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This paper aims to clarify the relationship between professional services companies and changing customer expectations. It proposes following the digital transformation process and outlines how companies can adopt agile, digital-first ways of doing business to tackle major long-term pain points.

This paper’s author draws on the author’s deep domain expertise on delivering digital transformation projects to businesses and organisations in a variety of industries, including professional services. The author explains the crucial applications for technology to help industry leaders address key business pain points.

This paper provides insights into how companies have an opportune moment to build long-term digital foundations for greater management, process efficiency and collaboration – with data-driven reporting, end-to-end business management solutions, dedicated HR modules and greater connectivity capabilities. This paper demonstrates that a digital-first approach can help companies achieve higher levels of customer engagement and secure their place in a highly competitive market.

This paper fulfils an identified need to explain how professional services companies can embark on digital transformation journeys to tackle outdated and manual ways of doing business.

Details how robots are now being commissioned for work on surface treatment, cleaning and preparation. Robots are proving ideal and cost‐effective in applications which are known to be dangerous and where personnel/operator health and safety considerations predominate. Gives examples of the kinds of blast work being undertaken by robots; proving that there is an attractive return on investment and greater flexibility of operation.

The aim of the present paper is to present certain existence theorems for stochastic control systems whose state variables, χ(t;ω), are continuous functions from the set R+ = {t;t ≥ 0} into the space L2(Ω, A, μ). That is, for each t R+, χ(t;ω) is a vector‐valued random variable whose second absolute moment exists. U = μ(t), the admissible controls, are taken as measurable functions of t only. It is assumed that the initial time is fixed but allow the terminal time tf(ω) to vary with ω∈Ω. The usual space constraints and boundary conditions are also allowed to vary with ω∈Ω. The cost functional is taken to be a continuous functional over a suitable class of continuous functions.

This chapter is about helping you provide a solid platform for your organisation to engage with impact, by shining a light on what sits behind the decisions you make. This chapter will firstly set out why focussing on societal impact, whilst historically relevant, is really not a natural thing for today's organisations – in a sense, it goes against everything we have told ourselves about business for the past number of decades. At the same time, uniting the energy of an organisation to drive positive wellbeing impact is where the heart of the current revolution to address our multifaceted sustainability crises lies. It is a challenge we must rise to.

Many useful frameworks of sustainability/corporate responsibility maturity exist that can help us think about impact (e.g., Schaltegger, Hansen, & Lüdeke-Freund, 2015; Baumgartner & Ebner, 2010; Ainsbury & Grayson, 2014). This chapter extends this by delving deeper into the underlying economic mental models that structure existing organisational decision-making logics regarding impact. It outlines three archetypes of impact logic and the level of impact you would expect to be able to achieve if you operate from each one. All three sit within a ‘capitalist’ approach. Two of them are tightly bounded with neo-classical economic assumptions that have dominated business, the third marks a seismic break with these assumptions. In clarifying these archetypes, this chapter sets a trajectory that leaders can follow if they want to move towards delivering greater impact. The leadership lesson is that when it comes to delivering impact, if you want to go far, you have to go deep.

Business enterprises…are organs of society. They do not exist for their own sake, but to fulfil a specific social purpose and to satisfy a specific need of a society, a community or individuals.

Drucker (1974, p. 39).

Business enterprises…are organs of society. They do not exist for their own sake, but to fulfil a specific social purpose and to satisfy a specific need of a society, a community or individuals.

This chapter considers the school-to-prison pipeline (STPP) within the United States as a network of flows and feedback loops that connects the education and delinquency systems. This system is heavily biased to funnel students with disabilities, disproportionately from low-income minority families, away from productive educational outcomes through punitive, exclusionary, and restrictive measures that too often result in incarceration. Congress intended special education and disability rights laws to ameliorate injustice and ensure long-term positive outcomes for all students. Through a systems theory perspective, this chapter outlines key leverage points inherent in disability rights laws, which can and should be activated to interrupt and reverse the STPP. Many provisions within the law are overlooked or inadequately enacted within current educational practices. The authors present problem-solving strategies, rooted in the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) and other disability rights laws, for educators, juvenile justice advocates, and policymakers to use in order to reduce school exclusion and incarceration of vulnerable youth and to provide education opportunity for all students.

This paper revisits the derivation and properties of the Allen-Uzawa and Morishima elasticities. Using a Swiss dataset, this paper empirically estimates various elasticities both in a dual and primal framework using a production theory open economy model and tests for linear homogenous technology. In addition to reporting elasticity at the mean, the standard practice in the literature, this paper also calculates nonparametric distribution of various elasticities. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

To assess the effect of price change on input, the paper estimates a translog cost function and to assess the effect of quantity change on price, the paper estimates the translog distance function using the data on Swiss economy. The paper estimates Allen-Uzawa and Morishima elasticity both under homogenous and non-homogenous technology using the Swiss dataset of one aggregate gross output and four inputs (resident labor, non-resident labor, imports, and capital) over 1950-1986. Elasticities are reported and compared at the mean as well as explored by looking at the range and nonparametric distribution.

This paper shows that constant returns to scale are easily rejected in this dataset and that the elasticities, both qualitatively and quantitatively, are very different under homogenous and non-homogenous technology. These elasticities can switch from complements to substitutes or vice versa when one moves away from the mean of the sample. The equality of the nonparametric elasticity distributions under homogenous vs non-homogenous technology is rejected in all cases except one.

This paper gives a clear derivation and interpretation of different elasticities as well as demonstrates using a dataset how to systematically go about empirically estimating these elasticities in a dual and primal framework. It shows that linear homogenous technology can be easily rejected and the elasticities, both quantitatively and qualitatively, are very different under homogenous and non-homogenous technology. This paper is also very valuable because it shows that the standard practice of reporting elasticity at the mean might not be adequate and there is a possibility that these elasticities can switch from complements to substitutes or vice versa when one moves away from the mean of the sample.

Achievement goal theory traces people's behaviors, thoughts, and emotions in achievement situations to the broad goals they pursue in that activity, whether in education, sports, work, or other achievement domains (Dweck, 1986; Maehr & Midgley, 1991; Nicholls, 1984). Two goals have featured prominently: mastery goals (also sometimes called learning goals) and performance goals (also called ego goals or ability validation goals). Both goals concern the pursuit of competence and the assessment of one's own skill level, yet they do so in distinct ways. People pursuing a mastery goal strive to develop their skill or expertise, while those pursuing a performance goal instead strive to demonstrate and validate their existing skill, typically by outperforming peers. As such, those pursuing mastery goals typically use self-referential standards to define success versus failure, while those pursuing performance goals instead use normative standards to define success versus failure.