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Research on cultural entrepreneurship has explored the role of language in making and giving sense to novel ventures and market categories and in legitimating them. We analyze how an emerging de novo market category, quantum computing, is constructed through the use of analogies and metaphors. Through a multimodal analysis of interview and newspaper data, we find that in addition to using analogies and metaphors to highlight familiarity, actors also use such tropes to expound the weirdness of the new category, thus marking it as profoundly different and novel. Such tropes have a dual function; they draw the boundaries between science and laypeople but also arouse awe and curiosity among the audiences. Our study thus casts light on the cultural work during de novo category emergence.

Construction projects operate within a risky environment. It materialises as delays, which must be prevented or mitigated to avoid becoming amplified into late completion. But previous research has largely ignored how structural complexity of the underlying network schedules shapes their resilience.

This research hypothesizes that schedule structure plays a vital role in its ability to absorb or propagate delays. The impact of activity-level local risk factors is represented via activity duration distributions, i.e. probability density functions. The impact of project-level global risk factors is more challenging because they arise via interactions between multiple activities.

Modelling resilience to local and global risk factors can employ a matrix approach. Simulation shows that delay amplification depends on local structure, not global complexity.

Criticality had merely relied upon a single deterministic analysis of a network schedule to categorize activities as having zero or nonzero float from fixed relative duration a dependency structure. Repeated probabilistic analysis with sampled durations gives criticality indices of activities. This research limits itself to network schedules with point-wise relations between activities.

Managers can use this knowledge to develop schedules that protect their expected project duration with a suitable structural complexity.

Contributions to the body of knowledge are as follows: It converts the dependency structure into a reachability matrix and adds a correlation matrix to capture how the predecessor performance may impact its successors. It correlates criticality of activities with structural complexity indices. And it ranks activities objectively by their cruciality, i.e. potential delay propagation.

Technology-facilitated abuse, so-called “tech abuse,” through phones, trackers, and other emerging innovations, has a substantial impact on the nature of intimate partner violence (IPV). The current chapter examines the risks and harms posed to IPV victims/survivors from the burgeoning Internet of Things (IoT) environment. IoT systems are understood as “smart” devices such as conventional household appliances that are connected to the internet. Interdependencies between different products together with the devices' enhanced functionalities offer opportunities for coercion and control. Across the chapter, we use the example of IoT to showcase how and why tech abuse is a socio-technological issue and requires not only human-centered (i.e., societal) but also cybersecurity (i.e., technical) responses. We apply the method of “threat modeling,” which is a process used to investigate potential cybersecurity attacks, to shift the conventional technical focus from the risks to systems toward risks to people. Through the analysis of a smart lock, we highlight insufficiently designed IoT privacy and security features and uncover how seemingly neutral design decisions can constrain, shape, and facilitate coercive and controlling behaviors.