Guest editorial: foreword to the special issue on aggregation operators

The fourteen papers in this special section are devoted to aggregation operators with respect to knowledge based systems.

Sport development, systems, policies and pathways : an introduction to the special issue

Fundamentally sport development is about participation and promoting the opportunities and benefits of participation. Participation in sport and physical activity spans a wide range of contexts including the wholesomeness associated with the freedom of children’s play to the modification of sport to allow children to be children a little longer. The cycle of participation continues to junior and youth sport, where the rules, regulations and traditions of a sport become the foundation to protecting the “institution” of sport, to participation in senior competitions and ultimately, to elite and professional sport. Sport development research and practice therefore is concerned with all these manifestations of the sport experience. It logically follows that the purview of sport development is quite large and potentially complex. Moreover, it is possible to identify at least five themes that could be used to categorise sport development research. These themes include; policy, development through sport, development of sport, future patterns of sport delivery and marketing in terms of the relationship between professional sport and participation.

Introduction to special issue on indigenous entrepreneurs

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to introduce the content of a special issue of Journal of Enterprising Communities focusing on indigenous entrepreneurs.

Design/methodology/approach: The paper provides a brief description of the six contributions to the special issue.

Findings: The papers are found to range over New Zealand, Australia, Hawaii, Sweden Samoa and Ghana.

Originality/value: The papers comprising this special issue are of value in increasing understanding of how uniquely indigenous political, economic and social systems can explain cultural, social and political factors that both inhibit and enhance indigenous economic prosperity.

About global leadership and global ethics, and a possible moral compass : an introduction to the special issue

This paper reviews a number of huge challenges to ethical leadership in the twenty-first century and concludes that the need for global ethical leadership is not merely a desirable option, but rather – and quite literally – a matter of survival. The crises of the recent past reveal huge, and in some cases criminal, failures of both ethics and leadership in finance, business and government. We posit that mainstream economic theory’s construct of ‘homo economicus’ and its faith in the ‘invisible hand’ of the market constitute deeply flawed foundations upon which alone policy may be built and, farthermore, that these problematic foundations exert substantial shaping power over the institutional and discursive landscapes in which international business is transacted. Analogously, we argue that dominant approaches to business ethics and corporate social responsibility are, if not incorrect, at least in need of revisiting in terms of questioning their basic assumptions. Instead of the smugness of Western (especially Anglo-American) attitudes towards other ways of thinking, valuing and organising, it appears clear that openness, cooperation and co-creation between the developed and developing worlds is a basic prerequisite for dealing with the global challenges facing not just leaders, but humanity as a whole. This objective of stimulating discussion between dominant and marginal voices has guided our selection of papers for this Special Issue. We have thus included not only representatives of research from within the parameters of mainstream business ethics, IB or leadership scholarship, but also innovative contributions from fields such as military history, information technology, regulation, spirituality and sociology.

Special issue: Building secure parallel and distributed networks and systems

Security and privacy have been the major concern when people build parallel and distributed networks and systems. While the attack systems have become more easy-to-use, sophisticated, and powerful, interest has greatly increased in the field of building more effective, intelligent, adaptive, active and high performance defense systems which are distributed and networked. This special issue focuses on the issues of building secure parallel and distributed networks and systems.