This research explores how police staff, the civilian employees who make up over a third of the police workforce in England and Wales, experience law enforcement culture and professional inequity. Based on thirty-two semi-structured interviews with senior police staff from 23 UK policing organisations, analysed thematically, it identifies normalised discriminatory language, behaviours and processes, intersectional disadvantage linked to gender and ethnicity, limited progression opportunities, and a strong public service motivation that may buffer these strains. It proposes a whole-systems approach to enhancing professional equity in policing organisations.

This dissertation research asks how a solar energy firm adapted over time to sustain and thrive in response to disruptions from market competition, technological innovation and federal policy change. Applying sense-and-respond theory, it uses a qualitative longitudinal case study of a solar-plus-storage engineering, procurement and construction firm from December 2020 to December 2026, drawing on semi-structured interviews and archival sources analysed through thematic coding and longitudinal mapping. Anticipated results, informed by the literature and preliminary archival insights, suggest that vigilant sensing, technological reinvention and policy-driven business reconfiguration enable firms to thrive amid interconnected disruptions.

Grounded in Resource Dependence Theory, this conceptual research examines how U.S. research universities allocate research administration staffing as a strategic response to dependence on volatile federal funding. It proposes a model in which grant writing capacity, internal compliance training and professional development link administrative staffing allocations to institutional grantsmanship outcomes, with university governance type as a contextual condition. A quantitative design integrating archival and institution-level survey data is proposed; data collection has not yet begun, and the work is intended as a template to guide leadership decisions on research administration under constrained funding conditions.

This study explores the scientific literature on agricultural credit granting to farmers in order to identify elements and mechanisms that could support sustainable credit provision. Using a bibliometric co-occurrence analysis of authors’ keywords from 719 Scopus documents (1914–2025) processed with Bibliometrix, it builds strategic diagrams for four time periods to trace how thematic clusters have emerged, persisted, transformed or declined. Preliminary results show the field has grown and diversified, with themes such as gender, credit risk, climate change adaptation and food security gaining prominence, and future work will examine the identified clusters through co-word networks.

This work-in-progress study aims to develop a grounded, process-oriented theory of how AI integration evolves from pilot to sustained use in a legacy, high-compliance organization, and how governance practices and policy adoption emerge in daily work. Grounded in sociotechnical systems theory, levers of control, the Cynefin framework and systems analysis, it uses insider action research with constructivist grounded theory, treating each AI integration episode as the unit of analysis and drawing on interviews, internal documents, observations and indices of adoption, productivity, governance maturity and trust. It aims to produce an integration framework, a governance playbook and a decision-support model for leaders in regulated industries.

Public school facilities represent a critical yet persistently undervalued dimension of educational quality and equity. While prior research has established that the physical environment influences student achievement and teacher outcomes, less attention has been given to the financial mechanisms that produce disparities in facility conditions. This study advances the argument that district-level financial capacity functions as a foundational driver of infrastructure quality and, by extension, educational outcomes. Grounded in Strategic Facilities Management and Environmental Psychology, this research proposes a pathway-based conceptual model linking financial capacity and strategic financial management to facility conditions, and facility conditions to educational outcomes. Using publicly available secondary data, the study applies a comparative case-study design across selected New Jersey public school districts representing urban, suburban, and affluent contexts. Using publicly available data from the New Jersey Department of Education (NJDOE), the Electronic Municipal Market Access (EMMA) database, and the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), the study finds that urban, high-need districts such as Newark, Camden, and Paterson consistently exhibit lower bond ratings, lower per-pupil maintenance investment, older facilities, and graduation rates 20–35 percentage points below affluent districts such as Princeton, Ridgewood, and West Windsor–Plainsboro. Importantly, variation among mid-wealth suburban districts indicates that strategic financial management moderates the relationship between funding and infrastructure quality. These results support the argument that school facilities serve as the physical manifestation of financial decision-making and reinforce the need to treat infrastructure investment as a strategic and equity-relevant policy domain. The study provides a foundation for subsequent statewide quantitative analysis and contributes to a more integrated understanding of how financial systems shape educational environments.

Bread waste remains a persistent sustainability challenge in industrialised food systems despite increasing environmental awareness and technological optimisation. Existing research typically examines food waste from isolated behavioural, retail, or manufacturing perspectives, thereby overlooking the cross-level dynamics through which surplus is structurally reproduced. This paper reconceptualises bread waste as a systemic coordination problem emerging at the retail–consumer interface, shifting the analytical focus from actor-specific deficits to cross-level misalignment. Building on the Theory of Planned Behaviour (Ajzen, 1991), Institutional Theory (DiMaggio and Powell, 1983; Scott, 1995), and Information Processing Theory (Galbraith, 1973), the study develops the Systemic Alignment Framework. The framework explains how retail promotional volatility generates demand fluctuations, how manufacturers respond through structural buffering and conservative forecasting, and how consumers make disposal decisions under bounded rationality within abundance-oriented choice architectures. The interaction of these internally coherent yet unsynchronised logics systematically reproduces surplus. Methodologically, the study adopts an explanatory sequential mixed-methods design, combining a representative survey of German consumers with qualitative interviews across retail and manufacturing actors. By triangulating behavioural, institutional, and informational lenses, the study identifies key mechanisms of misalignment and outlines conditions under which alignment across actors becomes possible. The findings provide actionable insights for aligning demand generation, production planning, and consumer decision environments, thereby enabling more effective and systemically coordinated waste reduction strategies.

This extended abstract reconceptualises bread waste in Germany as a cross-level coordination problem at the retail–consumer interface rather than a deficit of any single actor, and develops a Systemic Alignment Framework integrating an extended Theory of Planned Behaviour for consumers, Institutional Theory for retailers and Information Processing Theory for manufacturers. It proposes an explanatory sequential mixed-methods design combining a representative consumer survey with semi-structured interviews with retailers and manufacturers, followed by an integrative phase. The study argues that durable waste reduction requires behavioural, strategic and communicative alignment across consumers, retail practices and production systems.

This research examines how digital communities reshape consumption, identity formation, and marketplace participation through an analytic-inductive qualitative design combining netnography, immersive journaling, and in-depth interviews. This research explores how engagement in online communities fosters offline participation and consumer behavior, revealing how creativity, mentorship, and shared identity are collectively constructed across digital and physical spaces. While research on consumer tribes and social identity has examined brand communities and fan cultures, little attention has been paid to digital collectives where leisure, artistry and commerce intertwine. Grounded in consumer culture theory (Arnould & Thompson, 2005; Arnould et al., 2019; Schau et al., 2009) and consumer tribes (Cova & Cova, 2002; Kozinets, 2020), this research investigates how digital engagement within groups translates into real-world behaviors. Methodologically, the project employs an analytic-inductive qualitative design (Tracy, 2024), combining a netnography of online needlepoint communities and in-depth interviews with active participants. Preliminary analysis suggests that online participation functions as both creative apprenticeship and social belonging, reinforcing participants’ sense of legitimacy within the community. Initial findings show that digital sociability revitalizes analog practices while influencing purchasing behavior and community-driven innovation. The findings are expected to extend conceptualizations of digital collectivism by demonstrating how online practices are revitalized through digital sociability.

Financial literacy is widely promoted as essential for improving financial outcomes, yet a persistent gap remains between knowledge and behavior—especially during adolescence. This study examines how neurodevelopmental processes shape financial decision-making beyond financial literacy, emphasizing cognitive engagement, perceived relevance, and emotional regulation. Using survey data from first-year college students, we analyze relationships among financial education, teaching methods, financial behavior, financial stress, and academic performance. Results show that financial education alone does not significantly predict behavior; instead, behavioral engagement and financial stress are key mechanisms. These findings challenge knowledge-based approaches and highlight the need for developmentally aligned, behaviorally informed financial education interventions.