ABSTRACT Driven by the escalating global emphasis on research impact, contemporary science policy has solidified around a valorisation imperative that increasingly treats knowledge as a strategic asset rather than a common heritage. This paper interrogates the ethical paradox that emerges as research outcomes are progressively viewed through the prism of economic utility, clashing with the foundational mission of science as a public good. By conceptualising publicly funded knowledge as a Polanyian fictitious commodity, the analysis deconstructs the institutional mechanisms that facilitate its disembedding from the social commons. Through a critical examination of two emblematic cases—the commercialisation of CRISPR gene‐editing and the technical enclosure of foundational AI—the inquiry reveals how pathways of legal and technical gatekeeping transform social resources into proprietary assets. Critically, it demonstrates that these valorisation regimes co‐produce systemic injustices, ranging from prohibitive price tags for essential therapies to the concentration of unaccountable digital power. In response to these structural failures, the paper proposes a normative framework wedding the principle of value pluralism with the procedural engine of Responsible Research and Innovation. By advancing these principles, it contributes to a critical reimagining of research valorisation, charting a principled course to better align scientific practice with its noble calling to serve the common weal.
ABSTRACT The rapid expansion of generative AI—particularly large language models (LLMs)—into mission‐critical domains has underscored the urgent need for unified frameworks that embed trust, risk and security management (TRiSM) throughout the AI lifecycle. In this work, we present a comprehensive review and synthesis of AI TRiSM, uniting five foundational pillars: explainability with real‐time drift monitoring, ModelOps governance, application‐level security, data protection and privacy, and adversarial resilience. We introduce three aligned taxonomies for trust dimensions (e.g., fairness, transparency, accountability, inclusiveness, ethical alignment), risk categories (e.g., model, data, legal, operational, societal, cognitive, emergent, third‐party) and security controls (e.g., access management, infrastructure hardening, runtime enforcement, privacy‐enhancing techniques). Building on these, we develop a detailed toxicity taxonomy for generative AI—covering hate, violence, self‐harm, misinformation, bias, jailbreak attacks, multimodal harms, and more—each mapped to specific TRiSM safeguards. Through cross‐domain case studies in finance, healthcare, autonomous vehicles, public sector, cybersecurity, and beyond, we illustrate practical integration patterns and governance workflows. We also identify key adoption challenges—fragmented tooling, late‐stage governance, scalability constraints, evolving threats and regulations—and chart a forward‐looking roadmap toward adaptive, AI‐driven policy engines, causal explainability, privacy‐by‐design pipelines, continuous real‐time assurance, federated governance, quantum‐safe architectures, and sustainable “green AI” practices. This article aims to guide researchers and practitioners in designing, evaluating and scaling resilient, ethical, and compliant AI systems at enterprise scale.
ABSTRACT This study examines how health charities employed rhetorical strategies in their reporting to gain legitimacy and accountability during a crisis. Drawing on rhetorical theory and analyzing both voluntary and mandatory reports from 52 New Zealand health charities between 2020 and 2022 during COVID‐19, we find that while all charities primarily used logos (logic) to justify crisis responses and secure pragmatic legitimacy and calculative accountability, they combined ethos (credibility) and pathos (emotion) with logos to construct narrative accountability and moral legitimacy. Narrative accountability was grounded in reporting of mission‐ and value‐driven, culturally embedded, and equity‐focused commitments, and further strengthened through shared responsibility among diverse stakeholders to promote collaborative crisis response. This study advances understanding of how charities gain accountability and legitimacy through crisis communication, extends the accountability in crisis and rhetoric reporting discussion to the nonprofit setting, and demonstrates how charity size and characteristics shape rhetorical strategies and reporting practices.
ABSTRACT This study investigates how non‐government organizations (NGOs) dynamically manage competing institutional logics (social logic, emphasizing beneficiary well‐being, and financial accountability logic, prioritizing fiscal prudence, regulatory compliance, and structured reporting) through evolving management controls (MCs). Although existing research typically captures static or episodic snapshots of this tension, we provide a longitudinal qualitative analysis to understand how MCs are continuously adapted in response to ongoing external accountability pressures and internal staff interpretations. Drawing on extensive interviews and documentary evidence, we find that managing competing institutional logics is an iterative, nonlinear process, characterized by MCs shifting fluidly among segmenting, bridging, and demarcating functions over time. By explicitly introducing a temporal dimension, this study contributes to institutional logic and MC literature, highlighting how NGOs use MCs to maintain legitimacy and mission alignment amid competing institutional logics.
ABSTRACT In the context of globalisation and ongoing educational reforms, universities are of increasing importance as central platforms for knowledge creation and talent cultivation. The mission statements articulated in institutional narratives play a crucial role in shaping the cultural identity and public image of universities. This study applies Corpus‐Assisted Critical Discourse Analysis (CACDA) to examine the ‘About’ sections of 147 ‘double first‐class’ Chinese universities and the top 150 US universities. Using AntConc for keyword, collocation and concordance analysis, this study identifies recurrent rhetorical strategies and sociocultural themes in institutional self‐narratives. We outline a stratified systemic functional transitivity module to connect clause‐level choices with identity work in mission texts. The findings reveal that while Chinese and American universities emphasise a global vision and research excellence, Chinese institutions place a stronger emphasis on national identity and cultural heritage. In contrast, American institutions focus more on liberal education and community engagement. These differences reflect distinct cultural, economic and political contexts in higher education, offering insights for cross‐cultural academic collaborations. The study contributes to higher education research and practice by linking corpus patterns, clause‐level realisations and organisational identity claims in mission discourse. This combined linguistic approach not only deepens theoretical understanding of identity construction in higher education but also informs more effective institutional communication.
ABSTRACT Nick Witham's Popularizing the Past: Historians, Publishers, and Readers in Postwar America provides cogent and accurate accounts of the careers of five American academic historians of the post‐World War II era who won large popular audiences for national narratives: Richard Hofstadter, Daniel Boorstin, John Hope Franklin, Howard Zinn, and Gerda Lerner. Witham omits, without explanation, the highly relevant case of Oscar Handlin, author of the 1951 work The Uprooted: The Epic Story of the Great Migrations That Made America . He also fails to engage the heavily Jewish ethnoreligious matrix of popular American historiography of the postwar era. In Popularizing the Past , Witham is directly concerned with today's challenges for writing popular national histories, and he argues that the very idea of a single, national audience has been rendered anachronistic by ideological polarization and media fragmentation. Whereas Witham insists that works resembling Jill Lepore's 2018 book These Truths: A History of the United States should no longer be attempted, he upholds Ibram X. Kendi's 2016 volume, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America , as an example of what is appropriate today: a narrative for a certain community of readers, and not for other readers. Witham's essentially sound account of major features of postwar American writings about history is marred by his jejune comments about the early twenty‐first century. He leaves us with only a shadow of the witness that each of Witham's subject‐historians bore with distinction to the mission of discovering and disseminating the truth about American history in the interests of a national community.
ABSTRACT Under neoliberal logic, language policies often frame languages as commodities with material returns but downplay their epistemic potentials. This study investigates how teachers and students at a Chinese language school in Macau interpreted and appropriated such neoliberal language policies. Analysis of the school's mission statements and curriculum design revealed the institutionalization of a “subtractive resource policy,” which prioritized Pinyin as an expedient path to Mandarin proficiency and relegated Chinese characters to an optional status. Drawing on the concepts of neoliberal versus epistemic agency, this research uncovers a nuanced spectrum of stakeholder appropriation. While some participants initially exhibited neoliberal agency by aligning their learning with a pragmatic, Pinyin‐centric approach, the majority demonstrated growing epistemic awareness. This awareness led to the exercise of epistemic agency, enabling participants to resist the policy's subtractive effect by pursuing a deeper and more complete understanding of the language through character literacy. The study argues that this individual and collective agency serves as a grassroots effort to transform a market‐driven policy into a more equitable and holistic educational experience. It contributes to the literature by demonstrating how neoliberal policies can create a hierarchy of knowledge and how local stakeholders can become powerful agents in fostering epistemic diversity and inclusion.
Abstract The rise of digital technology in recent decades has led to a rapid change of communication and interaction within society and its public dimensions. As this shift in the technological landscape raises theological questions about the appropriate ecclesial use of digital technology, it also touches upon fundamental questions about the church's public role, its claims, and its mission. Under the theological premise of the public character of church and its witness (1), this essay discusses the relationship between the public character of church and the ongoing digital transformation. The discussion begins by challenging a reductionist view of technology, emphasizing its socio‐cultural significance and the profound implications it holds for both society at large (2) and the ecclesial context in particular (3). Building on these foundational insights, the essay delves into an analysis of three prevailing perspectives on the church's public character – viewing the church as an institution of moral formation, as a public, and as an active participant in the public sphere – each reconsidered in the context of digital transformation (4). In the final section, it is proposed that the discourse on public theology, when reconsidered through the lens of digital media, may be enriched by embracing a form of ‘irregular’ public theology (5).
Abstract “L'eau c'est la vie” is a well‐known French expression for “water is life,” which reflects the fact that water is undoubtedly the most vital resource in the world. The main mission for water utility companies is to convey and distribute water that is of acceptable quality to satisfy the demand of the population at any time of the day. In the recent years, achieving this mission has become very challenging for these companies. Indeed, on the one hand, the rapid growth of population and the expansion of urbanization have significantly increased the demand for water, while on the other hand, natural phenomenon, such as drought, as well as the impact of climate changes are making it almost impossible for water distribution companies to convey the right amount of water where and when it is needed. The presence of water storage tanks in a water distribution network is aimed at alleviating this pressure by storing water and distributing it later in response of the variability of the demand across the network. The management of the tanks of the network is done based on the assignment of three‐level set points, which allows to meet the outflow demand of water from each tank, while maintaining the adequate flow rate through the network. The set points define the level at which the valves that enable inflow and outflow of water to the tank have to be switched on or off. However, operating the valves during different periods of the day to meet the water demand may yield extremely high operational cost because opening some of the valves will induce the running of pumps to maintain an adequate flow rate of water in the network. We present a network optimization model for managing the network of storage tanks in a drinking water distribution system while minimizing the total cost of electricity involved. Computational experiments have been conducted on up to three sets of distribution networks. The results show that our proposed optimization model can be used to reduce the operational cost of managing the network of storage tanks for a water distribution system by up to 38%, while still being able to maintain the right amount of water in the tanks.