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Educational institutions have a special social responsibility to initiate processes of sustainability transformation in society, nevertheless, activities that effectively address students as well as employees are rather moderate. To initiate change alongside strategic and political decisions, this paper aims to present findings of a gamification intervention (hereafter referred to as climate duel), which was implemented in a field study and tested to assess its potential as a supporting and transformative approach in a university context.

A three-month field study was conducted with two universities of applied sciences. The study included an environmental impact analysis of the two participating university departments, the conception and testing of the intervention and associated surveys to evaluate the effectiveness of the intervention in order to and to obtain feedback that would allow the duel to be scaled up at other universities or institutions.

Three hundred seventy-five people took part and saved 2.6 tons of greenhouse gas emissions through their participation in the climate duel and their corresponding behavioural changes. In addition, feedback from the participants yielded positive results in terms of behavioural changes and generated valuable evidence for future implementations. Nevertheless, there is still room for improvement, especially in terms of supporting communication activities that promote social relatedness to motivate each other, share experiences or deal with implementation difficulties in everyday life.

Building on the promising effects of gamification, the study is a showcase for applied science. With the possibility of testing a theory-based intervention in practice, an implementable, effective and scalable measure for universities that helps to accelerate the transformation process is available.

It is typical of public real estate benchmarking reports to show only highly aggregated benchmarks based on buildings’ floor areas. They hardly provide disaggregated benchmarks for usage clusters. The aim of this study is to show the caveats from highly aggregated benchmarking without consideration of cluster-specific characteristics.

Based on the parameters of the German facility management association 812 standards, cleaning costs and costs for the surfaces of seven hospitals have been collected and allocated to specific room clusters. Using these basic data, a calculation and simulation conducted with the aim of simulating facilities that are comparable in the sum of costs yet feature varying sub-clusters as cost drivers. In particular, during this simulation, area ratios were varied randomly and the average cleaning costs per cluster were held constant for all hospitals. Therefore, the costs per square meter in the clusters of all simulated hospitals are identical and the full costs only depend on the area ratios.

The simulation shows that highly aggregated cleaning costs lead to large spans, and thus, to misinterpretations in the field of action. In the case, the aggregate benchmark ranges from 40.6 to 66.5 EUR/m², although, for all hospitals the same costs per square meter had been used. Thus, the bias results only from varying the share of area across the clusters. This finding is caused by a well-known statistical problem: the Simpson’s paradoxon, which currently receives little attention in real estate benchmarking.

The results show, that the regular benchmarking with high aggregated data, often used in practice, cannot be recommended. The author consider using a detailed benchmarking as meaningful and purposeful. To be able to make a detailed benchmarking, it is essential to identify and collect the influencing factors. Only if all important factors, in this case, the clusters will be regarded in the benchmarking, a reasonable benchmarking and useful interpretation can be given. Using a simple benchmarking to get a rough overview is refused steadfastly.

The study highlights that a comparison with public benchmarking reports (operation costs) must be taken with great caution. The author has quantified the bias from the aggregated benchmarking and have shown, that the Simpson’s paradox fully explains the consequences.

In this study the authors aim to outline new ways of information extraction for automated valuation models, which in turn would help to increase transparency in valuation procedures and thus contribute to more reliable statements about the value of real estate.

The authors hypothesize that empirical error in the interpretation and qualitative assessment of visual content can be minimized by collating the assessments of multiple individuals and through use of repeated trials. Motivated by this problem, the authors developed an experimental approach for semi-automatic extraction of qualitative real estate metadata based on Comparative Judgments and Deep Learning. The authors evaluate the feasibility of our approach with the help of Hedonic Models.

The results show that the collated assessments of qualitative features of interior images show a notable effect on the price models and thus over potential for further research within this paradigm.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first approach that combines and collates the subjective ratings of visual features and deep learning for real estate use cases.

The paper aims to explain why and how, in the USA, a very particular interpretation of economic liberalism, faring though different historical contexts, has generated, since the 1970s, a new kind of capitalism whose language, logic, legitimating paradigm and associated practices have become, thanks to “organic intellectuals” and active networks of power and influence, the “newspeak” and compass of chief executive officers from around the world, despite their always direst societal consequences.

Using history as a support to investigate the domestic and international relations contexts that bore financialized globalization, the paper is strongly located into political sociology. As such, and if we consider that political sociology is the “science of power”, the paper tries to identify precisely the networks of power and influence which transformed a specific interpretation of liberalism and business into a dominant paradigm and specific kind of capitalism, in the USA and the rest of the world. The approach helps to understand which sets of ideas and authors were deemed worth supporting by business and political networks of power and influence and how both sides drew on their reciprocal resources to transform their cosmogonies into dominant paradigms and real politics (corporate and States).

The paper provides a global but precise understanding of the complex processes that allowed some vested interests to impose their vision of economics and business on a domestic, then world, scale. It also questions the relevancy of that vision according to a presentation of the negative societal externalities the associated policies generated and according to the official investigations that have been conducted on the corporate and banking misdemeanors that it contributed to generate.

The paper illustrates a method of investigation that can be used to develop the “global view”, a prerequisite to making decisions in full knowledge of causes and consequences and thus a means to train future “globally responsible leaders”.

By revealing the hidden interests behind financialized globalization and the societal consequences of their power plays, the paper indirectly demonstrates the urgent need for an “alter‐economy” geared to meet the fundamental needs of societies and to preserve their natural environment in the long term.

The paper offers a different perspective on economics and business which is seldom presented in business schools where, owing to the discussed dominant ideology, politics is considered irrelevant to understand business and economics and where the latter are nearly always presented as vectors of good.

The emergence of climate science denialism in the United States provides a challenge to STS theories of the relationship between scientific expertise and public policy because a situation of epistemic rift occurs: the capacity of scientific consensus to establish the grounds of political debate is broken, and the standard circulation of expertise from the scientists and funding from the state is interrupted. Three mechanisms for the containment of scientific expertise are studied: direct intellectual suppression of climate scientists, industry support of contrarian scientists and policymakers, and cutbacks on government research programs that support climate change. This situation politicizes climate scientists, who are drawn into the public sphere as a counterpublic to the effort to contain the circulation of their knowledge in the political field. Although the strategy of contained expertise has been effective in blocking climate legislation at the federal government level in the United States, it may be losing effectiveness, and an emergent alternative strategy based on adaptation may be coming to replace it. Factors that affect the reduction in the capacity to contain the circulation of scientific expertise are also analyzed.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate who rules the world. The hypothesis is that it is the 0.1 per cent of owners and controllers of capital.

This study used secondary sources including the Bureau Van Dyk and The World Top Incomes database to look at distributions of income and wealth (stock ownership). This is supplemented with a secondary source analysis and with some interviews.

The top point one per centers, the wealthy, those on the top incomes and transnational capitalist class are all distinct but overlapping categories that describe the (white) men and (few) women who hold power through their ownership and/or control of capital and who are thereby directly or indirectly able to act hegemonically on an emerging global basis.

Theorists of the global school of capitalism Alveredo et al., 2013 argue that there has been a qualitatively new twenty-first century transnational capitalism in the process of emerging (see Robinson, 2012a). This paper tests this assumption and relates it to the work by Hamm 2010.

The flip side of this progressively widening concentration of income and wealth into fewer (0.1 per cent) hands brings new lows to the polarisation of class, exploitation and domination. All of these have intensified since the 1980s with the end of the Keynesian Compromise. This north/south accentuated division has implications for social justice.

This seeks to identify empirical evidence to support the theory of an emerging transnational capitalist class.

This paper examines the clustering of return volatility within industries by comparing the short‐run responses of stock returns to the arrival of macroeconomic news across several industries. We hypothesize that some industries have distinctive qualities which influence the sensitivity of companies’ equity value to information releases. To test this hypothesis, we sample intraday stock price data of ten firms from three industries ‐ General Industry, Banking, and Real Estate Trusts ‐ and conduct the Brown‐Forsythe‐Modified Levene tests. The evidence shows that there exist different degrees of responses to the release of macroeconomic news and consequently different degrees of return volatility clustering: strongest in General Industry, less strong in Banking, and weak in Real Estate Investment Trusts.

The purpose of this chapter is twofold. First, to show how the financial power of the fossil fuel industries and the prevalence of religious ideology in Congress are the two major obstacles preventing the U.S. government from taking action to slow down global warming. Then to evaluate various approaches to ‘satisfying our energy needs’, by showing a crucial dynamic behind our insatiable drive to consume energy, and to propose some ways of circumventing the current obstacles.

The approach is through a comprehensive study of the relevant evidence and academic literature, interwoven with philosophical reflections on their significance.

The findings are as follows: a major root of the current problem is the dysfunctional political system in the United States, which is corrupted by vast infusions of money from the fossil fuel industries and the dogmatic religious beliefs of Republicans in key positions on Congressional committees.

The implications are several. The proposed technological solutions to the ‘energy problem’ – nuclear power, carbon sequestration, fracking for natural gas and geo-engineering – only address the symptoms and ignore the dynamic that underlies them, exemplified in the story of Prometheus. If we continue to be driven by the Promethean spirit, we risk being subject to excruciating punishment as a result. The solution to our problems is a transition to clean and renewable sources of energy, accompanied by the kind of reduction in material desires that evidently makes for lives that are more fulfilled.

The value of the philosophical perspective on this topic is that it highlights questions of value that otherwise remain inexplicit.

A review of Nancy MacLean’s Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America focuses on the implications of her historiographic method in reading Jim Buchanan’s work and the resulting failure to take seriously the underlying framework of constitutional political economy that informed both Jim Buchanan’s and Frank H. Knight’s work. MacLean’s historiography is that of social movement history, which sublimates the interests and motivations of the individual to that of the movement. The real scholar disappears into simply an agent of the movement’s master plan. Because MacLean is suspicious of the movement she believes Buchanan to be part of, his work is interpreted solely in light of what she assumes to be the master plan. In particular, she ignores Buchanan’s habit of returning to key themes in order to develop new modes of analysis. MacLean focuses solely on his public choice work, ignoring the latter developments of constitutional economics and even moral order.

Two issues in MacLean’s account are the focus on the review. The first is simply a research mistake that she drew unwarranted conclusions from regarding Buchanan’s connection to the “massive resistance” movement against desegregation of Virginia public schools. The second issue reveals MacLean’s unwillingness to consider the changes in Buchanan’s scholarship over his career. Taken together, the issues indicate that she refused to read Buchanan on his own terms in order to understand the progress of his work, even if she disagreed with him at the end.