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The purpose of this paper is to explore perceptions of the advantages and disadvantages of green roofs for commercial real estate building owners/occupiers in a UK city and consider how these might affect the chances of their adoption.

Two sets of semi-structured interviews were conducted with purposively selected respondents, 10 with and 25 without green roofs, to compare and contrast differing perspectives. A grounded theory approach was taken to data analysis, allowing themes to emerge directly from the data.

Low awareness and understanding were observed amongst those without green roofs, which positively affected perceived costs whilst negatively affecting perceived benefits. Green roof owners gave weight to wider societal and ecosystem services benefits, whilst those without focussed much more upon building-level benefits and costs.

Because of the restricted sample size, the findings in themselves are not generalizable; rather, themes are drawn from the research for reflection.

Findings point to steps that might be required of regional and national government to increase green roof uptake. This could involve initiating conversations to raise awareness, shift discourse and perceived norms and best practice; offering incentives, education and training; and presenting high-profile exemplar projects of green roofing to begin to mainstream the technology and get it onto the radar of building owners.

Bringing together social research around cohorts with and without green roofs, the paper throws into sharp relief discussions around costs and benefits and points towards potentially more productive directions for action to encourage consideration and take-up of green roofs by building owners.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how public/private hybrid and ambiguous organizations played pivotal roles in a governmental programme of housing reconstruction following a major earthquake in central Italy in 2009. Venturing beyond the boundaries of institutional isomorphism and using a Foucauldian approach, the longitudinal analysis seeks to illuminate accounting and performance challenges and provide insights to the calculative techniques associated with evacuee housing.

In “act 1” this paper investigates the role of a consortium created during the recovery stage of the disaster to construct temporary housing. In “act 2” attention shifts to consortia established for the reconstruction of buildings in devastated communities. The total observation period is 11 years. 31 semi-structured interviews were conducted with 15 key-actors. A broad range of official documents was also consulted.

In the immediate aftermath of the earthquake a comprehensive reporting system was established to facilitate the construction of 19 new towns for 15,000 evacuees. The mix of accountants, engineers and architects who developed the system and a building prototype evidences the assembly of diverse calculative techniques by different experts and the de-territorialization of subject disciplines. During reconstruction technologies of government included the introduction of standardised systems and vocabularies that homogenised administrative procedures among diverse experts.

This paper provides academics and policymakers with insights to accounting, performance management and accountability in hybrid organizations in the largely unexplored realm of post-disaster evacuee housing. Further studies are needed to examine the politics of calculation in similar contexts.

This paper fills a gap in the literature by exploring the role played by individual experts working for hybrid organizations. Further, by exploring actual practices over an extended period of post-disaster recovery and reconstruction, the study highlights how experts intervened to solve problems at the meso-political level and at the micro-organizational level.

Internationally, rates of suicide and lifetime self-harm are higher in prisoners compared to the general population. This study aims to identify specific characteristics of self-harming behaviour and to establish a profile of prisoners who engage in self-harm.

Data from the Self-Harm Assessment and Data Analysis Project (SADA) on self-harm episodes in prisons in the Republic of Ireland during 2017–2019 was used. Annual rates per 1,000 were calculated by age and gender.

The rate of self-harm between 2017 and 2019 was 31 per 1,000 prisoners for men and six times higher at 184 per 1,000 prisoners for women. The rate of self-harm was twice as high among prisoners on remand than sentenced prisoners (60.5 versus 31.3 per 1,000). The highest rates of self-harm among sentenced prisoners were observed among 18–29-year-old men (45 per 1,000) and women (125 per 1,000). The rate of self-harm was higher among women prisoners in all age groups. Contributory factors associated with self-harm were mainly related to mental health but also linked to a prisoner’s environment and relationships.

There is a need to ensure access to timely and suitable mental health services, including both appropriate referral and provision of evidence-based mental health interventions to address the needs of these cohorts.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first national study to systematically examine incidence and patterns of self-harm among the prison population in Ireland. The recording of severity/intent of each episode is novel when assessing self-harm among the prison population.

The received wisdom underlying many guides to ethical research is that information is private, and research is consequently seen as a trespass on the private sphere. Privacy demands control; control requires consent; consent protects privacy. This is not wrong in every case, but it is over-generalised. The distorted perspective leads to some striking misinterpretations of the rights of research participants, and the duties of researchers. Privacy is not the same thing as data protection; consent is not adequate as a defence of privacy; seeking consent is not always required or appropriate. Beyond that, the misinterpretation can lead to conduct which is unethical, limiting the scope of research activity, obstructing the flow of information in a free society, and failing to recognise what researchers’ real duties are.

The parent-child relationship is important to the solidarity of families and the emotional well-being of family members. Since people are more dependent on their close social relationships as they age, understanding the quality of relationships between aged parents and their adult children is a critical topic. Previous research shows that this relationship is complicated with both kinship and ambivalence. However, there is little research on the causes of this complexity. This paper proposes a role model to explain this complexity by studying the leadership transition within a family as the child grows.

In this paper, we proposed a novel perception to understand this transition process and explain related problems based on the analysis of the leader-follower relationship between the parents and their children.

When a child is born, his/her parents become the leader of this family because of their abilities, responsibilities and the requirements of the infant. This leader-follower role structure will last a long time in this family. Decades later, when the parents become old and the child grows up, the inter-generational contracts within the family and the requirement of each members change. This transition weakens the foundation of the traditional leader-follower role structure within the family. If either the parent or the child does not want to accept their new roles, both of them will suffer and struggle in this relationship. This role conflict will cause ambivalence in the relationship between aged parents and their adult children.

Based on the quantitative study model provided in this paper, we can moderate the relationships between aged parents and their adult children. This effort is meaningful in enhancing the quality of life and emotional wellbeing for senior citizens.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the concept of pensionomics as a prospective tool for pension evaluation. This paper suggests a paradigm shift – a multi-disciplinary synthesis of differing perspectives in evaluating pension’s overall performance based on past work on pension evaluation – incorporating non-economic variables with significant impact on economic growth and social development.

This paper suggests a new analytical tool called “Pensions Consistency (PC) Index” that identifies the level of consistency and the strengths and weaknesses within any pension system. The new conceptual framework focusses on building inter-sectoral and holistic policies able to respond to the new multi-dimensional dynamic environment.

The consideration of pensionomics concept as an evaluation tool for pension schemes provides insights that are helpful in explaining performance differentials. Taking definition, classification and evaluation as a guiding principle, the new conceptual framework can be a useful point of reference for the overall evaluation of pension schemes, revealing deficiencies that traditional evaluation methods cannot detect. The multi-disciplinary approach focusses on building inter-sectoral and holistic policies that are able to respond to the multi-dimensional uncertainties of the new dynamic environment.

The heterogeneity and complexity in event dynamics are systemic in the sense that the impact is far from linear. The idiosyncratic nature of unexpected and unpredictable events is rather a result of multi-dimensionality based, among others, on magnitude, frequency, timing, intensity and impact. It is plausible to argue that crisis episodes can destabilize critical systems of economic activity, producing economic spillovers that can directly or indirectly affect the sustainability of pension schemes. If the calculation of direct economic impact is readily traceable, the estimation of indirect economic impact can be an onerous task.

Pensionomics places the concept of retirement in a multi-disciplinary context. Pensionomics overcomes theoretical and empirical limitations encountered by the path-dependency perspective, developing a new research agenda to study pension schemes under historical, cultural, social, political, economic, political and environmental prism. Integrating diversified data, techniques, perspectives and concepts, pensionomics’ objective is to connect natural and man-made events with social protection mechanisms for the development of a dynamic social protection framework where individual, community and society needs are met effectively and efficiently by implementing tailored policies, closely related to their specific context.

The concept of retirement has evolved constantly, transforming societies and shaping both income and non-income dimensions of well-being. Pension entitlement turned gradually from a political discourse to a human right discourse. Pension schemes have extended the scope of insurance coverage beyond labour markets and the lifecycle, supporting the broader needs of entire population. Furthermore, pension schemes are widely acknowledged as drivers of economic growth: they enhance labour productivity; foster smooth consumption; and create a stable economic environment for investment and innovation. Current expectations require pension schemes to adopt proactive and reactive policies to examine options for mitigation or for modification of potential consequences in anticipation of exceptional events.

This paper suggests a paradigm shift, a multi-disciplinary approach called pensionomics, and this “multi-disciplinary” focus builds a new analytical framework to evaluate pension’s overall performance based on past work on pension evaluation, incorporating non-economic variables with significant impact on economic growth and social development. PC-Index introduces a comprehensive evaluation tool to study the coverage, performance, efficiency, effectiveness, current trends and future possibilities of pension schemes.

The purpose of this paper is to increase the understanding of customer share of wallet (SoW) based on research in customer characteristics and the retail service quality model. Specifically, this study adopts an asymmetrical modelling approach to provide insights into the necessary and sufficient conditions leading to increased customer SoW in the context of neighbourhood shops in Southern Africa.

This study uses fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis to analyse survey data collected from 523 current customers of the shops.

This study reveals that large household size and low income are necessary conditions for increased SoW. It also reveals five unique customer profiles, or casual recipes, associated with increased customer SoW. More generally, this study demonstrates that service quality constituents (personal interaction, reliability, policy and physical aspects of the shop) and customer characteristics, namely, relationship duration, household size, gender and income-level act in combination to lead to customer SoW.

This study illustrates how service quality constituents and customer characteristics compete and/or complement each other in relation to increased customer SoW. To the best of the author’s knowledge, this is the first study to provide evidence on the necessary conditions for increased SoW, especially in the neighbourhood shop context of a developing economy. Value-wise, this paper provides a more nuanced perspective to understanding how unique customer profiles are associated with increased SoW.

This paper aims to explore four disruptions that practice theory makes to traditional social marketing approaches to school physical activity (PA) intervention.

The paper draws on existing literature from sustainable consumption, sociology of health and illness and the authors’ experiences working with primary schools in the UK to plan and execute social marketing approaches to PA, targeting interconnected social practices from which PA emerges or fails to emerge. The paper explores a practice-oriented theoretical framing, engaging with calls from interdisciplinary areas for PA interventions to shape the PA emerging from a school’s everyday routines, rather than promote PA participation at an individual level.

The paper argues first that a practice perspective would focus on situation research rather than audience research, with practices rather than people as the focus. Second, the purpose of practice-oriented social marketing would be to achieve transitions in practices rather than behaviour change. Third, the planning and management approach of practice-oriented social marketing would account for unintended consequences and complex interconnections between practices. Finally, an evolved evaluation approach to practice-oriented social marketing would take a longer term approach to understand how cultural transitions are emerging.

This paper contributes to an important stream of critical social marketing scholarship that seeks to advance social marketing away from its individualist routes. It sets an agenda for further research that considers the ontological and practical possibilities for practice informed approach to social marketing.

The purpose of the paper is to examine how media synchronicity facilitates the emergence of social exchange (i.e. trust and reciprocity) in organizations’ information and communication technology (ICT)-mediated interactions. A model of media synchronicity in organizational social exchange (MSiOSE) is proposed.

The paper has a design and review approach. The theoretical analysis is based on social exchange theory (SET) and media synchronicity theory (MST).

The authors propose that, in general, social exchange benefits from both asynchronous and synchronous communication processes. However, media synchronicity has different boundary conditions (i.e. pros and cons) in relation to the emergence of social exchange, determined in accordance with the mutually interacting patterns of trust and reciprocity predicted by SET. The authors provide testable theoretical propositions to support the analysis.

Social exchange is a critical business factor for organizations due to its well-known positive outcomes, such as the strengthening of social ties. The need for successful social exchange in remote work conditions is particularly emphasized. However, with regard to the communication and behavioral patterns that lead to social exchange via ICT, the theoretical understanding is limited. The study reveals previously unmapped heuristics between social exchange and physical media capabilities. Thus, the study's propositions can be used to study and analyze social exchange in the ever-changing media landscape. As a practical contribution, the study helps organizations to improve their communication strategies and use of ICT.