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This paper aims to present an objective overview of the factual discourse around the wasting nature of real estate for an appreciation of the resultant exacting management responsibility. The durability feature of real estate has had consequential implications on the appreciation of the asset class.

The paper uses literature survey and key informant interview to identify the peculiar features of real estate to understand the exacting responsibility of its ownership and management.

The study reveals that real estate is a specialised investment asset that requires extra management care, costs and specialised expertise to retain its investment value. Thus, the asset is not inherently perpetual but wasting and requires conscious physical and functional management, which are dependent on sound financial management.

Real estate investment decisions must be made with the exacting management responsibility in mind. Both individual and corporate investors must use a sinking fund policy to meet the financial liability involved in managing both income and non-income properties. The Government of Ghana must create a National Infrastructure Maintenance Fund and adopt a National Infrastructure Management Strategy for managing the existing stock of public real estate.

It is the first literature appraisal and facts collation on the wasting nature of real estate and its attendant exacting management responsibility with a call for paradigm shift in our understanding of this investment asset.

This paper seeks to report original research examining how effectively board members of occupational pension trusts administer pension plan assets on behalf of their respective members. The concept of the concerned lay board member (the “prudent person”) is increasingly under attack from the media, government and professional bodies. The proposition is that lay members should be replaced by professionals. Aims to explore the prudence vs professionalism theme through an examination of trustee profile, trustee financial competence and trustee performance effectiveness.

The study adopts demographic theory from the perspective that group demographics are a critical focus of analysis due to their potent impact on organisational outcomes. A qualitative approach was initially pursued in order to capture trustee views which formed the platform for the second quantitative phase of the study.

The study concludes that lay trustees display comparable capacity to professional trustees and emerge as equally able to positively respond to the future challenges facing pension boards.

The study highlights that HR practitioners can make a significant impact on the selection and development of pension board trustees.

Rather than continuing with the unhelpful, historically based distinction between lay and professional pension board trustees, this original study identifies the growing complexities of managing pension trusts, whilst emphasising the capabilities required to pursue innovative investment practice in the future. This paper is likely to be of value to researchers in the areas of board and pension trust performance, fund trustees, actuaries, trust fund managers, employee benefits consultancies, the Treasury and HR professionals.

This paper illustrates how two contemporary economic traditions - New Institutional and Austrian economics - may be used to add insight into the organization and governance of public sector investment programs. When combined, these frameworks offer a theoretical foundation that may be used for purposes of assessing relative levels of agency and transactions costs within different institutional settings. The insights provided suggest that one option for reducing these costs is to “outsource” the public sector investment function. The theories explored in the paper are not panacea for dealing with agency and transaction costs, but they do draw attention to key institutional characteristics that influence their size.

A number of large banks were nationalised in India in 1969 with a view to making banking services available all over India in unbanked and under‐banked areas, and to protecting the rural population and poor people from the clutches of money lenders by making credit available at subsidised rates. Indian banks have achieved this to a considerable extent but they must expand their services in the marketing and technical advice fields in order to gain the people's confidence in their financial skills.

The social organization of work has become more entrepreneurial and less bureaucratic over the past 20 years. How is this development consistent with managerial control over the labor process? This paper develops a professional autonomy perspective to explain the acceptance of new management ideas in the United States, including the recent turn away from bureaucratic organizational forms. The focus on professional autonomy helps to create a theoretical link between past and current managerial practices, including the latest anti-bureaucratic phase that we label neoentrepreneurialism. We conclude by exploring future research implications of studying managerial practice from a professional autonomy perspective.

Schedule 2 of the Financial Services Act 1986 (FSA) was amended by s. 204(1) of the Companies Act 1989 to make it incumbent on self‐regulatory organisations (SROs) to have a satisfactory mechanism to take account of cost factors in compliance. Critically, however, published regulatory guidelines for the assessment of cost of compliance fail to address a key and fundamental quantitative aspect of the entire industry equation — that of people and the impact of a compliance based control administration upon their individual professional motivation. This paper attempts to evaluate critically such a compliance administrative control system on the employees of an FSA authorised financial institution.

Triggered by public concerns over office workplace safety during the COVID-19 pandemic, this study sheds light on the office workplace environment and aims to investigate how organisations respond to forces from the external environment (impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic) and how they modify their office workplace management strategically and operationally to suit the stakeholders’ needs and future development in the post COVID-19 period.

A desktop study was conducted to provide the framework for the in-depth interviews with five corporate real estate (CRE) managers and three workplace consultants. Thematic analysis including coding technique was adopted to analyse the qualitative data.

The findings show that during the COVID-19 pandemic, most of the intended and implemented office workplace modifications are mainly related to two types of risk control: administrative control and personal protection. At a strategic level, organisations react to the external forces by re-modelling their businesses and working towards re-orienting their CRE strategies, such as portfolio transformation, agile portfolio strategies and redesign of the office workplace, etc.

This is a topical and timely study that presents the general practice of office workplace modification during the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as the related CRE management (CREM) strategies developed for the new normal. The findings obtained through in-depth interviews have well supported the CREM strategic alignment theory. It is foreseen that office workplace management will encounter other challenges due to uncertainties of the COVID-19 pandemic. The findings of this study provide a practical lens to look at the future changes of office workplace environment.

Supply chain relationships have often been analysed from the macro-perspective of the companies involved, but there is less evidence of how relationships relate to the micro-perspective of persons involved. The purpose of this paper is to investigate, in IT outsourcing (ITO), how the buyer–supplier relationship type strengthens buyer performance from the perspective of consultants.

IT consultants were surveyed, and analysis was performed considering the aggregated values of variables that characterise buyer–supplier relationships adjusted to ITO.

The results show that strategic relationships are associated with higher supplier investment in relational management than in transactional ones. Similarly, in this type of relationship, higher levels of trust are linked to the recognition of more activities shared between parties involved than in transactional relationships. The improvement of supplier development by buyers was also found to improve buyers’ performance.

The model proposed here was developed for nonspecific industries but tested in the context of ITO. Further research should be undertaken to broaden generalisability.

The paper provides an understanding of the influence of the buyer–supplier relationship type on buyer performance based both on relational management and, more specifically, how the formal dimension of supplier development can also contribute to performance. ITO is increasing worldwide, and relational management affects outsourcing outcomes in broad supply chain integration. This analysis is usually visited from buyer and supplier perspectives using decision makers. This paper assesses it from the perspective of consultants.

The purpose of the paper is to analyse how the intensive use of non-financial performance measures and the lack of an economic reality among Danish farmers have contributed to a low economic performance despite high productivity. The research ambition of the paper is to contribute to a better understanding of the managerial decision-making made by family business managers, in this case farmers, and how these decisions may impact financial performance.

The study is based on a case study including farmers, agricultural consultants and bankers. The analysis uses pragmatic constructivism to analyse the economic reality of the farmers included and the business topos among Danish farmers.

The main finding of the paper is that the dominating non-financial performance management techniques and a historically based strong emotional emphasis on size and production volume as the main success criteria for being a good farmer have led to a neglect of economic rationality. In addition, this practice has made the farmers blind to alternative possibilities for taking advantage of the resources available. The result has been an un-economic utopian reality.

The paper shows how the use of non-financial performance measures can lead to prolonging of a certain reality perception that may not be economically sustainable. Small family businesses such as family farms are likely to be more exposed to such risk because such businesses are run by a set of values that include more objectives that are more dominating than the profit objective. The paper concludes that family business managers must be open towards inputs from the society around the business, because family businesses may have a tendency to create their own reality that at some point may come in conflict with society of which the family business has to co-exist within.