Search results

This study focuses on specifically women refugees' experiences of accessing information and how sociocultural barriers impact these experiences aiming to broaden the LIS literature of women refugees' information problems from sociocultural aspects. The socioculturally formed roles of a woman can impact the information practices of women refugees or cause certain information problems during the integration process. Hence, the research questions that drive this study are: What kind of information problems might women refugees face in a new host country? What kind of sociocultural barriers influence their information problems? How do they react toward these information problems?

The study is designed based on semi-structured in-depth interviews with eighteen refugee women living in Sweden. The study is a part of a larger study in which authors intend to explore the information practices and integration challenges of almost 20 or more refugee women living in Sweden.

Women refugees face information overload, difficulties in understanding new communication culture and lack of appropriate sources and networks in a new country. These information problems are influenced by sociocultural barriers such as the role of women, national culture of “collectivism”, small-world and lack of information literacy. Women react in certain ways such as, stressing, panicking, quitting the tasks, wasting time and making wrong decisions which negatively impact the integration process.

The research has its limitations as it is conducted with a small group of women refugees, belong to specific Middle Eastern culture and cannot be generalized. Another limitation is that the interviews are conducted in English language (with sufficient language skill). However, conducting interviews in their mother language would have been an advantage.

Practically, the study provides awareness for official and private organizations, volunteers and policymakers dealing with refugees. The stakeholders involved in the societal integration process of refugees, must consider that women refugees are more prone to information problems due to certain sociocultural influences (i.e. “being a woman” and national culture) and need a separate plan than the male refugees. For instance, by increasing and offering intercultural opportunities at workplaces or schools can encourage the wider social networking for women refugees. The programs aiming to reduce the sociocultural differences among women refugees and the Swedes are needed to be included in the integration policy.

The study intends to help the refugees society and the Swedish society overall by improving the integration plan.

The findings related to the information experiences of women refugees have potential implications for research where the value of information in the integration process is explored. The study meets the gap in previous literature by presenting the gender specific views on information problems from sociocultural aspects. The study also provides future directions to understand how women refugees deal with potential sociocultural barriers to information in a new country.

Sustainability may be defined as a concept that activates the inner sense of individuals, companies and societies to initiate, promote and sustain practices to protect and enhance the human and natural resources needed by future generations to enjoy a quality of life equal to or greater than our own. To translate this vision into action, it takes time, efforts and sincere leadership and managerial commitments towards sustainable global development. Therefore, the role of business schools is critical in generating a work force to cater to such needs. The purpose of this paper is to focus on the top business schools in India which promote sustainability issues, exploring the challenges of incorporating sustainability in the business curriculum and practices developed by leading professors and business schools to address these issues.

A sample of 35 faculty members from 17 leading business schools of India forms the basis of this research. Data were collected through on‐line questionnaires, telephone interviews and in‐depth exploration of teaching plans and course materials.

The findings highlight the importance of sustainability issues within the business curriculum and the value of integrated case studies which provide a wider perspective to students. Faculty members face serious challenges in the conflict between monetary and sustainability orientations of the curriculum, maintaining students' interest, applying new pedagogical tools effectively, and including considerations of social costs and quality of life.

This paper contributes to existing knowledge about the practical challenges of designing and teaching sustainability issues through integrated courses. It also explores the effectiveness of innovative pedagogical tools to address such issues.

Aim of the present monograph is the economic analysis of the role of MNEs regarding globalisation and digital economy and in parallel there is a reference and examination of some legal aspects concerning MNEs, cyberspace and e‐commerce as the means of expression of the digital economy. The whole effort of the author is focused on the examination of various aspects of MNEs and their impact upon globalisation and vice versa and how and if we are moving towards a global digital economy.

Researchers recommend a reorganization of the medical profession into larger groups with a multispecialty mix. We analyze whether there is evidence for the superiority of these models and if this organizational transformation is underway.

We summarize the evidence on scale and scope economies in physician group practice, and then review the trends in physician group size and specialty mix to conduct survivorship tests of the most efficient models.

The distribution of physician groups exhibits two interesting tails. In the lower tail, a large percentage of physicians continue to practice in small, physician-owned practices. In the upper tail, there is a small but rapidly growing percentage of large groups that have been organized primarily by non-physician owners.

While our analysis includes no original data, it does collate all known surveys of physician practice characteristics and group practice formation to provide a consistent picture of physician organization.

Our review suggests that scale and scope economies in physician practice are limited. This may explain why most physicians have retained their small practices.

Larger, multispecialty groups have been primarily organized by non-physician owners in vertically integrated arrangements. There is little evidence supporting the efficiencies of such models and some concern they may pose anticompetitive threats.

This is the first comprehensive review of the scale and scope economies of physician practice in nearly two decades. The research results do not appear to have changed much; nor has much changed in physician practice organization.

Team integration is a concept that has been widely fostered in alliances as a way of improving collaborative relationships between diverse organisations. However, deeper insights into the practice of high levels of team integration remain elusive. The purpose of this paper is to develop a deeper understanding of team integration through the “lived experience” of practitioners in an alliance.

This study employed a qualitative research methodology. Using a phenomenological examination, via the lived experiences of 24 alliance practitioners, the practice of alliance team integration has been investigated based on the key indicators that foster alliance team integration: team leadership, trust and respect, single team focus on project objectives and key results areas, collective understanding, commitment from project alliance board, single and co-located alliance team, and free flow communication.

The findings highlight that alliancing gives the project teams’ flexibility to change and adapt, to advance the collaborative environment and that successful integration of multi-disciplinary project teams requires commitment to the identified indicators. These findings have led to the development of a framework of leadership for successful alliance integrated practices. It is proposed that to influence the leadership for the purpose of achieving successful integration practice, a team-centric approach is required which includes four elements: task and relationship-oriented behaviours; collaborative learning environments; cultivating cross-boundary networks; and collaborative governance.

As team integration is the central tenet of alliance projects, greater understanding regarding the leadership of integration practice is of value in leveraging the benefits of outstanding performance. Also, the results of the study are expected to be informative and provide insight for alliance teams to help them proactively recognise how the context of integrated teams is influenced by specific indicators, impacting on the extent of integration practice.

This study contributes to the current body of knowledge concerning the insights from the “lived experience” of alliance teams towards achieving a greater understanding of what contributes to the leadership of successful integration practices.

The architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) industry encounter substantial risks and challenges in its evolution towards sustainable development. International businesses, multinational AEC organisations, technical professionals, project and portfolio management organisations face global connectivity challenges between business units, especially during the outbreak of novel coronavirus pandemic, to manage construction megaprojects (CMPs). That raises the need to manage global connectivity as a main strategic goal of global organisations. This paper aims to investigate barriers to integrating lean construction (LC) practices and integrated project delivery (IPD) on CMPs towards the global integrated delivery (GID) transformative initiatives and develop future of work (FOW) global initiatives in contemporary multinational AEC organisations.

A two-stage quantitative and qualitative research approach is adopted. The qualitative research methodology consists of a literature review to appraise barriers to integrating LeanIPD&GID on CMPs. Barriers are arranged into six-factor clusters (FCs), with a conceptualisation of LeanIPD&GID, GID strategy placements and FOW global initiatives with multiple validations. This analysis also involved semi-structured interviews and focus group techniques. Stage two consisted of an empirical questionnaire survey that shaped the foundation of analysis and findings of 230 respondents from 23 countries with extensive cosmopolitan experience in the construction of megaprojects. The survey examined a set of 28 barriers to integrating LeanIPD&GID on CMPs resulting from a detailed analysis of extant literature after validation. Descriptive and inferential statistical tests were exploited for data analysis, percentage scoring analysis, principal component analysis (PCA) and eigenvalues were used to elaborate on clustered factors.

The research conceptualised LeanIPD&GID principles and proposed GID strategy placements for LeanIPD&GID transformative initiatives and FOW global initiatives. It concluded that the most significant barriers to integration of LeanIPD&GID on CMPs are “lack of mandatory building information modelling (BIM) and LC industry standards and regulations by governments”, “lack of involvement and support of governments”, “high costs of BIM software licenses”, “resistance of industry to change from traditional working practices” and “high initial investment in staff training costs of BIM”. PCA revealed the most significant FCs are “education and knowledge-related barriers”, “project objectives-related barriers” and “attitude-related barriers”. Awareness of BIM in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region is higher than LC and LC awareness is higher than IPD knowledge. Whilst BIM adoption in the MENA region is higher than LC; the second is still taking its first steps, whilst IPD has little implementation. LeanBIM is slightly integrated, whilst LeanIPD integration is almost not present.

The research findings, conclusion and recommendation and proposed GID strategy placements for LeanIPD&GID transformative initiatives to integrating LeanIPD&GID on CMPs. This will allow project key stakeholders to place emphasis on tackling LeanIPD&GID barriers identified in this research and commence GID strategies. The study has provided effective practical strategies for enhancing the integration of LeanIPD&GID transformative initiatives on CMPs.

This paper explores what differentiates success from failure in post-acquisition integration. It seeks to overcome some of the limitations of previous research by adopting a more holistic and dynamic examination of the process and by focusing on aspects that can be readily applied in practice. Four cases of mergers and acquisitions (M&A) in the global automobile industry are examined using secondary data and taking a grounded theory approach. The four cases comprise two pairs of successes and two pairs of failures. Two of the pairs comprise established multinational companies, while two others comprise emerging multinational companies’ acquisitions of Korean automakers; in each case, there was one successful M&A and one failure. It is inducted that what differentiates the successful cases from the failures is their different approaches to two common tensions in post-acquisition integration, namely, their approaches to integration strategy and people issues. A two-level framework is proposed in which post-integration is managed simultaneously and dynamically at the strategic and people levels. These inductive findings, if verified by a more broadly based empirical examination, will extend M&A theory by providing a more integrated and dynamic approach to post-acquisition integration, in which strategic and people perspectives are jointly taken into account and interact with each other, thereby creating value for both acquiring and acquired firms.

The authors contribute to practice-driven institutionalism by examining how the introduction of new field-level evaluation practices may facilitate encroachment of highly institutionalized organizational fields by new institutional logics. The authors conducted an inductive study of a trial of social impact bonds in the field of social integration services in Finland. Our analysis elaborates how new field-level evaluation practices created an experimental space that induced organizational practice experimentation, reconfigured relationships among field members, and lowered the barriers to entry for new organizations. The authors theorize how evaluation practices may create experimental spaces by suspending the carriers of established logics and legitimizing institutional innovations. The authors further elaborate how such spaces can bring about a parallel “shadow field” by inducing bottom-up experimentation aligned with a new institutional logic.