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Today, sustainability is considered a high priority; and it is on the agenda for major corporations. It has experienced an increase due to the demands of the customers, thereby pressuring corporations to act in more sustainable ways to stay relevant and competitive. One industry that is experiencing an increased request to act sustainably is the construction industry. The construction industry differs quite a lot from other industries since it is project-based and built on temporary relationships. Subcontractors are temporarily engaged in the projects, often by a main contractor, to perform tasks in which they are specialised. The subcontractors additionally engage their respective subcontractors. This makes it harder to control and ensure that all involved actors are acting sustainably due to the multiple tiers of contractors and the complex nature of the projects. A technology that recently has had the attention of construction professionals is blockchain technology, which is built on smart contracts. It can be described as a shared, distributed ledger technology, which was created as an enabler for the cryptocurrency Bitcoin. The technology has, in recent years, been widely discussed as a potential business enhancer. It can, for example, provide immutable record-keeping, enables the usage of smart contracts and enhance transparency within the network, which is deemed valuable to the construction industry's push towards sustainability. The smart contracts technology has the potential to disrupt current business practices and decrease the required amounts of trust needed in business relationships.

Like other academic fields, educational policy is being reviewed for the affective component. Analysis is occurring in two forms: (a) the affects of education policy on education, school leaders, teachers and student learning outcomes and (b) text analysis of specific education policies. This chapter explores the representation of emotions in education policy texts, drawing on a theory of social contracts (Rawolle & Vadeboncoeur, 2003; Yeatman, 1996) as a way to explore what is being conveyed to administrators and teachers. This chapter considers the way in which emotions are represented in education policy, through social contract analysis. Social contracts are underpinned by three underlying conditions: consent to be a part of a contract, points of renegotiation through the duration of the contract and mutual accountability to those involved.

In this chapter muamalah contracts are developed through the derivation of the respective rules from the requirement of shari'ah, not only avoiding the prohibited items in commercial transaction but at the same time enforcing the rights of parties to the contract in accordance with the contractual needs. Thus, these contracts safeguard the parties from being victim of the other in pursuing their commercial gains. The study examines the requirement of mudarabah and musyarakah contracts in the context of the relationship between shareholders and corporation as a foundation of a sound corporate governance mechanism. It is derived that the muamalah contracts if applied in its true nature are capable of defining and protecting the rights of all parties ridding crucial corporate governance concern which are mostly incited by the distrust of the parties in the running of the corporation and generation of benefits.

CEO incentive contracts are commonplace in China but their incidence varies significantly across Chinese cities. We show that city and provincial policy experiments help explain this variance. We examine the role of two policy experiments: the use of Special Economic Zones (SEZs) to attract Foreign Direct Investment (FDI), and the privatisation of State-Owned Enterprises (SOEs). The introduction of SEZs is found to be uncorrelated with the prevalence of CEO incentive contracts. However, firms are more likely to use such contracts in areas that saw rapid SOE privatisation, irrespective of the firm’s own current ownership status and irrespective of the size of the SOE sector in the late 1970s. The positive effect of privatisation is robust to various estimation techniques and model specifications. These findings suggest that domestic privatisation policies have been more influential than FDI in driving the expansion of incentive contracts in China.

The legal devices crafted within large organizations are a key component of legal endogeneity theory (LET). While symbolically complying with legislation, legal devices allow organizations to infuse managerial logics into the legal field, which eventually diverts law from its initial political goals. Although the LET has considered legal devices such as anti-discrimination guidelines and grievance procedures, this chapter argues that contracts also constitute a locus of symbolic compliance and contribute to the eventual endogenization of regulation. Supplementing LET with a focus on legal intermediation, this chapter explores how contracts are crafted and used by large organizations to respond to regulatory pressure. While other legal instruments are unambiguously managerialized from the outset, contracts are highly versatile legal objects that perform the seemingly opposite functions of symbolically complying with regulation and serving substantive commercial purposes. This discussion of the role of contracts as compliance mechanisms is based on an in-depth empirical study of the French retail industry and its response to a set of regulations that aimed at making their business practices fairer.

It is well known that a player in a non-cooperative game can benefit by publicly restricting his possible moves before play begins. We show that, more generally, a player may benefit by publicly committing to pay an external party an amount that is contingent on the game’s outcome. We explore what happens when external parties – who we call “game miners” – discover this fact and seek to profit from it by entering an outcome-contingent contract with the players. We analyze various structured bargaining games among such miner(s) and players that determine such an outcome-contingent contract before the start of the original game. These bargaining games include playing the players against one another as in the original game, as well as allowing the players to pay the miner(s) for exclusivity and first-mover advantage. We establish restrictions on the strategic settings in which a game miner can profit and bounds on the game miner’s profit. We also find that game miners can lead to both efficient and inefficient equilibria.

E-commerce is gaining popularity across the globe and Mauritian businesses are also increasingly making use of online platforms to engage in cross-border electronic transactions. However, there are several implications arising from online trading which need to be addressed, among which one is the validity of e-contracts. This research will therefore emphasise on two main components of e-contracts: choice of law and the applicable jurisdiction. While Mauritian laws were amended to give effect to digital signatures and e-agreements, there is no extensive or substantive domestic legal provision on choice of law and jurisdiction. Hence, the purpose of this study is to advocate for a greater clarity on the legal framework governing the applicable law and jurisdiction governing a conflict situation in e-contracts, with the view of increasing trust in international e-commerce and to bring in consistency with international commercial relations. This study will be carried out in the Mauritian context by adopting the black letter approach which will analyse the relevant rules and regulations concerning e-contract formation and validity. Additionally, a comparative analysis will be conducted on the legal framework relating to the applicable law and jurisdiction in e-contracts for selected countries: the European Union and the United States. These countries have been chosen for the comparison due to their high involvement in e-commerce and their advanced as well as comprehensive rules on e-commerce.

The relationship between work and family has long been the subject of lively debate in the political, public, and academic arena. Employers in the hospitality industry should carefully consider the work–family balance of their employees because maintaining a good balance will result in lower costs, lower sick rates, and lower staff turnover. The term “balance” refers to the way in which work interferes with life at home and how home life interferes with work. It includes both the positive and negative effects that work has on the family domain and vice versa. As research on the psychological contract approach to the employment relationship is scarce with regard to work–family interference, it became the subject of this study. The results demonstrate that psychological contract measures, in particular time commitment, can explain work–family conflict, while job content can explain work–family enrichment. In addition, the study revealed that with the appearance of gender as a moderator, different additional factors may play a role in work–family enrichment and work–family conflict. Furthermore, it revealed that family structure is not a predictor for work–family interference. This paper discusses managerial implications and offers recommendations for further research.

This chapter uses data from the World Bank’s Private Participation in Infrastructure project database, and hand-collected evidence on project performance, to examine how PPPs are applied to infrastructure development in Africa, and how well they have delivered expected benefits. It has two analytical parts: an investment trend analysis and a meta-analysis of project performance and explanatory factors. The analysis shows growth both in number and volume of PPP investments that is weaker than that observed in other developing regions, and more volatile. The performance of PPP contracts appears to be improving over time with an overall cancelation rate of 7% over the assessment period. Although PPPs have contributed to increasing infrastructure stock, they have not completely met their potential, especially with respect to increasing infrastructure access rates. The main determinants of performance include accuracy of costing and allocation of risks, consistency of macro policies with the objectives and functioning of PPPs, coherence of sector policies and plans and local capacity. Contract cancellations are mainly explained by the misalignment of outcomes with government objectives, in particular, access and investment objectives. These findings suggest that PPP application should be well planned to ensure coherence of a wide range of policies, readiness of institutions and capacity of public sector actors. This chapter contributes to closing information gaps on a relatively novel policy instrument, and provides useful evidence to support prudent policy making at the time of considerable growth in PPP application.