Stuart Colin Carr

To examine how social enterprises (SEs) operationalize environmental, social, and governance (ESG) frameworks for multistakeholder impact, this study employs a realist review grounded in an ecological and purpose-driven approach in the contexts of New Zealand and the Philippines – two island nations in the disaster-prone Asia-Pacific region. By utilizing a realist review process to conduct a comprehensive database search of academic, gray, and case literature, this study selected 32 academic publications and 14 case studies published between 2014 and 2024, successfully capturing a rich depth of data on social enterprises in New Zealand and the Philippines that other research designs would have missed. Findings illustrate how the ESG reflects the external issues and the visionary beliefs/commitments of the founder. The review likewise surfaced how purposes are articulated through their narratives and framing, then formalized through embedding their dual missions reflective of the ESGs in their operations and structures. Results also point to how the SEs institutional context enables/constrains the achievement of their purpose. Interestingly, the analysis revealed how local cultural values and context served as a contributing factor to the purpose-driven approach. More so, the ESG principles were observed to be embedded not just in the SEs value creation process but in how its outcomes are appropriated and felt by its various stakeholders. Illustrating that ESG integration is a deeply localized, multistakeholder process rather than a static compliance mandate, these findings provide helpful guideposts for international SEs ecosystems seeking to authentically anchor value creation within the ESG framework.

In the current Cost-of-Living Crisis, Living wage values are calculated backwards from the cost of an employee’s imagined needs, rather than forwards from the benefits that different wage values deliver for both, employees and employers. Moving wage baselines from Minimum to a true-score Living wage, extant research shows, transforms employee job attitudes and wellbeing from negative to positive, a qualitative shift that could realistically translate into sizeable gains in work performance. In Test Utility models, the more the living wage increases work performance by an amount greater than the cost of increasing the baseline wage from a bare minimum, the more sustainable it must be. We discuss a protocol for testing that prediction, through non-linear multilevel mediation, as an extension and reorientation of Job Evaluation Theory (JET). This new JET hinges on standard-setting by finding true-score living wages that are cost-effective, functional, and sustainable for all.

This paper introduces a newly emerged sub-discipline in work studies – Humanitarian Work Psychology (HWP) – to researchers and practitioners in Occupational Health Psychology (OHP). Focused initially on the eradication of working poverty, under the United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), HWP has since its inception contributed to the health and well-being of marginalized workgroups globally. Until today, however, those contributions in HWP have not been integrated with OHP. Key strands in the connecting nexus include how to: (1) set living wages that protect occupational and thus wider public health; (2) tackle infectious diseases as occupational health hazards; (3) bring valuable and skilled in formal work closer into the ambit of OHP; and perhaps the toughest challenge of all, help to (4) combat unfree work . OHP is a cross-cutting theme in all four, and we call for broaden-and-build training initiatives and greater supervisor awareness of links not only between HWP and OHP, but also with the wider social sciences and management disciplines including corporate social responsibility, human resources, and policy and public health.

Emotional labour (EL) has become a serious concern in the modern workplace due to the rapid development of the service‐oriented economy. Existing literature reviews of emotional labour studies leave many questions unexplored. This study addresses these questions by conducting a holistic review of 143 high‐impact empirical articles published in peer‐reviewed journals from APA PsycInfo, EBSCO Academic Search Premier, Scopus, and Web of Science using the TCCM framework (Theory‐Context‐Characteristics‐Methodology). The document search process is visualised with a PRISMA diagram. We point out several future directions for scholars who are interested in emotional labour. For example, emotional labour research needs to transition from cross‐sectional designs to multi‐wave designs. Most importantly, this study serves as a roadmap for scholars to navigate the complexity of emotional labour research and provides practitioners with evidence‐based strategies to mitigate the negative influence of emotional labour.

Not all green collar work is created equal, yet measures of its sustainability, cast against the triple bottom line that underlies the Sustainable Development Goals (People, Planet, Prosperity) remain under-developed. We applied a published protocol for indexing sustainable livelihoods identifying, rating and ranking the 10 most sustainable green collar livelihoods in contemporary New Zealand. The resulting mini-index of sustainable livelihoods provides a proof-of-concept for combining with the remaining 12 livelihood collars identified in the Wheel of Work. Responding to the International Labor Organization's (ILO) identification of decent work, poverty eradication and environmental sustainability as most significant challenges for the twenty-first century, this pilot study is the first step in the development of a full Sustainable Livelihoods Index (SL-I). More than structures of decent work, an SL-I will help guide and incentivize multiple directly invested groups - students, organizations, and government workforce development agencies - towards comparatively sustainable forms of livelihood that protect, people, planet and prosperity.

Not all living wage standards are equally inclusive. Mainstream ‘shopping basket’ calculations for determining the living wage do not capture the diverse needs and experiences of workers and their households, and/or only identify an indeterminate living wage range. Addressing these concerns is an alternative approach which measures wages and wellbeing directly, using induction to discover not only the wage range in which there is a cusp in wellbeing but also how far it can be adjusted as a psychometric cutoff score to maximize the number of workers and households benefitting, in-context, from its coverage. Evidence from a study of wage and wellbeing conducted in New Zealand, before and during the COVID-19 pandemic, reveals that applying this protocol could have provided a significantly greater number of individuals and households with a functional living wage. Some of the wellbeing indicators used have theoretical and empirical links to work productivity. This psychometric protocol thereby addresses both halves of Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) 8, i.e., Decent Work and economic prosperity. It may render econometric methods, based on shopping basket assumptions and conducted largely by fiat, unnecessary.

The concept of a sustainable livelihood affords protection from crises and protects people, including future generations. Conceptually, this paper serves as a study protocol that extends the premises of decent work to include and integrate criteria that benefit people, planet, and prosperity. Existing measures of sustainability principally serve organisations and governments, not individual workers who are increasingly looking for ‘just transitions’ into sustainable livelihoods. Incorporating extant measurement standards from systems theory, vocational psychology, psychometrics, labour and management studies, we conceptualise a classification of livelihoods, criteria for their sustainability, forming a study protocol for indexing these livelihoods, a set of theory-based propositions, and a pilot test of this context-sensitive model.

Despite widespread evidence that green-collar work is increasingly sought as a career pathway, it remains largely undifferentiated in job descriptions and recruitment sites, leaving environmentally oriented school-to-work, and just transitions, underserved. Digital Recruitment Platforms provide databases for the analysis of green-related knowledge skills, abilities and other characteristics by job seekers and career counselors. A frequency analysis of job needs and opportunities on a New Zealand digital recruitment site was conducted in December 2024. In terms of content, a diverse range of green roles was differentiated in terms of adjacent green collar work (existing and generic skills in sustainability-oriented work contexts) and core green collar work (output or process based green work, that may be direct or indirect).In terms of process a context-sensitive protocol is described, which is potentially transferable to aid just transitions; to help meet CSR obligations for organizations, and to inform workforce planning for governments and multilateral institutions.