WSB Universities

The European Union faces persistent disparities in its progress toward climate neutrality, despite unified policy frameworks under the Green Deal and Fit for 55. A key unresolved policy challenge is understanding why investment support and R D efforts accelerate decarbonization in some countries but produce weaker outcomes in others. Existing research offers fragmented insights and rarely evaluates whether investment and innovation effects depend on institutional conditions or nonlinear thresholds. This creates a critical gap: the EU still lacks evidence on the mechanisms through which investment capacity, innovation activity, and governance jointly shape national decarbonization pathways. To address this gap, the study examines how green investment (proxied by greenfield FDI) and R D influence renewable energy development and CO₂ emissions in 26 EU member states from 2004 to 2023. Fixed-effects regressions, moderation models, and panel threshold techniques are applied to capture both institutional conditioning and potential nonlinearities in the decarbonization process. The empirical results show that both green investment and R D activity contribute to decarbonization, promoting renewable energy expansion and reducing CO₂ emissions. Green investment displays an inverted U-shaped relationship with emissions, indicating the presence of a threshold beyond which financial flows become more effective. Institutional quality significantly amplifies the effects of both investment and R D, strengthening their contribution to the energy transition. These findings reveal that investment and innovation do not generate uniform outcomes across the EU; instead, their impact depends on reaching critical investment levels and on the strength of national governance systems. By identifying the structural and institutional mechanisms that shape decarbonization pathways, the study provides actionable evidence for designing differentiated, country-specific climate and investment policies within the EU.

The growing digitalization of supply chains and increasing sustainability requirements create the need for structured tools that assess organizational readiness for Cognitive Twin (CT) adoption. However, existing digital twin and sustainability maturity models rarely integrate technological architecture, governance, and circularity within a unified framework. To address this gap, the study proposes the Supply Chain Twin Sustainability-Cognitive Maturity Model (SCT-SCMM), a novel framework that explicitly integrates governance structures, sustainability objectives, and a hierarchical system architecture into the assessment of Cognitive Twin readiness. Unlike existing models, the proposed framework captures the interdependencies between technological capabilities, decision intelligence, and governance mechanisms across multiple system layers, providing a systemic perspective on sustainable digital transformation. The framework structures organizational readiness through five interdependent layers: Physical, Control, Communication, Decision-making, and Governance, and defines staged maturity levels reflecting progression toward sustainable cognitive autonomy. This layered architecture enables the simultaneous evaluation of operational automation, digital intelligence, and institutional governance as co-evolving dimensions of Cognitive Twin adoption. The model was developed through a structured literature review and operationalized using a hybrid multi-criteria and fuzzy-based evaluation approach, enabling the evaluation of complex socio-technical systems under uncertainty. The framework was applied in an automated product-to-human warehouse case study to evaluate technological, sustainability, and governance readiness. The results demonstrate the model's ability to identify maturity gaps, reveal inter-layer dependencies, and prioritize transformation pathways toward more resilient and circular logistics systems. By integrating governance, sustainability, and system architecture into a single maturity model, SCT-SCMM extends existing digital twin maturity approaches and provides a transparent decision-support tool for guiding staged Cognitive Twin adoption in next-generation sustainable supply chains.

Drawing on the conservation of resources theory (COR), this study constitutes one of the few empirical investigations focusing specifically on Lebanese firefighters. It examines how war conditions shape their compassion-related work and explores the factors contributing to experiences of compassion satisfaction and/or compassion fatigue during wartime. The study draws on empirical data from thirty semi-structured interviews conducted between May and July 2025, which were analyzed using the Gioia methodology. The findings indicate that, during wartime, firefighters are strongly motivated to develop what can be described as satisfaction compassion. This motivation is shaped by multiple factors: nationalistic sentiments (repaying the homeland and embracing the concept of 'one voice, one fight'), the desire to affirm self-worth (demonstrating a heroic identity, seeking recognition, and fulfilling a vow beyond words), and religious motivations (acting in God's name and believing in 'heaven for the brave'). Additionally, respondents identified the reduction of human loss and the pursuit of fairer wages as key drivers that intensify satisfaction compassion during periods of war. By addressing a significant gap in qualitative research on compassion work, particularly in non-Western contexts such as Lebanon, this study contributes to the literatures of human resource management and public administration. Moreover, examining compassion work in the context of a grand societal challenge like war provides an original perspective and opens new avenues for future scholarly inquiry.

PurposeThis paper aims to examine how women academics assess their career trajectories and, where challenges are present, to explore the factors that motivate their continued engagement in academic work.Design/methodology/approachThis study adopts a qualitative research design based on 30 semistructured interviews with women academics employed at five Catholic universities. Interview data were analyzed using a systematic qualitative coding process to identify key themes and patterns across participants' experiences.FindingsThe analysis identifies three major challenges encountered by women academics. Gender-related challenges include bias from male department heads and persistent sexual harassment. Representation-based challenges are reflected in the continued presence of the glass ceiling and the professional disadvantages associated with humility. Workload-related challenges involve heightened expectations for research productivity alongside extensive demands for community service, defined as academic activities beyond teaching and research that benefit the broader community, including stakeholder engagement, institutional outreach and public service initiatives. Despite these constraints, many women academics remain in academia to preserve social recognition and maintain financial stability through a regular income.Originality/valueThis study addresses a gap in the management, gender and higher education literature, where qualitative research remains limited in the Middle East and the wider MENA region. By documenting the challenges faced by women academics in Lebanon, the study contributes to ongoing debates on gender equality and women's empowerment in comparable academic contexts.

A class of benzohydrazide-linked 4,6-O-protected N-glucosylamine derivatives was synthesized under ambient conditions with good yields and characterized by Nuclear Magnetic Resonance, High Resolution Mass Spectroscopy, and Density Functional Theory calculations. Anomeric forms of the N-glucosylamines were assigned from 1H NMR spectroscopy. These derivatives showed good gelation behaviour in aromatic solvents upto 1.0