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There is profound demand for higher skills and expertise in retrofitting the existing building stock of Europe. The delivery of low- or nearly zero-energy retrofits is highly dependent on technical expertise, adoption of new materials, methods of construction and innovative technologies. Future Irish national building regulations will adopt the Energy Performance of Buildings Directive vision of retrofitting existing buildings to higher energy efficiency standards. Construction industry stakeholders are key for the achievement of energy performance targets. Specifically, the purpose of this paper is to assess the attitudes, approaches and experiences of Irish construction professionals regarding energy efficient buildings, particularly nearly zero-energy buildings (nZEBs).

Data were collected through a series of quantitative and qualitative methods, including a survey, a workshop and detailed interviews with professionals in the retrofit industry. The structure of this approach was informed by preliminary data and information available on the Irish construction sector.

There is a substantial amount of ambiguity and reluctance among the professionals in reaching the Irish nZEB targets. The growing retrofit industry demonstrates low-quality auditing and pre/post-retrofit analysis. Basic services and depth of retrofits are compromised by project budgets and marginal profits. Unaligned value supply chain, poor interaction among nZEB professionals and fragmented services are deterrents to industry standardisation.

This study will enable construction industry stakeholders to make provisions for overcoming the barriers, gaps and challenges identified in the practices of the retrofit projects. It will also inform the formulation of policies that drive retrofit uptake.

This study has implications for understanding the social barriers existing in retrofit projects. Support from clients/owners has a diverse impact on energy performance and retrofit decisions. Community-based initiatives are key to unlock the promotion of nZEBs.

This paper provides an overview of current activities of retrofit professionals and analyses the barriers, gaps and challenges in the industry.

The purpose of this paper is to standardised four-step flexibility assessment methodology for evaluating the available electrical load reduction or increase a building can provide in response to a signal from an aggregator or grid operator.

The four steps in the methodology consist of Step 1: systems, loads, storage and generation identification; Step 2: flexibility characterisation; Step 3: scenario modelling; and Step 4: key performance indicator (KPI) label.

A detailed case study for one building, validated through on-site experiments, verified the feasibility and accuracy of the approach.

The results were benchmarked against available demonstration studies but could benefit from the future development of standardised benchmarks.

The ease of implementation enables building operators to quickly and cost effectively evaluate the flexibility of their building. By clearly defining the flexibility range, the KPI label enables contract negotiation between stakeholders for demand side services. It may also be applicable as a smart readiness indicator.

The novel KPI label has the capability to operationalise the concept of building flexibility to a wider spectrum of society, enabling smart grid demand response roll-out to residential and small commercial customers.

This paper fulfils an identified need for an early stage flexibility assessment which explicitly includes source selection that can be implemented in an offline manner without the need for extensive real-time data acquisition, ICT platforms or additional metre and sensor installations.

This chapter will focus on the Netflix television series The Exorcist (2016–) starring Gina Davis as Angela Rance/Regan MacNeill and Ben Daniels as Father Marcus. The Rances are a well-off urban family in Chicago, with Angela, a successful and powerful professional woman. The Exorcist allows Angela Rance, a woman in midlife, to be central to the narrative, despite the paucity of positive, central roles for women over 50.

The chapter will also examine the depiction of gender through the themes of families and homes. Homes are sanctuaries but can also be a site of violence. The Rance home is the first clue that all is not well, when Angela hears noises in the walls. Families, homes, faith and betrayal are everywhere in The Exorcist, including the Rances, the Church, the priesthood, the Friars of Ascension and the homeless settlement. Traditionally, families and homes are where women can achieve creativity and some kind of agency, as well as being contained.

The third approach of this chapter will be to compare gender representations in the television series and the film The Exorcist (1973). In theory, the intervening 44 years could have seen gains for women and feminism, but 2017 has seen women’s rights eroded yet again. The film was made at the height of the women’s liberation movement and second-wave feminism, and at the start of the era of ‘video nasties’ and explicitly gory slasher and cannibal films, so I will use the historical context to frame a discussion about the two different versions.

This paper aims to highlight the availability and use of software systems in the Irish construction professional cost consultancy process. Also to gather the views from practising quantity surveying professionals as to how available systems could assist total cost management of green buildings throughout their lifespan.

A questionnaire was given to a number of senior quantity surveyors throughout Ireland to ascertain the extent to which IT systems were being used as part of a total life cycle cost analysis and control procedure. Particular focus of questions related to the extent to which use of IT systems encouraged information sharing. Statistical analyses of results of same are given.

Quantity surveying practice must adapt and integrate cost management systems within the life cycle cost plan of a building. Use of well‐designed IT systems should complement the existing knowledge base of traditional cost models.

The extent to which life cycle costs become an accepted and integral part of the total cost management package may be determined more by government legislation than client desire for the cost management system. Nevertheless, the quantity surveying profession with its well‐established cost control and planning techniques should consider the use of well‐designed IT systems as part of the future development of the profession.

The role of the professional quantity surveyor is to provide information with regard to the initial and future costs so that sound financial factors – inter alia – are considered by the design team. However, it has always been very difficult to produce conceptual estimates because they require the ability not to count the bricks, windows, doors and fixtures but the ability to visualise these components. This problem stifles quantity surveyors' capability to meet the demand for “value for money” (VfM) throughout sustainable building development. The purpose of this paper is to describe results from a case study of deploying a building product model on a commercial project in Ireland, with a view to easing the cost management duties of the quantity surveyor.

The paper comprises a case study of the Environmental Research Institute project and a questionnaire survey of quantity surveying business in Ireland.

Quantity surveying still encounters serious data compatibility problems in integrated teams because most software available on the market run proprietary file formats. It is concluded that there is a huge business potential for quantity surveying to facilitate designing to a budget within integrated teams, and that software interoperability could have a negative impact on professional fee structures, which could trigger more robust appraisal strategies for building products if quantity surveying is to maintain a leading role in providing cost management services to the construction industry.

Some case study data could not be made public.

Quantity surveyors might be encouraged to be innovative when using computerised systems that could produce better cost models; hence meet the demand for VfM throughout sustainable building development.

The paper provides valuable information to built environment stakeholders working in integrated teams so as to optimise whole life resources expendable on a constructed facility.

This paper delineates the proprietary contest developed around a highly valued prestige item: a silver roofed tankard owned by a Romanian, Gabor Roma man.

The author applies “methodological fetishism” (Appadurai, 1986, p. 5), the perspective of things-in-motion, as well as the biographic method to interpret data collected during 31.5 months of multi-sited anthropological fieldwork carried out in the Transylvanian Gabor and Cărhar Roma groups.

As the tankard in question crossed the borders of three Transylvanian Roma groups, and thus went through the processes of de- and re-contextualization three times, it is characterized by a transethnic/transcultural biography. This paper pays special attention to the agency associated with the tankard (the social and economic practices, processes and emotions it caused or influenced), the transformations concerning its symbolic properties, and its movement between various social contexts and value regimes. Furthermore, it examines how the analysis of these issues contributes to a deeper understanding of prestige relations and consumption, morality and business ethics, and measures of success in two Transylvanian Roma groups.

This paper reveals how subjects create, manipulate, and represent their identities, and social and economic differences through the construction of commodity biographies and ownership histories interpreted as symbolic pantheons. By combining the terms of Marcus (1995) and Fowles (2006), it argues that analyses based on multi-sited fieldwork focusing on commodities crossing cultural or social boundaries, and their transnational/transcultural biographies, should be defined as multi-sited commodity ethnographies.

This chapter reviews the existing empirical evidence on how social insurance affects health. Social insurance encompasses programs primarily designed to insure against health risks, such as health insurance, sick leave insurance, accident insurance, long-term care insurance, and disability insurance as well as other programs, such as unemployment insurance, pension insurance, and country-specific social insurance programs. These insurance systems exist in almost all developed countries around the world. This chapter discusses the state-of-the art evidence on each of these social insurance systems, briefly reviews the empirical methods for identifying causal effects, and examines possible limitations to these methods. The findings reveal robust and rich evidence on first-stage behavioral responses (“moral hazard”) to changes in insurance coverage. Surprisingly, evidence on how changes in coverage impact beneficiaries’ health is scant and inconclusive. This lack of identified causal health effects is directly related to limitations on how human health is typically measured, limitations on the empirical approaches, and a paucity of administrative panel data spanning long-time horizons. Future research must be conducted to fill these gaps. Of particular importance is evidence on how these social insurance systems interact and affect human health over the life cycle.

In the previous chapter, the reader will have become familiar with the idea of screening for traumatic experiences within organisations as a way to identify those who may benefit most from interventions and support. In this chapter, I present an overview of the trauma therapy literature in the first instance and then explore some of the debates regarding specific trauma-informed treatments versus general therapeutic approaches. The multicultural competency literature is discussed, and the multicultural orientation approach of cultural humility, cultural opportunity and cultural comfort is highlighted in a practice context. This chapter concludes with a case study vignette that brings it all together with a clinical example of what trauma-informed therapy through a multicultural lens might look like. As such I operationalise choice, collaboration , trust and transparency, and cultural principles from the trauma-informed care literature. Although applied here to specific trauma-informed organisations, some of the methods and processes that I unpack can be used in non-specific organisations where social/case managers are employed and wish to operationalise choice and collaboration in a structured way.

In the year 2000, a team from Istanbul Technical University (ITU) developed the “Urban m³ - Respect for Life Project”, which was aimed at providing shelter for those people who were left homeless as a consequence of the earthquake in 1999, in the districts of Arizli-Kocaeli in Turkey. This earthquake had a catastrophic effect on one of the most densely populated and industrial regions of Turkey whose population accounts about 20 percent of Turkey's total population. In addition to providing shelter, the major objective of this project was to re-establish those humanistic and natural values that had been lost or obscured in respect of the traditional, Turkish life-style and culture, as a result of the rapid urban-isation which took place after the 1950s. In 2000, research was conducted to evaluate the prospective residents' preferences in respect of their future housing and its environment needs. For this purpose, 400 people, who had been living in temporary housing in the area affected by the earthquake, were the target group of an in-depth survey. The main objective of the study was to determine whether the prospective residents' perceptions and evaluations matched the project designed by the ITU's team. It was assumed within the project planning and design that people would prefer the socially, and physically rich environment offered by the project. Based on the research findings, the ideology, philosophy and concepts underlying the “Urban m³ - Respect for Life Project” could be evaluated as an altenative design approach, which provides not only environmental protection and disaster mitigation, but also a high level of socio-cultural satisfaction. Thus, the paper suggests strategies for improved post-disaster (re-)construction.