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The importance of humans to the successful delivery of construction projects has led to the emergence of research attention on construction workforce management. As such, this chapter uncovers emotional intelligence (EI) and the external environment as critical aspects of workforce management practices that have not gained substantial attention in past workforce management studies. While some theories and models (existing outside the construction domain) have considered the external environment, none of these models is specific to the construction industry. Furthermore, EI has received less attention within existing workforce management models. Through a review of related studies and theories, this chapter noted that the EI of construction workers and their senior management is crucial to the performance of these workers and the ultimate performance of their organisations. In the same vein, since construction organisations do not operate in silos, the external environment significantly influences the operations of organisations in the construction industry. The environment exact pressures that can influence workforce management practices and technological innovations construction organisations adopt.

Male identity and motor-mobility are deeply intertwined across much of the globe but nowhere is this relationship more strongly in evidence than in Africa. On the African continent, road transport work has always appeared, in essence, to be a masculinist domain: it is almost always men who are seen driving commercial vehicles, regulating loading activities in the lorry and bus parks (and now the motorcycle stages), undertaking roadside repairs, vulcanising tyres, and even serving fuel. This does not mean that women are entirely absent from the sector, but their place is commonly peripheral – constrained at least in part by hegemonic norms of femininity that shape women’s self-understandings. They typically supply cooked food, alcohol and sex to male road workers, or take on back-breaking work in the lowliest – and lowest paid – of porterage roles, head-loading goods along the road, carrying materials when assisting men making and mending roads, or loading vehicles. From time to time, women have aspired to infiltrate more lucrative areas of the sector, especially through ownership of commercial vehicles, but their closer engagement with the oily nuts and bolts of the road business remains rare.

This chapter draws on a wide range of published and grey literature and some personal ethnographic research from a diversity of African countries and contexts to examine women’s efforts at engagement in the sector. The discussion spans women’s employment in road transport services (porterage, ticket-selling, taxis, buses, Bus Rapid Transit [BRT] and commercial trucks) and the road construction that supports transport service operations (engineering, planning, contracting, and labouring). The authors pay particular attention to the factors that so often continue to impede women’s progress in these arenas. The concluding section first references COVID-19 and its detrimental impacts on women transport workers’ jobs, then considers the potential for overcoming current barriers and promoting a more central space for women in transport operations, a development that could provide significant benefits across the sector.

Transnational corporation (TNC)-led oil investments have been widely encouraged as a mechanism for the development of the Global South. Even though the sector is characterized by major accidents, oil-based developmentalist narratives claim that such accidents are merely isolated incidents that can be administratively addressed, redressed behaviorally through education of certain individuals, or corrected through individually targeted post-event legislation. Adapting Harvey Molotch’s (1970) political economy methodology of “accident research”, this paper argues that such “accidents” are, in fact, routine in the entire value chain of the oil system dominated by, among others, military-backed TNCs which increasingly collaborate with national and local oil companies similarly wedded to the ideology of growth. Based on this analysis, existing policy focus on improving technology, instituting and enforcing more environmental regulations, and the pursuit of economic nationalism in the form of withdrawing from globalization are ineffective. In such a red-hot system, built on rapidly spinning wheels of accumulation, the pursuit of slow growth characterized by breaking the chains of monopoly and oligopoly, putting commonly generated rent to common uses, and freeing labor from regulations that rob it of its produce has more potency to address the enigma of petroleum accidents in the global south.

This chapter discusses the growing use of social media during election campaigns in Ghana. It examines how social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter became preferred tools for voter engagement, mobilisation and campaign for political parties and their presidential and parliamentary candidates in the 2020 elections in Ghana. It establishes that social media are gradually surpassing traditional/legacy media as the preferred media choice for political mobilisation, civic engagement and political communication in Ghana. The chapter reviews the European Union Election Observation Mission (EOM) report through social media affordance lens. This chapter attempts to answer two critical questions: To what extent did political parties and presidential candidates in Ghana use social media in electioneering campaigns during the 2020 elections and, which social media platforms were highly preferred by political parties and presidential candidates in engaging the electorate? The EOM's data indicators show the prominence of Facebook and Twitter as significant in political party campaigns during the period under study. Preliminary analysis also points out that the ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP) and their presidential candidate, Nana Akufo Addo including the opposition National Democratic Congress and their leader, John Dramani Mahama, spent thousands of dollars on Facebook advertisements for extensive voter mobilisation.

Since the advent of digital activism, a lot of scholarly attention has been paid to the use of the internet, especially in Africa, for effecting changes in authoritarian rule. This chapter extends the work done by such scholars focusing on the work of African digital feminist activists, thus adding to the growing body of work on digital feminist activism. Drawing on interviews and analyses of digital material produced by four different feminist groups in Ghana, this chapter explores the variety of ideas that such digital feminists express, and the manner in which such ideas are received by the larger Ghanaian society. It argues that, indeed, digital feminists are making a positive impact on the larger Ghanaian society. While these digital feminists are subjected to cyberbullying, there are also many ways in which other individuals, both Ghanaian and otherwise are showing support for these women and their ideas. Increasingly, with particular reference to the newest of these groups, it is clear that they have institutional support for their views as evident in public and private organizations sanctioning employees or associates whose digital language they have critiqued. As with activism targeted at authoritarianism, digital activism targeted at patriarchy gets results, changing mindsets and penalizing sexist behaviors.