Building urban resilience through sustainability-oriented small- and medium-sized enterprises.

The unfolding COVID-19 pandemic, and the unprecedented social and economic costs it has inflicted, provide an important opportunity to scrutinize the interplay between the resilience of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and the resilience of the communities they are embedded in. In this article, we articulate the specific ways that SMEs play a crucial, and underappreciated role in building resilience to human and natural hazards, and provide new opportunities to accelerate the adoption of sustainability practices through the configuration of 'enabling ecosystems' geared towards promoting sustainability in the private sector. We argue that capacity-building and experimentation are not only required within companies, but also throughout this emerging supportive ecosystem of policies, resources (i.e. finance, materials, skills), governance actors, and intermediaries to adequately focus investment, technical capabilities and innovation. Ultimately, we call for a new transdisciplinary action research agenda that centers on SMEs as pivotal actors and amplifiers of community resilience; while recognizing that these firms are themselves in need of support to secure their own capacity to respond to, and transform in light of, crises. This research program calls for recognizing and applying the lessons that the pandemic presents to the urgent need for accelerated climate action. This will be enabled by developing more targeted approaches to collaborative capacity-building activities in SMEs that feed into experimentation and allow for the accelerated adoption of deliberate and strategic resilient business practices and models.

Business models for the Anthropocene: accelerating sustainability transformations in the private sector.

The rapid pace and escalating severity of climate change impacts have made clear that current incremental approaches to pressing global socio-ecological challenges are insufficient to address the root causes of unsustainable development. This has spurred increasing interest in the dynamics of transformation: the actors, capacities and resources needed to fundamentally shift development paths. The private sector is at the core of essential transformative processes necessary to build a future premised on environmental integrity, social inclusivity, and resilience. The activities of the private sector are structured and driven by their underlying business model, which is at its core a set of assumptions about how a business creates, extracts and delivers value. Dominant conceptualizations of the business model remain a narrow imagining of how business interacts with societal processes and shape development patterns. In this article we call for the conceptualization and design of business models anchored in societal purpose and operating within planetary boundaries, apt for the Anthropocene. We identify five building blocks for business models where transdisciplinary sustainability research can accelerate entrepreneurial activity that fosters desirable sustainable pathways by enabling the creation of new capabilities in support of broader transformational processes. This article seeks to inform (and potentially re-orient the efforts of) transdisciplinary scholars engaging the private sector in the co-production of community-based sustainability and resilience-building initiatives. Likewise, the building blocks provide a guide for businesses who aim to deepen their capacity to build new partnerships, identify, and incorporate new information on climate risk into their operations and develop practices, sequences and procedures oriented toward the sustainable development goals and disaster resilience.

'I'm not just a number on a sheet, I'm a person': Domiciliary care, self and getting older.

Social care funding is reducing in spite of a growing older population. Within this context, domiciliary services are increasingly failing to deliver care that respects the individuality and heterogeneity of older people. To date, there has been limited research in the U.K. that explores, from the older person's perspective, how care practices interact with self. Using biographical-narrative methodology, this study takes a constructionist approach to understand the individual's lived experience of care and how it interacts with sense of self. A three-stage model of data collection was used, beginning with a narrative biographic enquiry, exploring with participants (65 yrs +, n = 17) their journeys into care and any possible relationship to personal identity. Stage 2 involved a two-week period of diary completion, with participants recording daily reflections on their care experiences. In stage 3, a semi-structured interview explored the diary entries, linking back to the narrative biographic enquiry to reveal ways in which specific care practices interacted with the sense of self. The findings reveal that a strong relationship between older person and formal carer, forged through familiarity, regularity and consistency, plays a significant role in promoting feelings of autonomy. Furthermore, such relationship mediates against the loss of executional autonomy that often accompanies increasing disability. Maintaining autonomy and control was a recurring theme, including in relation to home, privacy and dignity. Feelings of autonomy are also promoted when formal carers understand the unique ways in which individuals experience ageing and being in the cared-for relationship. This paper suggests that a care approach should be based on two tenets. First, a knowledge and insight into the importance of understanding and respecting the older person's continuing development of self, and second applying this knowledge to care through a positive, stable and consistent relationship between the older person and the carer.

Dementia buddying as a vehicle for person-centred care? The performance of a volunteer-led pilot on two hospital wards.

Objectives To understand and explain whether a dementia buddies pilot introduced into two adjacent mental health hospital wards in England was achieving its aim of enhancing person-centred care. Methods The research used a cultural lens to evaluate the dementia buddies pilot. It comprised 20 in-depth semi-structured interviews with staff, volunteers and carers in the two wards where the pilot was introduced. Results The pilot's ability to deliver positive outcomes depended on its compatibility with the culture of the ward and it performed better in the ward where a person-centred culture of care already existed. In this ward, the pilot became a catalyst for improved experience among patients, carers and staff, whereas in the second ward, the pilot faced resistance from staff and achieved less. Conclusions This finding underlines the benefit of focusing on workplace culture to understand the performance of volunteer-led initiatives. It also shows that existing ward culture is a determining factor in the capacity for dementia buddy schemes to act as vehicles for culture change.

Reversal of phencyclidine-induced dopaminergic dysregulation by N-methyl-D-aspartate receptor/glycine-site agonists.

N-methyl-D-aspartate (NMDA) receptors may play a critical role in the pathophysiology of schizophrenia. In rodents, NMDA receptor antagonists, such as phencyclidine (PCP), induce dopaminergic dysregulation that resembles the pattern observed in schizophrenia. The present study investigates the degree to which concurrent treatment with NMDA modulators, such as glycine and the recently developed glycine transport antagonist N[3-(4"-fluorophenyl)-3-(4"-phenylphenoxy)propyl]sarcosine (NFPS) prevents dopaminergic dysregulation observed following chronic (3 months) or subchronic (2 weeks) PCP administration. Both chronic and subchronic treatment with PCP in the absence of glycine or NFPS led to significant potentiation of amphetamine-induced dopamine release in the prefrontal cortex and striatum, similar to that observed in schizophrenia. Treatment with either high-dose glycine or NFPS along with PCP prevented PCP effects. These findings demonstrate effective doses of glycine for use in animal models of schizophrenia, and support recent clinical studies showing the effectiveness of NMDA agonists in the treatment of persistent symptoms of schizophrenia.