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With proper design and work planning, falls through fragile skylights are preventable. Skylights pose a hazard to workers when their work tasks for operations, maintenance and repair require them to be on roofs. The National Institute of Occupational Health and Safety produced guidelines and special alerts to address the dangers that are present around skylights, and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration regulations have prescriptive requirements for work performed around skylights, and yet incidents still occur. The purpose of this study is to investigate and raise awareness for the causality of the incidents involving skylights in the USA.

The authors investigated and analyzed 204 incidents involving skylights recorded by the Bureau of Labor Statistics to characterize their nature and to determine any correlation with the roof environment or the nature of the work performed. Using Google Earth and Google Maps roof geometry, proximity of skylights to roof edge and rooftop mechanical equipment was determined.

The majority of falls through skylights occur during roof maintenance and repair activities. Falls through skylights are underreported. Because of a general lack of good design to reduce or eliminate the risk of falling through skylights, facility managers carry the burden to properly assess work and access on roofs where fragile skylights are present.

The phenomenon of falling through skylights was made aware on a national level in the USA in 1989; however, little has been done from a design and planning perspective to reduce these incidents. This paper presents a unique perspective on the role of facility managers in understanding the hazards associated with roof maintenance near skylights.

Inaccurate capturing and processing of customer requirements result in negative economic and ecological effects. Digital twins of customer demands promise to remedy these issues. However, successful implementation necessitates users' technology acceptance. This study contrasts three hierarchical digital twin levels with different degrees of user integration and examines determinants for their respective acceptance.

A structural equation model is applied in a comparative manner, considering different levels of digital twin radicalness. A multidimensional approach is used to measure attitudes towards usage. Data are collected in the context of organisational supply management.

Results show harmonious effects across digital twin levels. This indicates that technological radicality plays only a subordinate role when assessing acceptance determinants such as user perception on ease of use, usefulness, trust and risk.

Rather than focussing solely on technological factors, findings suggest that users prioritise the actual outcome and efficiency of the system. This perspective offers practical implications for organisations seeking to implement advanced systems and emphasises the significance of user perceptions beyond technological features.

The societal impact of this research are an appreciation of customer roles in the supply chain where an enhanced detection of customer needs and preferences aligns businesses with the dynamic and evolving demands of a diverse and a continuously environmentally-conscious consumer base.

This study applies a measurement model for technology acceptance in a unique and multidimensional manner. Thereby, a comparative analysis of user perceptions across different digital twin levels sheds more light on a nascent, promising and underexplored technological method. This interdisciplinary research combined knowledge from the supply chain management and management information systems fields by highlighting key factors for the adoption of complex technological methods.

Why is it that highly trained and seasoned executives fail? On the surface, this doesn’t make sense because they are very successful; yet research in the organization sciences provides no shortage of evidence to prove just that. From the classic Mann Gulch fire disaster of Weick’s famous collapse of sensemaking study, to studies of myopia of learning, escalation of commitment, threat-rigidity, dominant logic, the architecture of simplicity, the Icarus Paradox, to core competencies turning into core rigidities, and navigating new competitive markets using “old” cognitive maps, and many more such examples point to a ubiquitous phenomenon where highly trained and experienced professionals find themselves “stuck” in the heat of battle, unable to move and progress. On the one hand, for some, there is a desperate need for change, but are unable to do so, due to their trained incapacities. On the other hand, some simply cannot see the need for change, and continue with their “business as usual” mentality. For both, their visions of the world shrink, they have a tendency to cling onto their past habitual practices and oversimplify the complexity of the situation. In moments like these: DROP YOUR TOOLS and UNLEARN! This book chapter introduces a framework (grounded in clinical psychology) that has had consistent success in helping seasoned executives and key decision-makers open up the alternatives whenever they find themselves stuck with complexity.

This study aims to understand the degree of predictability and value in analyzing consumer purchase patterns in the US wine retail market. The study considers whether brands in US wine retailing follow the well-established Duplication of Purchase Law and Double Jeopardy Law.

Over 20,000 customer panel wine purchases were analyzed from a number of locations within a supermarket chain based on the West Coast of the USA. Cross-purchasing behavior for the top 20 wine brands by market penetration was analyzed to assess whether the well-established Duplication of Purchase Law and Double Jeopardy Law hold up in this wine retail setting in the USA. The degree of predictability and the existence of anomalies in expected cross-purchasing behavior were identified in the analysis.

Results confirmed a Double Jeopardy pattern and that wine cross-purchasing patterns for the most part followed the Duplication of Purchase Law. However, exceptions to these patterns were found, which indicated areas in need of managerial attention due to the potential to remedy, develop or monitor the most prominent variations between predicted and realized cross-purchasing behavior. Repeated identification of variations has been identified in other product categories, known as market partitions.

Although it is commonly believed that wine is a unique product category, the results of this study demonstrate that consumer behavior toward wine is similar to other fast-moving consumer goods. The exceptions suggest that while similar consumer purchase patterns are evident, consumers are more likely to cross purchase wine brands and grape types more than would be expected given Duplication of Purchase Law benchmarks.

States have intervened with legislation to improve cashflow within construction project supply chains. The operation of the UK’s Housing Grants, Construction and Regeneration Act 1996 leads to payment obligations stated either as a contract administrator’s certificate (or equivalent) or an adjudicator’s decision. The purpose of the intervention would be defeated unless there are speedy ways of transforming these pieces of paper into real money. The combination of the legislation, contractual provisions and insolvency law has produced a minefield of complexity concerning enforcement of payment obligations stated in these documents. Unfortunately, the knowledge and understanding required to navigate these complexities have been sorely lacking. The purpose of this paper is to plug this gap.

Legal research methods and case study approaches, using relevant court decisions as data, were adopted.

The enforcement method advised by the court is the summary judgment procedure provided under the Civil Procedure Rules. An overdue payment obligation, either under the terms of a construction contract or an adjudicator’s decision, amounts to a debt that can be the subject of insolvency proceedings. Although the insolvency enforcement method has been successfully used on some occasions, using it purely as a debt collection weapon would be inappropriate and likely to be punished by the court.

The paper contributes to knowledge in two ways: (i) it maps out the factual situations in which these payment challenges arise in language accessible to the construction industry’s professions; and (ii) comparative analysis of payment enforcement methods to aid decision-making by parties to construction industry contracts. It is relevant to the other common-law jurisdictions in which similar statutory interventions have been made.

This chapter presents a critical analysis of the wealth current practices of multinational firms as wealth predators; and relevant references from the theory of multinational corporations and globalization from a Marxist perspective. The Marxist approach has also contributed to a theory of the self-expansion of capital (internationalization of the circuits of capital) on a global scale, within an analysis of the differentiation and of inequality.

Economists usually shy away from talking about power. They assume an economy comprised of many small and medium-sized firms, each competing for consumer dollars. This circumvents the problem of economic power. John Kenneth Galbraith, however, refused to ignore power. It stood at the center of his economics, and he saw it as a key reason the US economy thrived in the years following World War II (WWII). This chapter examines Galbraith’s changing views regarding economic power. American Capitalism explains how countervailing power, or power on the other side of the market, solves the problem of economic power. In The New Industrial State, scientists and educated managers within the firm (the technostructure) mitigate the negative consequences of economic power wielded by large firms. The Affluent Society and Economics and the Public Purpose look to the government as the main check on corporate power. It does this through labor legislation or programs such as the New Deal and Fair Deal. This chapter then evaluates the different solutions Galbraith proffered to the problem of economic power. It contends that Galbraith got three things right when analyzing economic power. First, we no longer live in a world of scarcity due to oligopolistic firms. Second, capitalism was different in the post-WWII era because the US economy thrived and gains were shared widely. Third, Galbraith understood that power was unequally distributed – both between the public and private sectors and within the private sector itself. On the other hand, Galbraith was overly optimistic in believing the market economy or the public sector could counter corporate power.

Racial stigma and racial criminalization have been centralizing pillars of the construction of Blackness in the United States. Taking such systemic injustice and racism as a given, then question then becomes how these macro-level arrangements are reflected in micro-level processes. This work uses radical interactionism and stigma theory to explore the potential implications for racialized identity construction and the development of “criminalized subjectivity” among Black undergraduate students at a predominately white university in the Midwest. I use semistructured interviews to explore the implications of racial stigma and criminalization on micro-level identity construction and how understandings of these issues can change across space and over the course of one's life. Findings demonstrate that Black university students are keenly aware of this particular stigma and its consequences in increasingly complex ways from the time they are school-aged children. They were aware of this stigma as a social fact but did not internalize it as a true reflection of themselves; said internalization was thwarted through strong self-concept and racial socialization. This increasingly complex awareness is also informed by an intersectional lens for some interviewees. I argue not only that the concept of stigma must be explicitly placed within these larger systems but also that understanding and identity-building are both rooted in ever-evolving processes of interaction and meaning-making. This research contributes to scholarship that applies a critical lens to Goffmanian stigma rooted in Black sociology and criminology and from the perspectives of the stigmatized themselves.

Valuers should independently assess market value. The purpose of this article is to analyze whether the valuation behavior remains independent when commissioned by publicly listed companies in Taiwan.

This study used both quantitative and qualitative methods. Quantitative data analysis was used to examine the estimated premium ratio and estimated divergent ratio with the independent sample t test and Wilcoxon-Mann-Whitney test. To complement and validate the quantitative analysis, open-ended questionnaires were conducted, providing additional insights into the research findings.

The results showed that there is a significant difference in estimated valuations commissioned by representatives of buyers and sellers, and the estimated premium ratios commissioned by representatives of buyers were higher than those of sellers. Furthermore, the open-ended questionnaires results indicate that these findings may be influenced by clients for less experienced appraisers. However, for senior appraisers, this is seen as an action to gain a better understanding of the valuation purpose and always within a reasonable price range. In addition, client influence is not a static factor; it may transform into the valuer's behavior as the appraiser's experience grows and deepens.

It is difficult to obtain valuation reports commissioned by representatives of both buyers and sellers for the same property transactions. In this study, data were obtained from the Market Observation Post-System (MOPS) in Taiwan. As valuation reports could not be obtained, estimated valuations and transaction prices are used to calculate estimated premium ratio and estimated divergent ratios.

Previous investigations of the client effect have been conducted using qualitative methods including questionnaire surveys, in-depth interviews and experimental design. However, these studies are subject to moral hazard. This study may be the first study that has access to data on valuations for both buyers and sellers in such a formal setting.