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This article describes the development of the Supported to Independent Living project (SIL), which is for the support and care for people with mental health needs in Oxfordshire to live as independently as possible in ordinary housing in the community. The project is a partnership between NHS Oxfordshire (Primary Care Trust), the Oxfordshire Supporting People programme and Oxfordshire County Council Social and Community Services.Although there was a very vigorous development of community living for people with longstanding mental health needs through the provision of group homes, particularly in Oxford City that started in 1963, there has not been an overall strategy for the development of mental health services for the County as a whole. The needs of a diverse, younger, often more mobile and potentially more challenging group of service users for housing with appropriate care and support have not been met.A joint strategy between the County Council and the Primary Care Trust (PCT) to meet these needs has therefore been developed that introduces a pathway of linked accommodation and support arrangements. These range from intensive support through to floating support in the community, and are intended to offer individuals a guided pathway away from specialist services to more mainstream provision. The services are based on the principles of recovery, personalisation and ordinary housing.As well as achieving significantly reconfigured services the strategy has to deliver savings to meet the cuts imposed on the Supporting People programme grant by Central Government.The project has involved the PCT and the County Council in close partnership working, and important and significant involvement of and engagement with service users and carers. A framework agreement has been agreed by all of the organisations involved. It sets out the roles and responsibilities of each and covers local government, the NHS, housing and support.

This research aims to propose a model for the complex decision-making involved in the ecological restoration of mega-infrastructure (e.g. railway engineering). This model is based on multi-source heterogeneous data and will enable stakeholders to solve practical problems in decision-making processes and prevent delayed responses to the demand for ecological restoration.

Based on the principle of complexity degradation, this research collects and brings together multi-source heterogeneous data, including meteorological station data, remote sensing image data, railway engineering ecological risk text data and ecological restoration text data. Further, this research establishes an ecological restoration plan library to form input feature vectors. Random forest is used for classification decisions. The ecological restoration technologies and restoration plant species suitable for different regions are generated.

This research can effectively assist managers of mega-infrastructure projects in making ecological restoration decisions. The accuracy of the model reaches 0.83. Based on the natural environment and construction disturbances in different regions, this model can determine suitable types of trees, shrubs and herbs for planting, as well as the corresponding ecological restoration technologies needed.

Managers should pay attention to the multiple types of data generated in different stages of megaproject and identify the internal relationships between these multi-source heterogeneous data, which provides a decision-making basis for complex management decisions. The coupling between ecological restoration technologies and restoration plant species is also an important factor in improving the efficiency of ecological compensation.

Unlike previous studies, which have selected a typical section of a railway for specialized analysis, the complex decision-making model for ecological restoration proposed in this research has wider geographical applicability and can better meet the diverse ecological restoration needs of railway projects that span large regions.

Service research offering a view of both the dark and bright sides of smart technology remains scarce. This paper embraces a critical perspective and examines the conflicting outcomes of smart services on the customer experience (CX), with a specific focus on chatbots.

This study uses empirical research methods to examine a single case study where an online retail service provider implemented a chatbot for customer service. Using discourse analysis, we analysed 7,167 conversations between customers and the chatbot over a two-year period.

The analysis identifies seven general themes related to the effects of the chatbot on CX: interaction quality, information gathering, procedure literacy, task achievement, digital trust, shopping stress and shopping journey. We illuminate both positive (i.e. having a pleasant interaction, providing information, knowing procedures, improving tasks, increasing trust, reducing stress and completing the journey) and negative outcomes (i.e. having an unpleasant interaction, increasing confusion, ignoring procedures, worsening tasks, reducing trust, increasing stress and abandoning the journey).

The paper develops a comprehensive framework to offer a clearer view of chatbots as smart services in customer care. It delves into the conflicting effects of chatbots on CX by examining them through relational, cognitive, affective and behavioural dimensions.

The Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), set specific targets for halting biodiversity loss, including the need to establish 10 per cent of coastal/marine areas conserved through, among other things, well‐connected systems of protected areas by 2020. The reality is that whereas nearly 15 per cent of land is protected, just over 1 per cent of marine space is similarly protected. The challenge is to reach “a global representative system” of Marine Protected Areas (MPAs), recognizing that countries need to establish cooperative mechanisms at ecoregion level. The purpose of this paper is to address the options and trends for countries to develop transboundary cooperation through MPAs.

The authors address several case studies, focusing on political, governance and financing frameworks.

The main findings revealed that countries use MoU, MoA or Joint Declaration supported on international conventions as the WHC, Ramsar Convention and CMS. Governance models seem to include political/management/technical levels, with political decisions translated into action plans carried out by joint committees, supported by national institutions and scientific/technical boards. Also the involvement of civil society in management is a growing driving force. Financing transboundary MPAs is going through an evolutionary process, from an exclusive binomial national budgets/UNEP‐GEF to a wider financial net through ecotourism income and private donors.

The different solutions found point out myriad possibilities where transboundary cooperation is envisaged. States can benefit from the experiences already acquired to jointly achieve the target of protecting 10 per cent of the marine environment by 2020.

The Design For Six Sigma (DFSS) methodology is one of the most important to achieving excellence in an organization’s product development process. This paper aims to propose a roadmap for product development based on the DFSS for the consumer durables manufacturing industries. The proposed roadmap presents a systematic approach to the phases of the product development process, integrating the statistical techniques and quality tools that should be used in each phase.

This study presents a detailed roadmap for product development, which was built by identifying gaps in the DFSS methods, based on previous studies on the subject. In this step, the opportunities are provided in all phases from creation to discontinuation of the product in the market. In addition, the roadmap presented was validated by team of stakeholders in the product development process of different industrial companies.

The proposed roadmap for the product development process based on six sigma design suggests a visual tool with sequential steps and techniques that allow you to follow the evolution of the development process from idea conception until the product is discontinued in the market. Identifying the priorities of organizations, especially the consumer, regarding the quality and reliability of the product.

The roadmap seeks to facilitate an understanding of the important stages of the product development process and to provide an approach to improving and optimizing the product before the manufacturing process step through the principles of DFSS methodology. This research provides a guide step by step to apply statistical techniques and quality tools in the product development process to achieve high quality and six sigma level in the manufacturing process.

The proposed roadmap of this research combines design for sigma and product development concepts, covering a wide spectrum of relevant activities that include the product development process, the application of statistical techniques and the design of high-quality durable consumer goods to match manufacturing technologies.

Small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) generally make a crucial contribution to local and national economies. As the market has become increasingly globalised over the past two decades, SMEs often feel the need and/or push to internationalise their business activities. It is in this need that several barriers and challenges are perceived by SMEs, since these companies generally have different characteristics and resources compared to large multinational enterprises (MNEs). Accordingly, given that the literature on internationalisation is rather extensive and relatively fragmented, this study seeks to systematically understand the scientific structure of research on the internationalisation of SMEs, and how it is organised.

The authors used a bibliometric approach and data co-citation to identify and systematise the scientific publications, intellectual structures and research trends related to SME internationalisation.

The study research reveals five approaches that theoretically support the internationalisation processes of SMEs: (1) internationalisation and networks; (2) internationalisation and venture capital; (3) internationalisation and intrinsic characteristics; (4) internationalisation and transactional costs; and (5) internationalisation and firm resources and capabilities.

This study has important implications for academics and practitioners who are likely to benefit from a holistic understanding of the different aspects of SME internationalisation.

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the determinants of export performance literature. The authors investigate the effect of firm characteristics on the Douro region wine firms export performance. The authors consider the Douro region, as it has the Portugal highest wine classification, the appellation d’origine contrôlée and undertakes the first position in the Portuguese wine production and export.

The authors apply a pooling cross-sectional data set that includes 427 observations. The authors pooled two cross sections consisting of 214 and 213 firms for the years 2014 and 215, respectively. The firm export intensity and propensity are the dependent variables. Moreover, the firm size, age and productive efficiency are accounted as the firm characteristics. The authors use the ordinary least squares regression and the tobit and probit models for estimations.

First, size is an influential factor to improve the export performance, and the importance of size is higher for younger firms. Second, there is a positive response from export intensity to age and this response is higher for smaller firms. However, there is a negative response from the export propensity to age and this negative response is higher for bigger firms. Third, there is weak evidence to support a relationship between efficiency and export performance.

This research and the presented results are undoubtedly under some limitations. The main limitation is about the data availability for all characteristics of a firm. For example, it will enrich the result if the authors add some other important variables such as production cost, research and development expenditure and the quality of produced wine by each firm to our analysis.

This research reveals that the influence of firm characteristics on the export performance of Portuguese wine firms is missing in the literature. The results provide a basis to Portuguese wineries to improve their export performance by applying the relevant strategies.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze how, in three different contexts, the National Council for Advertising Self-Regulation narratively uses its past to build an official history concerning its origins that legitimates advertising self-control as a hegemonic narrative.

By using the historical research and the “uses of the past” approach, this study identifies, analyzes and confronts three organizational histories of Conar’s origins (both its official and unofficial versions) in the context of the creation of the Brazilian system of advertising self-regulation.

After a thematic analysis of the documentary sources, the narratives on the National Council for Advertising Self-Regulation’s origins and the self-control process were grouped into three versions: the narrative under the military regime: 1976/1980; the narrative during the process of re-democratization of the country: 1981/1991 and the contemporary narrative: from 2005 onwards. These narratives were confronted and, in consequence, provided, each of them, a different interpretation of the context surrounding the creation and justification for advertising self-control.

The study shows how a consumer defense organization re-historicized its past strategically to gain legitimacy in three different ways through time. It also reveals that organizations strategically use their past to build an intended vision of the future, thus having more agency than the hegemonic literature in management studies usually guarantees. Finally, it exposes the malleability of past narratives through which organizations play a critical role in the ongoing struggle for competing uses of the past. Therefore, the study identifies different organizational stories through time that allow researchers to reflect on several strategic uses of the past by organizations.

This chapter provides an overview of how, from a multi-stakeholder approach, Brazil can recover, fight against climate change and build an inclusive and sustainable future for itself. The interdependencies of the climate change action and current COVID-19 pandemic are discussed through extensive secondary data research to provide an updated context on Brazilian initiatives or the lack thereof. Through a multi-stakeholder methodological approach, the response and recovery actions of Brazil's government are assessed and future scenarios are developed for the country.