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This paper aims to explore the impact of COVID-19 on office space in Johannesburg. This study further explores the role of changing work practices in the office sector in South Africa because of the pandemic and its impact on future office space use planning and management.

To understand the footprints that the COVID-19 pandemic has left on the office space market in Johannesburg, this study uses semi-structured interviews, which were administered to corporate office users, and a thematic analysis was adopted to understand the views, perspectives and expectations of office users.

The study showed that space users perceive COVID-19-induced remote working as having benefits, opportunities and challenges. A notable shift in office space utilization has emerged, with employees increasingly opting for roles that permit remote work. This newfound flexibility, accommodating both on-site and remote work, often makes working from home more appealing than traditional office environments that may no longer align with users’ preferences for office spaces.

The study is limited to Johannesburg, South Africa, and may not apply to other African markets. Ten in-depth interviews were conducted, and analysis and results were deduced; this may be considered a limitation of this study.

The pandemic’s impact has brought about irreversible changes, compelling policymakers and business leaders to strategize and prepare. This proactive stance aims to prevent avoidable challenges for employees and companies during future pandemics. A thoughtful approach to the post-pandemic world can usher positive changes in the office and property sector. This includes the coexistence of both remote work and on-site working models.

This paper provides valuable insight into some of the outcomes of the COVID-19 pandemic in South Africa that are essential for future office space use planning and management. The insights from this study extend the literature and provide novel knowledge based on an office sector in the “global south.”

This article argues the value of integrating pragmatism in applying behavioural science to complex challenges. We describe a behaviour change-led knowledge co-production process in the specific context of climate change in Australia. This process was led by an interdisciplinary research team who struggled with the limitations of the prevailing deterministic behaviour change paradigms, such as the “test, learn, adapt” model, which often focuses narrowly on individual behaviours and fails to integrate multiple interpretations from diverse stakeholders into their knowledge co-production process.

This article uses collaborative reflection as a method of inquiry. We document the team’s experience of a recent challenge-led, programatic research initiative that applied behaviour change strategies to reduce climate vulnerabilities. We demonstrate the necessity of critical reflection and abductive reasoning in the face of the complexities inherent in knowledge co-production addressing complex problems. It underscores the importance of accommodating diverse perspectives and contextual nuances over a one-size-fits-all method.

The article shares lessons learnt about integrating collaborative and critical reflection throughout a project cycle and demonstrates the capacity of abductive reasoning to ease the challenges arising from the tension between behaviour change paradigms and knowledge co-production principles. This approach allows for a more adaptable and context-sensitive application, acknowledging the multiplicity of understandings and the dynamic nature of behavioural change in relation to climate adaptation.

This reflection contributes original insights into the fusion of pragmatism with behaviour change strategies, proposing a novel framework that prioritises flexibility, context-specificity and the recognition of various stakeholder perspectives in the co-production of knowledge.

This paper aims to propose a robust method for non-rigid point set registration, using the Gaussian mixture model and accommodating non-rigid transformations. The posterior probabilities of the mixture model are determined through the proposed integrated feature divergence.

The method involves an alternating two-step framework, comprising correspondence estimation and subsequent transformation updating. For correspondence estimation, integrated feature divergences including both global and local features, are coupled with deterministic annealing to address the non-convexity problem of registration. For transformation updating, the expectation-maximization iteration scheme is introduced to iteratively refine correspondence and transformation estimation until convergence.

The experiments confirm that the proposed registration approach exhibits remarkable robustness on deformation, noise, outliers and occlusion for both 2D and 3D point clouds. Furthermore, the proposed method outperforms existing analogous algorithms in terms of time complexity. Application of stabilizing and securing intermodal containers loaded on ships is performed. The results demonstrate that the proposed registration framework exhibits excellent adaptability for real-scan point clouds, and achieves comparatively superior alignments in a shorter time.

The integrated feature divergence, involving both global and local information of points, is proven to be an effective indicator for measuring the reliability of point correspondences. This inclusion prevents premature convergence, resulting in more robust registration results for our proposed method. Simultaneously, the total operating time is reduced due to a lower number of iterations.

This paper aims to examine the processes of sustainability reporting assurance (SRA) and the influence they have on shaping perception from disclosures. Given the evidence of inconsistencies and ambiguities in assurance processes, this paper examines how legitimacy is attained and maintained at different stages of SRA.

Evidence collected from 23 semi-structured interviews with assurance providers (APs), consultants, professionals and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) (non-APs) was used to conduct a thematic analysis from the perspectives of interviewees.

APs and non-APs are united in recognising the value of SRA, although, perspectives on transparency between the two groups differ. Experience and industry knowledge are essential to SRA delivery with non-APs preferring accounting APs. Nevertheless, non-APs are concerned about the role of companies in deciding assurance scope, as it can affect scrutiny. APs favour data accuracy (as opposed to data relevance) assurance due to team dynamics and internal review influences, with the latter also restricting assurance innovation. APs are interested in accessing better evidence and stakeholder engagement evaluations. Providing advisory services was not rejected by all APs. The perspectives of APs and non-APs demonstrate how progress in SRA has gained pragmatic legitimacy with noticeable gaps that serve to undermine attainment of moral legitimacy.

SRA is a developing practice that will adopt changes as it continues to mature; some of these changes could impact findings in this research. General perspectives on SRA were sought from interviewees, this affected the ability for an in-depth focus on any of the range of interesting SRA issues that arose over the course of the research. Interviews were conducted with relevant parties in the SRA space that operate in the UK. Perspectives from parties outside the UK were not solicited.

Companies make an important decision to commission SRA. Findings in this research have highlighted specific non-APs issues of concern that can be useful in structuring operations and reporting regimes to facilitate assurance procedures. The findings will also be helpful to APs as they can direct more emphasis on stakeholder concerns towards demonstrating greater stakeholder accountability. Regulatory and standard setters can enact appropriate policies that can potentially drive the practice forward for assessment of cognitive legitimacy.

The findings provide relevant account of stakeholder voices on the quality of corporate disclosures that has a direct effect on the wellbeing of communities and sustainability of societies. Collective stakeholder input on expectations can shape sustainability discourse.

This research demonstrates the applicability of financial audit quality indicators in SRA processes, extends the debate around the effectiveness of new audit fields and highlights the challenges of maintaining legitimacy with different audiences.

This paper aims to further our understanding of policy–practice gaps in organizations from an organizational learning perspective. The authors conceptualize and analyze policy–practice gaps in terms of what they label the dual challenge of organizational learning, i.e. the organizational tasks of both adapting ongoing practices to prescribed policy demands and adapting the policy itself to the needs of practice. Specifically, the authors address how this dual challenge can be understood in terms of organizational learning and how an organization can be managed to successfully resolve the dual learning challenge and, thereby, bridge policy–practice gaps in organizations.

This paper draws on existing literature to explore the gap between policy and practice. Through a synthesis of theories and an illustrative practical example, this paper highlights key conceptual underpinnings.

In the analysis of the dual challenge of organizational learning, this study provides a conceptual framework that emphasizes the important role of tensions and contradictions between policy and practice and their role as drivers of organizational learning. To bridge policy–practice gaps in organizations, this paper proposes five key principles that aim to resolve the dual challenge and accommodate both deployment and discovery in organizations.

Because this is a conceptual study, empirical research is called for to explore further and test the findings and conclusions of the study. Several avenues of possible future research are proposed.

This paper primarily contributes by introducing and elaborating on a conceptual framework that offers novel perspectives on the dual challenges of facilitating both discovery and deployment processes within organizations.

Community centers play a socio-economic and urban role of combining different communal necessities, that serve inhabitants, at different neighborhoods in cities. Their role emerged in importance as being a hub for improving and customizing quality of life experiences of the public. This research presents a code-based risk assessment tool for evaluating fire safety measures that can be adapted in the context of community centers. It also provides an exemplary case study to demonstrate its application.

The study identified the factors that render community centers as a high-risk type of facilities in fire events. Various fire codes and standards were reviewed to describe the relevant fire safety measures. A code-based fire risk assessment tool was developed and implemented, through a case study. A set of recommendations were developed to improve the fire safety conditions of the case study facility.

Several violations to fire safety were identified in the case study building. The findings led to identifying a set of recommendations to improve its fire safety conditions.

This research introduced a systematic approach to raise awareness about fire incidences and consequences in community centers, and provides facilities managers with a tool, to assess compliance based on international fire code requirements.

In fire events, community centers are considered as high-risk facilities that may lead to significant losses of human lives and damages to assets. It is significant to study the causes of fire, for ensuring effective prevention and safe operations.

The study aims to analyse the role of digitisation in accounting in enhancing the overall effectiveness of accounting functions. To achieve this, the study provides empirical evidence from the stakeholder’s perspective of digitisation of accounting, auditing, reporting and regulatory compliance procedures.

The study has applied a quantitative approach to identify the thoughts of auditors, accountants and academicians on the impact of digitalised accounting applications on accounting functions. The data was collected by administering an empirical study and a sample of 482 professionals from the accounting, auditing and academic sectors. To analyse and interpret data descriptive statistics, structured equation modelling and mediation analysis has been used.

The finding of the study signifies the relevance of digitalised accounting applications in accounting functions and reveals that there is a significant impact of digitalisation on accounting, auditing, reporting and regulatory compliance aspects of accounting functions. The outcome of the study explores that a digitalised accounting system reduces possible errors and improves the accuracy and transparency of the system.

The study highlighted the importance of developing new methods and techniques that can be used in practice. This indirectly advocates the inclusion of such concepts in accounting curricula to emphasise the need to understand the challenges and opportunities created by digitisation. Furthermore, the study will become a motivation to scholars who intend to explore different areas through which new technologies can be adopted to transform traditional accounting systems.

The contributions of the current study have implications that the adoption of digitised accounting enhances economic efficiency through a reduction in accounting costs, and enhanced accuracy that leads to the elimination of penalties and litigations for non-compliance with regulatory authorities. This indirectly impacts positively on the financial health of the business organisations and economies at large. This implication becomes greater evidential support to the organisations which are yet to plan the adoption and implementation of digital tools in their organisation for accounting functions.

Digitalisation is a relevant part of the accounting function to improve efficiency and accuracy. Since accounting and auditing practitioners struggle to control the accuracy and efficiency of transactions. Furthermore, the outcome of the study assists organisations in gaining real-time access to financial data, transforms workflows and empowers management to make timely informed sound decisions, optimise resource allocation, efficient regulatory compliance and so on.

The present study aims to gauge the experience of gender non-binary (NB) employees in the context of employee value propositions (EVP) in Indian enterprises and make suggestions for organizations to align their gender-aligned interventions with the EVP framework.

Qualitative methodology was used for collecting data through semi-structured interviews and subsequent analysis of the transcripts. The data was gathered from 10 NB participants working in Indian enterprises with the use of non-probabilistic purposive snowball sampling.

The analysis revealed eight themes representing the good, bad and ugly experiences of NB individuals within the context of EVP. These findings underscore the potential of enriching value propositions for employees to promote gender inclusion in corporate settings, contributing to long-term organizational success.

The study offers both theoretical and practical implications for fostering inclusivity at the workplace. It suggests that policymakers and organizations should align EVP with diversity and inclusion initiatives, re-evaluate hiring processes and promotion policies to ensure equal opportunities for NB individuals, provide regular staff training to address biases and implement inclusive insurance policies and representation in employee resource groups (ERGs).

This study provides unique insights into the experiences of NB employees within the framework of EVPs in Indian organizations.

This paper makes a conceptual contribution by intersecting two strands of literature (return to work following health issues and industrial relations) to facilitate our understanding of the potential role of social dialogue in supporting return to work (RTW) following the diagnosis of a chronic illness. It conceptualises the levels and channels through which various actors and their interactions may play a role in RTW facilitation within the actor-centred institutional framework.

The paper uses an exploratory design based mainly on desk research but is also informed by roundtable discussions done in six countries as part of a larger project.

The conceptual and analytical framework (CAF) is developed to explain how various actors interact together in ways shaped by the RTW policy framework and the industrial relations systems, resulting in a continuum of RTW facilitation situations.

There is limited research on return-to-work policies following diagnosis of chronic illness from a comprehensive actor-oriented perspective. The existing literature usually focusses on just one stakeholder, overlooking the role of social dialogue actors. By bridging the two streams of literature and incorporating all potential actors and their interactions in a unitary model, the proposed framework provides a valuable tool to further discuss how successful RTW after a diagnosis of chronic illness can be facilitated.