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The purpose of this paper is to understand how higher education institutions (HEIs) educate future leaders with social impact contributing to the sustainable development goals (SDGs). HEIs have an interest in developing leaders with social impact, but there is a lack of knowledge on the best teaching and learning strategies to engage students with social action aimed at the SDGs. This paper fills this gap by addressing the question of how HEIs can shape the sustainability mindsets of future leaders with social impact contributing to the SDGs.

This research used a mixed method research design, including a quantitative survey and qualitative semi-structured interviews of UK students involved in HEIs experiential learning programmes, focused on social impact and entrepreneurial action, developed in partnership with the organisation Enactus.

This research highlighted the importance of experiential learning, as it develops the knowledge, values and competency underpinning the sustainability mindset of future leaders contributing to the SDGs, in particular their emotional intelligence.

This research shows that HEIs can educate future leaders with social impact contributing to the SDGs, through real-world experiential learning that develops their sustainability mindset; in terms of aligning the curriculum to the SDGs, more focus on the systems perspective of the sustainability mindset framework is needed.

The chapter discusses abductive thematic analysis as an innovative qualitative methodology in hospitality and tourism research. The novelty of the abductive approach is to combine the power of both deductive and inductive reasoning: it is possible to initiate the research starting from an existing theoretical, without renouncing to a creative phase where the researcher interprets the phenomenon beyond the words utilized and theorizes dependencies between concepts. The chapter further presents a case study to illustrate how abductive thematic analysis can be applied to study small hospitality and tourism businesses. The chapter further highlights the benefits of adapting thematic analysis to abductive reasoning, which is a paradigmatic position thus adding rigor to hospitality and tourism. The chapter finally highlights future avenues for development of methodology research toward adding further rigor to this novel methodology.

This first chapter provides an overview of all the chapters included in this book. This book focuses on contemporary research methods in hospitality and tourism. Revisiting the traditional research methods is necessary for academia and practitioners in the hospitality and tourism field. New understandings and interpretations of traditional research paradigms such as positivism and interpretivism as well as more recent paradigms such as realism and pragmatism in the context of hospitality and tourism are vital to strengthen the research practices. We hope that the edited book can help researchers and practitioners in our field in their research journeys and applications.