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Business education and its paradoxes: Linking business and biodiversity through critical pedagogy curriculum

The Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, launched during the United Nations Biodiversity Conference in December 2022, encourages governments, companies and investors to publish data on their nature-related risks, dependencies and impacts. These disclosures are intended to drive businesses to recognise, manage and mitigate their reliance on ecosystem goods and services. However, there is a ‘biodiversity blind spot’ that is evident for most organisations and business schools. Business education rarely addresses the root causes of biodiversity loss, such as the unsustainable exploitation of natural resources. As the dominant positioning of Education for Sustainable Development Goals (ESDG) presents biodiversity in anthropocentric instrumental terms inadequate for addressing ecosystem decline, we posit that a more progressive and transformative ecocentric education through ecopedagogy and ecoliteracy is needed. Both approaches include the development of critical thinking about degrowth, the circular economy and conventional stakeholder theory to include non-human stakeholders. Using comparative case studies from Northumbria University, the University of Hong Kong and Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences, we illustrate how business education can be transformed to address biodiversity loss, providing theoretical guidance and practical recommendations to academic practitioners and future business leaders.

Learning about racism: A week-by-week qualitative exploration of two white Dutch primary student teachers’ emotional responses during a Critical Race Theory based course

This qualitative study explored emotional responses of two white Dutch student teachers during a Critical Race Theory (CRT) based course. Following Plutchik's (2001) classification of 32 emotions, the analysis of their weekly diaries resulted in the identification of 16 emotions. In both diaries similar emotional responses were identified. However, the analysis did not reveal a straightforward path these students emotionally went through. The number and types of emotional responses, both comfortable and uncomfortable, fluctuated weekly and occurred simultaneously in various combinations. Even when similar emotional responses were identified, students connected differently to the course content. This could be explained by different starting points both students had when entering the course. The findings add to past work by identifying a variety and complexity of emotional responses of white student teachers during a CRT based course and can be used to create course conditions to prepare teachers for contributing to anti-racist education.

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Good Governance in Sport

This book fills an important gap in the sport governance literature by engaging in critical reflection on the concept of ‘good governance’. It examines the theoretical perspectives that lead to different conceptualisations of governance and, therefore, to different standards for institutional quality. It explores the different practical strategies that have been employed to achieve the implementation of good governance principles. The first part of the book aims to shed light on the complexity and nuances of good governance by examining theoretical perspectives including leadership, value, feminism, culture and systems. The second part of the book has a practical focus, concentrating on reform strategies, from compliance policies and codes of ethics to external reporting and integrity systems. Together, these studies shed important new light on how we define and understand governance, and on the limits and capabilities of different methods for inducing good governance. With higher ethical standards demanded in sport business and management than ever before, this book is important reading for all advanced students and researchers with an interest in sport governance and sport policy, and for all sport industry professionals looking to improve their professional practice.

Critical issues in sustainability - Part III

This booklet is the third of its kind and, as such, the sequel to ‘Critical Issues in Sustainability – Part I’ and ‘Critical Issues in Sustainability – Part II’. It contains several of our reflections as they have appeared in writing throughout 2020, notably but not exclusively through opinion articles. Just as much as we hope this booklet will challenge your ideas and actions and will provide you with the inspiration to change our world for the better, we hope it will be the ancestor of our and others’ future work. In any case, we invite you to let us know what you think about it and how we might join forces

The actualization of the critical impulse in critical theory : dialogical rationality around Rachel`s tomb in Bethlehem, Palesine

In this review article, Isaac and Platenkamp argue that during the 1930s and 1940s of the previous century, concepts like "critical" and "essence" were still defined and understood in the tradition of what increasing numbers of academics called "Critical Theory." However, they suggest that since then the situation has significantly changed. In their view, while Critical Theory critically approaches the ideologies of the modern Western world, it has actually (itself) became a victim of this overwhelming critique of ideologies. To Isaac and Platenkamp, the main conceptualizations in and for Critical Theory have been weakened by a content inflation in the new historical phase of postmodernism. Thus, for instance, as a concept "criticism" had been revitalized to (down to?) a relativist position. In this review article, Isaac and Platenkamp suggest that academics in Tourism Studies now inherently claim to be "critical" by just appropriating the mere qualification critical, ipso facto. In this light, the old vital value of "Essence" thereby has become a superficial concept of old primitive ideologies, today, and it seems to have no meaningful function anymore in Tourism Studies. This review article thus aims to reintroduce the field of Tourism Studies to Marcuse's original concept of Essence and discuss it vis-à-vis its interpretational confrontation with the said postmodernist position and thereby to the very revitalization of the qualification "critical." Hence, Isaac and Platenkamp seek to save this qualification from the postmodernist attacks on the universality of the Critical Theoretical position by drawing particular attention to Arendt's concept of the agora, viz. as that kind of public space (comparable to the forum Romanum), in which people significantly present themselves as individuals with independent opinions. In this regard, Isaac and Platekamp are particularly disturbed by the recent flowering of the so called "Critical Turn" group (or network) within Tourism Studies since it appears to progress without a thorough understanding of Critical Theory, per se. They argue that classical thinkers of Critical Theory need to be addressed and understood if the Critical Turn group of scholars in Tourism Studies may decently/faithfully/meaningfully be deemed to be critical. In order to make their case, Isaac and Platenkamp highlight the case of Rachel's Tomb in Bethlehem. They position the Tomb as a very important biblical tourism site (and agora) by and through which the revitalization of the "critical" may be incorruptibly recognized.