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This study aims to present the results of an experimental evaluation of low (M30), mid (M40) and high (M50) grade self-compacting concrete (SCC) with three nominal maximum aggregate sizes (NMAS), namely, 20 mm, 16 mm and 12.5 mm, with Bailey gradation (BG) in comparison with Indian standard gradation (ISG).

This study was conducted in a laboratory by testing the characteristics of fresh and hardened properties of self-compacting concrete.

Rheological and mechanical properties of SCC were evaluated in detail and according to the results, a concrete sample containing lower NMAS with BG demonstrated improvement in modulus of elasticity and compressive strength, while improving the rheological properties as well. Meanwhile, SCC demonstrated poor performance in split tensile and flexural strengths with lower NMAS gradations and a direct correlation was evident as the increase in NMAS caused an increase in the strength and vice-versa.

Upon comparison of BG with ISG, it was revealed that BG mixes succeeded to demonstrate superior performance. From the material optimization, rheological and mechanical performance study, it is recommended that BG with NMAS 16 mm can be used for conventional SCC.

Public schools in a democracy should educate young people to develop the knowledge and dispositions of citizenship in order to foster a more inclusive society and ensure the continuation of the democratic republic. Conceptualizations of citizenship must be clearly framed in order to support civic engagement, in particular, civic engagement for social justice. Rarely do educational technology scholars or educators interrogate the International Society for Technology in Education definition of digital citizenship. Educational technologists should connect notions of civic engagement and conceptions of digital citizenship. Instead, the field continues to engage in research, policy and practice which disconnects these ideas. This suggests that a gap exists between educational technologists’ conceptualizations of citizenship and the larger implications of citizenship within a democracy. The paper aims to discuss this issue.

This paper uses a between-study analysis of the literature to answer: How does the field of educational technology discuss and research digital citizenship? The data were coded using constant comparative analysis. The study adopted a theoretical framework grounded in Westheimer and Kahne’s (2004) What Kind of Citizen, and Krutka and Carpenter’s (2016) digital approach to citizenship.

The findings suggest that educational technologists’ uncritical usage of the term digital citizenship limits the authors’ field’s ability to contribute to a fundamental purpose of public schooling in a democracy – to develop citizens. Further, it hampers imagining opportunities to use educational technology to develop pedagogies of engaged citizenship for social justice.

Reframing the conception of digital citizenship as active civic engagement for social justice pushes scholarship, and its attendant implications for practice, in a proactive direction aimed at dismantling oppression.

We investigate the social and legal blame that investors assign to auditors following unfavorable outcomes using the precision of accounting guidance described as principles-based (i.e., less-precise) or rules-based (i.e., more precise), and why investors assign blame at differing levels. We also examine how the precision of accounting guidance is related to perceptions of auditors’ ethical characteristics. We posit that blame assigned to auditors differs based on auditors’ perceived decision-making control. Results indicate a significant association between the precision of accounting guidance and social blame, and a positive association between social blame and legal blame under standards described as less-precise. Investors are also more likely to make negative evaluations of the auditor’s ethical characteristics under less-precise accounting following an unfavorable outcome, which helps explain the association between social and legal blame. Our findings suggest that auditors could face additional blame as a result of a trend toward less-precise accounting guidance, with investors being more likely to question the auditors’ ethical characteristics following unfavorable outcomes.

It is more than a decade since Skinner's first publication on programmed instruction. In the interim period American schools and colleges have adopted the technique with characteristic enthusiasm and vigour, whilst in the USSR there has been a similar ready realisation of its educational value at many levels of teaching.

The purpose of this paper is to examine a long-term mentoring relationship between a White female from the Traditional Generation and an African American male from the Xennial Generation, as engaged in a mentoring relationship within higher education institutions in the USA. The study investigated if, how and to what degree the differences and similarities between them influenced their mentoring relationship.

The authors used an autoethnographic approach involving extensive questioning, dialoguing, note keeping and analysis over eight months.

The analysis suggested that race had the greatest influence on the relationship. The primary reasons for mentoring success were similarities in family backgrounds and commonly held values.

This study may not be generalizable to mentoring relationships that do not involve cultural differences in race, age or gender.

The paper offers a model for the types of strategies individuals can use in cross-racial mentoring endeavors to help build and sustain these relationships. It also includes suggestions for individuals engaged in mentoring relationships, which include gender, race or age differences, and organizations seeking to enhance diversity within their institutions.

There is not an extensive body of research on individual cross-racial, gender and generational mentoring that provides an analysis of the experience of those involved. Additionally, the model presented for examining cross-racial mentoring relationships is unique.

The purpose of this research is to present an integrated methodological framework to aid in performance stewardship of management institutions according to their strategies based on a holistic evaluation encompassing social, economic and environmental dimensions.

A Mamdani fuzzy inference system (FIS) approach was adopted to design the quantitative models with respect to balanced scorecard (BSC) perspectives to demonstrate dynamic capability. Individual models were developed for each perspective of BSC using Mamdani FIS. Data was collected from subject matter experts in management education.

The proposed methodology is able to successfully compute the scores for each perspective. Effective placement, teaching learning process, faculty development and systematic feedback from the stakeholders were found to be the key drivers for revenue generation. The model is validated as the results were well accepted by the head of the institution after implementation.

The model resulting from this study will assist the institution to cyclically assess its performance, thus enabling continuous improvement. The strategy map provides the causality of the objectives across the four perspectives to aid the practitioners to better strategize. Also this study contributes to the literature of BSC as well to the applications of multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) techniques.

Mamdani FIS integrated BSC model is a significant contribution to the academia of management education to quantitatively compute the performance of institutions. This quantified model reduces the ambiguity for practitioners to decide the performance levels for each metric and the priorities of metrics.

Performance in virtual teams, which faces cultural and demographic differences, is a relevant phenomenon that has been widely investigated in recent decades, but with opportunities in exploring other levels of analysis as individual and project. This current research aims to understand how multicultural virtual teams affect individual, team and project performance.

The authors conducted a systematic literature review (SLR) and bibliometric analysis to capture 273 papers from the Web of Science (WoS) database using a snowball approach. In a second approach, the authors selected 130 papers to conduct a content analysis.

The authors presented a longitudinal overview regarding the adoption of virtual teams in project management (PM) literature. A conceptual framework was proposed to explore the relationship between multicultural virtual teams and performance with three levels of analysis: individual, teams and project. The authors contributed with research hypotheses to be explored in future empirical studies not only at the team perspective but also at the project and individual levels. The thematic analysis suggested that the literature focus has shifted from hard to soft aspects faced by virtual teams. Social identity/categorization theory was the most prominent theory in this body, but it is not fully explored in PM literature. Other opportunities of future studies are to understand the impact of cultural diversity, the sense of belongingness, the project life cycle and the development of a knowledge management program.

The authors developed a 3-level conceptual framework for future empirical studies and demonstrated that cultural differences are mainly approached at the national level in the literature, bringing suggestions for future empirical research.

This paper aims to create a theoretical model of student involvement in the institutional quality assurance process at their universities.

The model suggested in this paper was created and developed from a critical examination of relevant literature on stakeholder involvement in decision making and quality assurance processes, regarding different disciplines.

This paper presents a theoretical model of student involvement in the institutional quality assurance with its diminutions, categories and 20 rungs of student activities. It suggests a definition of student involvement term, regarding participating in the quality assurance process at higher education institutions. The importance of involving students in quality assurance procedures has been discussed. The paper provides some international experiences about student involvement in institutional QAP depending on the categories of student involvement activities that were suggested in the theoretical model.

The paper reveals a comprehensive model of student involvement that allows a full understanding of the extent and nature of the activities which higher education students undertake when they involve themselves in the quality assurance process at their institution.

The purpose of this paper is to identify the main practitioners, goods, customers and locations of secondhand marketing activities in late medieval England. It questions how important was the economic role played by such markets and what was the interaction with more formal market structures?

A broad range of evidence was examined, covering the period from 1200 to 1500: regulations, court rolls, wills, manorial accounts, literature, and even archaeology. Such material often provided mere scraps of information about marginal marketing activity and it was important to recognise the severe limitations of the evidence. Nevertheless, a wide survey of the available sources can give us an insight into medieval attitudes towards such trade, as well as reminding us that much marketing activity occurred beyond the reach of the surviving documentation.

Late medieval England had numerous outlets for secondhand items, from sellers of used clothes and furs who wandered the marketplaces to craftsmen who recycled and mended old materials. Secondhand marketing was an important part of the medieval makeshift economy, serving not only the needs of the lower sectors of society but also those aspiring to a higher status. However, it is unlikely that such trade generated much profit and the traders were often viewed as marginal, suspicious and even fraudulent.

There is a distinct lack of research into the extent of and significance of medieval secondhand marketing, which existed in the shadowy margins of formal markets and is thus poorly represented in the primary sources. A broad‐based approach to the evidence can highlight a variety of important issues, which impact upon the understanding of the medieval English economy.

New ways of working (NWW) change some fundamental processes in the workplace. NWW practices like teleworking, flexible workspaces, and flexible working hours lead to different behaviors of employees. But does the employment of NWW practices also have an impact on the innovation behavior of employees? This chapter explores this relationship and uses qualitative data from case studies to illustrate the complex linkages between three components of NWW and IWB.