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Globalisation means that more and more construction projects involve participants from different cultural backgrounds. Besides the obvious language barrier, people may also have different faiths, assumptions and behaviour norms which can and do cause conflicts. This challenges previous approaches and is creating a new context for the construction industry. This research aims to explore how practitioners can work more effectively in cross‐cultural situations.

The paper uses real‐life experience and personal construct theory to understand the problems in interpretation, communications, emotion and trust. It uses methods of participatory action research and experiential research, and an analysis based on dialogue and reflection between the researchers with different cultural backgrounds.

The paper concludes that, to work effectively in cross‐cultural situations, one needs to work with one's personal constructs and pay more attention to informal communications. It is also necessary to recognise and deal with emotions explicitly. It is very important yet difficult to build and maintain trust in cross‐cultural cooperation.

This approach inevitably brings some personal or even biased subjective judgement on certain cultural phenomena. There are others involved who do not have a voice.

The research provides a new approach to facilitate practitioners to tackle the problems of cross‐cultural projects.

The paper applies personal construct theory to cross‐cultural analysis using a novel methodology of cross‐cultural dialogue. This develops a practical approach to situations and establishes the importance of emotion in cross‐cultural cooperation.

The Austrian education system can be classified as an egalitarian system. This is due to the fact that although it is a centrally governed system, the implementation of reforms is the responsibility of the schools. Regarding this implementation, in turn, there is a low level of accountability for the schools to the education administration. Consequently, this has implications for the way how and from whom evidence is handled within the system. Despite the increased emphasis on evidence-informed decision-making, current trends are leading away from nationally coordinated approaches (abolition of the regular and external assessment of national educational standards) and towards locally based initiatives (informal competences assessments). In this context, extended autonomy for schools plays a crucial role as schools received more responsibilities for decision-making. After a detailed description of the Austrian education system, the following article shows how evidence-informed practice is supported within the system by means of selected instruments and projects. Furthermore, relevant groups of actors are identified and analysed in terms of their competences and thus responsibilities for evidence-informed practice. From the analysis, facilitating and hindering factors for evidence-informed teaching and leading are identified.

Intrapreneurship (IP) and Strategic Human Resource Management (SHRM) are a paradigm in which the current global scenario of increased homeoffice and professional globalization can have the capacity to stimulate professionals’ autonomy and new business orientations able to re-invent new strategies, services, technologies and even leadership development. This study, of an exploratory nature, aims to analyze the synchronicities between IP and SHRM, raised by relational dynamics translated into leadership, organizational culture and individual practices having as a facilitating factor technology as an agent of change for continuous improvement (based on the Kaizen philosophy). It is supported by a qualitative analysis through a case study of a leading Portuguese group, Grupo Salvador Caetano, which has been in existence for 75 years.

The results demonstrate that dynamic relations are the synchronicities of IP and SHRM as long as stimulated and transmitted to collaborators, and that technology, facilitated these processes. The flexibility of SHRM, the sequence of delegation and implementation of relational dynamics must be the key for the synchronicities of SHRM and IP to be two phenomena that go side by side and contribute to more effective performance and evolution among collaborators, as they support each other in creating firms’ value for customers. Some contributions to theory and practice, raised through a logic of “in-house entrepreneurship,” are also presented at the end of the study.

Discusses some of the problems associated with the requirements and the prospects for international standards for the exchange of bibliographic records in machine‐readable form: the various roles of national bibliographies and national libraries; a lack of international cataloging standards; a lack of an international subject control system; language difficulties; character sets and codes; and nonroman alphabets. Explains that these problems lie behind the development of various MARC formats out of UNIMARC. In this final part of a four‐part article, describes the formats for South Africa, Taiwan, Japan, Croatia and Germany and indicates the points of difference and local requirements.

This paper aims to provide a bibliometric meta-analysis of the already substantial and growing literature on international franchising. Franchising is a model for businesses to achieve scale with limited resources. International franchising is a mode of entry that allows firms to develop new markets with relatively little risk but also little control.

Using a systematic approach, the paper identifies all articles in the ISI Web of Science from 1970 to 2018 that includes the term international franchising (in the title, the abstract or keywords) and finds 131 articles. This paper used HistCite software to analyze the bibliometric data.

Four major research clusters in the international franchising literature are identified. In addition, this study shows a change in research patterns regarding topics, theories and methodologies from the 1970s through 2018. The paper presents the most influential articles, authors and journals.

From the analyzes, this study develops a conceptual framework of international franchising and suggest avenues for future research.

The purpose of this paper is to propose an agile assistant robot to be used as a mobile partner with two rotational motions and one translational motion. This robot possesses the rolling function and three operating abilities to assistant human beings in the industrial environment.

The main body of the robot is a typical 4-RSR (where R denotes a revolute joint and S denotes a spherical joint) parallel mechanism. The mechanism can reach any position on the ground by two rolling modes (the equivalent Watt linkage rolling mode and the equivalent 6R linkage rolling mode), and the robot can work as a spotlight or a worktable in operating modes at the target location. The mobility, rolling modes, operating modes and kinematics are analyzed.

Based on the results of kinematics of this assistant robot, the upper platform of the 4-RSR rolling mechanism has two rotational motions and one translational motion which can be used in the industry. The proposed concept is verified by experiments on a physical prototype.

This paper also discusses the application to industrial cases where cooperation between workers and robots is required.

The work presented in this paper is a novel exploration to apply parallel mechanisms to the field of assistant rolling robots. It is also a new attempt to use the rolling mechanism in the field of mobile operating robots for industry tasks.

Chinese agri‐food chains consist of the millions of small scale farmers, who are not well structured and organized in the supply chain. Owing to market liberalization and globalization, one of the most challenging issues along agri‐food chains in China is becoming the issue of how to link these small‐scale farmers into the modern chains. Consequently, it is essential for both policy makers and private sectors to understand the governance structure in agri‐food supply chains. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to develop a theoretical framework for supply chain governance, including its antecedents and consequences, as well as a series of hypotheses for empirical testing.

A conceptual framework of chain governance is proposed in this study, where governance structure consists of two dimensions: contractual governance and relational governance. The study intends to propose a complementary relationship between contracts and relational aspects, such as trust, in the Chinese context. Future research is needed to empirically test this model.

The proposed conceptual model is unique, since the majority of the articles addressing this topic focuses on contract farming while limited research touches upon the issues of trust and relations. However, a combination of both contracting and relationships are seldom addressed.

This paper evaluates a novel concept of two dimensional governance structure in the agri‐food supply chain, where transaction cost economics theory and relational theory are combined to study the governance relationships between small scale producers in China and their buyers.

According to the literature, quality management consists of a set of components: critical factors, tools, techniques and practices. The purpose of this paper is: to identify the components of total quality management (TQM), in order to make them known to managers and thus facilitate successful quality management implementation, and to show the situation of 106 ISO 9000 certified firms concerning these components.

In order to achieve this objective, a literature review and a survey based on 106 ISO 9000 certified firms in Spain were developed.

The results reflect that certified firms must develop their people orientation 1and use techniques and tools to a higher extent in order to progress towards total quality.

The value of the paper is point out which TQM components are important to successfully implement TQM and identify the situation of these components in ISO 9000 certified firms in a particular area.

The paper seeks to explore how globalization processes have shaped the nature, scope, and time frame of considerations of social responsibility and the development of a corporate social responsibility (CSR) regime. The paper identifies three generations of human rights' values embedded within the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and aims to argue that they inspire and influence contemporary discussions about, and practices of CSR.

Employing the emergence of the human rights regime as a paradigmatic case comparison, the interrelationships of states, non‐governmental organizations (NGOs), and corporations in the development of new conceptions and expectations of, and organizations for CSR were explored.

The paper finds strong parallels between the growth of the global human rights regime and the burgeoning international attention paid to issues of CSR and sustainability. Four critical stages are identified: the formal articulation of norms, the increasing role of NGOs, changing power dynamics between state, NGOs, and multinational corporations, and the reconfiguration of network density and diversity.

The paper suggests that attention to the communicative processes associated with the development of the international human rights regime provides important insights for the future development of a global CSR regime.

Through the introduction of the three generations of human rights discourse, communicative actions and pathways from which a global corporate social responsibility regime may emerge were articulated.

To react quickly and to be flexible to respond to environmental uncertainty, working in teams is preferable. However, leadership must be decentralised for effective team performance. This paper aims to examine the impact of shared leadership on team performance through team reflexivity with task complexity.

To test the hypothesised relationships, a quantitative research design with purposive sampling technique was used. Data were gathered from employees working in teams. A total of 351 valid responses were analysed via SPSS PROCESS macro.

The findings signify that shared leadership positively impacts team reflexivity, which, in turn, has a significant impact on team performance. Results also revealed that team reflexivity strongly affects team performance in the presence of shared leadership and complex tasks.

Research related to effective team performance is scarce. Similarly, a review of a recently published article revealed that team reflexivity could work as a mediating mechanism in the relationship between shared leadership and effective team performance. Moreover, the concept of task complexity in the existing literature is scattered and needs to be integrated.