Search results

This paper summarizes research involving a multidisciplinary team of volcanologists and social scientists. It describes collaboration in relation to social and physical risk and vulnerability following the Mount Ruapehu eruptions of 1995‐1996. This work stresses a key role for such multidisciplinary teams in reducing the social impact of volcanic hazards through assisting communities, organizations, and individuals following an eruption and, importantly, during quiescent periods. We present an overview of a multidisciplinary approach and related research. In stressing the role of the physical science community in managing societal hazards and risk, the paper addresses how this role can be enhanced through collaboration with social scientists and others. The emphasis here is the facilitation of volcanological knowledge and expertise in threat communication, mitigation, community development, emergency planning, and response management. Our research has examined mechanisms for integration, multi‐disciplinary training, and preparing volcanologists for the social demands encountered in playing an active crisis management role. One area of overlap that can tie together disciplines and assist the public is the idea that volcanic activity and the related uncertainties are, at their essence, simply problems that with increasingly integrated efforts likewise have increasingly attainable solutions.

As disaster resilience activities are increasingly occurring at the neighbourhood level, there is a growing recognition in research and in practice of the contributions that community stakeholders can make in assessing the resilience of their communities. The purpose of this paper is to describe the process in deriving a disaster resilience measurement framework by soliciting the perspectives of stakeholders from urban neighbourhoods in two countries. The authors examined their community values, and their perspectives on both the concept of resilience and the essential elements that they believe would contribute to the resiliency of their neighbourhoods.

The authors used an appreciative inquiry approach to draw out the perspectives of 58 stakeholders from nine focus groups in five urban neighbourhoods in New Zealand and in the USA.

Results of this research show common values and recurring perceived characteristics of disaster resilience across the study sites. A neighbourhood-based disaster resilience measurement framework is developed that encompasses individual/psychological, socio-cultural, economic, infrastructural/built, and institutional/governance dimensions of disaster resilience. In the process of developing the framework, the authors identified challenges in engaging certain segments of the population and in accounting for wider structural influences on neighbourhood resilience.

Issues relating to inclusive community engagement and linkages to cross-scalar resilience factors need to be addressed in future studies.

Results of this research provide insights and guidance for policy makers and practitioners when engaging communities in the development of resilience metrics.

This study fills the literature gap in evaluating community values and stakeholders’ perspectives on disaster resilience when identifying metrics for resilience interventions in urban neighbourhoods. The proposed measurement framework is derived from cross-cultural and diverse socioeconomic settings.

The authors determine how the scheduling and sequencing of surgeries by surgeons impacts the rate of post-surgical complications and patient length-of-stay in the hospital.

Leveraging a dataset of 29,169 surgeries performed by 111 surgeons from a large hospital network in Ontario, Canada, the authors perform a matched case-control regression analysis. The empirical findings are contextualized by interviews with surgeons from the authors’ dataset.

Surgical complications and longer hospital stays are more likely to occur in technically complex surgeries that follow a similarly complex surgery. The increased complication risk and length-of-hospital-stay is not mitigated by scheduling greater slack time between surgeries nor is it isolated to a few problematic surgery types, surgeons, surgical team configurations or temporal factors such as the timing of surgery within an operating day.

There are four major limitations: (1) the inability to access data that reveals the cognition behind the behavior of the task performer and then directly links this behavior to quality outcomes; (2) the authors’ definition of task complexity may be too simplistic; (3) the authors’ analysis is predicated on the fact that surgeons in the study are independent contractors with hospital privileges and are responsible for scheduling the patients they operate on rather than outsourcing this responsibility to a scheduler (i.e. either a software system or an administrative professional); (4) although the empirical strategy attempts to control for confounding factors and selection bias in the estimate of the treatment effects, the authors cannot rule out that an unobserved confounder may be driving the results.

The study demonstrates that the scheduling and sequencing of patients can affect service quality outcomes (i.e. post-surgical complications) and investigates the effect that two operational levers have on performance. In particular, the authors find that introducing additional slack time between surgeries does not reduce the odds of back-to-back complications. This result runs counter to the traditional operations management perspective, which suggests scheduling more slack time between tasks may prevent or mitigate issues as they arise. However, the authors do find evidence suggesting that the risk of back-to-back complications may be reduced when surgical pairings are less complex and when the method involved in performing consecutive surgeries varies. Thus, interspersing procedures of different complexity levels may help to prevent poor quality outcomes.

The authors empirically connect choices made in scheduling work that varies in task complexity and to patient-centric health outcomes. The results have implications for achieving high-quality outcomes in settings where professionals deliver a variety of technically complex services.

Residents of two North Island, New Zealand, communities were surveyed in March 1995 to measure their understanding of volcanic hazards. This was repeated in November 1995, following the Ruapehu eruptions of September‐October 1995. Both communities were subjected to intense media coverage during the 1995 Ruapehu eruption. Whakatane was spared any direct effects, whereas Hastings experienced the hazard directly, in the form of ash falls. Only Hastings’ respondents showed a significant change in threat knowledge and perceived volcanic risk. While experiencing the direct and indirect impacts of the 1995 Ruapehu eruption may make subsequent warnings and information releases more salient, thereby enhancing the likelihood of engaging in successful protective actions or other forms of response, the characteristics of hazard impacts may increase susceptibility to a “normalisation bias”, reducing future community preparedness.

Historically, Panama has always been “a place of transit.” While technically the isthmus formed part of Colombia in the nineteenth century, it was linked geopolitically to the United States soon after the California gold rush, beginning in the late 1840s. The first attempt at building a canal ended in failure in 1893 when disease and poor management forced Ferdinand de Lesseps to abandon the project. The U.S. undertaking to build the canal could only begin after Panama declared itself free and broke away from Colombia in 1903, with the support of the United States.

Challenges to energy access in Nigeria have resulted in the widespread use of fossil fuel generating sets (generators) despite its renewable energy (RE) potential. Given the climate crisis, combined with the country's rapid population growth and expected rise in energy and building demand, transitioning to low-carbon electricity using REs like solar photovoltaic (PV) presents opportunities beyond securing its energy future. While PV use is growing in Nigeria, this is focused on the residential sector despite the identification of the commercial sector as a high energy consumer and a key platform for its integration. In line with this, this research aims to investigates the challenges to energy transitioning from generators to solar PV in commercial buildings.

A qualitative approach in line with grounded theory was adopted using in-depth face-to-face interviews with industry experts.

Two distinct but interrelated categories emerged: being held captive and being a saviour that represented a duality of systems, and/or processes formed the core category “Hostage Syndrome”. The core category (theory) was generated based on the explanations and expressions by participants about their concerns, interests, and the conditions under which they operate. The findings reveal the value attributed to generators beyond an operational role and the adjustments or mechanisms adopted by building professionals during their practice. It suggests a sphere of influence beyond the obvious financial and/or institutional aspects, as determining factors to what is viewed as sustainable which will be key to transitioning to REs.

This paper provides new and in-depth insight into understanding the conditions under which building professionals operate associated with their interpretations of “being sustainable”. The study highlights the need to consider psychological and cultural factors in the development of interventions, strategies and/or policies to support RE transition, particularly towards achieving a sustainable construction industry.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the perceptions and experiences of building practitioners in the adoption of renewable energy (RE) in commercial buildings in Nigeria.

A qualitative methodology was used guided by the principles of the Grounded Theory Method (GTM). Data were collected using in-depth semi-structured interviews with a purposive sample of five industry practitioners.

Five distinct factors emerged, namely, being compliant, change in mindset, normalising, being autonomous and identity. The research revealed the significance of contextual (cultural) peculiarities and the role identity plays in informing RE adoption. The findings substantiate the significance of RE adoption in the future practice of building practitioners and in ensuring environmental stability within the Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) context.

The study focuses on commercial office buildings and attempts to provide contextual grounding to inform theory generation as part of a wider study.

This research contributes methodologically and empirically by providing grounded insight into the adoption of RE in commercial buildings. Thereby, enabling a much greater understanding of the issues associated with enhanced promotion and adoption by professionals and stakeholders, which can inform policy interventions. Furthermore, it will benefit further research within the SSA context and provide valuable lessons associated with adopting GTM in construction research.

With regard to their utility in predicting the adoption of household hazard preparations, traditional approaches to public education directed at increasing awareness and/or risk perception have proven ineffective. Discusses reasons why this may have occurred from public education, vulnerability analysis, and community resilience perspectives and outlines strategies for enhancing preparedness. Describes a model of resilience to hazard effects that has been tested in different communities and for different hazards (toxic waste, environmental degradation and volcanic hazards). Drawing upon the health education literature, introduces a model for promoting the adoption on preparatory behaviour. Discusses links between these models, and the need for their implementation within a community development framework.

The supply chain management literature and agency theory suggest that preventing supplier non-conformance—a supplier's failure to conform to the requirements of the buyer—requires monitoring supplier behavior. However, case studies collected to explore how buyers monitored suppliers revealed an unexpected empirical phenomenon. Some buyers believed they could prevent non-conformance by either trusting their suppliers or relying on a third party, without monitoring their behavior. The purpose of this article is to examine conditions when buyers should monitor supplier behavior to prevent non-conformance.

This article employs a mixed-method design by formulating an agent-based simulation grounded in the case-study findings and agency theory to reconcile observed unexpected behaviors with scholarly suggestions.

The simulation results indicate that buyers facing severe consequences from non-conformance should opt to monitor supplier behavior. Sourcing from trusted suppliers should only be reserved for buyers that lack competence and have a small number of carefully selected suppliers. Moreover, buyers facing minor consequences from non-conformance should generally favor sourcing from trusted suppliers over monitoring their behavior. The results also suggest that having a third-party involved in monitoring suppliers is an effective path to preventing non-conformance.

By combining a simulation with qualitative case studies, this article examines whether buyers were making appropriate decisions, thereby offering contributions to theory and practice that would not have been possible using either methodological approach alone.

The purpose of this research is to highlight the role of not-for-profit (NFP) organisations in enhancing disaster preparedness. The authors set out to understand their perspectives and practices in regard to disaster preparedness activities to support people who live precarious lives, especially those who live as single parents who are the least prepared for disasters.

The research draws on in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 12 staff members, either in a group setting or individually, from seven NFP organisations, who were located in Ōtautahi (Christchurch) and Kaiapoi in Aotearoa New Zealand. These participants were interviewed eight years after the 2011 Christchurch earthquake.

Four key narrative tropes or elements were drawn from across the interviews and were used to structure the research results. These included: “essential” support services for people living precarious lives; assisting people to be prepared; potential to support preparedness with the right materials and relationships; resourcing to supply emergency goods.

This research contributes to disaster risk reduction practices by advocating for ongoing resourcing of NFP groups due to their ability to build a sense of community and trust while working with precarious communities, such as single parents.