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The increased need for, and maintenance of, infrastructure creates challenges for all agencies that manage infrastructure assets. To assist with these challenges, agencies implement asset management systems. The purpose of this paper is to investigate and compare the importance of barriers faced by agencies establishing transportation asset management systems in the USA and Libya to contrast a case of a developed and developing country.

A literature review identified 28 potential barriers for implementing an asset management system. Practitioners who participate in decision-making processes in each country were asked to rate the importance of each barrier in an online survey questionnaire. Descriptive statistics, Kendall Concordance W., and Mann-Whitney are used to analyze the collected data.

Through an analysis of 61 completed questionnaires, 14 barriers were identified as important by both the US and Libyan practitioners. A total of 11 additional barriers, primarily in the areas of political and regulatory obstacles, were determined to be important only for Libya. These 11 barriers provide reasonable insights into asset management systems’ barriers for developing countries.

The list of barriers identified from this research will assist decision makers to address and overcome these barriers when implementing asset management systems in their specific organizational and country conditions.

The research identified standard barriers to implementing asset management systems and identified barriers that were specific to the country context, such as political and regulatory barriers in Libya. When viewed with the asset management literature, the results show broad applicability of some asset management barriers and the need to contextualize to country context (e.g. developing countries) for other barriers.

The purpose of this research is to examine why communities facing the same disaster recover differentially and determine pathways to successful disaster recovery in the research setting of New Orleans neighborhoods affected by Hurricane Katrina. While previous studies suggest that there are a variety of pathways to recovery, a broader cross-case comparison is necessary to generalize these pathways into a recovery framework. Specifically, this study seeks to determine what pre-disaster and post-disaster causal factors, alone or in combination, were important to recovery following Hurricane Katrina.

This paper presents a cross-case comparative study of neighborhood-level recovery. Based on prior work, which used the Delphi method to determine hypothesized causal factors and indicators of recovery, data was collected through publically available sources, including the US Census, the Greater New Orleans Community Data Center and previously completed studies for 18 damaged neighborhoods. Fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis was used due to its ability to analyze both quantitative and qualitative data for smaller case studies.

The results show that there are multiple pathways combining pre-disaster community factors and post-disaster actions that led to recovery, as measured by population return. For example, economic capacity is nearly sufficient for recovery, but a combination of low social vulnerability, post-disaster community participation, a high proportion of pre-World War II housing stock and high amounts of post-disaster funds also led to recovery.

This research uses a novel method to link pre-disaster measures of resilience and vulnerability to recovery outcomes and, through cross-case comparison, generates results that will enable researchers to develop a theory of sustainable community recovery.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the inter-firm variation in the opening of international global development centers (GDCs), in a high commitment entry mode, by Indian software firms as a function of their past performance, degree of internationalization, possession of a valuable resource in the form of CMMI Level 5 certification and rivals’ establishment of GDCs.

The authors draw on the organizational learning theory, the resource-based view and the strategic behavior theory to analyze the variation in the number of GDCs opened by 32 leading Indian software firms between 2000 and 2009.

The authors find that strong past performance of Indian software firms leads to the establishment of a greater number of GDCs. The authors further demonstrate that non-financial resources, such as the possession of CMMI Level 5 certification, positively moderate the above relationship.

The research is conducted in the context of a single industry and a single home country. The authors also focus on a subset of firms (large, listed firms) in the industry. The authors recommend future research to examine other knowledge-intensive industries.

An increasing number of Indian software firms and other emerging market firms wish to locate close to their overseas customers by choosing a high commitment entry mode. The research suggests that, prior to internationalizing, managers should build up critical and relevant resources through deployment of high commitment entry modes.

The research has many unique aspects including a rigorous model development, a robust empirical approach as well as an interesting empirical context. The authors believe that the results will be useful to academics and practitioners alike.