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Construction management is ameliorated by the lean construction concept in many direct and indirect ways to reduce waste of construction process and improve the value. The purpose of this paper is to identify the challenges of the implementation of lean construction in the Bangladeshi construction industry and to prioritize these factors that constitute these challenges.

A comprehensive literature review was used for shorting the global challenges of implementing lean construction. Subsequently, these challenges were incorporated into a structured questionnaire for survey. A total of 164 valid responses were collected from Bangladeshi construction practitioners involved in different types of construction organizations. The results were analyzed using the Relative Important Index (RII) and Mann–Whitney U test.

The findings revealed 41 challenges of lean construction implementation in the Bangladeshi construction industry. The highest ranking challenges are the lack of awareness about lean construction, lack of skills, training and lean techniques, unwillingness to change the existing culture, lack of management commitment, fragmented and cyclic nature of the construction project and unavailing communication between all project participants. The study also discusses some universally applicable solutions to overcome these challenges.

By the findings of this study, the Bangladeshi construction industry could get a new insight into the challenges of implementing lean construction. It could play a very important part in the body of knowledge, as it reveals the challenges of implementing lean construction for the first time with the socio-economic context of Bangladesh. Exploring the findings, the study could help the stakeholders, companies, academician, researchers and government to focus their effort and resources on the significantly appropriate issues. Furthermore, this study may beneficial to those developing countries especially in South Asia, who have shared the same socio-economic status with Bangladesh.

A stochastic process with repulsive correlation is proposed to simulate the nonequilibrium electronic transport through microstructures under finite bias voltage. Since an electron needs to stay a finite time τ0 on a channel state while traversing the constriction structure, within τ0 other electrons can not follow up through the same channel state because of the Pauli exclusion. This quantum effect induces a time correlation and suppresses the shot noise. The Monte Carlo results fairly compare with experimental measurements.

Ludwig Lachmann looked to the Austrian School of economics as an intellectual space of refuge from the sterile formalism that constituted the academic work of the mainstream economics establishment. From an early interest in capital theory, he moved to broader epistemological, methodological, and institutional concerns – specifically from the subjectivism of values to the subjectivism of expectations and the implications thereof for human action. Human action in disequilibrium was his central focus. This chapter examines the relationship of Lachmann’s views to the Austrians, those who preceded him, those of his time, and those who have come after him. During his lifetime, his views sometimes provoked controversy. I examine this from the perspective of 2017 and the concerns of the modern Austrian intellectual community and find that Lachmann’s views are surprisingly much more complementary to those of his contemporary Austrians than have perhaps hitherto been realized.

This paper is a keynote address prepared for a conference on “Entangled Political Economy” sponsored by the Wirth Institute. In keeping with the conventions of such an address, I look both backward and forward, while placing more emphasis on looking forward. In looking backward, I compare and contrast two orientations toward political economy: additive and entangled. In looking forward, I explore some of the analytical challenges that confront efforts to pursue a vision of entangled political economy. While these challenges are substantive in character, those efforts necessarily rest on methodological presumptions. Accordingly, the paper opens by reviewing some of those methodological presumptions before turning to the substantive articulations and challenges.

Entangled Political Economy, the idea that the economy and the polity are a nexus of interrelations often with unplanned outcomes, is close to the concept of economics that Adam Smith presents, a concept which was not shaped by strict discipline barriers. I show that Adam Smith analyzes the nature and causes of the wealth of nations by analyzing the interaction of the economy with politics, ethics, and the law. In particular, Smith presents each of these systems as a network of relations with all the other systems: the economy is entangled not just with the polity, but also with other systems of behavior such as the law and morality. Adam Smith may help expand the horizons of the entangled political economy analysis and the explanatory powers of economics.

The recurring implementation and continuous maintenance of price controls implies a deep incongruence between public policy and economic common sense. Yet, economists do not tire of concluding their papers with policy recommendations as if oblivious to the ineffectiveness of their efforts. By assuming that policy is an object of choice, economists have no alternative but to naively hope for a decision-maker sensitive to economic logic. An alternative approach is to think of policy, not as an object of choice but as an outcome of a competitive process. From this perspective, the often-lamented disregard for economic principles is not a characteristic of a deficient policymaker, but a systemic quality of institutional arrangements. I illustrate my argument with the analysis of the implementation of rigid prices for reimbursed pharmaceuticals in Poland.

During the interwar period, the Netherlands experienced a phase of rapid industrialization and mechanization and saw the introduction of many new labor-saving techniques on the shop floor. This process, which went under the name “rationalization of production,” caused great concern in the labor movement and sparked an intensive debate over the existence and extent of technological (or permanent) unemployment. Although the problem of technological unemployment was denied by the mainstream economists of the day, the problem was addressed by left-wing, mathematically trained economists such as Theo van der Waerden and Jan Tinbergen. They sought for rigorous “scientific” arguments that would convince policymakers, colleagues, and the public of socialist employment policies.

This chapter shows that van der Waerden and Tinbergen used ever-increasing formal methods to face the issue of rationalization, which became politically relevant and controversial in the specific context of the interwar period. Their new scientific tools gave them esteem and influence. In their role as advisers to the government, they gained influence and were able to recommend policies that were in accordance with their political beliefs.

This study aims to improve the offshore wind farm (OWF) site selection evaluation index system and establishes a decision-making model for OWF site selection. It is expected to provide helpful references for the progress of offshore wind power.

Firstly, this paper establishes an evaluation criteria system for OWF site selection, considering six criteria (wind resource, environment, economic, technical, social and risk) and related subcriteria. Then, the Criteria Importance Though Intercrieria Correlation (CRITIC) method is introduced to figure out the weights of evaluation indexes. In addition, the cumulative prospect theory and technique for order preference by similarity to an ideal solution (CPT-TOPSIS) method are employed to construct the OWF site selection decision-making model. Finally, taking the OWF site selection in China as an example, the effectiveness and robustness of the framework are verified by sensitivity analysis and comparative analysis.

This study establishes the OWF site selection evaluation system and constructs a decision-making model under the spherical fuzzy environment. A case of China is employed to verify the effectiveness and feasibility of the model.

In this paper, a new decision-making model is proposed for the first time, considering the ambiguity and uncertainty of information and the risk attitudes of decision-makers (DMs) in the decision-making process.

The purpose of this paper is to provide forum for critical discourses in the area of retroduction thinking in the re-orientation of social sciences research at the Bank of Sierra Leone. It is acknowledged that economic research at the bank is more oriented towards the orthodox approach (Keynesian, etc.), while that of the un-orthodox (heterodox) view is being blighted by the need to prove economic theory application without much consideration given to the imperfect market economic conditions faced in the country.

The methodology of the paper is based on critical theoretical literature review of documents and also the assessment of current approach to research practices at the Bank of Sierra Leone.

There is actually a pool of professionals from different backgrounds, whose passion have been coordinated to embrace the idea of integrating variety of triangulation approaches (methodological, theoretical, data, and investigator) in their pursuit of exploring best practices for policy research at the bank. Research is an ontological journey and the process of its epistemological inquiry requires pool of experts, drawn from wide range of backgrounds (mainstream Social Sciences, Mathematical Science, etc.), whose approaches are pertinent in the pursuit of human discovery, and particularly for policy development, as in the case with the Bank of Sierra Leone. This work has highlighted several salient recommended points for future action in the lead towards energizing research at the bank.

The effort to provide this paper is very original, which is based on the author's experience of working in a research focused environment. This paper will be of value to future pursuance of work in promoting triangulation research at the Bank of Sierra Leone. It is hoped that the outcome of this will spearhead mixture of professional engagement of work activities that is geared towards addressing effective policy formulation at the bank in meeting its key objective (maintaining price stability).