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This paper aims to solve the facility location problem of mobility industry call centers comprehensively, considering both investment efficiency and long-term development efficiency.

In this paper, a two-phase decision-making approach within a multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) framework has been proposed to help select optimal locations among various alternate locations. Both quantitative and qualitative information is collected and processed based on fuzzy set theory and fuzzy analytic hierarchy process. Then the fuzzy technique for order preference by similarity to an ideal solution method is incorporated in the framework to assess the overall feasibility of all alternates.

A real case of a mobility giant in China is applied to verify the effectiveness of the proposed framework. Sensitivity analysis also proves the robustness of the framework.

This two-phase MCDM framework allows the mobility industry call center location to be selected considering economic, human resource and sustainability elements comprehensively. The framework proposed in this paper might be applicable to other companies in the mobility industry when deciding optimal locations of call centers.

The purpose of the study is to explore the dominant ideas in research on the management of time in construction. The focus of research has been to improve techniques for optimising the timing and sequence of activities.

A critical review of research on construction time management, challenging the typical focus. We examine the assumptions different authors make, underline the limitations of the dominant research approaches and examine the prospects for developing a new approach to researching these issues.

The dominant approach in literature focuses on unique activity traits in construction planning and measurable patterns between time-related variables. This assumes that time in construction can be managed by changing the way activities are calculated. These approaches have not been correlated with improvement in performance. Social practice theory may help to explain how programmes figure as one of many objects used during construction.

The focus is on reviewing indicative literature from key journals in construction management. The implication is that research is needed about how such documents are used in practice, which goes further than optimising plans in theory.

Future research could focus on understanding the context of construction planning practice and shift the debate from a focus on optimisation to practice.

An interpretivist approach with a focus on how tools such as planning documents are used on site. Social practice theory may provide a clearer explanation of the place of construction planning within the practice of construction management. This could provide solutions that deal effectively with stakeholder expectations around timely completion of construction projects.

Crises are moments when citizens are beckoning on the political leaders for necessary action. As a president, one is expected to change the narratives during the pandemic that split the world. This analysis aimed at investigating the American government’s response to the critical crisis of COVID-19 and its policy implementation.

The study explored a case point method using a narrative and qualitative analysis to diagnose the USA’s response to the COVID-19 crisis. An exploratory approach was further adopted to finetune the case study report.

The analysis demonstrates that Trump’s power dynamics were weak in the USA and lacked crisis control even as the President that the entire nations of the world were looking up to. The case study report also showed that Trump did not possess the audacity of resilience to manage the crisis. The analysis provides us with how presidential leadership under Trump placed the USA in a state of colossal failure enmeshed with high rates of COVID-19 cases, deaths and unending incapacity to create a fundamental consensus in the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic today. This report shows Trump aged prolonged inability to drive governance mechanisms in the US and illustrated pockets of failures in decision analysis and information dissemination as a leader.

The study revealed how incompetent Trump was in responding to the crisis. This study has provided academia with an understanding of leadership dynamics and behaviour through a Nigerian scholar lens and a sociological perspective.

This study aims to review the literature on sharing economy logistics and crowd logistics to answer the three following questions: How is the literature on sharing economy logistics structured? What are the main trends in sharing economy logistics and crowd logistics? What are the future research options?

Bibliometric analysis is used to evaluate 85 articles published over the past 12 years; it identifies the top academic journals, authors and research topics contributing to the field.

The sharing economy logistics and crowd logistics literature is structured around several disciplines and highlights that some are more scientifically advanced than others in their subject definitions, designs, modelling and innovative solutions. The main trends are organized around three clusters: Cluster 1 refers to the optimal allocation of costs, prices, distribution and supplier relationships; Cluster 2 corresponds to business related crowdsourcing and international industry practices; and Cluster 3 includes the impact of transport on last-mile delivery, crowd shipping and the environment.

The study is based on data from peer-reviewed scientific journals and conferences. A broader overview could include other data sources such as books, book chapters, working papers, etc.

Future research directions are discussed in the context of the evolution from crowd logistics to crowd intelligence, and the complexities of crowd logistics such as understanding how the social crowd can be integrated into the logistics process. Our results are part of the crowd science and engineering concept and provide some answers about crowd cyber-system questions regarding crowd intelligence in logistic sector.

Hong Kong has a global reputation as an entrepreneurial hub. The Japanese restaurant community has grown and evolved over the last three decades into what many consider as a natural secondary market for Japanese food. As such, several Japanese restaurateurs have come to Hong Kong to enter Hong Kong’s premium Japanese restaurant market. The purpose of this paper is to explore this market of Japanese restaurateurship in Hong Kong.

One of the closest methodologies within the topic and discipline from Baldwin (2017) focuses on Japaneseness as a measurement of culinary authenticity examining Hong Kong’s Michelin rated restaurants. Here, the qualitative approach using semi-structured interviews with the chefs of two sets of premium Japanese restaurants from Japan that expanded in Hong Kong, Sushi Iwa and Sushi Yoshitake. As this paper focuses on the premium and high-end market of Japanese chefs and restaurateurs in Hong Kong, the researcher combined the approaches of Kawahara & Speece and Baldwin to pursue a qualitative methodology using semi-structured interviews.

For this research, the interview process had to be divided into two stages. The first was to speak with long standing members of Hong Kong’s Japanese restaurant community. The common thread amongst the restaurateurs was that they were either the sole proprietor or a partner who was financially vested within the company not a form of sweat equity. To respect the privacy of the interviews, questions about exact monetary amounts, number of shares and equity or anything regarding holdings were not asked. The idea was to only examine their responses within the criteria of the research objectives.

As the Michelin and premium market of Japanese cuisine is so small, this research can only represent a certain part of the market. Future research could examine other Japanese restaurateurs outside of this market that could be examined to gain a wider perspective of the entrepreneurial strategies they used to start-up their business in Hong Kong.

As research in this area is very limited, this paper helps bring restaurateurship in Hong Kong into the academic front. Restaurants are one of the most common entry points for new entrepreneurs in hospitality. This paper may help shed some light on how foreign investment entrepreneurship has been achieved in Asia.

This study aims to explain the importance of human resources and attempts to identify the competencies required by the personnel involved in disaster management operations.

The research uses a qualitative methodology to explore the competencies required by the relief workers using a content analysis approach to analyze the disaster literature and the job advertisements. The data for the content analysis was developed with the help of 23 independent coders, and exploratory inferences were drawn.

A detailed review of the literature highlighted the importance of competent personnel in disaster relief organizations. The analysis listed 34 mutually exclusive competencies and their relative importance, which were further divided into four competency clusters. The study also creates a competency dictionary that defines the competencies with the expected behaviors.

Deploying the right resources in the acute time frame during a disaster event can make a difference, and with lives at stake, such deployment acquires prime importance. In addition to contributing to humanitarian logistics literature, the competency model developed will also help forecast the future requirements and help the organization choose “the right person for the right job.”

The inferences drawn in the study are based on disaster management areas, unlike earlier research which also considered business logistics research.

This study answers the call for research and theorising exploring ethical communication and brand risk from the African continent. The study's purpose was to identify the challenges that strategic communication practitioners face in enacting ethical crisis communication in South Africa.

The researchers conducted ten in-depth interviews with South African strategic communication professionals.

The dominant theme emerging from the study is the marginalisation and exclusion of the communication function in decision-making during crisis situations. Communicators were viewed as implementers, technicians and not strategic counsel. The protection of organisational reputation was done at the expense of the ethics and moral conscience of practitioners. Practitioners were viewed and deployed as spin doctors and tools to face unwanted media interactions.

The article sheds light on the concepts of ethical communication and decision-making in a multicultural African context using the moral theory of Ubuntu and strategic communication. It demonstrates the tension professionals experience as they toggle between unethical capitalist approaches and African values. The practitioner's role as organisational moral conscience is hindered, suppressed and undermined by organisational leadership's directives to use opaque, complex communication, selective transparency and misrepresentation of facts.

The unprecedented SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) pandemic has further constrained the budgets of governments worldwide for delivering their much-needed infrastructure. Consequently, public-private partnerships (PPPs), with the private sector's investment and ingenuity, would appear to be an increasingly popular alternative. Value for money (VfM) has become the major criterion for evaluating PPPs against the traditional public sector procurement and, however, is plagued with controversy. Hence, it is important that governments compare and contrast their practice with similar and disparate bodies to engender best practice. This paper, therefore, aims to understand governments' assessment context and provide a cross-continental comparison of their VfM assessment.

Faced with different domestic contexts (e.g. aging infrastructure, population growth, and competing demands on finance), governments tend to place different emphases when undertaking the VfM assessment. In line with the theory of boundary spanning, a cross-continental comparison is conducted between three of the most noticeable PPP markets (i.e. the United Kingdom, Australia and China) about their VfM assessment. The institutional level is interpreted by a social, economic and political framework, and the methodological level is elucidated through a qualitative and quantitative VfM assessment.

There are individual institutional characteristics that have shaped the way each country assesses VfM. For the methodological level, we identify that: (1) these global markets use a public sector comparator as the benchmark in VfM assessment; (2) ambiguous qualitative assessment is conducted only against PPPs to strengthen their policy development; (3) Australia's priority is in service provision whereas that of the UK and China is project finance and production; and (4) all markets are seeking an amelioration of existing controversial VfM assessments so that purported VfM relates to project lifecycles. As such, an option framework is proposed to make headway towards a sensible selection of infrastructure procurement approaches in the post COVID-19 era.

This study addresses a current void of enhancing the decision-making process for using PPPs within today's changing environment and then opens up an avenue for future empirical research to examine the option framework and ensuing VfM decisions. Practically, it presents a holistic VfM landscape for public sector procurers that aim to engage with PPPs for their infrastructure interventions.

The authors will give an overview of the railway market, with a focus on Morocco, before seeing the challenges to face, before listing some benefits of rail links in terms of development, ecology, security, space management, etc. The authors will then give an overview of the development of BIM, its benefits, risks and issues. The purpose of this paper is to verify that the BIM can provide the railway with the tools to face some of its challenges and improve its productivity.

This paper is part of our research project on the integration of BIM in railway, which is the result of a partnership between Colas Rail Maroc and the ENSAK of the Ibn Tofail University of Kenitra. The objective of this paper is mainly to confirm that the integration of BIM with the railway, through a theoretical and practical study, can have positive impacts. To do this, our methodology consists in studying briefly the development of the railway, the need to improve the budgets and schedules of the projects, to increase the productivity, before showing the advantages of the BIM in the sector of the Architecture, Engineering and Construction (AEC). The study of feedback from railway projects (chosen for their date of completion – beyond 2014, their size, their geographical situation in several countries and for the availability of literature in a new field) will confirm the initial hypotheses. Among the projects studied will be a project that has been the subject of an article written by the authors of this paper. In the discussion of the results, the authors will focus on the benefits, risks and limitations of integrating BIM into the railway. In conclusion, the authors are laying the groundwork for future research in the field.

The cases study discussed in this paper and previous research confirms the hypotheses of the literature. The integration of BIM into railway projects can have several advantages: collaboration, time saving, cost optimization, prevention of conflicts between networks, construction before construction, optimization of facility management, improvement of the quality of works, prefabrication. They also allowed us to illustrate the risks (status and appropriation of the BIM model, lack of standardization of versions or software and lack of understanding of the basics of schedules and specifications) and limitations (lack of feedback, lack of adaptability and convergence of tools). These experiences have also shown that the use of BIM is not just a technological transition, but a revolution in the project management process, which requires several key success factors (participation of all, commitment, change management and adoption of the collaborative approach). Visualization, collaboration and conflict elimination are the three main chapters where the benefits of BIM can be organized. In fact, there is a lot of intersection between these chapters, but they have been chosen as the main ideas around which all the benefits can be better understood. Visualization primarily addresses the benefits to an individual and improving one’s personal understanding as a result of using BIM. The collaboration refers to the cooperative action of several team members, which is encouraged and facilitated by BIM. Conflict elimination mainly concerns project-related benefits, such as conflict reduction, waste, risks, costs and time. For railway infrastructure projects, the main purpose of using BIM is to improve the design integration process, internal project team communication and collision detection to eliminate risk of rehabilitation.

The application of the BIM process in railway infrastructure requires constant improvement. This concerns the development of libraries and the models available to all users in order to encourage the development of this methodology and, consequently, its use of information throughout the life cycle of an infrastructure work.

The case study of real projects incorporating BIM confirms the results of the literature review. The benefits of integrating BIM into rail projects are multiple and proven: cost control, decision support, avoids extra work due to design errors, improves detection of interface problems, improves planning of vision, help with prefabrication and facility management, etc. Finally, the BIM process is able to overcome delays in procedures slowing the development of the construction industry in many countries, especially in Morocco, because of the slowness of design (or downright bad design).

The integration of BIM into rail is becoming a global trend. This integration requires government decisions and a maturation of technology and tools. The authorities of some developed countries studied (Sweden, UK, France, Germany) in the railways, at different stages of implementation, are adopting BIM in the process of setting up new railway projects. This political impulse is still behind in southern countries, such as Morocco. The trend and the data collected indicate an adoption between 2020 and 2030 of BIM in all/some AEC projects in developed countries. This will have an impact on other countries that will soon be doing the same, especially in the railway sector to adopt the BIM.

As part of the realization of this paper, we proceeded to the implementation of an electrical substation as part of the project to build 40 electric traction substations built by Colas Rail on behalf of ONCF.