Knowledge has become a key resource and the driver of economic progress. The distribution of welfare in the world demonstrates that the richest countries are the ones that have the knowledge, not natural resources. Creating a knowledge-based society is the foundation for sustainable development. Key factors influencing the creation of a knowledge based economy are investments in education, research and development and application of new technologies. Nevertheless, culture, attitudes and values that affect people's commitment to continuous improvement and learning, can also play an important role in creating a knowledge society for sustainable development. In this paper authors are making an attempt to identify the basic values of employees in several Serbian companies by means of factor analysis approach, with special emphasis on the national cultural dimensions framework and its utility.

Combating global warming, safeguarding ecological support systems and reducing energy and resource use as well as maintaining functioning societies are key challenges for many businesses today and in the near future. These problems have been addressed under the integrating concept of sustainable development. Implementing sustainable development in corporations, however, necessitates organizational learning. In light of a wide variation in corporate behaviour in accepting these challenges or not, the question arises of when and why companies pursue processes of learning and change to integrate sustainability, what effects these innovations have, and to what extent, and what factors promote or inhibit learning. This article addresses these questions on the basis of an empirical analysis of six companies. The study analyses internal and external explanatory factors for the occurrence of sustainability‐oriented learning and change processes in medium‐sized and large companies. Our findings highlight the role of learning mechanisms, leadership styles, internal networks and change agents. In terms of company‐external factors, the study focused on the pressure applied by stakeholders and governmental regulation. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.

The Earth System Science Partnership, which unites all major global change research programmes, declared in 2001 an urgent need to develop ''strategies for Earth System management''. Yet what such strategies might be, how they could be developed, and how effective, efficient and equitable such strategies would be, remains unspecified. It is apparent that the institutions, organizations and mechanisms by which humans currently govern their relationship with the natural environment and global biochemical systems are not only insufficient-they are also poorly understood. This article presents the science programme of the Earth System Governance Project, a new 10-year global research effort 123Int Environ Agreements (2010) 10:277-298 DOI 10.1007 endorsed by the International Human Dimensions Programme on Global Environmental Change (IHDP). It outlines the concept of earth system governance as a challenge for the social sciences, and it elaborates on the interlinked analytical problems and research questions of earth system governance as an object of study. These analytical problems concern the overall architecture of earth system governance, agency beyond the state and of the state, the adaptiveness of governance mechanisms and processes as well as their accountability and legitimacy, and modes of allocation and access in earth system governance. The article also outlines four crosscutting research themes that are crucial for the study of each analytical problem as well as for the integrated understanding of earth system governance: the role of power, knowledge, norms and scale.

The article introduces the notion of adaptiveness and discusses the role of social learning in it. Adaptiveness refers to the capacity of a social actor or socialecological system to adapt in response to, or in anticipation of, changes in the environment. We explore arguments both from a theoretical perspective and through illustrations from case studies of water management in the Alps of Europe and Mekong in southeast Asia. We propose and illustrate that social learning processes are important for building adaptiveness in several ways and at different scales. Social learning can help cope with informational uncertainty; reduce normative uncertainty; build consensus on criteria for monitoring and evaluation; empower stakeholders to take adaptive actions; reduce conflicts and identify synergies between adaptations; and improve fairness of decisions and actions. Findings in the case studies provide some support for these generalizations but often with caveats related to diversity of stakeholder interests, levels of shared understanding versus contested knowledge and scale of coordination. For this reason, we suggest that future work pays greater attention to issues of agency, knowledge and scale: What strategies have individuals and organizations pursued in successful examples of social learning? How are the boundaries and interactions between science, policy and practice managed? How does social learning occur across spatial and temporal scales?

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