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Stakeholder engagement in construction projects is an ingredient that contributes to project optimal performance. Many developing countries have a paucity of literature about stakeholders' engagement in construction projects. Therefore, the study investigated South Africa's shareholders' engagement in construction projects and recommended possible measures to mitigate potential limitations.

The researchers collated data from South African experts in stakeholder engagement via a phenomenology type of qualitative research design. They explored the “perceived hindrances” facing stakeholders' engagement in construction projects and proffer measures to mitigate them. The study analysed collected data via thematic analysis and achieved saturation. Three themes emerged from the analysed data.

Findings show that efficient stakeholder engagement will enhance team collaboration and integrated construction project delivery. Results identified the perceived limitations facing stakeholders' engagement in South Africa's construction projects and categorised them into individual perceived hindrances, organisational perceived hindrances and government-related perceived hindrances. Also, findings proffer measures to mitigate perceived hindrances via policies and programmes within the sector.

Besides enhancing policymakers and other stakeholders in South Africa's construction industry to understand the benefits of stakeholder engagement better, the study may stir up the construction sector's stakeholders to embrace enhanced and effective stakeholders' management.

This study contributes to construction project practice that involves stakeholders, as it reveals the underlying causes of perceived hindrances facing stakeholders' engagement in construction projects. Also, it proffers feasible solutions to mitigate these hindrances and enhance stakeholders' engagement within South Africa's construction projects.

Value-based healthcare suggested using patient-reported information to complement the information available in the medical records and administrative healthcare data to provide insights into patients' perceptions of satisfaction, experience and self-reported outcomes. However, little attention has been devoted to questions about factors fostering the use of patient-reported information to create value at the system level.

Action research design is carried out to elicit possible triggers using the case of patient-reported experience and outcome data for breast cancer women along their clinical pathway in the clinical breast network of Tuscany (Italy).

The case shows that communication and engagement of multi-stakeholder representation are needed for making information actionable in a multi-level, multispecialty care pathway organized in a clinical network; moreover, political and managerial support from higher level governance is a stimulus for legitimizing the use for quality improvement. At the organizational level, an external facilitator disclosing and discussing real-world uses of collected data is a trigger to link measures to action. Also, clinical champion(s) and clear goals are key success factors. Nonetheless, resource munificent and dedicated information support tools together with education and learning routines are enabling factors.

Current literature focuses on key factors that impact performance information use often considering unidimensional performance and internal sources of information. The use of patient/user-reported information is not yet well-studied especially in supporting quality improvement in multi-stakeholder governance. The work appears relevant for the implications it carries, especially for policymakers and public sector managers when confronting the gap in patient-reported measures for quality improvement.

This paper aims to investigate how purchasing organizations implement supplier diversity (SD) initiatives over time.

A multiple case study approach was conducted. Data were collected through in-depth interviews with participants from purchasing organizations, intermediary organizations and diverse suppliers.

The research suggests that the SD journey encompasses three different, but interrelated stages before full implementation is achieved: structuring, operation and adaptation. The findings also provide evidence that SD implementation in Brazil is highly influenced by the lack of a consistent knowledge base and the lack of legitimized intermediary organizations.

Using a temporal approach to understand how different practices suggested by the literature have been managed by practitioners over time, this study contributes to the understanding of the path to effective SD implementation and how intra- and interorganizational context influences this journey.

By identifying which practices should be adopted during different phases of SD implementation and proposing ways to overcome some of the inherent challenges, managers can better plan and allocate resources for the adoption of a successful SD initiative.

This research demonstrates how organizations can promote diversity and reduce social and economic inequalities by buying from diverse suppliers.

Using a temporal approach, the research empirically investigates how different purchasing organizations have implemented and managed the known practices and dealt with the challenges faced when trying to adopt SD.

Measuring shared value (SV) created in innovation ecosystems (IEs) is increasingly relevant but complex, given the multidimensional and multiactor nature of both concepts, which challenges traditional performance measurement systems (PMSs). Moving from this gap, the authors propose an integrated approach to extend the balanced scorecard (BSC) for measuring and monitoring SV creation at IE level.

The proposed approach combines the most recent contributions on PMS in IEs and SV to define perspectives and dimensions that are better suited to deal with the nature of both IEs and SV. The approach is also applied to the real case (Alpha) of an Italian IE through a step wise method. Starting from the IE vision, the authors identify in the strategy map the specific objectives related to each perspective/dimension combination and then associate a performance indicator with each objective.

The resulting SV BSC is composed of indicators interconnected along different perspectives and dimensions. The application of the approach to the real case proves its feasibility and highlights characteristics, advantages and disadvantages of the SV BSC when used at IE level. The authors also provide guidelines for its application to other IEs.

The study contributes to the research on PMS by introducing and applying to a real case an integrated approach to assess SV in IEs, overcoming the shortcomings of PMS framed for single firms. It can be of interest for both researchers in the field of ecosystems value creation and practitioners managing or promoting such complex structures.

This paper aims to present insights on the governance of sustainability transitions in higher education in Africa. The authors interrogate the research literatures on the governance of socio-technical transitions in water, electricity, transport and waste management, and identify barriers and enabling factors that enhance transformative practices in universities.

The analytical framework proposed in this paper combines the elements of governance network theory (GNT) and transition topology. The framework of this study is grounded in an actor-centric approach using GNT to understand networks conducive to sustainability transitions. Events and governance networks were mapped on a transition topology to visualise organisational and institutional changes over time. The study engaged students, management, academic and administrative staff in building a community of practice towards sustainability. This research is based on qualitative content analysis grounded in interview data, focus group discussions, workshops, webinars and secondary data analysis.

The findings show that the university has consolidated a sustainability vision and targets, but several factors prevent the community from achieving these targets, including hierarchical decision-making processes, a multitude of disjointed committees and fragmentation in the campus community.

This research adds to an emerging body of literature in the field of sustainability in higher education with two contributions. Firstly, the study presents a novel perspective(s) on the governance of sustainability transitions by combining the literatures on governance and sustainability transitions using a new methodological approach of transition topology to show organisational and institutional changes. Secondly, the study presents new empirical evidence for improving the governance of sustainability transitions in a diverse and highly unequal African university community in the process of (de)colonisation of knowledge and governance.

This paper aims to provide a starting point to discuss how social enterprises can drive systemic change in terms of social impact through operations and supply chain management.

This paper reviews existing literature and the four papers in this special issue and develops a conceptual framework of how social enterprises and their supply chains create social impact and further enable systematic change.

Our paper finds that social impact and systemic change can be shaped by social enterprises at three different levels of analysis (organization, supply chain and context) and through three enablers (cognitive shift, stakeholder collaboration and scalability). Such dimensions are used to position current literature and to highlight new research directions.

This paper proposes a novel understanding of operations and supply chain management in social enterprises intended as catalysts for systemic change. Based on this premise we distinguish different practices and stakeholders to be considered when studying social impact at different levels. The conceptual framework introduced in the paper provides a new pathway for future research and debate by scholars engaged at the intersection of social impact, sustainable operations and supply chain management.

This paper delves into the critical role of women in the domains of architecture, engineering, construction and urban planning, particularly within the context of the United Nations sustainable development goals (SDGs) and the imperative of achieving gender parity. Concentrating on the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries, this paper explores the profound importance of women as essential contributors to urbanisation and sustainable development. It scrutinizes the existing gender disparities within the architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) industries; evaluates prevailing women empowerment indices in diverse sectors; and presents a strategic framework for harnessing women’s engagement to cultivate inclusive and sustainable urban cultures in the GCC. This conceptual paper introduces an actionable framework that can serve as a guiding agenda for empowering women in the AEC sectors by incorporating their socio-cultural, economic and ecological contributions towards creating sustainable cities.

Centring its focus on Gulf Cities, this paper employs a comprehensive approach to examine the current gender disparities within the architecture, engineering and construction sectors. It probes potential barriers and advocates for leveraging women’s participation to foster inclusive and sustainable urban development in the GCC. The study introduces the Women’s Empowerment Index (WEI) for the Gulf AEC industry elucidating how these measures are translated into a tailored framework.

The paper presents a practical framework that provides actionable guidance for engaging various stakeholders, including governments, academia and industry players, to empower women within the AEC industries. An “Agenda for equitable AEC industries for sustainable urban development: Our Common Gulf Cities” is culminated in a Women Empowerment Index for the AEC Industry (WEI-AEC) designed to serve as a guidance tool to monitor progress within industry, governments and academia.

Future research endeavours could advance the framework by conducting institutional support analyses, multi-stakeholder collaboration studies and practical testing of the framework within real-world scenarios.

The findings of this study can guide and influence a diverse range of initiatives, including policy development, educational strategies, corporate endeavours, awareness campaigns, capacity-building programs, skill enhancement initiatives and knowledge exchange among the Gulf Cooperation Council countries.

This conceptual paper introduces a practical framework that can serve as a roadmap for implementing the study’s potential to shape policies, educational programs and corporate initiatives aimed at advancing both gender equality and the development of sustainable cities.

The lean startup approach (LSA) is extensively utilized by early-stage entrepreneurs, with “pivot” serving as a key pillar. However, there is a research gap concerning the boundary conditions impacting LSA and pivot decisions, especially when addressing societal challenges, as in the context of transformational entrepreneurship. In this regard, the healthcare sector, further compounded by a lack of research on startups and scale-ups, presents an embraced opportunity to provide multiple contributions for both theory and practice.

The present investigation employs a grounded approach to explore the experiences of the co-founders of a fast-growing Italian e-health startup. A narrative strategy was employed to organize conditions and evolving strategic action/interactions into three different pivoting phases of the startup – before the pivot, its enactment and aftermath – with primary and secondary data collected over a period of one year.

Pivoting in digital healthcare unfolded as a liminal experience marked by factors such as high regulation, multiple stakeholders, technological and symbolic ambivalence, resource-intensive demands and institutional actors acting as pathway pioneers, leading to an information overload and unforeseeable uncertainty to manage. These factors challenge entrepreneurs' ability to attain optimal distinctiveness, presenting the paradoxical need for vertical flexibility for scaling up.

By uniquely illuminating the sector’s constraints on entrepreneurial phenomena, this study provides a valuable guide for entrepreneurs and institutional actors in addressing societal challenges.

This study introduces a process model of transformational information crafting when pivoting, highlighting the role of entrepreneurs' transformational stance and platform-mediated solutions as engines behind strategies involving information breaking and transition, preceding knowledge-driven integration strategies.

The purpose of this article is to discuss how the mastery of resilience in operations and supply chains plays a significant role in the transition to a more sustainable future. Furthermore, it is supposed to propose avenues for future research on operational and supply chain resilience, interacting with the sustainability literature in our field.

A conceptual review of resilience and sustainability themes within operations and supply chain management research is conducted. Reflections on the topic are informed by relevant literature published over the last decade.

The major conceptual contributions are threefold: (1) This article elaborates on the understanding of operational resilience and supply chain resilience concepts and reviews their respective primary research streams. (2) It proposes resilience as the missing element in the pursuit of excellence in organizations that want to contribute to a more sustainable future. (3) The article offers a research framework that provides a future research agenda at the intersection of resilience and sustainability in operations and supply chain management research.

The article highlights gaps in current research and illustrates further areas of research that need to be addressed to maximize the contribution of operations and supply chain management research in supporting practitioners to achieve a more sustainable future.

The purpose of this study is to present an in-depth examination of stakeholder engagement processes in non-governmental organisations (NGOs) from the perspective of NGO managers to enhance accountability and the effectiveness with which aid services are delivered. Specifically, demand-side (downward) accountability and the implications of an accountability system that is predominantly supply-side (upward) focused are explored.

This study draws on evidence gathered from 25 in-depth interviews with representatives of leading NGOs in Nigeria to explore and uncover the nature of stakeholder engagement and accountability processes in their respective organisations. This study shows prospects for entrenching organisational reform that balances power and influence that benefits the less economically powerful demand side of the stakeholders. A relevant aspect of stakeholder theory was used to frame the analysis.

The study reveals an overlay of a blanket engagement system and a seeming reluctance of NGOs to disclose critical information to the demand-side stakeholders (DSS), and suggests ways to meet sustainability demands and address the militating concerns. A perceived lack of understanding and prospects or outcomes of demand-side accountability are central to this; however, engagement outcomes that account for impact rather than output are explored and reported. The findings suggest that proper accountability involves adequate stakeholder engagement which is a prerequisite and paramount for sustainability.

This study primarily delineates NGO managers’ views on NGO engagement and accountability dynamics. Future research may explore the perspectives of downward stakeholders themselves. The study highlights the concern for NGOs to maintain a defined stakeholder engagement process that resists external forces that may impact on their operations and derail their mission, resulting in duplication of services.

The study shows the implications of donors’ influence on accountability practices which can be improved by re-structuring supply-side stakeholders to significantly include DSS accountability requirements in the key performance indicators of NGOs in developing countries. The authors present a nuanced perspective to aid delivery and access that ensures improved services and more effective, impactful and sustainable aid which is of practical relevance to NGOs and their accountability mechanism.

This study deepens the understanding of the dynamics of stakeholder engagement and accountability processes and shows that the most effective way to deploy aid funds to meet sustainability goals is to draw on the experiences and local knowledge of the DSS. This would require an effective and results-driven dialogue among all the stakeholders involved. The proposed engagement and management framework contribute to theory and practice by fostering multi-stakeholder cooperation, DSS accountability and the advancement of sustainable development