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Poor maintenance management leads to non-negligible economic, environmental and social impacts and obstacles to the sustainable manufacturing paradigm. Studies evaluating maintenance impacts on sustainability underline growing interest in the topic, but reports on the industrial field are lacking. Therefore, this paper investigates the industrial environment and the indicators that manufacturing companies use for measuring their maintenance impacts.

In this pilot survey study, several stakeholders of production enterprises in the south of Italy were interviewed to unveil the spread of the measurement of maintenance impacts on sustainability and the indicators used by those companies.

The interview results showed a low level of awareness among stakeholders about maintenance impacts on sustainability. Maintenance stakeholders are mainly focused on technical and economic factors, whereas environmental, quality and safety stakeholders are becoming more aware of maintenance impacts on environmental and social factors. However, both groups need guidelines to define sustainability indicators to assess such impacts.

This exploratory study allowed us to investigate the current situation in industrial organisations and achieve the first variegated and diversified vision of the awareness of company stakeholders on maintenance impacts on the sustainability of several business functions. This paper provides a valuable contribution to “maintenance and sustainability” research area in production contexts and sheds light on non-negligible maintenance impacts on sustainability, providing preliminary insights on the topic and an effective basis for defining future research opportunities. Moreover, this study enables increased awareness among internal and external manufacturing company stakeholders on the role of maintenance in sustainable production.

During the evaluation of European Capital of Culture (ECoC) Aarhus 2017, the evaluation organisation rethinkIMPACTS 2017 formulated a set of “dilemmas” capturing the main challenges arising during the design of the ECoC evaluation. This functioned as a framework for the evaluation process. This paper aims to present and discuss the relevance of the “Evaluation Dilemmas Model” as subsequently applied to the Galway 2020 ECoC programme evaluation.

The paper takes an empirical approach including auto-ethnography and interview data to document and map the dilemmas involved in undertaking an evaluation in two different European cities. Evolved via a process of practice-based research, the article addresses the development of and the arguments for the dilemmas model and considers its potential for wider applicability in the evaluation of large-scale cultural projects.

The authors conclude that the “Evaluation Dilemmas Model” is a valuable heuristic for considering the endogenous and exogenous issues in cultural evaluation.

The model developed is useful for a wide range of cultural evaluation processes including – but not limited to – European Capitals of Culture.

What has not been addressed in the academic literature is the process of evaluating ECoCs; especially how evaluators often take part in an overall process that is not just about the evaluation but also planning and delivering a project that includes stakeholder management and the development of evaluation criteria, design and methods.

Non-uniform rational B-splines (NURBSs) are the de facto standard for representing objects in computer-aided design (CAD). The purpose of this paper is to discuss how to stick to this standard in all phases of the additive manufacturing (AM) workflow, from the CAD object to the final G-code, bypassing unnecessary polygonal approximations.

The authors use a commercial CAD system (Rhino3D along with its programming environment Grasshopper) for direct slicing of the model, offset generation and trimming. Circular arcs are represented as quadratic NURBSs and free-form geometry as quadratic or cubic polynomial B-splines. Therefore, circular arcs are directly expressible as G2/G3 G-code commands, whereas free-form paths are rewritten as a succession of cubic Bézier curves, thereby admitting exact translation into G5 commands, available in firmware for AM controllers, such as Marlin.

Experimental results of this paper confirm a considerable improvement in quality over the standard AM workflow, consisting of an initial polygonization of the object (e.g. via standard tessellation language), slicing this polygonal approximation, offsetting the polygonal sections and, finally, generating G-code made up of polyline trajectories (G1 commands).

A streamlined AM workflow is obtained, with a seamless transfer from the initial CAD description to the final G-code. By adhering to the NURBS standard at all steps, the authors avoid multiple representations and associated errors resulting from approximations.

This paper aims to understand what drives people – their motivations, autonomous learning attitudes and learning interests – to volunteer as mentors for a program that helps families to ideate technological solutions to community problems.

A three-phase method was used to build volunteer mentor profiles; elicit topics of interest and establish relationships between those. The mentor profiles were based on self-assessments of motivation, attitude toward lifelong learning and self-regulated learning strategies. The topics of interest were elicited through content analysis of answers to reflection questions. Statistical methods were applied to analyze the relationship between the interests and the mentor profiles.

Bottom-up clustering led to the identification of three mentor groups (G1 “low”; G2 “high” and G3 “medium”) based on pre-survey data. While content analysis led to identifying topics of interest: communication skills; learning AI; mentoring; prototype development; problem-solving skills; working with families. Analyzing relationships between mentor profile and the topics of interest, the group G3 “medium,” with strong intrinsic motivation, showed significantly more interest in working with families. The group with the overall highest scores (G2 “high”) evidenced also substantial interest in learning about AI, but with high variability between members of the group.

The study established different types of learning interests of volunteer mentors and related them to the mentor profiles based on motivation, self-regulated learning strategies and attitudes toward lifelong learning. Such knowledge can help organizations shape the volunteering experience to provide more value to volunteers. Furthermore, the reflection questions can be used by volunteers as an instrument for reflection and by organizations to elicit the learning interests of volunteers.

To protect information and communication technology (ICT) infrastructure and resources against poor cyber hygiene behaviours, organisations commonly require internal users to confirm they will abide by an ICT Code of Conduct. Before commencing enrolment, university students sign ICT policies, however, individuals can ignore or act contrary to these policies. This study aims to evaluate whether students can apply ICT Codes of Conduct and explores viable approaches for ensuring that students understand how to act ethically and in accordance with such codes.

The authors designed a between-subjects experiment involving 260 students’ responses to five scenario-pairs that involve breach/non-breach of a university’s ICT policy following a priming intervention to heighten awareness of ICT policy or relevant ethical principles, with a control group receiving no priming.

This study found a significant difference in students’ responses to the breach versus non-breach cases, indicating their ability to apply the ICT Code of Conduct. Qualitative comments revealed the priming materials influenced their reasoning.

The authors’ priming interventions were inadequate for improving breach recognition compared to the control group. More nuanced and targeted priming interventions are suggested for future studies.

Appropriate application of ICT Code of Conduct can be measured by collecting student/employee responses to breach/non-breach scenario pairs based on the Code and embedded with ethical principles.

Shared awareness and protection of ICT resources.

Compliance with ICT Codes of Conduct by students is under-investigated. This study shows that code-based scenarios can measure understanding and suggest that targeted priming might offer a non-resource intensive training approach.

This research aims to investigate the factors that can influence Bumiputera contractors’ acceptance of the Contractor’s All Risks (CAR) takāful (Islamic insurance) product using the theory of reasoned action (TRA).

Using the method of quantitative surveys, 414 questionnaires were collected from targeted Bumiputera contractors in Malaysia (grade G1 to grade G7), except in Sabah and Sarawak, that are registered with the Construction Industry Development Board (CIDB) and are also members of Persatuan Kontraktor Melayu Malaysia (PKMM). The data was analysed using the partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) technique.

The findings from the PLS-SEM analysis show that attitude, subjective norm, religiosity and awareness have a positive relationship with Bumiputera contractors’ acceptance of the CAR takāful product. Religiosity appeared to be the most significant factor influencing Bumiputera contractors’ acceptance of the CAR takāful product.

The respondents in this study only comprised Bumiputera contractors in Peninsular Malaysia, excluding those from Sabah and Sarawak. Therefore, it is not possible to generalise the findings to a broader population.

Takāful operators and their sales and marketing departments need to act proactively in promoting the benefits of investing in CAR takāful that follows Sharīʾah (Islamic law) rules and principles. They should create mechanisms to market CAR takāful better, thus accelerating its acceptance rate among contractors.

The paper uses the proposed extended TRA model, which includes the variables of religiosity and awareness in the TRA model. These variables were successfully integrated in the model, and the findings show that they have significantly contributed to the acceptance of the CAR takāful product among Bumiputera contractors.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate current practices of water governance disclosure in the food, beverage and tobacco industry and to determine whether the quality of disclosure has a positive association with integrated reporting (IR).

A water governance disclosure index was developed that used content analysis to code the latest standalone social, environmental and sustainability reports or integrated reports of 49 companies in the food, beverage and tobacco industry. The selected companies are listed on three indices, the ASX, JSE and DJSI. This was followed by quantitatively testing the association between IR and the quality of water governance disclosure, as measured against the qualitatively developed index.

It was found that the 18 IR companies’ water governance disclosure quality significantly outperformed the 31 companies in the non-IR group, with a calculated index score of 71.67% and 40.97%, respectively.

The evidence indicates that IR is superior to non-IR water governance disclosure, and the study, therefore, contributes to the literature around the legitimacy theory by concluding that IR is supportive to companies to legitimise their being.

The originality of this paper stems from the comparison of water governance disclosures between IR and non-IR firms. Considering that IR preparers outperformed companies in the non-IR group could provide insights to academics, regulators and reporting organisations that IR could be used to enhance water governance disclosure.

Self-employment is considered one of the responses to precarious employment, particularly among those who lost jobs during an economic crisis. Although starting a new business is widely available, operating new ventures remains challenging. This article aims to explore the premises of self-employment success, namely self-employment intention and proactive coping as crucial predictors of further performance.

The authors recruited participants among initially unemployed individuals who participated in the entrepreneurial program aimed at creating self-employment. Since entrepreneurs are expected to have specific personal characteristics important for performance, the authors assessed proactive coping as the key factor for self-employment intention.

The results depicted proactive coping as crucial in performing own ventures in the long run, which suggests that self-employment intention may change over time.

Proactive coping is particularly appropriate for self-employed at any stage of the entrepreneurial process because it maintains the intention to perform own business. Thus, the findings underline the need for proactive coping training for entrepreneurs, particularly those previously unemployed.

As the self-employment intention may differ in time, the importance of being proactive in operating small businesses increases.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the feasibility of an end-to-end simplified and automated reconstruction pipeline for digital building assets using the design science research approach. Current methods to create digital assets by capturing the state of existing buildings can provide high accuracy but are time-consuming, expensive and difficult.

Using design science research, this research identifies the need for a crowdsourced and cloud-based approach to reconstruct digital building assets. The research then develops and tests a fully functional smartphone application prototype. The proposed end-to-end smartphone workflow begins with data capture and ends with user applications.

The resulting implementation can achieve a realistic three-dimensional (3D) model characterized by different typologies, minimal trade-off in accuracy and low processing costs. By crowdsourcing the images, the proposed approach can reduce costs for asset reconstruction by an estimated 93% compared to manual modeling and 80% compared to locally processed reconstruction algorithms.

The resulting implementation achieves “good enough” reconstruction of as-is 3D models with minimal tradeoffs in accuracy compared to automated approaches and 15× cost savings compared to a manual approach. Potential facility management use cases include the issue and information tracking, 3D mark-up and multi-model configurators.

Through user engagement, development, testing and validation, this work demonstrates the feasibility and impact of a novel crowdsourced and cloud-based approach for the reconstruction of digital building assets.

Monocytes are a leukocytes’ subset that plays an important role in immunity. Protein kinase B (AKT) is involved in monocytes' survival, proliferation and differentiation. Using phorbol 12-myristate 13-acetate (PMA) as an inducer for cell line U937 differentiation into macrophage-like cells may be used as a model for cancer cell therapy or other biomedical research studies. The authors investigated the Akt1 signaling pathway's involvement with PMA as a differentiating agent and survival in the U937 cell line.

PMA was utilized to stimulate the differentiation of the U937 cell line into macrophage-like cells at a concentration of 10 nM. Akt1-phosphorylated Serine 473, Bad-phosphorylated Serine 136 and Caspase9-phosphorylated Serine 196 were tested by flow cytometry for the involvement of the Akt1 signaling pathway during differentiation in addition to the expression of CD14, CD206 and CD83. DNA cell cycle variation analysis was done using PI staining and cell viability and apoptosis detection using Annexin V and PI flow cytometry.

There was a decrease in phosphorylated Akt1 and Bad activation and an increase in Caspase9 activation, with an increase in surface markers CD14, CD206 and CD83 acquired by PMA-differentiated cells. DNA cell cycle analysis revealed cell accumulation in the G2/M phase and fewer cells in the S phase of PMA-induced U937. Apoptosis induction for Ly294002 or Wortmannin-inhibited cells and part of PMA-induced cells were detected.

These results may be used to create a model for biomedical research studies and advance the understanding of the mechanism involving differentiation of the U937 cell line.