Search results

Despite being a common term in the literature, there is little agreement about what the word “adaptability” means in the context of the built environment and very little evidence regarding practitioners’ understanding of adaptability. This paper aims to examine what practitioners in the building industry mean when they talk about “adaptability”.

This study adopted a qualitative approach, involving 82 unstructured face-to-face interviews with practitioners from a range of professional disciplines in the construction industry, including architects, engineers, facilities managers, property agents and planners. The interview transcripts were coded inductively to identify themes in the qualitative data.

The interview data revealed a wide range of perspectives on adaptability, particularly regarding terminology, the meanings practitioners associate with adaptability and the way in which these meanings are communicated to others in the industry. The applied meaning of adaptability varied depending on context.

Conflicting language, and different interpretations of adaptability, is a potential barrier to the development of adaptable buildings. A clearer articulation of the meaning of adaptability (particularly by clients) during briefing and design could give rise to a more appropriate level of adaptability in the built environment.

This study has addressed a gap in the existing literature by foregrounding the voices of industry practitioners and exploring their (sometimes very different) interpretations of adaptability in buildings.

Regulations and complying with regulation are a considerable burden on small firms, which consistently report that regulation is an obstacle to growth. Regulation for small business includes financial and psychological costs and worry about non‐compliance. Accordingly, regulation inflation raises increasing difficulties in understanding and complying with new regulation. Time and resources are diverted from running or growing the business. This paper explores self‐regulation as a mechanism for resolving the problems of regulation.

The authors first sets out the “regulation problem” as seen by the research community and by small business. The analysis explores the issues associated with small business regulation and compliance. They show that “imposed” regulation is expensive and may not be very effective. They continue by examining the nature of self‐regulation and consider a case study: the auto trade.

Self‐regulation can have beneficial effects. All regulation need not be top down control and command and self‐regulation can be effective if done well.

Self‐regulation seems to offer a number of advantages over legislation for small businesses, but it appears that a number of conditions need to be met if they are to be seen as effective. The authors discuss the implications and benefits of SFROs as an alternative way of assuring regulatory compliance.

Self‐regulation presents an attractive solution to some of the problems encountered by small business regulation through providing a credible, flexible and cost effective alternative to command and control legislation.

In the co-creation process from a network perspective, service is produced, designed, and evaluated entirely by the actors with dynamic roles and with less participation by the firm's employees in the service process. The purpose of this paper is to develop a theoretical model that represents environmental stimuli and value perceptions that contribute to service co-creation behaviour in an online network.

A total of 36 semi-structured interviews were conducted with members of two online programming communities – GitHub and Stack Overflow co-creators, with the data analysed using thematic analysis. The stimulus-organism-response model guided the development of the final model.

Social influence and trust are influential in actor value perceptions, including primary and network value, the interplay of which leads actors to co-production, supportive, and administrative behaviour. Environmental factors do not directly drive actors; rather it is the value that initiates and drives actors, which, by extension, initiates and drives the co-creation of services.

The service co-creation behaviour model provides a basis for future research in the co-creation and co-destruction context to model behaviours within the online network organisation setting and thereby enable improvement of such systems. This model can be operationalised in a network environment through design features.

This paper provides a rich understanding of environmental stimuli and value perception factors that contribute to the co-creation of services, and identifies different types of behaviours in dynamic online networks. This paper presents a new model of different types of behaviours emerging from actor participation in the co-creation process.

Aims to promote concern and debate about the penetration of accounting and financial management in the health care sectors of several Anglo‐Saxon countries – the United States, United Kingdom and New Zealand. Questions may be raised in several ways. For example, by highlighting how accounting concepts such as “costs” are not neutral notions but rather are sites for struggles of divergent interests or by commenting on how accounting may change or be changed by different organizational and societal rationalities. Concern may also be raised by questioning the effects of accounting change in terms wider than the purely instrumental and thereby arguing that its global spread is grounded more in faith than “factual” evidence regarding its efficacy.

This chapter looks at what it means to set out to do anthropological research with tangata whenua (New Zealanders of Māori descent; literally, ‘people of the land’), from the particular perspective of a Pākehā (New Zealander of non-Māori descent – usually European) musical anthropologist with an interest in sound-made worlds. In late 2017, Lowe was awarded funding for a conjoint PhD scholarship in anthropology at James Cook University, Australia, and Aarhus University, Denmark. However, following advice from several colleagues in Aotearoa New Zealand, Lowe decided to assess the viability of the project with his prospective Māori and non-Māori collaborators prior to officially starting his PhD candidature. Throughout this process of pre-ethics (Barrett, 2016), Lowe met with both Māori and non-Māori to discuss the proposed PhD project; a ‘listening in’ to his own socio-historical positioning as a Pākehā anthropologist within contemporary Aotearoa New Zealand. This approach to anthropological research is in response to George (2017), who argues for a new politically and ethnically aware mode of anthropology that aims to (re)establish relationships of true meaning between anthropology and Māori in Aotearoa New Zealand.

This chapter examines some key themes raised by the intersection of the urban, the rural and the penal against the backdrop of the Australian ‘rural ideal’. But the chapter also seeks to look critically at that ideal and how it relates (or does not) to the various lifeworlds and patterns of settler development that lie beyond the Australian cityscape. Attention is directed away from the singular focus on the rural/urban divide to stress the importance of North/South in understanding patterns of development and penal practices beyond the cityscape in the Australian context.