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In recent times, reverse logistics (RL) is gaining significant traction in various automobile industries to recapture returned vehicles’ value. A good RL program can lower manufacturing costs, establish a green supply chain, enhance customer satisfaction and provide a competitive advantage. However, reducing disruptions and increasing operational efficiency in the automobile RL requires implementing innovative technology to improve information flow and security. Thus, this manuscript aims to examine the hurdles in automobile RL activities and how they can be effectively tackled by blockchain technology (BCT). Merging BCT and RL provides the entire automobile industry a chance to generate value for its consumers through effective vehicle return policies, manufacturing cost reduction, maintenance records tracking, administration of vehicle information and a clear payment record of insurance contracts.

This research is presented in three stages to accomplish the task. First, previous literature and experts' opinions are examined to highlight certain factors that are an aggravation to BCT implementation. Next, this study proposed an interval-valued intuitionistic fuzzy set (IVIFS) – decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory (DEMATEL) with Choquet integral framework for computing and analyzing the comparative results of factor interrelationships. Finally, the causal outline diagrams are plotted to determine the influence of factors on one another for BCT implementation in automobile RL.

This study has categorized the barriers to BCT implementation into five major factors – operational and strategical, technical, knowledge and behavioral, financial and infrastructural, and government rules and regulations. The results revealed that disreputable technology, low-bearing capacity of IT systems and operational inefficiency are the most significant factors to be dealt with by automobile industry professionals for finer and enhanced RL processes utilizing BCT. The most noticeable advantage of BCT is its enormous amount of data, permitting automobile RL to develop client experience through real-time data insights.

This study reveals several factors that are hindering the implementation of BCT in RL activities of the automobile industry. The results can assist experts and policymakers improve their existing decision-making systems while making an effort to implement BCT into the automobile industry's RL activities.

Although there are several studies on the benefits of BCT in RL and the adoption of BCT in the automobile industry, individually, none have explicated the use of BCT in automobile RL. This is also the first kind of study that has used IVIFS-DEMATEL with the Choquet integral framework for computing and analyzing the comparative results of factor interrelationships hindering BCT implementation in automobile RL activities.

Students in full-time higher education are increasingly combining work with study. This can present challenges and conflicting priorities which may result in stress and compromised academic performance. However, working can also afford students a better quality of life and enhanced employability. The growth of student employment creates implications for universities and employers. In this chapter, we report the results of our research which explored experiences of students at a business school in a large UK university who were working while studying. We examine the experiences and perceived consequences of combining employment with full-time study and seek to understand why students work during their degree program, the challenges and benefits of balancing work and factors which may help and hinder their efforts. The chapter builds on the existing knowledge base about the effects working has on students’ academic performance and well-being, and considers how universities, employers and social circumstances may support students in managing their complex lives.

This is the first article to apply a machine learning approach to the analysis of time on market on real estate markets.

The random survival forest approach is introduced to the real estate market. The most important predictors of time on market are revealed and it is analyzed how the survival probability of residential rental apartments responds to these major characteristics.

Results show that price, living area, construction year, year of listing and the distances to the next hairdresser, bakery and city center have the greatest impact on the marketing time of residential apartments. The time on market for an apartment in Munich is lowest at a price of 750 € per month, an area of 60 m2, built in 1985 and is in a range of 200–400 meters from the important amenities.

The findings might be interesting for private and institutional investors to derive real estate investment decisions and implications for portfolio management strategies and ultimately to minimize cash-flow failure.

Although machine learning algorithms have been applied frequently on the real estate market for the analysis of prices, its application for examining time on market is completely novel. This is the first paper to apply a machine learning approach to survival analysis on the real estate market.

An attribute common throughout Lor’s distinguished career has been a passion for learning and continuous improvement in an approach that sets high standards, both for himself and others. Taking on the informal mantle of both mentor and mentee, these contributions have blended with no clear boundaries or timelines.

Lor has been active in the library and information sector (LIS) landscape since the 1960s. A stalwart of the library and information profession, the author is being honoured by International Federation of Library Associations and Institution (IFLA) with a prestigious festschrift in recognition of a librarian who has made a sustained contribution to the library and information profession over decades with significant impact on academia, scholarship, praxis, communities and individual librarians.

Lor is recognized as a lifelong mentee as evidenced by his unbounded forays into discovery driven by a natural curiosity that, in turn, shaped his approach to mentoring through teaching, instilling best practices in research methodology and significant contributions to international librarianship. Today this continues in a regular column for South African librarians, drawing from the international literature of books, libraries and information, his role as a key figure in the establishment of Library and Information Association of South Africa (LIASA) in the 1990s, as well as experience from close involvement in developing LIS policies for post-apartheid South Africa, drafting guidelines for national library legislation and serving as IFLA Secretary-General in The Hague.

This viewpoint has been an attempt to share reflections on one individual’s lifetime of influence without borders or timelines. Without doubt, Lor’s global mentorship reach remains unbounded in his approach to critical thinking and desire for continuous improvement for himself and others.

We study ceremonial adoption of voluntary standards, where participants adopt the standard in principle but do not change their practices. Ceremonial adoption can benefit individual participants, who may be able to reap the benefits of association with the standard at lower cost, but it can be problematic for overall levels of adoption. We conceive of ceremonial adoption as an interaction between strategic incentives of participants and social ties to their audiences, such that not all participants are likely to ceremonially adopt. Our setting is the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certification for sustainable construction. We study the conditions under which projects register for LEED certification, allowing them to claim affiliation with LEED, but then do not actually finish certification. While our data are correlational in nature, our results suggest that studying the competition for audience members (in our case, occupants) can provide greater understanding of certification behavior as well as overall levels of adoption. Our findings have implications for organizations that design and maintain voluntary standards and for organization theorists who wish to understand field-level change. Thus, we provide more evidence that strategy and organizational theory interact in important and often unexamined ways.

The purpose of this paper is to prevent the destruction of other parts of a wind energy conversion system because of faults, the diagnosis of insulated-gate bipolar transistor (IGBT) faults has become an essential topic of study. Demand for sustainable energy sources has been prompted by rising environmental pollution and energy requirements. Renewable energy has been identified as a viable substitute for conventional fossil fuel energy generation. Because of its rapid installation time and adaptable expenditure for construction scale, wind energy has emerged as a great energy resource. Power converter failure is particularly significant for the reliable operation of wind power conversion systems because it not only has a high yearly fault rate but also a prolonged downtime. The power converters will continue to operate even after the failure, especially the open-circuit fault, endangering their other parts and impairing their functionality.

The most widely used signal processing methods for locating open-switch faults in power devices are the short-time Fourier transform and wavelet transform (WT) – based on time–frequency analysis. To increase their effectiveness, these methods necessitate the intensive use of computational resources. This study suggests a fault detection technique using empirical mode decomposition (EMD) that examines the phase currents from a power inverter. Furthermore, the intrinsic mode function’s relative energy entropy (REE) and simple logical operations are used to locate IGBT open switch failures.

The presented scheme successfully locates and detects 21 various classes of IGBT faults that could arise in a two-level three-phase voltage source inverter (VSI). To verify the efficacy of the proposed fault diagnosis (FD) scheme, the test is performed under various operating conditions of the power converter and induction motor load. The proposed method outperforms existing FD schemes in the literature in terms of fault coverage and robustness.

This study introduces an EMD–IMF–REE-based FD method for VSIs in wind turbine systems, which enhances the effectiveness and robustness of the FD method.

With more cities aiming to achieve climate neutrality, identifying the funding to support these plans is essential. The purpose of this paper is to exploit the present of a structured green bonds framework in Sweden to investigate the typology of abatement projects Swedish municipalities invested in and understand their effectiveness.

Marginal abatement cost curves of the green bond measures are constructed by using the financial and abatement data provided by municipalities on an annual basis.

The results highlight the economic competitiveness of clean energy production, measured in abatement potential per unit of currency, even when compared to other emerging technologies that have attracted the interest of policymakers. A comparison with previous studies on the cost efficiency of carbon capture storage reveals that clean energy projects, especially wind energy production, can contribute to the reduction of emissions in a more efficient way. The Swedish carbon tax is a good incentive tool for investments in clean energy projects.

The improvement concerning previous applications is twofold: the authors expand the financial considerations to include the whole life-cycle costs, and the authors consider all the greenhouse gases. This research constitutes a prime in using financial and environmental data produced by local governments to assess the effectiveness of their environmental measures.

This study aims to focus on a specific project marketing concept, i.e. “discontinuity,” and analyzes how this concept emerged in project marketing, becoming its key scholarly embodiment, how it became decoupled from the increasingly service-intensive project business practice and what the relevance of discontinuity is for project marketers moving forward.

This study is built on a systematic literature review of 31 years (1993–2023) of publishing data from major marketing and management journals.

This study provides three findings. First, the author reveals the risks related to marketing scholars and practitioners losing sight of each other as business practices evolve much faster than scholarly research can keep up. Second, the author highlights the role of interdisciplinary collaboration in advancing conceptual innovations. Finally, the research elucidates the need for broader metatheoretical reflection to keep this research tradition on an upward trajectory.

The aim of this study is not to criticize project marketing, as many strands of business-to-business (B2B) marketing face the same challenge, but to elucidate a need for conceptual innovations, collaboration with practitioners and other disciplines and broader metatheoretical reflection to keep this research tradition on an upward trajectory.

This study makes several contributions to the project marketing research tradition. First, it reviews the emergence and dissipation of the concept of discontinuity, drawing on semantical, etymological and epistemological insights. It also reflects on recent disruptions in the marketplace and envisions future research trajectories for this elusive concept. In addition, the author develops a conceptual framework that combines project types with exchange elements in project and service businesses. This conceptual framework helps elucidate what part of the exchange is continuing and what is discontinuing in the resulting business relationships. Furthermore, the research contributes to B2B marketing more broadly by highlighting the fleeting correspondence between theory and the real world. It underscores the need for constant updates to maintain relevance.

Regarding how the public regulation of human services is perceived within welfare organizations and how the latter cope with it, the role of emotions (as mediators between structure and agency) proves highly relevant while often being hidden beneath the surface. This article shows how a specific approach to such regulation – here: managerialism – may impact on “emotional regimes” at the organizational and individual level, affecting the attainment of organizational goals and workers' health.

The article primarily draws on multiple qualitative case studies across two welfare sectors (four organizations) in Germany (continuing education/active inclusion; long-term care). The study research was conducted between 2020 and 2022 and based on 36 interviews with caseworkers and managers, focus group interviews and expert dialogues at industry level.

The results suggest that the managerialist regulation of welfare services breeds complex and ambiguous emotional regimes. Business-like management techniques elicit various emotions, affecting the motivational basis of human service work. While the experience of hard challenges may raise positive feelings, coping patterns often put strain on organizations and staff alike. In the short run, related emotional regimes tend to make service delivery proceed smoothly, yet in the long run they may have corrosive effects and problematic repercussions on macro-level developments.

The study highlights the role of emotions in publicly regulated human service settings by intermingling macro- and micro-level processes and thereby broadens the perspective of welfare state research as it reveals the impact of (managerialist) regulation on the dynamic organizational chemistry of such settings.

This paper aims to inform the discussion on why and how non-profit organizations can experience a hybridization process to address the criticism that would assume hybridity as an intrinsic characteristic of all organizations. Specifically, by referring to the academies of intellectuals as the non-profit setting in which investigating the emergence of hybridity takes place, this paper aims at exploring, first, to what extent this emergence could be induced by institutional conditions, and, second, which structural innovations could sustain the academies’ “motion” towards hybridity.

This paper relies on the institutional logics perspective and adopts the case study method applied to a historical context. The case under analysis is the Academy of “the Immobili”, which, in spite of its name, experienced a hybridization process in 1720 because of the decision to involve an impresario in the management of its theatre.

The findings highlight the significant role played by institutional conditions in inducing the emergence of hybridity, even in presence of internal resistance to any “motion” from the non-profit setting. Moreover, the analysis of the innovations associated with this emergence detects the intertwined action of the different decision makers involved in the hybridization process, in spite of their formal separation. These findings strengthen the conceptualization of hybridity within non-profit organizations.

Besides referring to a historical period that is still little explored in terms of hybridity within organizations, the paper focuses on an original context, i.e. academies, representing an ancient typology of cultural organizations. Therefore, the paper also provides the first insights into the hybridization process of cultural organizations from a historical perspective.