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This paper aims to examine the extent to which these reforms address the limitations of Saudi Arabia’s previous investment framework. Long viewed as a hostile environment in which to do business, the Saudi Government has enacted a broad sweep of measures aimed at restoring investor confidence in central aspects of the country’s evolving private law framework.

This paper offers a timely assessment of the raft of foreign investment reforms, both legislative and regulatory, that have been introduced in Saudi Arabia over the last decade.

The paper will proceed by outlining the perceived failings of the old investment regime before going on to reforms.

It will consider the remaining obstacles to the flow of foreign investment in Saudi Arabia in the context of the dual forces that have historically defined the Kingdom’s ambivalent investment law regime.

Voluntary participation (VP) has been identified as one of the characterizing features of mediation. This study aims to examine the value of VP in construction dispute mediation from two perspectives. Firstly, is VP a prerequisite of successful construction mediation. Secondly, does power asymmetry (PA) between the contracting parties marginalize the value of VP in fostering the use of mediation to resolve construction disputes.

Constructs of VP, PA and prerequisites of successful mediation were first developed. Principal component factor analysis was performed on data collected from the construction dispute resolution community to explore the underlying structure of the constructs. The relationships between the constructs were tested by structural equation modelling.

VP is found to be an important attribute of successful mediation. PA is also found to be inherent in construction contracting. This study identified three forms of PA: Resource, Information and Expectation. Moreover, this study found no conclusive empirical evidence to support that PA would marginalize the value of VP in fostering an attempt to construction dispute mediation. It is suggested that VP shall remain one of characterizing features of mediation.

The users, mediators and the judiciary should be aware of the importance of VP in mediation, irrespective of the use of mediation is contractual or court-encouraged. Although the presence of PA between the disputing parties, through participating voluntarily and ensuring the mediation process is flexible and fair, the chance of achieving a settlement would be enhanced.

VP has been viewed as one of the fundamentals of mediation. This study empirically supported this design concept. Furthermore, PA in construction contracting can be expressed as disparities in resource, information and expectation. Their existence presents no significant barrier to attempt of mediation. The flexible approach of mediation has been instrumental in overcoming the paradox between VP and PA. This study affirms the positive value of VP in fostering the use of construction dispute mediation.

The construction industry is complex, human-intensive and driven by monetary values. Hence, disputes are widespread. Initial conflicts among parties may develop into a disastrous dispute that costs the project success and good relationships and affects stakeholders' expectations. There has been a focus on causes of construction-related disputes, and studies over the past three decades have attempted to identify a more comprehensive list of reasons for disputes. Some of these studies' limitations were geographical, project delivery methods and project types. The purpose of this study is to identify the most recent and conclusive list of causes of disputes based on current literature by undertaking a systematic literature review (SLR).

Considering the large number of studies that focused on causes of disputes, this study aims to develop a comprehensive list of causes, using a SLR, as it ensures that all previous articles in multiple databases are reviewed to produce a comprehensive outcome. A six-stage SLR was followed from background study to analysis and reporting.

Not surprisingly, the number of publications has increased over time, most from the Middle East region. The interconnected nature of the causes was widely emphasised. The SLR has produced eight common core causes of disputes. They are: poor contractual arrangements, employer-initiated scope changes, unforeseen site changes, poor contract understanding and administration, contractor’s quality of works, the inability of the contractor to achieve time targets, non- or delayed payments and poor quality of design. The majority of previous authors realised that disputes could be avoided by parties’ involvement during the early stages, avoiding being opportunistic and acting collaboratively.

Even though numerous studies have been carried out to identify the causes of disputes in the construction industry, none did a SLR. This study aggregates all the previous studies that focused on construction-related disputes systematically. Categorising causes based on the party primarily responsible help various stakeholders by providing a distinct list of factors to avoid that contribute to disputes.

A workplace bullying dynamic involving multiple individuals targeting victims can lead to the victim losing emotional bonds or affect-based trust with their colleagues, resulting in employee silence. The literature has largely ignored this negative aspect of social dynamics. This study aims to examine the relationship between workplace bullying and employee silence behaviors and determine whether affect-based trust mediates this relationship and whether climate for conflict management moderates the mediated relationship.

Hypotheses are tested using surveys and scenario-based experiments among faculty members in Indian Universities. There were 597 participants in the survey and 166 in the scenario-based experiment.

Results revealed that workplace bullying correlated positively with silence behaviors, and affect-based trust mediated the bullying-silence relationship. The hypothesized moderated mediation condition was partially supported as moderated the mediating pathway, i.e. indirect effects of workplace bullying on defensive silence and ineffectual silence via affect-based trust were weaker for employees with high climate for conflict management. However, the study failed to support the moderation of climate for conflict management in the relationship between workplace bullying and affect-based trust and workplace bullying and relational silence. The results of this moderated effect of climate for conflict management were similar in both studies.

This study is one of the few attempts to examine employee silence in response to workplace bullying in academia. Additionally, the study revealed a critical area of trust depletion associated with bullying and the importance of employee perceptions of fairness toward their institutions’ dispute resolution processes.

The smart contract provides an opportunity to improve existing contract management practices in the construction projects by replacing traditional contracts. However, translating the contracts into computer languages is considered a major challenge which has not been investigated. Thus, it is necessary to: (1) identify the obstructing clauses in real-world contracts; and (2) analyze the replacement's technical and economic feasibility. This paper aims to discuss the aforementioned objectives.

This study identified the flexibility clauses of traditional contracts and their corresponding functions through inductive content analysis with representative standard contracts as materials. Through a speculative analysis in accordance to design science paradigm and new institutional economics, the economic and technical feasibility of existing approaches, including enumeration method, fuzzy algorithm, rough sets theory, machine learning and artificial intelligence, to transform respective clauses (functions) into executable codes are analyzed.

The clauses of semantic flexibility and structural flexibility are identified from the contracts. The transformation of semantic flexibility is economically and/or technically infeasible with existing methods and materials. But with more data as materials and methods of rough sets or machine learning, the transformation can be feasible. The transformation of structural flexibility is technically possible however economically unacceptable.

Given smart contracts' inability to provide the required flexibility for construction projects, smart contracts will be more effective in less relational contracts. For construction contracts, the combination of smart contracts and traditional contracts is recommended. In the long run, with the sharing or trading of data in the industry level and the integration of machine learning or artificial intelligence reducing relevant costs, the automation of contract management can be achieved.

This study contributes to the understanding of the smart contract's limitations in industry scenarios and its role in construction project management.

Despite an enormous body of literature on conflict management, intra-group conflicts vis-à-vis team performance, there is currently no study investigating the conflict prevention approach to handling innovation-induced conflicts that may hinder smooth implementation of big data technology in project teams.

This study uses constructs from conflict theory, and team power relations to develop an explanatory framework. The study proceeded to formulate theoretical hypotheses from task-conflict, process-conflict, relationship and team power conflict. The hypotheses were tested using Partial Least Square Structural Equation Model (PLS-SEM) to understand key preventive measures that can encourage conflict prevention in project teams when implementing big data technology.

Results from the structural model validated six out of seven theoretical hypotheses and identified Relationship Conflict Prevention as the most important factor for promoting smooth implementation of Big Data Analytics technology in project teams. This is followed by power-conflict prevention, prevention of task disputes and prevention of Process conflicts respectively. Results also show that relationship and power conflicts interact on the one hand, while task and relationship conflict prevention also interact on the other hand, thus, suggesting the prevention of one of the conflicts could minimise the outbreak of the other.

The study has been conducted within the context of big data adoption in a project-based work environment and the need to prevent innovation-induced conflicts in teams. Similarly, the research participants examined are stakeholders within UK projected-based organisations.

The study urges organisations wishing to embrace big data innovation to evolve a multipronged approach for facilitating smooth implementation through prevention of conflicts among project frontlines. This study urges organisations to anticipate both subtle and overt frictions that can undermine relationships and team dynamics, effective task performance, derail processes and create unhealthy rivalry that undermines cooperation and collaboration in the team.

The study also addresses the uncertainty and disruption that big data technology presents to employees in teams and explore conflict prevention measure which can be used to mitigate such in project teams.

The study proposes a Structural Model for establishing conflict prevention strategies in project teams through a multidimensional framework that combines constructs like team power conflict, process, relationship and task conflicts; to encourage Big Data implementation.

A public–private partnership (PPP) is an agreement between the government and private investors to deliver long-term public services. The efficiency of PPP projects depends on PPP contracts stipulating contractual parties' corresponding responsibilities and rights to deal with relational and performance risks. Although more complex contracts provide more remedies for mitigating ex-post transaction costs, they also result in the increased ex ante transaction costs associated with contract writing. Thus, contractual complexity is a design choice that can reduce the overall contract transaction costs.

Using 365 transportation PPP projects in China from 2010 to 2019, this study applies the Poisson regression model to examine the effects of payment mechanisms, ownership by investors and equity structure on contractual complexity.

PPP contracts have control and coordination functions with unique determinants. Parties in the government-pay mechanism are more likely to negotiate coordination provisions, which results in greater contractual complexity. PPP projects with state-owned enterprises (SOEs) have less contractual complexity in terms of both two functions of provisions, whereas the equity structure has no impact on contractual complexity.

These findings provide a nuanced understanding of how various contractual provisions are combined to perform control or coordination functions and make managerial recommendations to parties involved in PPP projects.

Integrating transaction costs economics and task-technology fit theory, this study distinguishes two categories of social media–enabled interactions, namely task-related interactions and tie-related interactions, and explores the match between these two and firms' use of contracts in achieving safeguarding and coordinating purposes in interfirm governance.

Two studies were conducted to test the hypotheses. In Study 1, this study collaborated with a professional market research firm and collected responses from Chinese manufacturing firms in a survey. In Study 2, this study designed a scenario-based experiment and collected 239 participants from the Credamo platform.

This study categorized social media–enabled interactions into task-related interactions and tie-related interactions and conducted two studies to reveal that the safeguarding purpose of contract specificity is amplified by tie-related interactions, whereas the coordinating purpose of contract specificity is strengthened by task-related interactions.

This study assumes that firms permit and encourage the use of social media. However, some firms might prohibit the use of social media due to risk issues, or their partners may be prohibited from using social media.

Given that social media–enabled interactions have joint effects with contracts in achieving safeguarding and coordinating purposes, a firm's employees should match their goals with an appropriate type of social media–enabled interactions.

This study enriches the interfirm governance literature by uncovering the roles of these two types of interactions in matching contract specificity to achieve safeguarding and coordinating purposes, which provides actionable insights for managers in governing interfirm relationships.

The dynamic nature of the built environment and trending smart construction project complexities demand proactive needs tailored towards architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) education. It is a task for the built environment professionals (BEP) to prepare for the future, including the quantity surveying (QS) profession. Studies are scarce in preparing QS education from Nigeria’s stakeholders’ perspective regarding digital technology. Therefore, this paper aims to investigate how to improve QS education by continually updating curriculum digitalisation to meet the construction industry requirements.

Data were sourced from elite virtual interviews across Nigeria. A total of 40 key stakeholders knowledgeable in QS education, advocating a future template for the advancement of QS education in higher institutions, were engaged, and saturation was achieved.

Findings show that improving QS education through continually updating curriculum digitalisation to meet industry requirements cannot be over-emphasised in the 21st-century-built environment industry. The outcomes of the results led to the conclusion that the current QS education curriculum was not meeting the expectations of other BEP stakeholders. Thus, for competitiveness in the future, the QS education curriculum needs to infuse more related-digital technology modules/courses to assist in the sustainability and relevance of the profession within the BEP.

This paper focussed on improving Nigeria’s QS education using digital technologies via a qualitative approach. Future study is needed via a quantitative approach for broader coverage and validation.

The research revealed the need for designing QS programmes to provide for industry demands with emphasis on digital technologies modules/courses. Nigeria’s QS education stakeholders have been stirred up to embrace the curriculum review and make the profession digitalised and relevant within the BEP. The built environment sector is trending towards digitalisation, and the QS programmes cannot afford to be behind.

This research identified the current gap regarding digitalisation of the curriculum. This study will stir QS educational providers and regulators to improve future programmes via digital technologies. It would encourage the use of digital technologies with the right enabling environment. The outcome would mitigate the gap and improve Nigeria’s QS education in the future.

This article aims to examine the role of boundaryless career orientation in influencing Internet professionals' strategies toward workplace problems in China's Internet companies, which feature prominent problems including excessive overwork. It addresses one question: how do Chinese Internet professionals make grievance strategies?

This article draws on qualitative data based on semi-structured, in-depth interviews with 134 employees from 6 representative Chinese Internet companies. The data were collected during 2018-2021 and analyzed with a grounded theory approach.

This article highlights the role of boundaryless career orientation in explaining Chinese Internet professionals' strategies toward workplace grievances. The author develops a comprehensive model to illustrate how boundaryless career orientation influences four grievance strategies namely, strategic compliance, exit, dissent expression and resistance that correspond to four different motives to advance the professionals' boundaryless career: learning, transferring, relieving and resolving. Internet professionals choose different grievance strategies based on how each option can benefit their boundaryless career goals.

This article is one of the first to bring in boundaryless career orientation as a key factor in explaining Chinese Internet professionals' grievance strategies. It provides a fuller picture than previous studies by showing wide varieties of professionals' grievance behaviors. The finding of high-level boundaryless career orientation among Internet professionals offers insights on how companies can improve employment relations by improving career management practices.