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Competency frameworks can support public procurement capacity development and performance. However, literature on connecting professionalisation with national procurement contexts is limited. This paper aims to explain and conceptualise recent Romanian experience with developing bespoke competency frameworks at national level for public procurement that reflect the features of the Romanian public procurement system. The approach used could guide in broad-brush, mutatis mutandis, other (national) public procurement systems with comparable features, mainly those seeking a shift from a rather administrative function of public procurement towards a strategic function.

This case study reflects on the methodology used for analysing the Romanian public procurement environment in EU context to develop bespoke professionalisation instruments, and on ways to integrate competency management approaches in Romanian public procurement culture. That methodological mix has been mainly qualitative and constructionist, within an applied research approach. It combined desk research with empirical research and included legal research in this context.

A principled, methodological and pragmatic approach tailored to the procurement environment in question is essential for developing competency frameworks capable to resonate to and address the specific practical needs of that procurement system.

Competency frameworks can uphold societal objectives through public procurement.

Using valuable insights into the development of the Romanian public procurement competency frameworks, the paper provides a conceptual framework for instilling competency management approaches to public procurement professional development where the latter is governed by a rather distinct, public administration, paradigm. This conceptual framework can guide other public procurement systems and stimulate further research.

With the aim of monitoring the existing regulations that are applicable to community of owners facing delinquency, in view of the importance of this issue for the achievement of the Urban Agenda, the present study aims to analyse the most stringent and controversial measures available for the community of owners facing delinquency from a comparative perspective.

The present work addresses the recent legislative amendments that have taken place at national level in this field in several countries and analyses to what extent they have addressed the delinquency problem faced by community of owners.

The current paper shows that, in the end, legal certainty, the prospective legal and economic effects on mortgage lending and constitutional concerns are the underlying reasons behind the reluctance to implement some stringent measures to face delinquency. It also shows that recent amendments concerning alternative dispute resolution mechanisms are a missed opportunity.

Community of owners plays a key role in cities for the achievement of the Urban Agenda, so the periodical contributions from co-owners are paramount to the proper implementation of urban regeneration, energy efficiency and accessibility policies. To this end, the paper analyses existing regulations that are applicable to community of owners facing delinquency, which may increase in the coming years due to the current socioeconomic context.

This paper builds on existing research and goes one step further by addressing the recent legislative amendments that have taken place recently at national level in this field. These measures may serve as an inspiration to other EU legal systems.

The purpose of this study was to investigate a framework for the implementation of freedom of information (FOI) legislation in South Africa, against Article 19’s nine principles of FOI legislation.

This qualitative study used semi-structured interviews to collect data from six experts selected by means of the snowball sampling technique and content analysis. The study used a modified Delphi design consisting of two rounds of interviews.

The results showed that little effort is made by government officials to demonstrate commitment to the implementation of FOI legislation.

The passing of FOI is expected to reduce corruption, increase public participation, reduce the level of secrecy and increase transparency and openness. This is not the case as the implementation of this socioeconomic right in South Africa is faced by numerous challenges, such as a lack of political will, secrecy laws providing for the opposite of what the FOI legislation seeks to achieve, poor legislative interpretation and a lack of clear policies. The study proposes a framework aimed at addressing these challenges.

The study provides a framework for the implementation of FOI legislation. The framework was developed under the guidance of Article 19 principles of freedom of information legislation.

This paper aims to identify impediments, discuss impediments and make recommendations for the impediments during the execution of a search and seizure warrant for digital evidence in South African criminal cases.

The discussion of this article, the second article of two, focuses on a literature review of international and local impediments identified in case law and published research literature and how it is approached in various jurisdictions.

This study found that impediments identified and addressed internationally during the execution of a search and seizure warrant for digital evidence are relevant to South African criminal cases and still need to be addressed during the execution of a search and seizure warrant for digital evidence in South African criminal cases.

Although searches and seizures for digital evidence are relevant to civil, regulatory and criminal investigations, this study focuses on the search and seizure for digital evidence in criminal matters with an emphasis on the provisions of the Criminal Procedure Act 51 of 1977 and the Cybercrimes Act 19 of 2020.

The originality of this paper lies in the procedures followed during the physical search and seizure of digital information during the execution of search and seizure warrants for digital information in South Africa. If the South African Police Service follows the recommended procedures, it will contribute to the success of the South African Police Service, which would result in the improved quality of investigations and successful prosecution of crime in South Africa.

It has been demonstrated that AI-powered, data-driven tools’ usage is not universal, but deeply linked to socio-cultural contexts. The purpose of this paper is to display the need of adopting situated lenses, relating to specific personal and professional learning about data protection and privacy.

The authors introduce the results of a case study based on a large educational intervention at a fully online university. The views of the participants from degrees representing different knowledge areas and contexts of technology adoption (work, education and leisure) were explored after engaging in the analysis of the terms and conditions of use about privacy and data usage. After consultation, 27 course instructors (CIs) integrated the activity and worked with 823 students (702 of whom were complete and correct for analytical purposes).

The results of this study indicated that the intervention increased privacy-conscious online behaviour among most participants. Results were more contradictory when looking at the tools’ daily usage, with overall positive considerations around the tools being mostly needed or “indispensable”.

Though appliable only to the authors’ case study and not generalisable, the authors’ results show both the complexity of privacy views and the presence of forms of renunciation in the trade-off between data protection and the need of using a specific software into a personal and professional context.

This study provides an example of teaching and learning activities that supports the development of data literacy, with a focus on data privacy. Therefore, beyond the research findings, any educator can build over the authors’ proposal to produce materials and interventions aimed at developing awareness on data privacy issues.

Developing awareness, understanding and skills relating to data privacy is crucial to live in a society where digital technologies are used in any area of our personal and professional life. Well-informed citizens will be able to obscure, resist or claim for their rights whenever a violation of their privacy takes place. Also, they will be able to support (through adoption) better quality apps and platforms, instead of passively accepting what is evident or easy to use.

The authors specifically spot how students and educators, as part of a specific learning and cultural ecosystem, need tailored opportunities to keep on reflecting on their degrees of freedom and their possibilities to act regarding evolving data systems and their alternatives.

This paper aims to clarify how organizations manage their participation in networks to share and jointly create knowledge but also risk unwanted knowledge spillovers at the same time. As formal governance, trust and observation are less applicable in informal networks, the authors need to understand how members address the need to protect knowledge by informal practices. The study aims to investigate how the application of knowledge protection practices affects knowledge sharing in networks. The insights are relevant for organizational and network management to control knowledge risks but harvest the benefits of network engagement.

The authors opted for an exploratory study based on 60 semi-structured interviews with members of 10 networks. In two rounds, network managers, representatives and members of the networks were interviewed. The second round of interviews was used to validate the intermediate findings. The data were complemented by documentary analysis, including network descriptions.

Through analyzing and building on the theory of psychological contracts, two informal practices of knowledge protection were found in networks of organizations: exclude crucial topics and share on selected topics and exclude details and share a selected level of detail. The authors explored how these two practices are enacted in networks of organizations with psychological contracts.

Counter to intuition that the protection of knowledge can be strengthened only at the expense of knowledge sharing and vice versa, networks benefitted from more focused and increased knowledge sharing while reducing the risk of losing competitive knowledge by performing these knowledge protection practices.

The purpose of this paper is to examine whether mandatory disclosure of information accompanying the sale of real estate achieves its aim of informed purchasers.

Using a case study approach focused on mandatory disclosure in South Australia data was collected from interviews and focus groups with key personnel in the property industry involved in the production of information required to fulfil vendors’ disclosure obligations.

The authors found that purchasers are ill-served by a long and complex form of mandatory disclosure with a short time frame that prevents the use of the information provided. Without good form design and increased digital affordances provided by the cadastral and conveyancing systems, mandatory disclosure is insufficient to ensure minimisation of information asymmetry between vendor and purchaser.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first Australian qualitative study that examines the utility of mandatory vendor disclosure in real estate sales and the first to consider the impact of the digitalisation of cadastral and conveyancing systems upon the efficacy of mandatory disclosure regimes.

The paper presents a mathematical problem involving quasistatic contact between a thermo-electro-viscoelastic body and a lubricated foundation, where the contact is described using a version of Coulomb’s law of friction that includes normal damped response conditions and heat exchange with a conductive foundation. The constitutive law for the material is thermo-electro-viscoelastic. The problem is formulated as a system that includes a parabolic equation of the first kind for the temperature, an evolutionary elliptic quasivariational inequality for the displacement and a variational elliptic equality for the electric stress. The author establishes the existence of a unique weak solution to the problem by utilizing classical results for evolutionary quasivariational elliptic inequalities, parabolic differential equations and fixed point arguments.

The author establishes a variational formulation for the model and proves the existence of a unique weak solution to the problem using classical results for evolutionary quasivariational elliptic inequalities, parabolic difierential equations and fixed point arguments.

The author proves the existence of a unique weak solution to the problem using classical results for evolutionary quasivariational elliptic inequalities, parabolic difierential equations and fixed point arguments.

The author studies a mathematical problem between a thermo-electro-viscoelastic body and a lubricated foundation using a version of Coulomb’s law of friction including the normal damped response conditions and the heat exchange with a conductive foundation, which is original and requires a good understanding of modeling and mathematical tools.

The framework of this paper is financial mathematics and, more specifically, the control of data fraud and manipulation with their subsequent economic effects, namely, in financial markets. The purpose of this paper is to calculate the global loss or gain, which supposes, for the borrower, a change of the interest rate while the contracted loan is in force or, in another case, the loan has finished.

The methodology used in this work has been, in the first place, a review of the existing literature on the topic of manipulability and abusiveness of the loan interest rates applied by banks; in the second place, the introduction of a mathematical-financial analysis to calculate the interests paid in excess; and, finally, the compilation of several sentences issued on the application of the so-called mortgage loan reference index (MLRI) to mortgage loans in Spain.

There are three main contributions in this paper. First, the calculation of the interests paid in excess in the amortization of mortgage loans referenced to an overvalued interest rate. Second, an empirical application shows the amount to be refunded to a Spanish consumer when amortizing his/her mortgage loan referenced to the MLRI instead of the Euro InterBank Offered Rate (EURIBOR). Third, consideration has been made to the effects and the possible solutions to the legal problems arising from this type of contract.

This research is a useful tool capable of implementing the financial calculation needed to find out overpaid interests in mortgage loans and to execute the sentences dealing with this topic. However, a limitation of this study is the lack of enough sentences on mortgage loans referenced to the MLRI to get some additional information about the number of borrowers affected by these legal sentences and the amount refunded by the financial institutions.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first time that deviations in the payment of interests have been calculated when amortizing a mortgage.

Business rescue, as a mechanism to aid financially distressed companies in South Africa, has received considerable academic and practical recognition. However, the business rescue plan is an overlooked and, perhaps, underdeveloped aspect of the regime. For stakeholders, this is the ultimate decision-making document. Creditors are the most influential stakeholders in business rescue proceedings owing to their voting rights. For creditors to make informed decisions and exercise their votes meaningfully, the business rescue plan should be transparent and adequately disclose relevant and reliable information. This study aims to identify creditors’ primary information needs to enhance the sufficiency and decision-usefulness of business rescue plans, not only to entice the vote of creditors but to enforce accountability from practitioners.

Using a qualitative research design, semi-structured interviews were conducted with 14 executives from 10 South African financial institutions.

The findings reveal that comprehensive disclosure of financial, commercial and legal information in business rescue plans was a critical antecedent for stakeholder decision-making. Additionally, leadership and social impact information were influential determinants. This study advances academic knowledge and, for practitioners, adds value to the development of business rescue plans. This can enhance creditors' confidence in supporting the rescue effort and approving the plan.

This study advances academic knowledge and, for practitioners, adds value to the development of business rescue plans. This can enhance creditors' confidence in supporting the rescue effort and approving the plan.

The originality of this article lies in its investigation of how creditors assess the information in BR plans as a precursor to supporting the company’s reorganisation in a creditor-friendly business rescue system such as South Africa. This study provides novel insights into the decision-making process, particularly how creditors assess BR plans, address information asymmetry and vote on the plan.