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Previous studies have postulated that an advance payment system (APS) positively impacts the contractor's working capital and is paramount to ensuring an efficient and effective project cash flow process. However, scant research has been undertaken to empirically establish the cash flow performance and domino effect of APS on project and organisational performance.

The epistemological design adopted a positivist philosophical stance augmented by deductive reasoning to explore the phenomena under investigation. Primary quantitative data were collected from 504 Construction Industry Development Board (CIDB) registered contractors (within the grade bandings 1–9) in South Africa. A five-point Likert scale was utilised, and subsequent data accrued were analysed using structural equation modelling (SEM).

Emergent findings reveal that the mandatory use of an APS does not guarantee a positive project cash flow, an improvement in organisational performance or an improvement in project performance.

The ensuing discussion reveals the contributory influence of APS on positive cash flow and organisational performance, although APS implementation alone will not achieve these objectives. Practically, the research accentuates the need for various measures to be concurrently adopted (including APS) towards ensuring a positive project cash flow and improved organisational and project performance.

There is limited empirical research on cash flow performance and the domino effect of APS on project and organisational performance in South Africa, nor indeed, the wider geographical location of Africa as a continent. This study addresses this gap in the prevailing body of knowledge.

In the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s 2023 decision to effectively end race-conscious admissions practices across the nation, this paper highlights the law’s commitment to whiteness and antiblackness, invites us to mourn and to connect to possibility.

Drawing from the theoretical contributions of Cheryl Harris, Jarvis Givens and Chezare Warren, as well as the wisdom of Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s dissenting opinion, this paper utilizes CRT composite counterstory methodology to illuminate the antiblack reality of facially “race-neutral” admissions.

By manifesting the impossible situation that SFFA and the Supreme Court’s majority seek to normalize, the composite counterstory illuminates how Justice Jackson’s hypothetical enacts a fugitive pedagogy within a dominant legal system committed to whiteness as property; invites us to mourn, to connect to possibility and to remain committed to freedom as an intergenerational project that is inherently humanizing.

In a sobering moment where we face the end of race-conscious admissions, this paper uniquely grapples with the contradictions of affirmative action as minimally effective while also radically disruptive.

Drawing on a framework of conservation of resources theory, the purpose of this paper is to explore the relationship between self-perceived academic performance and individual entrepreneurial intention and consider the potential moderating role of (1) participation in serious leisure, (2) perceived stress and/or (3) gender.

A total of 405 UK-based undergraduates completed the questionnaire, with a representative gender split of 57% women and 43% men.

The positive relationship between self-perceived academic performance and individual entrepreneurial intention was moderated by serious leisure (stronger when participation in serious leisure increased) and by perceived stress (stronger when levels of perceived stress were lower). However, contrary to our expectations, gender had no statistically significant moderating role.

The practical contribution comes from informing policy for universities and national governments to increase individual entrepreneurial intention in undergraduates.

The theoretical contribution comes from advancing conservation of resources theory, specifically the interaction of personal resources, resource caravans and resource passageways.

The purpose of this research is to increase academic understanding of the relationship between systems' political identity and their viability, and to contribute to anarchist-cybernetics by examining the idea of organization proposed by Malatesta using Viable Systems. The research also develops the understanding of the relationship between Viable Systems and the environment.

The author developed a content analysis method that uses dynamic analysis, identifying how some variables affect others, and data is analysed using the Viable Systems Model. The author used Dynamic Causal Diagrams and the Viable System Model to draw conclusions and build theory. The author examined 137 documents produced by Errico Malatesta, studying in detail 39 documents containing the researched concepts.

The article identifies the literature, proposes an organizational theory for society and for cooperatives, strongly grounded in both, self-management and control. It presents a theory of self-management as a balancing effort to the control exercised by the external economic, political and societal forces of the environment. The literature also shows a form of organization that can be interpreted using the VSM framework. The ideas about self-management found in the literature, extend to economics, social theory, ethics, organizations, management and even operations management. The article finishes proposing a set of committees linked to the VSM structure, and successfully bridges anarchism and organizational cybernetics.

The article presents a novel method of systems analysis for the study of literature. It discovers the theory proposed by Malatesta not identified previously. Using the VSM framework, the ideas presented by the author, are translated into the organizational identity, and the operation of cooperatives. It makes an important contribution to anarchist-cybernetics.

Carpal tunnel syndrome (CTS) is a hand disease caused by the pressing of the median nerve present in the palmar side of the wrist. It causes severe pain in the wrist, triggering disturbance during sleep. Different products like splints, braces and gloves are available in the market to alleviate this disease but there was still a need to improve the wearability, comfort and cost of the product. This study was about designing a comfortable and cost-effective wearable system for mild-to-moderate CTS. Transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation (TENS) therapy has been used to reduce the pain in the wrist.

After simulation by using Proteus software (which allowed the researchers to draw and simulate electrical circuits using ISIS, ARES and PCB design tools virtually), the circuit with optimum frequency, i.e. 33 Hz was selected, and the circuit was developed on a printed circuit board (PCB). The developed circuit was integrated successfully into the half glove structure.

The developed product had good thermophysiological comfort and hand properties as compared to the commercially available product of the same kind. In vivo testing (It involves the testing with living subjects like animals, plants or human beings) was performed which resulted in 85% confirmed viability of the product against CTS. A glove with an integrated circuit was developed successfully to accommodate various sizes without any sex specifications in a cost-effective way to mitigate the issue of CTS.

Industrial workers, individuals frequently using their hands or those diagnosed with CTS may wish to use this product as therapy. The attention could not be paid to the aesthetic or visual appeal of the developed product.

A very comfortable glove with integrated TENS electrodes was developed successfully to accommodate various sizes without any sex specifications in a cost-effective way to mitigate the issues of CTS.

First-generation college students in the United States are a unique demographic that is often characterized by the institutions that serve them with a risk-laden and deficit-based model. However, our analysis of the transcripts of open-ended, semi-structured interviews with 22 “first-gen” respondents suggests they are actively deft, agentic, self-determining parties to processes of identity construction that are both externally imposed and potentially stigmatizing, as well as exemplars of survivance and determination. We deploy a grounded theory approach to an open-coding process, modeled after the extended case method, while viewing our data through a novel synthesis of the dual theoretical lenses of structural and radical/structural symbolic interactionism and intersectional/standpoint feminist traditions, in order to reveal the complex, unfolding, active strategies students used to make sense of their obstacles, successes, co-created identities, and distinctive institutional encounters. We find that contrary to the dictates of prevailing paradigms, identity-building among first-gens is an incremental and bidirectional process through which students actively perceive and engage existing power structures to persist and even thrive amid incredibly trying, challenging, distressing, and even traumatic circumstances. Our findings suggest that successful institutional interventional strategies designed to serve this functionally unique student population (and particularly those tailored to the COVID-moment) would do well to listen deeply to their voices, consider the secondary consequences of “protectionary” policies as potentially more harmful than helpful, and fundamentally, to reexamine the presumption that such students present just institutional risk and vulnerability, but also present a valuable addition to university environments, due to the unique perspective and broader scale of vision their experiences afford them.

Construction industry (CI) has great prominence for the world economy, and it is expected that, with the use of the innovative technologies and approaches of Industry 4.0 (I4.0), the new industrial paradigm, construction can reach higher levels of productivity. This study aims to develop a model (readiness model) to assess the level of use of I4.0 technologies by the construction sector in Brazil and its most relevant applications.

The methodology used was bibliographic research, design-science research and a survey to validate the model, carried out with 162 companies, considered among the main ones in the sector in Brazil. The literature review revealed 13 technologies of I4.0 applied to construction; hence, the views of industry experts were based on these technologies.

The Digital Advancement Within CoNstruction (DAWN) readiness model was proposed, showing that among the 13 evaluated technologies of I4.0 and their applications, the Brazilian construction companies had a low level of utilization; both high and middle-income companies presented this low level of use; some technologies with a greater number of scientific publications were less used in practice in the Brazilian construction.

The originality and theoretical contribution are to present a readiness model to assess the level of use of I4.0 technologies and their most relevant applications in the CI in countries with an economy similar to Brazil’s, making it possible to measure the level of adoption of these technologies.

This study explores the relationship between economic freedom and gender ideologies on the allocation of women’s opportunity-to-necessity entrepreneurship across countries. Opportunity entrepreneurship is typically understood as one’s best option for work, whereas necessity entrepreneurship describes the choice as driven by no better option for work. Specifically, we examine how economic freedom (i.e. each country’s policies that facilitate voluntary exchange) and gender ideologies (i.e. each country’s propensity for gendered separate spheres) affect the distribution of women’s opportunity-to-necessity entrepreneurship across countries.

We construct our sample by matching data from the following country-level sources: the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor’s Adult Population Survey (APS), the Fraser Institute’s Economic Freedom Index (EFI), the European/World Value Survey’s Integrated Values Survey (IVS) gender equality index, and other covariates from the IVS, Varieties of Democracy (V-dem) World Bank (WB) databases. Our final sample consists of 729 observations from 109 countries between 2006 and 2018. Entrepreneurial activity motivations are measured by the ratio of the percentage of women’s opportunity-driven total nascent and early-stage entrepreneurship to the percentage of female necessity-driven total nascent and early-stage entrepreneurship at the country level. Due to a first-order autoregressive process and heteroskedastic cross-sectional dependence in our panel, we estimate a fixed-effect regression with robust standard errors clustered by country.

After controlling for multiple macro-level factors, we find two interesting findings. First, economic freedom positively affects the ratio of women’s opportunity-to-necessity entrepreneurship. We find that the size of government, sound money, and business and credit regulations play the most important role in shaping the distribution of contextual motivations over time and between countries. However, this effect appears to benefit efficiency and innovation economies more than factor economies in our sub-sample analysis. Second, gender ideologies of political equality positively affect the ratio of women’s opportunity-to-necessity entrepreneurship, and this effect is most pronounced for efficiency economies.

This study offers one critical contribution to the entrepreneurship literature by demonstrating how economic freedom and gender ideologies shape the distribution of contextual motivation for women’s entrepreneurship cross-culturally. We answer calls to better understand the variation within women’s entrepreneurship instead of comparing women’s and men’s entrepreneurial activity. As a result, our study sheds light on how structural aspects of societies shape the allocation of women’s entrepreneurial motivations through their institutional arrangements.

Output from the Irish Dairy Industry has grown rapidly since the abolition of quotas in 2015, with processors investing heavily in capacity expansion to deal with the extra milk volumes. Further capacity gains may be achieved by extending the processing season into the winter, a key enabler for which being the reduction of duration of the winter maintenance overhaul period. This paper aims to investigate if Lean Six Sigma tools and techniques can be used to enhance operational maintenance performance, thereby releasing additional processing capacity.

Combining the Six-Sigma Define, Measure, Analyse, Improve, Control (DMAIC) methodology and the structured approach of Turnaround Maintenance (TAM) widely used in process industries creates a novel hybrid model that promises substantial improvement in maintenance overhaul execution. This paper presents a case study applying the DMAIC/TAM model to Ireland’s largest dairy processing site to optimise the annual maintenance shutdown. The objective was to deliver a 30% reduction in the duration of the overhaul, enabling an extension of the processing season.

Application of the DMAIC/TAM hybrid resulted in process enhancements, employee engagement and a clear roadmap for the operations team. Project goals were delivered, and original objectives exceeded, resulting in €8.9m additional value to the business and a reduction of 36% in the duration of the overhaul.

The results demonstrate that the model provides a structure that promotes systematic working and a continuous improvement focus that can have substantial benefits for wider industry. Opportunities for further model refinement were identified and will enhance performance in subsequent overhauls.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first time that the structure and tools of DMAIC and TAM have been combined into a hybrid methodology and applied in an Irish industrial setting.

To elaborate the nature of fact-checking in the domain of political information by examining how fact-checkers assess the validity of claims concerning the Russo-Ukrainian conflict and how they support their assessments by drawing on evidence acquired from diverse sources of information.

Descriptive quantitative and qualitative content analysis of 128 reports written by the fact-checkers of Snopes – an established fact-checking organisation – during the period of 24 February 2022 – 28 June, 2023. For the analysis, nine evaluation grounds were identified, most of them inductively from the empirical material. It was examined how the fact-checkers employed such grounds while assessing the validity of claims and how the assessments were bolstered by evidence acquired from information sources such as newspapers.

Of the 128 reports, the share of assessments indicative of the invalidity of the claims was 54.7%, while the share of positive ratings was 26.7%. The share of mixed assessments was 15.6%. In the fact-checking, two evaluation grounds, that is, the correctness of information and verifiability of an event presented in a claim formed the basis for the assessment. Depending on the topic of the claim, grounds such as temporal and spatial compatibility, as well as comparison by similarity and difference occupied a central role. Most popular sources of information offering evidence for the assessments include statements of government representatives, videos and photographs shared in social media, newspapers and television programmes.

As the study concentrated on fact-checking dealing with political information about a specific issue, the findings cannot be extended to concern the fact-checking practices in other contexts.

The study is among the first to characterise how fact-checkers employ evaluation grounds of diverse kind while assessing the validity of political information.