Street Experiments and COVID-19: Challenges, Responses and Systemic Change

Cities have introduced street experiments, among others, in order to cope with the urgent health challenges caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. They are primarily intended to allow people to move safely in urban spaces according to physical distancing requirements. It has been suggested that street experiments have the potential to not only respond to pressing needs, but to also trigger systemic change in mobility. This paper explores urban case studies and demonstrates how pandemic-induced street experiments provide a solution to specific challenges to mobility and public space. There are, however, issues concerning equity and citizen participation. Finally, we find that pandemic-induced street experiments have a higher acceptance among the public and authorities, a more permanent character and a greater embeddedness in long-term planning agendas. The paper concludes that the pandemic stimulated the introduction of street experiments and fostered their potential to enable systemic change in urban mobility.

Professorial Advancement Initiative: A Cross-Institutional Collaboration to Increase Faculty Diversity in STEM

In this paper, we describe the model for faculty diversity developed as part of the Professorial Advancement Initiative (PAI) funded under the NSF AGEP program. The PAI, consisting of 12 of the 14 Big Ten Academic Alliance universities,¹ had the goal of doubling the rate at which the universities hired tenure-track minoritized faculty, defined by National Science Foundation as African Americans, Hispanic/Latinx, Native Americans, and Pacific Islanders. This paper reviews the key programmatic elements of the PAI and discusses lessons learned and the practices developed that helped the Alliance achieve its faculty diversity goal.

A Systems Analysis Critique of Sport-Science Research

PURPOSE

The broad aim of sport-science research is to enhance the performance of coaches and athletes. Despite decades of such research, it is well documented that sport-science research lacks empirical evidence, and critics have questioned its scientific methods. Moreover, many have pointed to a research-practice gap, whereby the work undertaken by researchers is not readily applied by practitioners. The aim of this study was to use a systems thinking analysis method, causal loop diagrams, to understand the systemic issues that interact to influence the quality of sport-science research.

METHODS

A group model-building process was utilized to develop the causal loop diagram based on data obtained from relevant peer-reviewed literature and subject-matter experts.

RESULTS

The findings demonstrate the panoply of systemic influences associated with sport-science research, including the existence of silos, a focus on quantitative research, archaic practices, and an academic system that is incongruous with what it actually purports to achieve.

CONCLUSIONS

The emergent outcome of the interacting components is the creation of an underperforming sport-science research system, as indicated by a lack of ecological validity, translation to practice, and, ultimately, a research-practice gap.

Long-term energy transitions and international business: Concepts, theory, methods, and a research agenda

International business and management (IB/IM) scholars are increasingly calling for more research attention to subject matter that incorporates global-scale issues (Buckley, Doh, & Benischke, 2017). These calls have frequently focused on societal "grand challenges" that transcend discrete geographical locations and well-defined (typically short) time periods. The present long-term energy transition (LTE), characterized by a shift away from hydrocarbons and towards renewables, represents an important example of a multi-level, multi-actor global challenge that unfolds at the interface of business and society, and requires employing multiple conceptual lenses to process and understand. Researchers addressing such multi-faceted complex problems face a range of challenges related to theorizing, framing, modeling, and ultimately conducting empirical studies. Based on our collective work as IB scholars and journal editors, in this Perspective article we identify some of the challenges long-term energy transitions pose, reflect on how those challenges can be conceptualized, offer potential responses, and propose a future research agenda.

Encouraging and Enabling Lifestyles and Behaviours to Simultaneously Promote Environmental Sustainability, Health and Equity: Key Policy Messages from INHERIT

Human consumption and activity are damaging the global ecosystem and the resources on which we rely for health, well-being and survival. The COVID-19 crisis is yet another manifestation of the urgent need to transition to more sustainable societies, further exposing the weaknesses in health systems and the injustice in our societies. It also underlines that many of the factors leading to environmental degradation, ill health and social and health inequities are interlinked. The current situation provides an unprecedented opportunity to invest in initiatives that address these common factors and encourage people to live more healthily and sustainably. Such initiatives can generate the positive feedback loops needed to change the systems and structures that shape our lives. INHERIT (January 2016-December 2019), an ambitious, multisectoral and transnational research project that involved 18 organisations across Europe, funded by the European Commission, explored such solutions. It identified, defined and analysed promising inter-sectoral policies, practices and approaches to simultaneously promote environmental sustainability, protect and promote health and contribute to health equity (the INHERIT "triple-win") and that can encourage and enable people to live, move and consume more healthfully and sustainably. It also explored the facilitators and barriers to working across sectors and in public private cooperation. The insights were brought together in guidelines setting out how policy makers can help instigate and support local "triple-win" initiatives that influence behaviours as an approach to contributing to the change that is so urgently needed to stem environmental degradation and the interlinked threats to health and wellbeing. This article sets out this guidance, providing timely insights on how to "build back better" in the post pandemic era.