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Mergers and acquisitions have significantly contributed to making the world globally connected, providing benefits from globalization through acquisition waves. Along with benefits, acquisitions have also accentuated many sustainability and responsibility issues that are central to both public discourse and global policies. Nonetheless, acquisition and sustainability research have evolved separately, as scholars have left sustainability and responsibility topics at the margin of the acquisition discourse. This impacts the ability of academics to affect practice through teaching by restricting available information. Scholars are important change agents for making more sustainable deals through their research, teaching, and public engagement. I specifically focus on research as it permeates both teaching and public engagement. I focus my analysis on five intertwined issues&mdash long term orientation, stakeholder lens, linguistic turn, umbrella constructs, and the engaged scholarship research approach&mdash that may conjointly foster such a change.

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The plant variability in the southern Iberian Peninsula consists of around 3500 different taxa due to its high bioclimatic, geographic, and geological diversity. The deciduous forests in the southern Iberian Peninsula are located in regions with topographies and specific bioclimatic conditions that allow for the survival of taxa that are typical of cooler and wetter bioclimatic regions and therefore represent the relict evidence of colder and more humid paleoclimatic conditions. The floristic composition of 421 samples of deciduous forests in the south-central part of the Iberian Peninsula were analyzed. The ecological importance index (IVI) was calculated, where the most important tree species were Quercus pyrenaica, Acer opalus subsp. Granatensis, and Corylus avellana. These species are uncommon in the south-central part of the Iberian Peninsula, forming forests of little extension. An analysis of the vertical distribution of the species (stratum) shows that the majority of the species of stratum 3 (hemicriptophics, camephytes, geophites, and nanophanerophytes) are characteristic of deciduous forests, and their presence is positively correlated with high values of bioclimatic variables related to humidity and presence of water in the soil (nemoral environments), while they are negatively correlated with high values of bioclimatic variables related to high temperatures, evapotranspiration, and aridity. This work demonstrates that several characteristic deciduous forest taxa are more vulnerable to disappearance due to the loss of their nemoral conditions caused by gaps in the tree or shrub canopy. These gaps lead to an increase in evapotranspiration, excess insolation, and a consequent loss of water and humidity in the microclimatic conditions.

The introduction of interdisciplinarity and industry-academia collaborations (IAC) into higher education institutions (HEIs) and curricula as tools for promoting sustainable development has been debated both in academic and non-academic contexts. While overall rising trends in the acceptance of interdisciplinarity and IAC exist, research has stressed difficulty in implementation and practices. We conducted eight focus groups at six European Universities (members of the SEA-EU alliance) and analysed the transcripts using Braun and Clarke’s reflexive thematic approach to qualitative analysis in order to develop themes on barriers and facilitators to both conducting interdisciplinarity and IAC, as well as the inclusion of university students in interdisciplinary research. We observed that the main barriers to IR and IAC and the inclusion of students in such activities include traditional HEI structures focused on single-discipline approaches, a lack of joint platforms for IR and IAC, and academic differences (publication outcome differences, academic background). Likewise, a lack of funding (especially for early career researchers), employability (for students willing to do a research career), and a lack of validation by HEIs for researchers conducting IR and IAC are major barriers. To IDR- and IAC-related activities, a top-down approach is needed to restructure HEIs and make them more accommodating to both students and staff willing to conduct IR and IAC activities, thus refocusing them towards sustainability.

2020 will go down in history as a tipping point when societies reassessed the fundamental objectives and principles that they had seen their communities develop. As a basis for investigating a broad sense of LifeStyle by Design, some 20 potentially rich narratives are used as the basis for these empirical analyses. They are our Virtual Living Lab at a time of unparalleled attitudinal and behavioural change and uncertainty. Social sharing is more authentic and trustworthy than traditional forms of mass communications. We explore our narratives in the UK and Japan and draw novel yet consistent, scalable implications for policy makers and public and private institutions alike. We track what people think is important to them and thus lay a foundation for engagement, in contrast to the traditional advertising communications approach of intrusion. Some of the new behaviours may become permanent, but there is a general need to streamline and simplify. People are against the complex, not because they want a simple life but because they want more time to enjoy enriched life experiences. At times of change, especially when uncertainty can bring negative outcomes, it is critical to be able to know what to say and how to say it so that leaders can establish trust and the right tone for the moment.

Digital transformation has become a key strategy for enterprises to enhance resilience in effectively responding to external shocks and achieving sustainable development in the context of the global spread of the epidemic and the increase of uncertainties in external environments. In this paper, the impact and mechanism of digital transformation on corporate resilience are examined based on data of listed Chinese companies from 2007 to 2020. Our research results reveal that digital transformation can significantly enhance corporate resilience. This conclusion remains unchanged after controlling for endogeneity issues and performing various robustness analyses. Digital transformation has heterogeneous effects in the dimensions of corporate property rights, industries, and regions, with state-owned enterprises, manufacturing, and eastern enterprises benefiting more. Digital transformation primarily reinforces corporate resilience through mechanisms that improve human capital, strengthen innovation capabilities, ease financing constraints, and enhance internal control. Therefore, the government must guide macro policies, pay attention to the leading role of state-owned enterprises, and narrow the regional digital divide to better enact digital transformation and promote corporate resilience. Simultaneously, in the process of digital transformation, enterprises should combine the characteristics and development stages of their industry by exploring the development requirements and strategically implementing them in stages in a targeted manner. The findings of this paper provide new empirical evidence for the economic impact of enterprise digital transformation, as well as useful inspiration for enhancing enterprise resilience and promoting high-quality development.

ETRDCND and their GHG emission reduction and energy saving. GHG emission and energy usage have been playing a crucial role in aggravating global warming. Global warming results in big problems such as worldwide unusual weather and health disorders. SMEs play a substantial role in the industrial growth of the global economy, which increases GHG emission and energy consumption. By performing the ordinary least squares regression with the data of 3300 South Korean SMEs, this research reveals four points. First, ETRDCND positively influences SMEs&rsquo D cooperation network diversity (ETRDCND) on the greenhouse gas (GHG) emission reduction and energy saving of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Besides this, this study aims at analyzing the roles of production time reduction and absorptive capacity in the relationship between SMEs&rsquo ETRDCND and their GHG emission reduction and energy saving. Third, the mediating role of production time reduction in this relationship is moderated by SMEs&rsquo GHG emission reduction and energy saving. Second, production time reduction perfectly mediates the relationship between SMEs&rsquo GHG emission reduction and their energy saving only if SMEs possess their own absorptive capacity. The purpose of this research is to empirically reveal the effect of external technology R& absorptive capacity. Fourth, ETRDCND significantly influences SMEs&rsquo

Determination of the parameters of motion of the surrounding objects, and in particular their speed, is one of the basic skills of a human being. Studies on the development of basic concepts of motion have been carried out for years, exploiting various methods and in different contexts. In our research, we analyzed the effect of school education on the understanding of the phenomenon of motion. We tried to determine its possible short- and long-term cognitive consequences. To achieve this goal, we used the survey method. Our studies show that children differentiate two specific concepts: average speed and instantaneous velocity. In the present work we present how the gender context is superimposed on the general picture. We found that the initial, genuine pre-school concept of speed is different for girls and boys. Our analysis shows also that this gender effect vanishes quickly along with the introduction of physical definitions of kinematical quantities by physics/science curricula. We discuss the methodological aspect of the statistical gender gap measure and we calculate the gender effect chance probability, p-value, to be slightly less than 0.001. The importance of the observed effect for the sustainable science teaching processes is discussed.

The emergent plants may differ in their capacity to assimilate nutrients from eutrophic water bodies, so the utilization of suitable emergent plants is the key part for successful restoration of shallow eutrophic lakes and rivers. This research applied the depletion method to study the kinetics of uptake of nutrient (H2PO4−, NH4+, NO3−) in different nutrient stresses by the five emergent aquatic plants (Acorus calamus L., Typha orientalis, Lythrum salicaria L., Sagittaria trifolia L., Alisma plantago-aquatica Linn) in the riverine zones of Dashi River (39°30′–39°40′ N, 115°59′–116°5′ E), a shallow eutrophic river located in Fangshan District, Beijing. The results showed that at the three phosphorus levels, A. calamus and A. plantago-aquatica had the highest maximum uptake rate values for NH4+ under low to moderate phosphorus conditions, and high phosphorus, respectively. T. orientalis had the highest maximum uptake rate values for NO3− at all phosphorus concentrations, while the Michaelis-Menten constant values of L. salicaria and A. plantago-aquatica were smaller. At the three nitrogen levels, the maximum uptake rate values for H2PO4− were the greatest for A. plantago-aquatica at the low to moderate nitrogen levels and L. salicaria at high levels. Meanwhile, T. orientalis and L. salicaria had the smallest Michaelis-Menten constant values. In this study, nitrogen microbial transformations, such as nitrification, denitrification and their coupling were not measured and their role in measuring kinetics was not assessed. Thus, achieved results shall be considered as a synthesis of several processes mediated by plants, a theoretical guidance to the selection of plant species for phytoremediation of polluted water bodies with different nutrient stresses for quality improvement around the diverse rivers in Haihe River basin.