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Educational institutions in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) are striving for better resource management and finance. The bottom-up budgeting approach plays an important role in motivating executives' performance. The main aim of this paper is to discover whether there is a significant difference between bottom-up and a top-down approaches to budgeting in terms of managers' performance.

Questionnaires were distributed to 453 university executives in 21 MENA educational institutions. The Kruskal–Wallis test was utilized to test the difference between the three groups (bottom-up, top-down and consultative approaches). Further analysis was conducted to test the difference between the two groups using the Mann–Whitney test.

The results show that there is a significant difference between a bottom-up and top-down approach in terms of managerial performance. The study's findings indicate that the bottom-up approach to budgeting leads to higher performance indicators than a top-down approach to budgeting.

The current study contributes to the research as it increases awareness of budgeting approaches that are used in higher education institutions, specifically in terms of the effect of these differences on executives' performance.

This paper critically reviews economic impact assessment methods adopted in construction-related projects, to develop and present a novel bottom-up approach suitable to estimate regional economic impacts of building maintenance projects.

A thorough literature review of economic impact assessment in construction projects is carried out to identify the most relevant approach to estimate wider economic impacts of building maintenance projects. Based on these findings, a model based on the bottom-up approach to estimate wider economic impacts is developed. The applicability and face validity of the developed model is demonstrated through a case of cladding replacement program in Australia.

The literature review revealed that bottom-up models are better suited for estimating regional economic impacts of maintenance projects, given the challenges of obtaining micro-level economic data in the maintenance sector. In relation to the total economic impacts (direct and indirect), the results show that for every $1 of government spending on similar projects the Gross State Product would increase by $1.34. In terms of employment impact, over 70% of the direct economic value addition is driven by the increase in labour, where close to 3 FTE jobs will be required for each $1 million of spending on cladding replacement projects.

This paper presents a model to estimate the wider economic impacts of building maintenance projects, which is typically overlooked in the construction management field. The proposed model is developed to incorporate the variability of different building maintenance projects so that the economic impact resulting from these projects could be estimated more accurately. This model can be used by local government decision-makers to justify and prioritise maintenance projects in a similar manner to new construction projects.

This chapter investigates the geographical variations and approaches that shape the implementation of smart city projects on a global scale. Recognizing the significant influence of contextual factors on smart city initiatives, this chapter aims to comprehend the dynamics that drive the objectives and approaches of smart city projects across different countries. This chapter provides an overview of the strategic and geographical factors that impact smart city implementation, considering organizational drivers and practices, such as the Hofstede model in context. It explores the role of citizen-based, technology-based, and decision-making-based development in smart city implementation. Moreover, this chapter examines the strategic, cultural, socioeconomic, and geographical differences that influence smart city projects worldwide. It analyzes the geographical influence and internal drivers of smart city projects, focusing on Europe, North America, Latin America, and East and South Asia. This analysis offers insights into diverse approaches to smart city development, encompassing top-down and bottom-up approaches. By examining various perspectives and experiences from smart city initiatives worldwide, this chapter sheds light on the challenges and opportunities associated with implementing smart city strategies in different contexts.

The authors look back and forward in terms of challenges and opportunities for marketing, viewed from the vantage point of the subsistence marketplaces stream. The authors discuss how marketing can evolve and expand to address the scale and scope of challenges that lie ahead. By way of challenges, the authors discuss the confluence of uncertainties, such as inherent in the Base of the Pyramid (BoP) contexts, in environmental issues, and in the arena of technological solutions, as well as the confluence of unfamiliarities among managers, students, and researchers. The authors discuss opportunities for marketing through a bottom-up approach and argue for evolving marketing with rapidly changing reality in BoP markets, a harbinger and an innovation laboratory for all contexts.

Adapting the Health Promotion School (HPS) approach to context specifics is acknowledged as being essential for implementation and achieving optimal effectiveness. This study aims to explore implementation variations on seven HPS spectra (such as top-down to bottom-up involvement of stakeholders) on which implementation of the HPS approach can vary, and the factors that relate to navigation on these spectra.

In 2020, fourteen HPS researchers and professionals from ten European countries participated in semi-structured interviews.

Navigation variations on the HPS spectra occurred throughout most spectra. Further, a tendency was found towards spectrum extremes of addressing multiple core-components, implementing non-disruptive Health Promotion (HP) programmes, and evaluating the HPS approach through an action-oriented research approach. Important general factors were resources, staff capacity and time available to staff members for implementing the HPS approach. Some spectra required more specific factors like organisational skills, leadership or a certain level of democracy.

The implementation of the HPS approach should be supported by implementation strategies addressing the spectrum-specific factors, but more generic factors such as staff capacity, resources and the level of democracy should also be considered.

This study explores navigation variations throughout HPS spectra rather than the HPS approach in general. It also nuances implementation diversity across and within different European contexts.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a perspective on consumers and technology in a changing world using insights gained from subsistence marketplaces. Consumers in a changing world are on different parts of the economic spectrum and are also reflected in contexts of poverty that is termed subsistence marketplaces. “Data” comes from pioneering the subsistence marketplaces stream of research, education and social enterprise.

The authors study the intersection of poverty and marketplaces, beginning at the micro-level, and take a bottom-up approach to deriving implications.

The authors cover both aspects – what micro-level insights about thinking, feeling and coping mean for technology perceptions and usage in general and what specific insights are derived for designing and implementing solutions that have bearing on the use of technology. In the course of all endeavors in research, education and social enterprise, technology, particularly information and communications technology, has been central.

The authors discuss implications for research at the confluence of a variety of uncertainties inherent in the context of subsistence marketplaces, in environmental issues and climate change and in the nature and speed of technological change and progress.

In this paper, the authors discuss what subsistence marketplaces mean for consumers and technology in a changing world, lessons learned for the design and development of technological solutions, technological innovation from subsistence marketplaces and a broader discussion of the importance of bottom-up approaches to the intersection of subsistence marketplaces and technological solutions.

The authors use insights developed from pioneering the arena of subsistence marketplaces and creating synergies between research, education and social enterprise.

The purpose of this chapter is to examine how leaders furthered the development of a social enterprise in response to paradoxes. Data on leadership practices were collected through interviews and observations in an Italian Healthcare network over the organization’s first two years. The data indicate that leaders addressed paradoxes in developing several critical resources by using both top-down influence and bottom-up participation. Leaders used top-down practices to further organizational development along a known path when they could leverage technical expertise or a vision to address a source of tension. Bottom-up practices, on the other hand, permitted the discovery of new paths that had not been previously identified. Leaders leveraged such responses where tensions appeared intractable. Implications for managers and organizational development and change practitioners are discussed.

Entrepreneurial ecosystems have quickly become one of the most popular topics in entrepreneurship research. Ecosystems are the characteristics and factors of a place that support high-growth entrepreneurship. This provides the ability for the field to provide important policy insights about how to aid the development of high growth, innovative ventures, as well as generate new insights into the relationship between the entrepreneurship phenomenon and the contexts it takes place within. However, work in the field remains undertheorized, with a little understanding of how the entrepreneur benefits from being in a strong ecosystem. This chapter argues that it is helpful to return to Ed Malecki’s work in a previous volume of this series, which explored the importance of networks. His work has contributed to a very broad stream of work on entrepreneurial environment. Using this as a starting point, this chapter distinguishes between “top-down” approaches to study ecosystems, which focus on the actors and factors that make up an ecosystem, and a “bottom-up” approach, which instead examines the ways in which entrepreneurs use their ecosystem to get the resources, knowledge, and support they need. The chapter concludes by suggesting how a research agenda for a bottom-up study of ecosystems can be informed by Malecki’s work.

Many service-oriented software engineering (SOSE) methods from industry and academia claim their compliance with SOA and SO, but there is a lack of framework to assess the existing methods or to provide new ones. First, the paper questions: (Q1) to what extent an approach would consider the three aspect: service, composition, and management to deliver software solutions that are conformed to SO and SOA principles; (Q2) to what extent an approach would consider the aggregates of a method, including representation techniques, assisting tools, and inspection techniques to assess the delivered solution (service and composition), in addition to the process; and (Q3) to what extent an approach would consider the alignment of business and IT through the application of model-driven development by using standards such as model-driven architecture. Then, the paper compares four generic approaches: top-down, bottom-up, green-field, and meet-in-the-middle, within a framework, to highlight their strengths and weaknesses. Finally, the paper aims to propose a business-oriented approach that focuses on the value a business can add to its customers, whereby the value must be specified in a contract to be largely re-used.

This work develops a framework as an abstract model for SOSE generic methods. Then, it uses the framework as an analytical study to compare the generic methods and come up with research issues and a new method for SOSE.

A set of guidelines that a SOSE method develops should consider when selecting or developing a new method.

Comparison of existing SOSE methods within the findings of the proposed framework. The paper has theoretical implications as the open issues provide a research roadmap towards the realization of SOA in accordance with a maturity model.

This has practical implications as it: provides a better understanding of the approaches, as they are ambiguously used by the existing methods; and assists developers in deciding an approach having the necessary knowledge related to its process, strengths and weaknesses.

None of the existing comparison framework has raised the level of abstraction up to generic methods such as top-down, green-filed, meet-in-the-middle and bottom-up.