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We consider what happened in the initial reconstruction interventions following the 6 April 2009 earthquake in L'Aquila (Italy). Using the disaster risk reduction and resilience paradigm, we discuss the cognitive and interactional failures of top-down approaches, and we analyse the main constraints to enacting inclusive social learning and socially-sustainable transformation and building back better more resilient communities in post-disaster reconstruction.

Our evidence comes from participant observation, action anthropology and analytic auto-ethnography conducted during the reconstruction phase following the L'Aquila earthquake. Findings were triangulated with document analysis, media analysis and retrospective interviewing conducted in 2013 and 2017.

The shift from civil defence to civil protection did not bring any advance in disaster management and development practice in terms of DRR and resilience. The militaristic command-and-control approach, which is still in vogue among civil protection systems, means that local political leaders become the civil protection authorities in a disaster area. As in the L'Aquila case, this exacerbates local social and environmental risks and impacts, inhibits local communities from learning and restricts them from participating in post-disaster interventions.

Most previous commentary on disaster recovery and reconstruction following the L'Aquila earthquake has focussed on the top-down approach carried out by the national government and the Italian Department of Civil Protection (DCP). This paper is unique in that it sheds light on how the command-and-control approach was also implemented by local authority figures and on how this undermined building back better more resilient communities.

The purpose of this paper is to critically analyse the role of housing reconstruction projects in post conflict and post tsunami Sri Lanka, and to discuss their implications on conflict prevention.

Using four housing reconstruction projects in Batticaloa, Kilinochchi and Jaffna Districts, Sri Lanka, as case studies, and a novel methodological framework, the study explores the causal relations among the independent variables associated with housing reconstruction and dependent variables related to conflict prevention. The data, gathered from interviews and project reports, were analysed using propositions from a literature review, adopting a thematic analytical approach.

This study finds that reconstruction has created new forms of conflicts and tensions for the people who came to live in the newly constructed houses. The hostile relations that existed among different ethnic groups during the conflict were continued, and to some extent, exacerbated by the reconstruction undertaken after the war.

The study identifies causal relations among the independent variables associated with housing reconstruction and dependent variables related to conflict prevention, which can be used to inform physical reconstruction programmes after conflict.

The research presents a novel methodological framework. The results reveal concerns in housing and infrastructure development that have implications for future research and practice in post conflict environments.

The purpose of this paper is to reduce the artifacts in fast Bayesian reconstruction images in electrical tomography. This is in particular important with respect to object detection in electrical tomography applications.

The authors suggest to apply the Box-Cox transformation in Bayesian linear minimum mean square error (BMMSE) reconstruction to better accommodate the non-linear relation between the capacitance matrix and the permittivity distribution. The authors compare the results of the original algorithm with the modified algorithm and with the ground truth in both, simulation and experiments.

The results show a reduction of 50 percent of the mean square error caused by artifacts in low permittivity regions. Furthermore, the algorithm does not increase the computational complexity significantly such that the hard real time constraints can still be met. The authors demonstrate that the algorithm also works with limited observations angles. This allows for object detection in real time, e.g., in robot collision avoidance.

This paper shows that the extension of BMMSE by applying the Box-Cox transformation leads to a significant improvement of the quality of the reconstruction image while hard real time constraints are still met.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a dating system for the Italian residential real estate market from 1927 to 2019 and investigate its interaction with credit and business cycles.

To detect the local turning point of the Italian residential real estate market, the authors apply the honeycomb cycle developed by Janssen et al. (1994) based on the joint analysis of house prices and the number of transactions. To this end, the authors use a unique historical reconstruction of house price levels by Baffigi and Piselli (2019) in addition to data on transactions.

This study confirms the validity of the honeycomb model for the last four decades of the Italian housing market. In addition, the results show that the severe downsizing of the housing market is largely associated with business and credit contraction, certainly contributing to exacerbating the severity of the recession. Finally, preliminary evidence suggests that whenever a price bubble occurs, it is coincident with the start of phase 2 of the honeycomb cycle.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first time that the honeycomb approach has been tested over such a long historical period and compared to the cyclic features of financial and real aggregates. In addition, even if the honeycomb cycle is not a model for detecting booms and busts in the housing market, the preliminary evidence might suggest a role for volume/transactions in detecting housing market bubbles.

Stakeholder theory understands business in terms of relationships among stakeholders whose interests are mainly joint but may be occasionally conflicting. In the latter case, managers may need to make trade-offs between these interests. The purpose of this paper is to explore the nature of managerial decision-making about these trade-offs.

This paper draws on the ordonomic approach which sees business life to be rife with social dilemmas and locates the role of stakeholders in harnessing or resolving these dilemmas through engagement in rule-finding and rule-setting processes.

The ordonomic approach suggests that stakeholder interests trade-offs ought to be neither ignored nor avoided, but rather embraced and welcomed as an opportunity for bringing to fruition the joint interest of stakeholders in playing a better game of business. Stakeholders are shown to bear responsibility for overcoming the perceived trade-offs through the institutional management of social dilemmas.

For many stakeholder theorists, the nature of managerial decision-making about trade-offs between conflicting stakeholder interests and the nature of trade-offs themselves have been a long-standing point of contention. The paper shows that trade-offs may be useful for the value creation process and explicitly discusses managerial strategies for dealing with them.

This study examines fisheries affected by the Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami in 2011 to explore how the collectivism appears during the recovery process.

The author questions the context of collaboration after the disaster among independent small-scale fishers in Miyagi by conducting semistructured interviews with more than 50 local fishers with anthropological observations of boat fishing operations and using local documents and statistics.

The corresponding collaboration among the fishers after the disaster is not a mere “disaster utopia,” but is embedded in the socioecological context of fishing. Fishers have developed individual and group fishing. They have institutionalized competitive distribution for sedentary fish with low resource fluctuation, while outcome-equal distribution is adopted for migratory fish with high resource fluctuation. This forms a fishing continuum that connects competitive individualism with collectivism in the community, which has contributed to resilience for disaster recovery.

The balance between individualism and collectivism is decisively coordinated in socioecological contexts. The multifaceted resource strategy for maritime biodiversity that features family-based occupational differentiation in a community is crucial for disaster recovery of small-scale fishers.

As Finland became an associate member of the European Free Trade Association in early 1960s, the domestic brewing industry faced a new threat posed by imported beer. It was neutralized effectively with joint and individual efforts of the breweries. This paper aims to analyze the maneuvers taken by Tornion Olut Oy to brand its new product, Lapin Kulta, which ultimately became the most popular beer in Finland. In addition, the contemporary changes in the Finnish society with related social tensions are shown to have contributed to its success significantly.

Archival research focusing on primary sources complemented with biographies, historical newspaper and magazine articles as well contemporary research papers with an aim to reconstruct and better understand the historical and social context of the events.

The success of the Lapin Kulta beer in 1960s was not only based on the effective marketing, although a well-thought name, the successful participation in international beer “competitions” enhancing the brand and both improved distribution and logistics certainly contributed to it. Instead the success is shown to have depended also on seemingly odd collection of external factors. However, when put together, the success is shown to have been based on brand's capability to address the social tensions present in Finland during 1960s.

The importance of the context reconstruction in historical marketing research is underlined as developments traditionally attributed solely to product qualities and marketing may equally stem from a multitude of external factors. As a case study, the research represents a fresh take on the subject through a variety of previously neglected sources.

This paper aims to examine the role of “restructuring” in confronting the challenges facing contemporary high streets in the devolved UK. It complements three articles concerned with repositioning, reinventing and rebranding and illustrates the multi-faceted approaches involved in addressing retail change and town centre transformations. This paper emphasises the role of planning and governance in effecting change.

Informed by a literature review, action research involved inter-related interventions in selected locations, and associated workshops with engaged practitioners and community actors.

The findings highlight that the “resilience” of contemporary town centres demands resisting efforts to return to the status quo and necessitate forms of adaptive management. Understanding high street degeneration and the limitations of a retail-only led policy focus as a “wicked issue” further demands socially constructing town centres as an ecosystem requiring a holistic response. New forms of joint-working involve selecting appropriate models, attending to relational aspects and defined roles and responsibilities. Land use planning, including masterplanning and creating evidenced policy options, provides an important democratic space for legitimising action, offering leadership and extending participation to new change agents.

Restructuring of governance is an essential prerequisite in effecting change.

The originality of this study lies in the application of the restructuring element of the 4 Rs Framework which enables a focus on the governance dimensions of town centre and high street regeneration. The findings are enhanced through the experiential evidence which stresses both the importance of place-based diversification and value of prioritising holistic and joint actions developed through participatory visioning exercises.

The purpose of this paper is to present a theoretical framework for capacity building in post disaster construction and demolition (C & D) waste management at a national level to address the identified capacity gaps in managing disaster waste resulting from natural hazards.

Data were gathered through pilot interviews, case studies and expert opinion surveys representing government, non-government and other sector organisations involved in post disaster waste management.

The study revealed unavailability of a single point of responsibility and provision for disaster waste in existing policies and capacity constraints in prevailing peace time solid waste management practices which were identified as major capacity gaps. Establishment of a regulatory body and enforceable rules and regulations with necessary levels of capacities was identified and presented in a theoretical framework comprising of seven identified areas for capacity building in post disaster waste management.

This study is limited to disaster C & D waste as debris generated from totally or partially damaged buildings and infrastructure as a direct impact of natural hazards or from demolished buildings and infrastructure at rehabilitation or early recovery stages. Waste generated during reconstruction phase of post disaster management cycle is not considered as disaster C & D waste for purposes of this study.

The research enabled analysis of existing capacities and presents approaches for capacity building for identified gaps in post disaster C & D waste management to attain sustainable post disaster waste management for future resilience.

Despite many efforts within organizations toward business process orientation (BPO), research on real-world experiences remains in its infancy. The purpose of this paper is to redress the existing knowledge gap by analyzing a Swedish public housing company that has made notable effects regarding BPO and to explore lessons learned from the BPO journey (from 1998 to 2013).

The point of departure is principles in the BPO foundation, principles of successful BPM and effects in empirically based literature. The reconstruction of the narrative case study describes milestones and critical junctions, as well as effects based on quantitative and qualitative data.

Effects in BPO are demonstrated in terms of higher customer satisfaction, increased innovative ability, improved operational performance, higher employee satisfaction and, as a result of these, increased profitability. Theoretical constructs with implications for the theory building on BPO are suggested in a three-layer management framework – with capabilities and abilities emerging from the case study used as an illustrative example.

Lessons are learned regarding critical practices related to advancement in BPO. A strategy-building process based on eight design propositions is suggested to define the pre-conditions for BPO in an organization.

This is the first longitudinal case study to provide a comprehensive view and detailed insights of a BPO journey and top management performance toward a business process-oriented organization. Practitioners and BPM community get valuable insights into how the temporality and the context shape the BPO maturity process in terms of new organizational structure and roles during the journey.