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1 – 10 of 82Omar Doukari, Mohamad Kassem, Enrico Scoditti, Rahim Aguejdad and David Greenwood
Buildings are among the biggest contributors to environmental impacts. To achieve energy-saving and decarbonisation objectives while also improving living conditions, it is…
Abstract
Purpose
Buildings are among the biggest contributors to environmental impacts. To achieve energy-saving and decarbonisation objectives while also improving living conditions, it is imperative to undertake large-scale renovations of existing buildings, which constitute the greater part of building stock and have relatively low energy efficiency. However, building renovation projects poses significant challenges owing to the absence of optimised tools and methods for planning and executing renovation works, coupled with the need for a high degree of interaction with occupants.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper describes the development of an automated process, based on building information modelling (BIM) and the principal component analysis method, for overcoming building renovation challenges. The process involves the assessment and simulation of renovation scenarios in terms of duration, cost, effort needed and disruptive potential. The proposed process was tested in three case studies; multi-residence apartment buildings comprising different construction components and systems, located in Greece, France and Denmark, on which six different renovation strategies were evaluated using sensitivity analysis.
Findings
The developed tool was successfully able to model and simulate the six renovation scenarios across the three demonstration sites. The ability to simulate various renovation scenarios for a given project can help to strategise renovation interventions based on selected key performance indicators as well as their correlation at two different levels: the building level and the renovated surface area level.
Originality/value
The objectives of this paper are twofold: firstly, to present an automated process, using BIM, for evaluating and comparing renovation scenarios in terms of duration, cost, workers needed and disruptive potential; next, to show the subsequent testing of the process and the analysis of its applicability and behaviour when applied on three live demonstration sites located in three different European countries (France, Greece and Denmark), involving six renovation scenarios.
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Ajeeta Srivastava and Akanksha Jain
Purpose of This Chapter: This chapter examines the gender-based skewness witnessed in terms of women-led unicorns, as well as, in the field of entrepreneurship in general in…
Abstract
Purpose of This Chapter: This chapter examines the gender-based skewness witnessed in terms of women-led unicorns, as well as, in the field of entrepreneurship in general in India. India has been witnessing a booming startup landscape lately, with the country producing several new unicorns. Competing internationally, India comes third in world rankings regarding the number of unicorns made.
Design / Methodology / Approach: The methodology adopted in this chapter is case-based analysis of individuals with the help of secondary data available in the public domain. The authors employ comparative analysis methodology keeping two major parameters of interest as the verticals that form the basis of the comparative analysis.
Findings: The special provisions in place that are especially meant for women entrepreneurs in order to help them scale up their business and target higher profits have loopholes in them and as a result, a very low number of women-led businesses have been able to mark their presence in the unicorn club.
Research Limitations / Implications: A lesser number of women entrepreneurs in the unicorn club, so making generalizations has not been possible.
Practical Implications: The chapter gives a better understanding of the dynamics of the entrepreneurship arena in India with respect to women entrepreneurs who are doing significant work on the basis of scale of operation and profits.
Originality: This is an original chapter which has not been presented or published before. This chapter can be of immense value to anyone interested in India’s current entrepreneurial scenario, and useful to policymakers, researchers, and academicians.
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Markus Kantola, Hannele Seeck, Albert J. Mills and Jean Helms Mills
This paper aims to explore how historical context influences the content and selection of rhetorical legitimation strategies. Using case study method, this paper will focus on how…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to explore how historical context influences the content and selection of rhetorical legitimation strategies. Using case study method, this paper will focus on how insurance companies and labor tried to defend their legitimacy in the context of enactment of Medicare in the USA. What factors influenced the strategic (rhetorical) decisions made by insurance companies and labor unions in their institutional work?
Design/methodology/approach
The study is empirically grounded in archival research, involving an analysis of over 9,000 pages of congressional hearings on Medicare covering the period 1958–1965.
Findings
The authors show that rhetorical legitimation strategies depend significantly on the specific historical circumstances in which those strategies are used. The historical context lent credibility to certain arguments and organizations are forced to decide either to challenge widely held assumptions or take advantage of them. The authors show that organizations face strong incentives to pursue the latter option. Here, both the insurance companies and labor unions tried to show that their positions were consistent with classical liberal ideology, because of high respect of classical liberal principles among different stakeholders (policymakers, voters, etc.).
Research limitations/implications
It is uncertain how much the results of the study could be generalized. More information about the organizations whose use of rhetorics the authors studied could have strengthened our conclusions.
Practical implications
The practical relevancy of the revised paper is that the authors should not expect hegemony challenging rhetorics from organizations, which try to influence legislators (and perhaps the larger public). Perhaps (based on the findings), this kind of rhetorics is not even very effective.
Social implications
The paper helps to understand better how organizations try to advance their interests and gain acceptance among the stakeholders.
Originality/value
In this paper, the authors show how historical context in practice influence rhetorical arguments organizations select in public debates when their goal is to influence the decision-making of their audience. In particular, the authors show how dominant ideology (or ideologies) limit the options organizations face when they are choosing their strategies and arguments. In terms of the selection of rhetorical justification strategies, the most pressing question is not the “real” broad based support of certain ideologies. Insurance company and labor union representatives clearly believed that they must emphasize liberal values (or liberal ideology) if they wanted to gain legitimacy for their positions. In existing literature, it is often assumed that historical context influence the selection of rhetorical strategies but how this in fact happens is not usually specified. The paper shows how interpretations of historical contexts (including the ideological context) in practice influence the rhetorical strategies organizations choose.
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Nico Cloete, Nancy Côté, Logan Crace, Rick Delbridge, Jean-Louis Denis, Gili S. Drori, Ulla Eriksson-Zetterquist, Joel Gehman, Lisa-Maria Gerhardt, Jan Goldenstein, Audrey Harroche, Jakov Jandrić, Anna Kosmützky, Georg Krücken, Seungah S. Lee, Michael Lounsbury, Ravit Mizrahi-Shtelman, Christine Musselin, Hampus Östh Gustafsson, Pedro Pineda, Paolo Quattrone, Francisco O. Ramirez, Kerstin Sahlin, Francois van Schalkwyk and Peter Walgenbach
Collegiality is the modus operandi of universities. Collegiality is central to academic freedom and scientific quality. In this way, collegiality also contributes to the good…
Abstract
Collegiality is the modus operandi of universities. Collegiality is central to academic freedom and scientific quality. In this way, collegiality also contributes to the good functioning of universities’ contribution to society and democracy. In this concluding paper of the special issue on collegiality, we summarize the main findings and takeaways from our collective studies. We summarize the main challenges and contestations to collegiality and to universities, but also document lines of resistance, activation, and maintenance. We depict varieties of collegiality and conclude by emphasizing that future research needs to be based on an appreciation of this variation. We argue that it is essential to incorporate such a variation-sensitive perspective into discussions on academic freedom and scientific quality and highlight themes surfaced by the different studies that remain under-explored in extant literature: institutional trust, field-level studies of collegiality, and collegiality and communication. Finally, we offer some remarks on methodological and theoretical implications of this research and conclude by summarizing our research agenda in a list of themes.
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David Martin Herold and Łukasz Marzantowicz
Neo-institutional theories and their constructs have so far only received limited attention in supply chain management literature. As recent supply chain disruptions and their…
Abstract
Purpose
Neo-institutional theories and their constructs have so far only received limited attention in supply chain management literature. As recent supply chain disruptions and their ripple effects affect actors on a broader institutional level, supply chains are confronted with multiple new and emerging, often conflicting, institutional demands. This study aims to unpack the notion of institutional complexity behind supply chain disruptions and present a novel institutional framework to lower supply chain susceptibility and increase supply chain resilience.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors identify the patterns of complexity that shape the supply chain susceptibility, namely, distance, diversity and ambiguity, and present three institutional responses to susceptibility to increase supply chain resilience, namely, institutional entrepreneurship, institutional alignment and institutional layering.
Findings
This paper analyses the current situational relevance to better understand the various and patterned ways how logics influence both supply chain susceptibility and the supply chain resilience. The authors derive six propositions on how complexity can be reduced for supply chain susceptibility and can be increased for supply chain resilience.
Originality/value
By expanding and extending research on institutional complexity to supply chains, the authors broaden how researchers in supply chain management view supply chain susceptibility, thereby providing managers with theory to think differently about supply chains and its resilience.
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Consistent with international trends, various policy initiatives have been proposed in South Africa to reform education practices and equip learners with the ability to become…
Abstract
Consistent with international trends, various policy initiatives have been proposed in South Africa to reform education practices and equip learners with the ability to become critical-thinking citizens. One such reform was the inclusion of Economic and Management Sciences (EMS) as a subject in the curriculum in the late 1990s. EMS, a uniquely South African creation, was introduced to address a particular agenda, enabling learners to understand the wealth creation process and develop entrepreneurial dispositions. Accordingly, the programmed curriculum evident in the EMS textbooks was designed to meet these official curriculum objectives that would create an entrepreneurial culture, which, in turn, would stimulate economic growth. Considering that textbooks are carriers of more than content information and reflect specific values and ideologies, it is of particular importance to examine these textbooks and the messaging communicated to young people about entrepreneurs, as these adolescents themselves start forming their own identities.
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This article reconstructs the conditions under which displaced persons are integrated into their workplaces with their hosts. It identifies the characteristics of this pathway and…
Abstract
This article reconstructs the conditions under which displaced persons are integrated into their workplaces with their hosts. It identifies the characteristics of this pathway and provides guidance on the support that should be provided to these people. This support is part of social responsibility. Theories on professional integration/labour market integration (LMI) have been categorised and then arranged in a logical order to determine the stages of this integration. Theories on professional integration support for refugees were also reviewed and examined in relation to this categorisation. Six stages characterise professional integration: getting a job, its sustainability and its wage adequacy, its security and sustainability, career continuity and employability, the fact of being a full and equal participant and being an integrated part of the workforce and the meaningfulness of that job. The level of professional integration marks the quality of this integration. Each level encompasses the previous levels. Displaced persons should be supported throughout their careers to go beyond technical and behavioural skills and take a more holistic view of their tasks to find meaning in their work. While most research focuses on getting a job as a characteristic of occupational integration, this study found five other characteristics that were ordered. It also links vocational integration with social responsibility and provides guidance on how to help displaced people reach the final stage of this integration.
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Wars, and violent conflicts generally, can generate significant institutional dynamics and new legitimacy pressures for multinational enterprises (MNEs). The purpose of this paper…
Abstract
Purpose
Wars, and violent conflicts generally, can generate significant institutional dynamics and new legitimacy pressures for multinational enterprises (MNEs). The purpose of this paper is to understand the nature or source of institutional pressures facing MNEs in war and to examine how MNEs respond and navigate these institutional pressures.
Design/methodology/approach
This is a conceptual paper.
Findings
Through the theoretical lens of institutional theory and drawing on insights from the devastating Russian–Ukrainian war in Europe, the study provides a framework that explains the nature of institutional pressures impacting MNEs in a major war conflict and how MNEs respond to these pressures. Central to the framework is the impact of formal and informal institutions on MNEs during war. As a result of regulatory and social pressures, MNEs have to make important strategic decisions either to protect their legitimacy or to defend their economic objectives against institutional demands.
Originality/value
As the paper situates the pressures of war for MNEs in a formal and informal institutional context, this offers a new approach to understanding the costs and pressures of war on MNEs.
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Alice Stewardson, David J. Edwards, Eric Asamoah, Clinton Ohis Aigbavboa, Joseph H.K. Lai and Hatem El-Gohary
The UK government has elaborated the effect of late payment on the economy, with its impact on the construction sector being particularly pronounced. This paper aims to evaluate…
Abstract
Purpose
The UK government has elaborated the effect of late payment on the economy, with its impact on the construction sector being particularly pronounced. This paper aims to evaluate the late payment epidemic that persists within the construction industry, specifically analysing the effectiveness of government-led voluntary payment initiatives.
Design/methodology/approach
A mixed philosophical lens is adopted that incorporates both pragmatism and post-positivism to examine the late payment phenomena. Couched within deductive reasoning and a case study strategy, a questionnaire survey was conducted to elicit responses from one-hundred construction professionals. Elucidating upon respondents’ perceptions of the UK’s late payment epidemic, a comparative analysis was undertaken of upstream (main contractor) and downstream (subcontractors/suppliers) contractors through Cronbach’s alpha, descriptive statistics, independence chi-square test, Kruskal–Wallis test and Mann–Whitney U test.
Findings
Emergent findings reveal that in practice, the monitoring and enforcement of government-led voluntary payment initiatives has been unprosperous with numerous contractors being forced to adopt indefensibly poor and punitive payment practices. Survey responses and extant literature substantiate and underscore the industry’s need to strengthen voluntary government-led payment initiatives. To create a responsible payment culture, any future code created should be mandatory and enforceable as a self-regulating approach has failed dismally. The work concludes with practical additional measures that could be introduced to create a responsible payment culture and promote ethical trading within the UK construction industry.
Originality/value
This paper constitutes a novel vignette of, and reflection upon, contemporary practice in this area of construction finance and serves to emphasise that very little has changes in the sector despite numerous UK government led reports and interventions.
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Neal M. Ashkanasy, Ashlea C. Troth and Ronald H. Humphrey
In this chapter, we outline the background to the present volume, including the history of the Emonet group and the origins of the book series. We argue that the volume subtitle…
Abstract
Purpose
In this chapter, we outline the background to the present volume, including the history of the Emonet group and the origins of the book series. We argue that the volume subtitle “A coat of many colors” reflects the diversity of approaches to studying emotion in organizational settings. We then provide a summary of the 11 contributor chapters in the volume, which illustrates the wide range of emotion-related topics covered in the volume.
Study Design/Methodology/Approach
This chapter provides an overview of the chapters in the volume, and gives a brief summary of each chapter, explaining how each fits into the overall theme of the volume and listing the key contribution of each chapter.
Findings
The introduction concludes with a summary of main findings of the chapters, and how they shape the future of the field, concluding that, since emotion-related topics nowadays are so integrated into the mainstream literature in organizational behavior and organization theory, maybe there is no longer a need to address emotions as a stand-alone topic.
Origin/Value
The chapters in this volume address a wide range of emotion-related topics in the fields of organizational behavior and organization theory and point to the future of research in this field.
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