareness to implementation. While some industries have taken the lead and have established reporting standards the other industries have lagged in their collective action. This study is an attempt to bring together data on sustainability, financial performance and link it with benchmarking theory. This will allow identification of factors which fuel faster implementation but will also serve as a starting point for later studies. A key area for understanding is that whether higher passenger numbers makes an airline to be more responsible. It will also be useful to see if other factors like fleet size, alliance membership and turnover are able to influence airlines into making progress in this key area of supply chain performance.The research starts with the 2014 reported figures for global passenger numbers and uses the ranking of airlines by their revenue passenger numbers. Further using a statistical package will determine if size of the company, turnover, passenger numbers, no of aircraft used, location in the world, will have an impact on their ability to achieve a higher level of practice in relation to sustainability. This research is based on a mixed methods approach based on qualitative scores that are used to score CSR performance using thematic analysis and then combined with secondary data to create an overall sustainability score for an airline.

The drive for sustainable products is inching higher, however our shopping, eating and leisure activities are entrenched in unsustainable supply chains. Statistics show that value attached to most of the goods we buy are located several thousand miles to us. This paper presents the level to which these activities contribute to the unsustainability. The paper further presents a hypothetical situation where changes to our attitudes in these areas will hugely impact the product and personal journeys. This realisation on the part individuals will have a major impact on how policies of governments and corporations are formulated. The current state of the art is of slower response to issues surrounding sustainability as viability of sustainability issues are frequently trumped by lower cost of unsustainable ways of working. Thus the scenarios presented in this research will help individuals, corporations and governments make changes to their attitudes to impact their related product journeys.

A presentation based on a recent survey of procurement professionals in North East England and Yorkshire regions on their preparedness for sustianability in procurement

Agriculture is not merely a simple way of living anymore. The primary sector employs more than 30% of the country’s labour force and contributes about 15 % to India’s GDP. Moreover, India being an avid exporter of agricultural production, it also brings in foreign exchange of 35 Billion USD. Therefore, engagement of farmers is not as simple an activity as we would like to believe. Being a state subject, private sector engagement along with state support would bring in advancement of agricultural cooperation, modernization and digitalization for effective innovation in the field. The agricultural value chain ranging from inputs to marketing has a lot of gaps, which in turn can be utilized as opportunities for entrepreneurial interventions. This book comprises articles and research papers that deal extensively in three key focus areas, which is its unique proposition. A novel collection, it brings together writings on (i) Entrepreneurial Innovations that Impact Agriculture, (ii) Government Policies and Interventions in Entrepreneurship and (iii) Farmers’ Development and Welfare through Agriculture. For ‘Entrepreneurial Innovations that Impact Agriculture’, the authors discuss BOP Model for Satellite data, Vertical and Sustainable Farming, Innovations in Agriculture and Solar-Water Pump, Packaging and Harvest & Post-harvest Wastages. The section on ‘Government Policies and Interventions in Entrepreneurship’ has articles on Agricultural Insurance, Staple Food Pricing, Intellectual Property Rights in agriculture, Corporate Governance, Organic Farming and Women farmers. ‘Farmers’ Development and Welfare through Agriculture’ has authors writing about Infrastructure Investment and Rural Entrepreneurship, Food Processing, Marketing Intelligence, CropInsurance and Market Performances. The articles in this book aim to bring to the reader a heterogenous collection about entrepreneurial opportunities in agriculture. The basic Indian way of life, is not just production of crops by marginal farmers, but opens up a gamut of activities that touch upon different avenues in economic being with the hope of developing the primary sector holistically. The book is a humble attempt to encourage readers to think of agriculture as a domain where innovation touches lives and creates enormous impact in multiple dimensions of society

The rationale behind this study is to test the apathy of the rural youth to engage in agriculture as their profession. This research was conducted across five universities in eastern India on a sample of 345 postgraduate students to analyse their agri-entrepreneurship intent and the determinants of agri-entrepreneurship. The findings of the study show a significant positive correlation among the variables of agri-entrepreneurship intent and career planning and agri-entrepreneurship intent and entrepreneurial capabilities. Regression analysis reveals that career planning, entrepreneurship capabilities and family background (FB) in agriculture have a significant contribution as predictors of agri-entrepreneurship intent. Categorizing the respondents based on their career planning and entrepreneurship capability tendencies, the findings indicate that career planning and FB explain the growth of agri-entrepreneurship intent. This article will be of great value to educationists to carry out the pedagogical transformations and include career planning programmes and capacity-enhancing training in their curriculum for students. It will also be relevant to agri-business entities who explore growth opportunities in agri-allied sectors.

Purpose This paper examines the relationship between consumers’ perceptions of sustainability in the foodservice industry and willingness to pay, identifying customer satisfaction and loyalty as mediators. The purpose is to establish how foodservice businesses can attract and retain consumers to sustain their performance amid the global market uncertainties and low consumer confidence. Design/methodology/approach The data were collected from 204 diners in the UK foodservice industry to test the study’s hypothesized relationships using partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) in SmartPLS 4. Findings The findings show no significant relationship between diners’ environmental perceptions and willingness to pay. The findings further show that customer satisfaction and loyalty mediate the relationship between environmental perceptions and willingness to pay. The findings of the conditional analysis reveal that the mediated relationship is moderated by economic sustainability, with distinct economic sustainability conditions identified under which the mediated relationship is most significant. Research limitations/implications This study contributes to the current knowledge in sustainability research by establishing whether consumer expressive sustainability behavior translates into a willingness to pay. The paper identifies a set of theoretical and managerial implications to help foodservice businesses and scholars implement sustainability initiatives. These implications relate to conceptualization, theoretical and methodological approaches in sustainability research. Originality/value This study enhances the understanding of how consumers’ perceptions of sustainability contribute to willingness to pay and the competitiveness of foodservice businesses. It enables targeted marketing by segmenting consumers based on their sustainability views.

This chapter examines GBGTE—a global leader in sports betting, gaming, and entertainment—and its approach to integrating AI into its HR technology, focusing on HR tasks such as performance reviews, recruitment, data privacy, and bias mitigation. To effectively support the research objectives, which were to focus on the role of AI in automating HR function in a technology business, the study uses quantitative and qualitative data, analysed using a narrative perspective. Also, the research gathered primary data through a survey of hiring managers across the organisation to understand their perception of using artificial intelligence within HR processes. The chapter identifies barriers to AI adoption, managerial perceptions, and framework gaps hindering AI utilisation in HR processes. Building on Alsheibani et al.’s (2020) framework, the chapter proposes principles for successful AI integration within HR, addressing the complexities of AI implementation in a large, multi-national organisation.

It is argued that regional policy should be derived from the local firms and their needs for developing competitiveness. Firms are symbolic concepts of social systems that are intertwined in structures of power and domination. In this instance, where the focus of interest was the connection and disconnection of policy and practice in the context of competitiveness as viewed by the practitioner, the choice of appropriate theory was structured by the need to tread a fine line between deterministic accounts of practice by the agent and individualistic accounts which neglect the contextual importance of the practitioner. This implied that views on firms that are primarily systematic, structural or processual must be rejected for this study.