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This article has been withdrawn as it was published elsewhere and accidentally duplicated. The original article can be seen here: 10.1108/03068299910227237. When citing the article, please cite: Dominic Smith, Paul Riethmuller, (1999), “Consumer concerns about food safety in Australia and Japan”, International Journal of Social Economics, Vol. 26 Iss: 6, pp. 724 - 742.

This paper is concerned with an exploration of crises within the service sector. The paper proposes setting out a thesis that places “management”, as both a function and a process, at the centre of crisis generation and response rather than simply in terms of “continuity management” or service recovery. The paper argues that the nature of interactions within a service sector context generates significant problems of emergence that, in turn, create vulnerability within organisations. The paper aims to conclude by offering suggestions regarding the various points of intervention that are available to organisations.

The paper explores the nature of crisis with particular reference to the service industries. The paper is conceptual in its scope, although it draws on a number of research‐ and consultancy‐based investigations.

This paper has sought to identify three of the key elements of the crisis management literature: namely vulnerability, emergence and the barriers to learning. Each of these offers quite fundamental challenges to the practice of service recovery by highlighting the need to address both the prevention and response dynamics of the crisis process. The paper outlines the theoretical aspects of failure and outlines the process of vulnerable pathways within organisations.

The conceptual framework needs to be applied to specific cases of crisis in order to validate the framework.

The interdisciplinary approach seeks to outline key issues facing practitioners around the development of contingency plans and the limitations that such plans have embedded within them.

The paper seeks to develop understanding of the nature of vulnerability within organisations and outlines a conceptual framework for the analysis of escalation within organisations.

Food safety, always an important issue, has recently gained a higher profile following a number of highly publicised incidents in Australia and overseas. Consumers in Australia and Japan were surveyed to obtain information on a range of issues including food safety. This paper presents the findings of this survey and shows that Japanese consumers tended to score lower on the measure of confidence in food safety, suggesting that they are less confident about the safety of the food they consume than Australian consumers. Other demographic factors that have a significant impact on consumer confidence in both countries are identified.

Reliable conceptual cost estimation of large-scale construction projects is critical for successful project planning and execution. For addressing the limited data availability in conceptual cost estimation, this study proposes an enhanced ANN-based cost estimating model that incorporates artificial neural networks, ensemble modeling and a factor analysis approach.

In the ANN-based conceptual cost estimating model, the ensemble modeling component enhances training, and thus, improves its predictive accuracy and stability when project data quantity is low; and the factor analysis component finds the optimal input for an estimating model, rendering explanations of project data more descriptive.

On the basis of the results of experiments, it can be concluded that ensemble modeling and FAMD (Factor Analysis of Mixed Data) are both conjointly capable of improving the accuracy of conceptual cost estimates. The ANN model version combining bootstrap aggregation and FAMD improved estimation accuracy and reliability despite these very low project sample sizes.

The generalizability of the findings is hard to justify since it is difficult to collect cost data of construction projects comprehensively. But this difficulty means that our proposed approaches and findings can provide more accurate and stable conceptual cost forecasting in the early stages of project development.

From the perspective of this research, previous uses of past-project data can be deemed to have underutilized that information, and this study has highlighted that — even when limited in quantity — past-project data can and should be utilized effectively in the generation of conceptual cost estimates.

The purpose of this paper is to encourage understanding of the practical value to managers and communication practitioners of the positive lessons from issue and crisis management cases.

Unlike many other areas of management writing, which focus on new approaches and best practice, issue and crisis management cases often highlight “PR disasters” where other managers may simply count themselves lucky that it happened to someone else. This paper uses well known examples to explore the reasons for this focus on failure and proposes ways for managers to move beyond schadenfreude to secure genuine learning and competitive advantage from the adverse experiences of others.

Whereas many industry “award winning” cases are self‐serving and prone to wisdom after the event, there is a growing body of authoritative case‐books and other material which can provide useful evaluation and benchmarking for an organization's own activity, both internal and external.

While academics and their students are familiar with the use of communication case analysis, this paper explores the range of published case study resources for practitioners and other managers who may be less aware of what is currently available and how independent analysis and insight can help facilitate effective performance against accountability.

In this paper, the dominant techno-rational view of studying delays in projects is challenged. In so doing, the purpose of this paper is to urge for more attention paid to studying the intentionalities of the planners involved in planning the schedule for projects.

In this paper, the authors take a critical approach to review a range of literatures related to the concept of project delays. Through this review, the authors render the relative absence of acknowledging intentionality in the study of delays problematic. Therefore, the authors inject fresh insights into how intentionality can play a crucial role in advancing the understanding of project delays.

Prevailing research tends to assume the primacy of the project plan and conceptualise delays as a consequence of flawed execution. The review offers three possibilities for reconceptualising delays as a consequence of flawed plans. In so doing, the authors refocus the attention on how intentionality could play a crucial role in shaping “inaccurate” plans, which in turn could lead to the creation of delays.

As a consequence of this review paper, the authors invite scholarship into project delays to move away from finding “cause-and-effect” mechanisms to attend more closely to the role intentionality plays in creating delays, whether intended, unintended, or imagined.

This paper brings intentionality to the fore to challenge the assumptions over the nature of delays. In so doing, the review expands the understanding of project delays by incorporating unintended, intended, and imaginary perspectives.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a detailed appraisal of the quality of domestic retrofits.

This paper presents the results of technical surveys on 51 retrofits undertaken before, during and after the retrofits.

Failures are observed to be endemic and characterised into five themes: 72 per cent showed moisture issues pre-retrofit, 68 per cent had moisture risks post-retrofit, 62 per cent did not adopt a whole house approach, 16 per cent showed inadequate quality assurance protocols and 64 per cent showed evidence of insufficient design detailing. Each theme is further subcategorised with a view to identifying implications for future policy.

The findings suggest the 10 per cent Ofgem retrofit failure rates predictions are an underestimate and so there may be a need for additional investigations to understand the trend across the UK.

Recommendations to reduce the failure rates may include making changes to the current inspection regime, widening understanding among installers; providing standard repeatable designs for repeated features; and empowering occupants to trigger inspections.

The sample is representative of a substantial proportion of the homes in the UK suggesting that retrofit quality may in many instances be below the required standards.

Risks of moisture issues and underperformance in domestic retrofit are a concern for government industry and households. This research shows that many installation failures are the result of not implementing existing guidelines and a change to the enforcement of standards may be needed to enact a fundamental change in installer practice and process control.