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To improve the quality of life, human-oriented smart city planning and management based on time-space behavior was studied. First, the basic theory of time-space behavior and smart city was introduced. The relationship between public participation and smart city construction planning was analyzed, and the positive and negative significance of public participation in smart city construction planning was expounded. Then, the mechanism for public participation in smart city construction planning was proposed. Finally, public participation in smart city construction planning was analyzed from the perspectives of power balance, interest coordination and safeguard measures. The results showed that public participation in smart city construction planning was an important manifestation of the realization of public democratic rights. The scientific nature and feasibility of smart city construction planning was enhanced. The smooth implementation of smart city construction planning was an important foundation for promoting smart city construction. Therefore, public participation is an important way to safeguard social public interests and build a harmonious society.

The utility of career planning for managers is evaluated. The current activities and beliefs of practising managers are drawn on. The results of a study of 50 women and men managers support other empirical findings and point to the absence of career planning and future plans in managers′ lives. This is contrary to the advice given to women managers, in particular, which advocates the importance of career planning in career advancement. Implications drawn for management development suggest that career planning is not useful as a broad strategy for advancement, is a misnomer, and may lead managers into following plans rather than developing the flexibility to take opportunities.

Futures research is commonly reported on the macro scale, and involves analysis of a global or national situation with a long‐range view of trends and alternative futures. This article approaches ageing and the future from the micro scale, examining the future one life at a time; suggesting that futures methodology can, and should, be effectively applied to individual lives. Three propositions relating to development of personal futures are introduced, focusing on life stages, personal trends and life events after age 60. These three elements of life are then shown as a framework on which individuals can build personal scenarios and create personal strategic plans for the stages of life after age 60.

The purpose of this paper is to propose the idea of linking the use of the Monte Carlo simulation with scenario planning to assist strategy makers in formulating strategy in the face of uncertainty relating to service quality gaps for life insurance business, where discontinuities always remain for need‐based selling.

The paper reviews briefly some applications of scenario planning. Scenario planning emphasizes the development of a strategic plan that is robust across different scenarios. The paper provides considerable evidence to suggest a new strategic approach using Monte Carlo simulation for making scenario planning.

The paper highlights which particular service quality gap attribute as risk impacts most and least for the possibility of occurrences as best case, worst case, and most likely case.

This study suffers from methodological limitations associated with convenience sampling and anonymous survey‐based research.

The approach using Monte Carlo simulation increases the credibility of the scenario to an acceptable level, so that it will be used by managers and other decision makers.

The paper provides a thorough documentation on scenario planning upon studying the impact of risk and uncertainty in service quality gap for making rational decisions in management of services such that managers make better justification and communication for their arguments.

The paper offers empirical understanding of the application of Monte Carlo simulation to scenario planning and identifies key drivers which impact most and least on service quality gap.

The retail sector is not largely studied in Italy. The study offers a comparison between youth retail shift work in Milan and London. The aim of this paper is to contribute to the debate on the one hand on youth work and on the other hand to the debate on agency and structural factors in life planning, representation of the future and the transition to adulthood, observed in the United Kingdom's and Italian labour market. Even if the second one is a Southern European Country, these contexts are both characterised by a service-oriented economy and the widespread of precarious and flexible jobs.

Qualitative methods were used: one year of ethnographic observation, 50 interviews and two focus groups were carried out between 2015 and 2018 with retail workers and trade unionists. The contexts are Corso Buenos Aires in Milan, Italy, and Oxford Street in London, United Kingdom. Analysing young workers' discourses, the author identifies narratives that allow to grasp their present agency and imagined future.

Observing the crisis of the narrative (Sennett, 2020) allows to highlight the social consequences of working times on young workers' everyday life and future. The author argues that young workers struggle with the narrative of their present everyday life and the representation of the future. This relates to the condition of time alienation due to the flexible schedules and the fast pace of work in retail, both affecting the work-life balance.

The social consequences of flexible schedules in retail and fast fashion sector, which are new issues not yet sufficiently explored, are here investigated from the perspective of young workers. The study is focussed on the representations of young people working with customers in social and economic contexts characterised by flexible schedules and the deregulation of shop openings, the so-called 24/7 service society, not largely investigated in the sociological scientific literature, above all in the Italian context.

If sustainable construction is to be secured as a response to sovereign governments’ acknowledgement of global warming, then there is an urgent need to focus on both the built environment’s facility and asset serviceability and service life characteristics and their management. Includes building life management, life based procurement practice together with the product’s associated life care needs. Adopting such a practice would permit and encourage client organisations to actively improve their building stocks and facility portfolios. In a sustainable sense too, both the asset and facility organisations should seek improved building space flexibility and a whole life quality set within some environmental or life cycle measure or benchmark. Pursuing such sustainable goals means that one must also both embrace the respective project’s building material and component supply chain and include its respective waste stream’s impact at that point of the product’s life time including its dismission stage. Finally, both in a sustainability and in a business excellence sense, all organisations need to find ways to bring their respective portfolio into a CO₂‐serviceability framework and keep a watching brief on developing their responses to an inevitable carbon based taxation future.

The purpose of this paper is to know how do early-phase planning of real estate (RE) and facilities management (FM) create value for owners and users of commercial and public sector buildings.

The data were collected in Norway in 2015 through a national online survey (N = 837). The sample gives a good picture of Norwegian owners’ and even users on tactical-level (customer) perspectives on RE and FM. The data have been analysed through descriptive statistics and exploratory factor analysis. The hypotheses have been tested through analyses of correlations and ordinary least square (OLS) linear regressions.

Exploratory factor analysis made it possible to establish seven composite variables (constructs). Based on these seven constructs, six hypotheses were derived and tested. Obstacles and financials have no significant effect on buildings’ perceived usability. The most important factors during early-phase planning that influence buildings’ perceived usability and lifetime value creation are measures promoting environment and life-cycle costs (LCC), FM, adaptability and image.

Further empirical and preferably, comparative studies are needed to establish whether the findings can be generalized. The study has shown that a building’s usability and lifetime value creation is largely determined by decisions made during early phase planning.

Well-founded early-phase planning of RE and FM may actually provide very high return on the investments and significantly improve the buildings’ lifetime value creation for owners and users. Early-phase planning is also of great importance both for buildings’ physical design, as well as for successful FM during the buildings’ use phase, and may prevent irreversible blunders.

This is a large N empirical study in Norway. The findings indicate what owner and users of buildings should emphasize during early phase planning.

This paper explores the development of household accounting practice in post‐war Japan through a review of reported experiences of the winners of an annual accounting prize scheme organized, since 1954, by the Central Council for Saving Information. While academic study of accounting at home is a developing area, analysis has tended so far to rely mainly on Anglo‐Saxon contexts. This paper’s examination of Japanese household accounting practice offers evidence from a very different context. The paper uses the prize schemes to document key changes in household accounting practice over the last half century which essentially has seen a switch in focus from short‐term budgetary control to lifetime planning and a growing concern with broader social and environmental issues. Such changes appear to be closely related to changes in the economic and social roles served by the Japanese household.

This mainly conceptual paper summarises the current conceptualisation of personalisation as it applies to people with learning disabilities. It goes on to map out how the drive towards the personalisation of services, its most recent iterations of person‐centred planning, person‐centred funding and person‐centred action, contributes to a better quality of life for people with intellectual disabilities, using the domains and indicators of quality of life set out in the Schalock et al (2002) international consensus. In doing so it describes what you would see in services where person‐centred approaches were being successfully implemented.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the status of the research on women’s financial planning for retirement. This paper provides a brief review of the work carried out so far along with a conceptual framework of factors influencing women’s retirement financial planning. In addition, it lists significant gaps and recommends avenues for future research.

The review is based on 151 articles appearing in various peer-reviewed journals published during 1980–2017. The study establishes its prominence by studying the publication activities based on the year of publication and region, citation analysis, research designs, data analysis techniques and findings from the selected articles.

Most of the literature on women’s financial planning for retirement indicates a lack of financial management amongst women and their susceptibility to poverty in postretirement years. The majority of the research works in this field have taken place in developed economies. Empirical research with regression-based models for analysis is the most popular research design. This review also highlights the significant determinants of women’s retirement financial planning as identified through literature. These include socio-demographic factors, psychological constructs, financial literacy, economic and circumstantial forces.

This paper covers the research works done in this area in the past 38 years. To the best of authors’ knowledge, this is the first attempt to provide a systematic and comprehensive compilation of the knowledge in this subject. It further synthesizes the findings of various studies on factors influencing women’s retirement financial planning and gives recommendations for future studies.