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With numerous and ambiguous sets of information and often conflicting requirements, construction management is a complex process involving much uncertainty. Decision makers may be challenged with satisfying multiple criteria using vague information. Fuzzy multi-criteria decision-making (FMCDM) provides an innovative approach for addressing complex problems featuring diverse decision makers’ interests, conflicting objectives and numerous but uncertain bits of information. FMCDM has therefore been widely applied in construction management. With the increase in information complexity, extensions of fuzzy set (FS) theory have been generated and adopted to improve its capacity to address this complexity. Examples include hesitant FSs (HFSs), intuitionistic FSs (IFSs) and type-2 FSs (T2FSs). This chapter introduces commonly used FMCDM methods, examines their applications in construction management and discusses trends in future research and application. The chapter first introduces the MCDM process as well as FS theory and its three main extensions, namely, HFSs, IFSs and T2FSs. The chapter then explores the linkage between FS theory and its extensions and MCDM approaches. In total, 17 FMCDM methods are reviewed and two FMCDM methods (i.e. T2FS-TOPSIS and T2FS-PROMETHEE) are further improved based on the literature. These 19 FMCDM methods with their corresponding applications in construction management are discussed in a systematic manner. This review and development of FS theory and its extensions should help both researchers and practitioners better understand and handle information uncertainty in complex decision problems.

The importance of teacher leadership in enhancing school outcomes is recognized, but there remains a scarcity of research addressing the conditions for principals to nurture such leadership. This study examined how school contextual factors, i.e. faculty trust and academic emphasis, moderate the impact of principals' distributed leadership lon teacher leadership.

A nationwide survey was conducted among junior high school teachers in Taiwan. The sample encompassed schools from different geographical regions and sizes, yielding a total of 1,340 valid responses. Hierarchical regression analyses were employed to analyze the potential moderating effects of interest.

There were interactive effects of principals' distributed leadership and school contextual factors on teachers' adoption of leadership roles. The impact of principals' distributed leadership on teacher leadership was amplified in environments marked by elevated levels of trust relations and reduced academic emphasis.

This study uncovers the critical prerequisites principals must address to cultivate teacher leadership. To effectively encourage heightened teacher engagement in leadership, principals must place a premium on nurturing trusting relations with their teaching staff and acknowledge that the influence of their leadership might be lessened in an environment where credentialism holds sway.

The exploration into faculty trust and academic emphasis yields insights into the conducive conditions for principals to foster teacher leadership. The identified attenuating impact of academic emphasis on principal effect within an Asian societal context highlights its significance not only as an organizational property but also as a manifestation of national cultural values.

This paper aims to explore how leader career calling stimulates employee career growth, with the supervisor–subordinate guanxi serving as a moderating factor.

Study 1 demonstrated that high leader career calling served as a catalyst for employee career crafting. The experiment provided causal evidence for the relationship between these two constructs, exhibiting strong internal validity. However, due to the challenges in measuring supervisor–subordinate guanxi and career growth within the context of a scenario experiment, Study 2 was designed to test the entire model and enhance the external validity of the findings.

Leader career calling significantly predicts employee career growth, while employee career crafting serves as a mediating mechanism in the relationship between leader career calling and employee career growth. Moreover, supervisor–subordinate guanxi positively moderates the relationship between leader career calling and employee career crafting. Furthermore, the mediating effect of employee career crafting in the relationship between leader career calling and employee career growth is contingent upon the quality of supervisor–subordinate guanxi. This study sheds light on the role of leader career calling in employee career growth and provides insights into the mechanisms facilitating employee career growth.

Firstly, it explores leader-to-employee career calling transmission, extending the career calling study beyond individual impacts. It emphasizes how leaders' work attitudes shape employee career growth. Secondly, it reveals career crafting as a mediator between leader career calling and employee career growth, identifying a new influence mechanism and expanding upon the primarily job crafting-focused existing literature. Lastly, it identifies supervisor–subordinate guanxi quality as a moderator in the leader career calling-employee career crafting relationship. This perspective enriches career calling research, illustrating how specific conditions stimulate career crafting.

Recently, the constrained surface projection stereolithography (SL) technology is gaining wider attention and has been widely used in the 3D printing industry. In constrained surface projection SL systems, the separation of a newly cured layer from the constrained surface is a historical technical barrier. It greatly limits printable size, process reliability and print speed. Moreover, over-large separation force leads to adhesion failures in manufacturing processes, causing broken constrained surface and part defects. Against this background, this paper investigates the formation of separation forces and various factors that affect the separation process in constrained surface projection SL systems.

A bottom-up projection SL testbed, integrated with an in-situ separation force measurement unit, is developed for experimental study. Separation forces under various manufacturing process settings and constrained surface conditions are measured in situ. Additionally, physical models are constructed by considering the liquid resin filling process. Experiments are conducted to investigate influences of manufacturing process settings, constrained surface condition and print geometry on separation forces.

Separation forces increase linearly with the separation speed. The deformation and the oxygen inhibition layer near the constrained surface greatly reduce separation forces. The printing area, area/perimeter ratio and the degree of porousness of print geometries have a combined effect on determining separation forces.

This paper studied factors that influence separation force in constrained surface SL processes. Constrained surface conditions including oxygen inhibition layer thickness, deformation and oxygen permeation capability were investigated, and their influences on separation forces were revealed. Moreover, geometric factors of printing layers that are significant on determining separation forces have been identified and quantified. This study on separation forces provides a solid base for future work on adaptive control of constrained surface projection SL processes.

The globalisation of markets, emerging concepts of sustainable development, and circular economy have defined the boundaries within which organisations must compete and address the needs of key stakeholders. As circumstances change, boundaries are often replaced by the relationships between companies and the communities they serve. Consequently, strategy has become a central aspect of sustainable leadership and the foundation for implementing strategic management in a dynamic system of relationships. Every company is born and grows within social and economic ecosystems. Drawing on the metaphor of biology, ecosystems are described as dynamic interconnections among various elements that influence and foster entrepreneurship. Interconnections between players (such as marketplaces, organisations, governments, and universities) create a flow of expertise, abilities, knowledge, experience, and tangible resources. Economic and social ecosystems involve various actors and components that continuously coexist and interact, leading to the creation of numerous mutual relationships. Consequently, it is crucial for managers to gain a comprehensive understanding of the internal and external environments. Various decision-making tools and strategies can be used to achieve this goal. These tools were developed to assist managers, researchers, and consultants in making informed decisions under complex scenarios. This chapter presents several decision-making strategies and tools, including the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) matrix, General Electric (GE) matrix, Balanced Scorecard (BSC), PEST, PESTEL analysis, and SWOT analysis.

This qualitative research articulates the perspective that educational institution directors have on the meaning of management action and the need for training in this area. Significant research findings include the importance of training in three specific aspects: technical knowledge, virtues, and managerial competencies. Study participants emphasized that experience alone is insufficient to run a school, which is an important job not only for educating students, but also for the impact it has on the entire educational community (i.e., managers, administrative and service staff, teachers, and parents).

Despite the implementation of the “land for social security” scheme to compensate for land expropriation in rural China, the distribution of social security benefits varies widely both between and within provinces. Why do local officials offer pension compensation in addition to cash payments to some landless farmers and not to others? Using in-depth interviews and survey data, I find that certain attributes of collective demands may signal a threat to social stability, prompting government concessions in the form of welfare benefits. Particularly, among the dispossessed farmers who have engaged in petitions, those who petitioned to higher-level officials were found to be more likely to receive pension benefits than those who have participated in claim-making with a bigger crowd. I propose that in the administrative hierarchy system of cadre evaluation, local officials may perceive public visits and petitions to higher levels of government as more threatening to their career prospects. Moreover, the dilemma between compensation and stability maintenance may also enable local officials to condone strategic targeting rather than collective gathering.

Social relationships play an important role in organizational entrepreneurship. They are crucial to entrepreneurs’ decisions because, despite the bleeding-edge technological advancements observed nowadays, entrepreneurs as human beings will always strive to be social. During the COVID-19 pandemic many companies moved activities into the virtual world and as a result offline Social relationships became rarer, but as it turns out, even more valuable, likewise, the inter-organizational cooperation enabling many companies to survive.

This chapter aims to develop knowledge about entrepreneurs’ SR and their links with inter-organizational cooperation. The results of an integrative systematic literature review show that the concept of Social relationships, although often investigated, lacks a clear definition, conceptualization, and operationalization. This chapter revealed a great diversity of definitions for Social relationships, including different scopes of meaning and levels of analysis. The authors identify 10 building blocks and nine sources of entrepreneurs’ Social relationships. The authors offer an original typology of Social relationships using 12 criteria. Interestingly, with regard to building blocks, besides those frequently considered such as trust, reciprocity and commitment, the authors also point to others more rarely and narrowly discussed, such as gratitude, satisfaction and affection. Similarly, the authors discuss the varied scope of sources, including workplace, family/friendship, past relationships, and ethnic or religious bonds. The findings of this study point to a variety of links between Social relationships and inter-organizational cooperation, including their positive and negative influences on one another. These links appear to be extremely dynamic, bi-directional and highly complex.