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This research proposes a viable method of slab and shore load computation for the partial striking technique utilized in high-rise construction projects to optimize the use of horizontal formwork. The proposed Partial Striking Simplified Method (PSSM) is designed to be utilized by industry practitioners to schedule the construction operations of casting floors in order to control the formwork costs incurred throughout the completion of a project.

The article presents the PSSM for calculating slab and shore loads in multi-story building construction. It introduces the concept of “clearing before striking,” where shore supports are partially removed after a few days of pouring fresh concrete. The PSSM procedure is validated through numerical analysis and compared to other simplified approaches. Additionally, a user-friendly Python program based on the PSSM procedure is developed to explore the capability of the PSSM procedure and is used to study the variations in slab load, shoring level, concrete grade and cycle time.

The study successfully developed a more efficient and reliable method for estimating the loads on shores and slabs using partial striking techniques for multi-story building construction. Compared to other simplified approaches, the PSSM procedure is simpler and more precise, as demonstrated through numerical analysis. The mean of shore and slab load ratios are 1.08 and 1.07, respectively, which seems to have a slight standard deviation of 0.29 and 0.21 with 3D numerical analysis. The Python program developed for load estimation is effective in exploring the capability of the proposed PSSM procedure. The Python program's ability to identify the floor under maximum load and determine the specific construction stage provides valuable insights for multi-story construction, enabling informed decision-making and optimization of construction methods.

High-rise construction in Indian cities is booming, though this trend is not shared by all the country's major metropolitan areas. The growing construction sector in urban cities demands rapid construction for efficient utilization of formwork to control the construction costs of project. The proposed procedure is the best option to optimize the formwork construction cost, construction cycle time, the suitable formwork system with optimum cost, concrete grade for the adopted level of shoring in partaking and many more.

The proposed PSSM reduces the calculation complexity of the existing simplified method. This is done by considering the identical slab stiffness and identical shore layout for uniform load distribution throughout the structure. This procedure utilizes a two-step load distribution calculation for clearing phase. Initially, the 66% prop load of highest floor level is distributed uniformly over the lower interconnected slabs. In the second step, the total prop load is removed equally from all slabs below it. This makes the load distribution user-friendly for the industry expert.

This paper aims to study the motives that led to conflict between two groups – Employees of state-owned power distribution companies and the Government – over permitting parallel licensing to a private company for power distribution services in selected areas of the Maharashtra state in India. The study also seeks to comprehend the reconciliation process and the role of leadership in thwarting the strike that could have impacted common citizens.

The research is built on a case-based approach to analyze the pre- and poststrike environment along with the impact of the power shortage during the few hours of the strike. A semi-structured interview method wherein government and employee union representatives were interviewed to understand their version of the incident is used. Related literature, reports and news were reviewed to realize the impacts and consequences of similar situations in the past.

The strike was called off within a few hours with the intervention of state government to resolve the issue, promising the union the government’s intention not to privatize but to invest INR 500bn in the three government companies. The parallel licensing may impact government-owned power distribution companies as well as customers in the future.

It will pave the way for lessons related to such incidence where the Government and the Unions are at loggerheads over issues like privatization or ownership of the company and help the involved and other parties to seek a viable solution. The role of resilient leadership demonstrated by both parties led to a win-win solution within a few hours of the strike.

The paper is a case study on an issue that is very contemporary; the role of leadership and its swiftness in decision-making that led to a solution to a very complex situation is something that was not done earlier in the context of the State vs Union issue.

The paper uses key themes from Fox’s writing to reflect on the wave of public sector industrial action that developed in the UK since the early 2020s: specifically the relevance of (1) radical pluralism, (2) historical context, (3) understanding the effects of high inflation and (4) (a breakdown of) trust relations.

The paper draws primarily on evidence from broad public debate but is informed by discussions held with senior union leaders both for a research project and in delivering development training.

Radical pluralism is used as a lens through which to understand declining trust in institutions of pluralist collective industrial relations in the UK public sector, arguing that current developments need to be understood in historical context. An analysis of the industrial action in the early 2020s highlights the ways that a period of high inflation can stress institutions of collective employment regulation, rendering visible the limits of conventional, pluralist industrial relations.

The paper could be extended by more detailed empirical data collection, both in the UK and other national institutional contexts.

Unions need to more consistently focus on issues of power. A stronger focus on power might identify the limitations of pluralist institutions of collective regulation and embed a commitment to building union influence to challenge those existing structures in favour of mechanisms to build workers' power more broadly.

Understanding these disputes as, at least in part, being about the limits to and undermining of trust in collective institutions that regulate work and employment allows us to better understand the forces at play and potential outcomes of these disputes.

The paper makes three key contributions: first, applying Fox’s work in a practical way to contemporary UK industrial relations; second, extending his analyses to public sector industrial relations and third, arguing that power needs to be more centrally located within union objectives in order to reshape industrial relations to radical pluralist ends.

Working conditions, pay rates and the rights of workers to collectively negotiate have become important points of discussions in recent years, with support for unions and union applications rising to levels long unseen in America. In many instances, though, companies have responded aggressively. This is not the first time such a dynamic has played out in American business. This study aims to take a fresh look at one of America’s most prominent historical disputes between labor and ownership – the Homestead Massacre of 1892 – to glean lessons from that conflict that remain relevant to today’s business environment.

This study adopts game theory and the principles of repeated interaction to assess how differing discount factors led to differences in time orientations between the workers and the Carnegie company. These differing time orientations affected both the strategy each side deployed in the negotiations and the payoffs received by the parties. Letters, contemporary news reports and histories of the events leading up to and immediately following the 1892 Homestead Massacre are qualitatively analyzed with a genealogical pragmatic approach.

Differences in temporal orientation between management and workers exacerbated the conflict, with the workers adopting a more cooperative stance and distal time orientation, while the Carnegie company negotiated with a proximal time orientation and played to “win” a game that, in fact, could not be fully won or lost given its infinitely repeating nature. The result was a short-term victory for the Carnegie company but with long-term negative consequences that highlight the suboptimal outcome the company achieved by playing a proximal strategy in an infinite game.

Although the incident at Homestead is a well-studied labor dispute, many of the themes that preceded the incident have resurfaced in the modern work context. This work, by adopting game theory as an analytical framework, provides new insights into management mistakes that led to the labor conflict and lessons for what present-day managers can do to avoid exacerbating labor strife.

This study explores the roles of formal advisors (FAs) in the succession process of family firms and the factors that determine them.

Data for this study were collected through interviews with 38 FAs, including lawyers, tax advisors, financial ad-visors and others.

FAs play multiple roles simultaneously in succession processes (both internal and external), which the authors call role hybridity. Among them, the authors differentiated roles, such as educators, sherpas, initiators, experts, managers, consiglieres and protectors. Additionally, the authors demonstrated that the critical factors shaping these roles are trust, communication, human capital and willingness to take on the role. To explain the role hybridity phenomenon, the authors used stewardship theory's assumptions and formulated propositions for further research.

This study provides insight into both internal and external succession processes from the perspective of various types of FAs. The authors indicate their roles and the factors that determine them.

The purpose of the article is to outline the insights provided by Alan Fox in Man Mismanagement in relation to the rise of the New Right political economy and the spread of unitarist managerialism. The article assesses the contemporary work and employment relations implications of mismanagement arising from a “second wave” of the New Right ideology from 2010 in the UK.

Responding to the Special Issue on Alan Fox, the article focuses on Alan Fox's book Man Mismanagement, considering industrial relations developments arising between the 1st (1974b) and 2nd (1985) editions relating to the political rise of the New Right. It reviews various literature that illustrates the contemporary IR relevance of the book and Fox's insights.

The New Right’s ideology has further fragmented work, disjointed labour rights and undermined collective industrial relations institutions, and macho mismanagement praxis is even more commonplace, compared to when Fox wrote Man Mismanagement. The stripping away of the institutional architecture of IR renders the renewal of pluralist praxis, like collective bargaining and other forms of joint regulation of work, a formidable task.

The value of the article relates to the identification of dramatic historical industrial relations events and change in the UK in Alan Fox's book Man Mismanagement, most notably relating to the rise to power of the Thatcherite New Right in 1979. Originality is evidenced by the authors’ drawing on Fox's ideas and assessing the implications of the “second wave” of the New Right in the contemporary industrial relations (IR) context of the 2020s under the conceptual themes of fragmented work, disjointed labour rights and undermined collectivism.

This paper aims to investigate the challenges faced by the transport infrastructure sector in its civil construction material supply processes, following the 2016 Kaikoura earthquake in New Zealand.

A case study approach was adopted, which included on-site observations, semi-structured interviews and literature-based desktop reviews.

The research findings show that there were supply problems for aggregates, concrete, stormwater pipes and some specialised products for the repair and rebuild of transport facilities. Those supply problems were largely caused by (1) difficulty in predicting material requirements, (2) constrained supply capability, (3) inadequate local freight capacity, (4) legal, cultural and/or environmental considerations on resource exploitation and utilisation, (5) impacts of COVID-19 and (6) ineffective communication and coordination.

For future research, it is recommended that a comparative analysis of multiple disaster cases be undertaken to further explore the generalisability of the research findings.

The research findings will inform the development of post-earthquake recovery policies and material supply chain operation strategies, in order to expedite the recovery of transport networks if a future earthquake strikes.

This study investigates the impact of large-scale teaching in higher education on students’ preparedness for the workforce within the context of evolving labour market demands, the expansion of higher education and the application of high-impact teaching strategies. It synthesizes perspectives on employer work readiness, the challenges and opportunities of large-scale teaching and strategies for fostering a dynamic academia-industry feedback loop. This multifaceted approach ensures the relevance of curricula and graduates’ preparedness while addressing the skills gap through practical recommendations for aligning teaching methodologies with employer expectations.

The research methodically examines the multifaceted challenges and opportunities inherent in large-scale teaching. It focuses on sustaining student engagement, maintaining educational quality, personalizing learning experiences and cultivating essential soft skills in extensive student cohorts.

This study highlights the critical role of transversal skills in work readiness. It also uncovers that despite its challenges, large-scale teaching presents unique opportunities. The diversity of large student groups mirrors modern workplace complexities, and technological tools aid in personalizing learning experiences. Approaches like peer networking, innovative teaching methods, real-world simulations and collaborative resource utilization enrich education. The importance of experiential learning for augmenting large-scale teaching in honing soft skills is emphasized.

This manuscript contributes to the discourse on large-scale teaching, aligning it with employer expectations and the dynamic requirements of the job market. It offers a nuanced perspective on the challenges and opportunities this educational approach presents, providing insights for crafting engaging and effective learning experiences in large cohorts. The study uniquely integrates experiential learning, co-creation in education and industry-academia feedback loops, underscoring their importance in enhancing student work readiness in large-scale teaching.

This study aims to better understand the emotional challenges that inexperienced accounting researchers may face in conducting ethnographies. To do so, the authors use Arlie Russell Hochschild’s (1979, 1983) notions of “feeling rules” and “emotion work” to shed light on the possible nature and impact of these challenges, and how her ideas may also become fruitful for academic purposes.

The authors take a reflective approach in sharing the raw observation notes and research diaries as first-time ethnographers in the area of management accounting. The authors use these to analyze “unprocessed” experiences of emotional challenges from the fieldwork and how the authors learned to cope with them.

The authors illustrate how emotional challenges in conducting ethnographies can be rooted in a clash with prevalent feeling rules of certain study situations. The authors explore the conditions under which these clashes occur and how they may prompt researchers to respond through means of emotion work to (re-)stabilize those situations. Based on these insights, the authors also discuss how wider conventions of the accounting academy may contribute to emotional challenges as they stand in contrast to principles of ethnographic research.

There remains a tendency in the accounting domain to largely omit emotional challenges in the making of ethnographies, especially in writing up studies. In this paper, the authors are motivated to break this silence and openly embrace such challenges as an asset when the authors talk about the process of creating knowledge.

Passive investing has established itself as the dominant force in the world of professionally managed assets, surpassing the concept of index funds. Its meteoric rise is fueled by investors’ preference for its dual benefits of strong diversification and low cost. A comprehensive study of the economic model, addressed areas and market structure has not yet been conducted, despite the existence of numerous studies on more specific topics. To address this gap, this paper examines 943 articles on passive investing published between 1998 and 2022 in SCOPUS and Web of Science.

The study utilizes the most pertinent tools for conducting a systematic review by the PRISMA framework. This article is the result of SLR and extensive bibliometric analysis. Contextualized systematic literature review is used to screen and select bibliographic data, which is then subjected to a variety of bibliometric analyses. The study provides a bibliometric overview of works on passive investment research that are indexed in Scopus and Web of Science. Bibliometrix, VoS Viewer and Cite Space are the tools used to conduct content and network analysis, to ascertain the present state of research, as well as its focus and direction.

Our exhaustive analysis yields important findings. One, the previous decade has witnessed a substantial increase in the number of publications and citations; in particular, the inter-disciplinary and international scope of related research has expanded; Second, the top three clusters on “active versus passive funds,” “price discovery and market structures” and “exchange-traded funds (ETFs) as an alternative” account for more than fifty percent of the domain’s knowledge; Third, “Leveraged ETFs (LETFs)” and “environmental, social and governance (ESG)” are the two emerging themes in the passive investing research. Fourth, despite its many benefits, passive investing is not suitable for everyone. To get the most out of what passive investing has to offer, investors, intermediaries and regulators must all exercise sufficient caution. Our study makes a substantial contribution to the field by conducting a comprehensive bibliometric analysis of the existing literature, highlighting key findings and implications, as well as future research directions.

While the study contributes significantly to the field of knowledge, it has several limitations that must be considered when interpreting its findings and implications. With our emphasis on academic journals, the study analyzed only peer-reviewed journal articles, excluding conference papers, reports and technical articles. While we are confident that our approach resulted in a comprehensive and representative database, our reliance on Elsevier Scopus and Web of Science may have resulted in us overlooking relevant work accessible only through other databases. Additionally, specific bibliometric properties may not be time-stable, and certain common distribution patterns of the passive investing literature may still be developing.

With this study, it has been possible to observe and chart the high growth trajectory of passive investing research globally, especially post-US subprime crisis. Despite the widespread adoption of passive investing as an investment strategy, it is not a one-size-fits-all proposition. Market conditions change constantly, and it frequently requires an informed eye to determine when and how much to shift away from active investments and toward passive ones. Currency ETFs enable investors to implement a carry trade strategy in their portfolios; however, as a word of caution, currency stability and liquidity can play a significant role in international ETFs. Similarly, LETFs may be better suited for dynamic strategies and offer less value to a long-term investor. Lastly, the importance of investor education cannot be underestimated in the name of the highly diversified portfolio when using passive alternatives, for which necessary efforts are required by regulators and investors alike.

The inexorable trend to passive investing creates numerous issues for fund management, including fee and revenue pressure, which forces traditional managers to seek new revenue streams, such as illiquid and private assets, which also implies increased portfolio risk. Additionally, the increased transparency and efficiency associated with the ETF market indicates that managers must rethink the entire value chain, beginning with technology and the way investments interact. Passive investments have triggered changes in market structure that are still not fully understood or factored in. Active management and a range of valuation opinions on whether a price is “too low” or “too high” provide much-needed depth to a market as it attempts to strike a delicate balance between demand and supply forces, ensuring liquidity at all price points.

I hereby certify that I am the sole author of this paper and that no part of this manuscript has been published or submitted for publication.