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This article investigates the practical implementation of the ecosystem approach in different branches of public management within an urban context. It explores how ecosystem thinking is introduced, disseminated and applied in a local government organization.

We utilize a qualitative case study methodology, relying on official documents and expert interviews. Our study focuses on the city of Espoo, Finland, which has actively embraced ecosystem thinking as a fundamental framework for its organizational development for almost a decade.

The case of Espoo highlights elements that have not been commonly attributed to the ecosystem approach in the public sector. These elements include (1) the significance of complementary services, (2) the existence of both collaborative and competitive relationships among actors in public service ecosystems and (3) the utilization of digital platforms for resource orchestration. Our study also emphasizes the need for an incremental adoption of ecosystem thinking in organizational contexts to enable its successful implementation.

The study provides valuable insights into the introduction and dissemination of ecosystem thinking in public management. It also further develops previously developed hypotheses regarding public service ecosystems.

This study aims to explore the linkage between fluctuations in the global crude oil price and equity market in fast emerging economies of India and China.

The present research uses wavelet decomposition and maximal overlap discrete wavelet transform (MODWT), which decompose the time series into various frequencies of short, medium and long-term nature. The paper further uses continuous and cross wavelet transform to analyze the variance among the variables and wavelet coherence analysis and wavelet-based Granger causality analysis to examine the direction of causality between the variables.

The continuous wavelet transform indicates strong variance in WTIR (return series of West Texas Instrument crude oil price) in short, medium and long run at various time periods. The variance in CNX Nifty is observed in the short and medium run at various time periods. The Chinese stock index, i.e. SCIR, experiences very little variance in short run and significant variance in the long and medium run. The causality between the changes in crude oil price and CNX Nifty is insignificant and there exists a bi-directional causality between global crude oil price fluctuations and the Chinese equity market.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, very limited work has been done where the researchers have analyzed the linkage between the equity market and crude oil price fluctuations under the framework of discrete wavelet transform, which overlooks the bottleneck of non-stationarity nature of the time series. To bridge this gap, the present research uses wavelet decomposition and MODWT, which decompose the time series into various frequencies of short, medium and long-term nature.

This study answers the call for research and theorising exploring ethical communication and brand risk from the African continent. The study's purpose was to identify the challenges that strategic communication practitioners face in enacting ethical crisis communication in South Africa.

The researchers conducted ten in-depth interviews with South African strategic communication professionals.

The dominant theme emerging from the study is the marginalisation and exclusion of the communication function in decision-making during crisis situations. Communicators were viewed as implementers, technicians and not strategic counsel. The protection of organisational reputation was done at the expense of the ethics and moral conscience of practitioners. Practitioners were viewed and deployed as spin doctors and tools to face unwanted media interactions.

The article sheds light on the concepts of ethical communication and decision-making in a multicultural African context using the moral theory of Ubuntu and strategic communication. It demonstrates the tension professionals experience as they toggle between unethical capitalist approaches and African values. The practitioner's role as organisational moral conscience is hindered, suppressed and undermined by organisational leadership's directives to use opaque, complex communication, selective transparency and misrepresentation of facts.

This study purposes to study the influence of artificial freezing on the liquefaction characteristics of Nanjing sand, as well as its mechanism.

was studied through dynamic triaxial tests by means of the GDS dynamic triaxial system on Nanjing sand extensively discovered in the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River under seismic load and metro train vibration load, respectively, and potential hazards of the two loads to the freezing construction of Nanjing sand were also identified in the tests.

The results show that under both seismic load and metro train vibration load, freeze-thaw cycles will significantly reduce the stiffness and liquefaction resistance of Nanjing sand, especially in the first freeze-thaw cycle; the more freeze-thaw cycles, the worse structural behaviors of silty-fine sand, and the easier to liquefy; freeze-thaw cycles will increase the sensitivity of Nanjing sand's dynamic pore pressure to dynamic load response; the lower the freezing temperature and the effective confining pressure, the worse the liquefaction resistance of Nanjing sand after freeze-thaw cycles; compared to the metro train vibration load, the seismic load in Nanjing is potentially less dangerous to freezing construction of Nanjing sand.

The research results are helpful to the construction of the artificial ground freezing of the subway crossing passage in the lower reaches of the Yangtze River and to ensure the construction safety of the subway tunnel and its crossing passage.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the trend of life expectancy in Bangladesh and find the effect of eliminating the causes of diseases on life expectancy statistics.

Data consisted of 1,530 deaths in 2000, 1,582 deaths in 2004 and 1,514 deaths in 2008 that were collected from the Health and Demographic Surveillance System of International Centre for Diarrheal Disease Research, Bangladesh. Trends in life expectancy after eliminating the cause of diseases were examined by a Single Decrement Life table.

The expectation of life for both male and female presented differing patterns. Results showed that life expectancies were greatly reduced in the presence of all groups of non-communicable diseases (NCDs) in the community, whilst life expectancies were significantly improved if all NCDs within all disease groups were completely eliminated. The life expectancies in the presence of NCDs showed lowest expected years among all the present diseases groups and the life expectancies eliminating NCDs showed highest expected years among all the eliminating diseases groups. The results indicated that 10.99 years of life would be added to life expectancy at birth for the male population and 8.82 years for the female population in 2008 if NCDs were eliminated.

The findings of this study provide useful information which could contribute to a more effective allocation of targeted funding for developing public health programs. Lowering mortality by eliminating major groups of diseases results in higher life expectancy ratings. Specifically, the relative impacts of eliminating cardiovascular diseases and respiratory diseases, as compared with eliminating neoplasms.

Contemporary service and marketing research on value co-creation and value co-destruction assume a one-dimensional view on value, ranging from positive value co-creation, alignment and high value to negative value co-destruction, misalignment and low value. This limitation has recently led researchers to conceptually develop more dynamic spatial-temporal models of how value is formed during the interaction, e.g. in terms of different relationships between practice elements (procedures, understandings and engagements) both within and between actors in “value formation spaces”. However, much of this research awaits validation and is in need of more details. This study aims to address this limitation with the purpose of detailing how and why the mechanisms in such spaces are formed.

Two different and interlinked typologies were analytically derived from previous research and applied on ethnographically-inspired multi-perspective empirical data from a service combining health care and transport service ecosystems, using a combination of interviews, observations and service design methodologies. The design in combination with a practice theory perspective was used to articulate crucial aspects related to understanding the dynamics of value co-formation for elaborative and illustrative purposes.

The study contributes to service theory by conceptualizing as follows: a typology consisting of nine different configurations of practice elements (within and between such elements) and eight possible directions that value formation can take, suggesting a theory that explains value co-creation, value co-destruction and mixed cases.

Although the findings have been developed in a specific empirical context, they articulate a conceptualization applicable to many other service and marketing value co-formation settings.

The typologies are conceptual tools to be used in identifying and measuring the alignment/misalignment of practice elements in complex organizations. The empirical findings uncover service problems faced by disabled customers.

The suggested typologies can guide research and practitioners in understanding and analysing value co-formation mechanisms in complex service settings.

Traditional classification algorithms always have an incorrect prediction. As the misclassification rate increases, the usefulness of the learning model decreases. This paper presents the development of a wisdom framework that reduces the error rate to less than 3% without human intervention.

The proposed WisdomModel consists of four stages: build a classifier, isolate the misclassified instances, construct an automated knowledge base for the misclassified instances and rectify incorrect prediction. This approach will identify misclassified instances by comparing them against the knowledge base. If an instance is close to a rule in the knowledge base by a certain threshold, then this instance is considered misclassified.

The authors have evaluated the WisdomModel using different measures such as accuracy, recall, precision, f-measure, receiver operating characteristics (ROC) curve, area under the curve (AUC) and error rate with various data sets to prove its ability to generalize without human involvement. The results of the proposed model minimize the number of misclassified instances by at least 70% and increase the accuracy of the model minimally by 7%.

This research focuses on defining wisdom in practical applications. Despite of the development in information system, there is still no framework or algorithm that can be used to extract wisdom from data. This research will build a general wisdom framework that can be used in any domain to reach wisdom.

Many countries aim to improve public services by use of information and communication technology (ICT) in public service supply chains. However, the literature does not address how inter-organizational ICT is used in redesigning these particular supply chains. The purpose of this paper is to explore this important and under-investigated area.

An explorative multiple-case study was performed based on 36 interviews, 39 documents, extensive field visits and observations providing data on digital transformation in four European criminal justice supply chains.

Two different design approaches to digital transformation were found, which are labelled digitization and digitalization. These approaches are characterized by differences in public service strategies, performance aims, and how specific public characteristics and procedures are dealt with. Despite featuring different roles for ICT, both types show the viable digital transformation of public service supply chains. Additionally, the application of inter-organizational ICT is found not to automatically result in changes in the coordination and management of the chain, in contrast to common assumptions.

This paper is one of the first to adopt an inter-organizational perspective on the use of ICT in public service supply chains. The findings have scientific and managerial value because fine-grained insights are provided into how public service supply chains can use ICT in an inter-organizational setting. The study shows the dilemmas faced by and possible options for public organizations when designing digital service delivery.

This study aims to evaluate the perception of the local experts and end users on the drivers, barriers and strategies to the use of alternative building technologies (ABTs), with a focus on sandbag building technologies (SBTs) in the provision of sustainable housing in South Africa towards improving the public's understanding of SBTs.

This research adopted a qualitative approach that used focus group meetings as the primary data collection method for this study. This study's focus group participants comprised ABT experts and end users of ABT houses in South Africa who were selected using a convenient sampling technique. The data were recorded, transcribed verbatim and analysed using NVivo 11 software.

This study found that the perceived drivers to using ABTs such as SBT comprise sustainability, affordability, job creation potentials, fire-resistant and earthquake resistance. This study revealed strategies for the SBTs, including awareness, building sandbag prototypes across cities and training.

This study's findings have practical implications for the practice and praxis of ABT implementation and uptake in South Africa. This study provides a framework for broadening the worldwide understanding of use and uptake of SBTs to provide sustainable and affordable housing.

This study adds significantly to the limited body of knowledge on ABTs, focusing on sandbag houses. Consequently, the findings provide policymakers with information on the expert and end-user perspectives on the barriers and strategies to using ABTs.

The study aims to explore the argument of implementing the lean method to part or whole of an operation by examining the moderating impact of varying levels of the extent of implementation of four different lean methods, along with their functionalities, in predicting productivity improvement (PI).

As the focus of understanding the efficacy of lean principles is shifting from process to industry level, this study tried to generalize the approach by gathering data from 132 large Indian auto component manufacturers. This involves an assessing/monitoring approach rather than measurement.

Results highlighted the interdependence or individuality of the extent of implementation of lean methods and their functionalities. Findings revealed a significant moderating effect in improving productivity to a greater extent of 50%.

Adopting an assessment approach to a measurement study provides a noteworthy contribution to bridging theory and practical consequences. The findings can be appropriately extrapolated to medium and small enterprises forming a critical connection in the entire automobile manufacturing ecosystem.

The study showed that even if a lean method is applied to a certain extent of operations the chances of PI are significant. This is important for decision makers as they confront problems of optimum resource allocation.

PI, reduced cost and generalization of results would enable the auto component industry to become more competitive.

The examination of the moderation effect of a lean principle implementation extent, along with that of its functionalities to predict the improvement in productivity from its existing level, is a major outcome of this study.