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This study examines how circular economy (CE) performance indicators are constructed in an urban context characterised by a multitude of conflicting interests and visions of urban development. It explores the process of constructing a shared consensus about the performance indicators in conditions of low contractibility, where intervention objectives and outcomes are not easily quantifiable because the object is ambiguous and cannot be fully specified in advance.

The construction of performance indicators at the urban level is examined through the lens of an action net. Using group interviews, observations and documentary analysis, this study investigates the case of a CE initiative in the city of Milan.

The study demonstrates that in cases of low contractibility, the development of CE solutions requires actions that span across organisational boundaries, organised in an action net. As the action net unfolds, it is closely knotted with the construction of performance indicators, indicating a co-constitutive relationship between the two processes.

This interdisciplinary study contributes to the public sector accounting literature by exploring the complexity of performance indicator construction at the urban level. It further recognises performance measurement in cities as a dynamic and flexible process, in which the interconnected actions and involvement of multiple actants shape the composition of the indicators.

This paper investigates school library services in the digital age for students with dyslexia and explores the impact of current library services on students’ learning.

A qualitative study with semi-structured interviews was designed according to the LAFE (Look and listen, Assistance and accessibility, Format and fit, and Environment) framework for learners with dyslexia and the 5E instructional model and conducted with 11 school librarians.

Results indicated that participants lacked knowledge of dyslexia for appropriate library services. Awareness, IT skills, school administration, funding and parental attitudes would influence the library’s tailored services to dyslexic children, despite the rich resources in these participants’ libraries, including paperbacks, digital resources and electronic devices. Adaptations are necessary to provide accessible services, especially by applying digital technologies, and school libraries can positively impact students’ reading interests, promote knowledge inquiry and strengthen information literacy skills.

While students with dyslexia spend significant time in schools, limited studies focus on school library services in the digital age, especially in Asia. This study fills the gap by systematically exploring the issue with the 5E instructional model.

The aim of this paper is to empirically investigate whether social contacts can mediate the way in which current unemployment impacts future unemployment.

We use 2006–2017 data from the Household Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) survey and a dynamic random-effects model to describe the evolution of individual unemployment status over time.

Once controlled for the local context where individuals live and create friendships, we find that above-average social contacts reduce unemployment persistence. However, social contacts seem to be slightly less effective in deprived neighborhoods. These findings are consistent with the idea that individuals obtain information about job opportunities through a network of social contacts, and unemployment may lead to a decay of social capital, making it more difficult to find employment in future periods. Our results also show that neighborhood deprivation increases individual unemployment risk, while above-average neighborhood cohesion reduces the probability of unemployment in deprived neighborhoods.

Although many studies have been published on unemployment persistence, to the best of the author's knowledge, this is the first study quantifying the impact of social contacts on unemployment persistence. The study also offers fresh empirical evidence on the impact of neighborhood characteristics on unemployment risk.

The authors' work aims to identify the employer-specific drivers of the college (or university) wage gap, which has been identified as one of the major determinants of the dynamics of overall wage and income inequality in the past decades. The authors focus on three employer-level features that can be associated with asymmetries in the employment relation orientation adopted for college and non-college-educated employees: (1) size, (2) the share of standard employment and (3) the pervasiveness of incentive pay schemes.

The authors' establishment-level analysis (data from the Basic Survey on Wage Structure (BSWS), 2005–2018) focusses on Japan, an economy characterised by many unique economic and institutional features relevant to the aims of the authors' analysis. The authors use an adjusted measure of firm-specific college wage premium, which is not biased by confounding individual and establishment-level factors and reflects unobservable characteristics of employees that determine the payment of a premium. The authors' empirical methods account for the complexity of the relationships they investigate, and the authors test their baseline outcomes with econometric approaches (propensity score methods) able to address crucial identification issues related to endogeneity and reverse causality.

The authors' findings indicate that larger establishment size, a larger share of regular workers and more pervasive implementation of IPSs for college workers tend to increase the college wage gap once all observable workers, job and establishment characteristics are controlled for. This evidence corroborates the authors' hypotheses that a larger establishment size, a higher share of regular workers and a more developed set-up of performance pay schemes for college workers are associated with a better capacity of employers to attract and keep highly educated employees with unobservable characteristics that justify a wage premium above average market levels. The authors provide empirical evidence on how three relevant establishment-level characteristics shape the heterogeneity of the (adjusted) college wage observed across organisations.

The authors' contribution to the existing knowledge is threefold. First, the authors combine the economics and management/organisation literature to develop new insights that underpin the authors' testable empirical hypotheses. This enables the authors to shed light on employer-level drivers of wage differentials (size, workforce composition, implementation of performance-pay schemes) related to many structural, institutional and strategic dimensions. The second contribution lies in the authors' measure of the “adjusted” college wage gap, which is calculated on the component of individual wages that differs between observationally identical workers in the same establishment. As such, the metric captures unobservable workers' characteristics that can generate a wage premium/penalty. Third, the authors provide empirical evidence on how three relevant establishment-level characteristics shape the heterogeneity of the (adjusted) college wage observed across organisations.

This study aims to explore how student recruitment practitioners at regional Australian universities strategise student recruitment efforts in Thailand. There is scarce research addressing regional universities, with prior studies focusing on metropolitan universities. Similarly, most prior studies have focused on high-volume markets, with little research exploring emerging markets such as Thailand.

Semi-structured interviews were conducted with student recruitment practitioners from regional universities that were responsible for recruiting Thai students. Thematic analysis was conducted to identify key themes.

Regional universities lack strategic ambidexterity in their approach to recruiting international students. They viewed Thailand as requiring longer term investment and were unwilling to dedicate their limited resources towards developing this market at the expense of other markets that would yield enrolments to contribute towards short-term targets.

Implications are provided with relevance to the student recruitment practitioner, with strategic ambidexterity discussed.

The paper fills a gap in the research by exploring international student recruitment and contextualising both regional universities and Thailand as a recruitment market. This study provides useful considerations that may be relevant to other emerging markets.

With the rise in wine consumption, accurate wine price forecasts have significantly impacted restaurant and hotel purchasing decisions and inventory management. This study aims to develop a precise and effective wine price point and interval forecasting model.

The proposed forecast model uses an improved hybrid kernel extreme learning machine with an attention mechanism and a multi-objective swarm intelligent optimization algorithm to produce more accurate price estimates. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first attempt at applying artificial intelligence techniques to improve wine price prediction. Additionally, an effective method for predicting price intervals was constructed by leveraging the characteristics of the error distribution. This approach facilitates quantifying the uncertainty of wine price fluctuations, thus rendering decision-making by relevant practitioners more reliable and controllable.

The empirical findings indicated that the proposed forecast model provides accurate wine price predictions and reliable uncertainty analysis results. Compared with the benchmark models, the proposed model exhibited superiority in both one-step- and multi-step-ahead forecasts. Meanwhile, the model provides new evidence from artificial intelligence to explain wine prices and understand their driving factors.

This study is a pioneering attempt to evaluate the applicability and effectiveness of advanced artificial intelligence techniques in wine price forecasts. The proposed forecast model not only provides useful options for wine price forecasting but also introduces an innovative addition to existing forecasting research methods and literature.

This preliminary study aims to examine the use of a co-designed immersive virtual reality intervention programme in improving access to health care for people with intellectual disability.

A co-production approach was used to design a virtual reality intervention in collaboration with people with intellectual disability, their families and carers. A mixed-method single sample pre-test-post-test design examined using a virtual reality intervention simulating health-care environments to improve access of attending health-care appointments. Qualitative feedback was used to understand participants’ experience and opinions of using the digital technology.

The study found that the intervention did help people access health-care appointment and reduced their fear. Improvements were also found in quality-of-life post intervention. Positive feedback was provided from participants on using digital technologies indicating the novelty of the approach and potential further applications.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study which has used virtual reality to support people with intellectual disability access health care.

This paper analyses changes in the activity pattern of Damascus city from late modern era (late Ottoman rule) to the contemporary era. The research objective is to explore the impact of the socio-historical process on the evolving morphological structure of the urban core and to draw implications for post-war reconstruction.

Space Syntax methodology was employed to trace the historical and morphological changes in the urban core of Damascus. The timeframe was divided into five periods covering the city's socio-political transformation and five maps depicting these periods. Local and global integration measures were used to analyse the changes in the urban core across each period. Normalised angular choice (NACH) measure was used to identify the changes in the city planning system.

The results revealed that the urban core corresponded to the main streets, which had socio-economic importance across history. However, introducing a new planning system influenced by Western planning ideals led to the creation of multi-morphological patterns. At the city level, the study found that the urban core was more accessible in the preplanned areas, while the organic expansion of the informal settlements was exclusive of the core area. At the local level, some informal settlements showed an intense core. Intelligibility analysis revealed that earlier periods showed considerably higher values, implying declines in the ease of navigation of the city over time.

This study did not account for the political, economic and cultural factors that could shape morphological changes in Damascus. In addition, the study adopted historical reference points to understand the morphological changes, as high-quality geospatial data was not available to monitor the recent post-war situation.

The research findings give a foundation for a more contextualised historical understanding of spatial structure and changes, which can contribute to the post-war reconstruction and redevelopment of Damascus city.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this paper is the first to trace historical spatial changes in Damascus from a space syntax approach, weaving together socio-historical and configurational studies. In doing so, it shows how historically informed and spatially aware urban planning and design policies can support policymakers and built environment professionals in planning and redevelopment.

In response, this study developed a mathematical and computational method, through spatial configurations with justified plan graph (JPG), drawn from Space Syntax to extract essential information of the spatial topology of 13 valuable traditional courtyard houses located in Toon historical city of Iran.

Historical vernacular housing has always been designed to incorporate and reflect the local lifestyle and cultural conditions. “Courtyard” is a fundamental part of traditional Iranian houses. This traditional building type includes a walled boundary and a complex of open, semi-enclosed and enclosed spaces. This study investigates the traditional houses in Toon historical town. Toon is one of the ancient towns in southeast Iran, including old courtyard houses in its heritage context. The spatial influence of the courtyard contributes to the formation of this famous architectural type.

The results show the remarkable impact of this space on dominating the plan of traditional Toon houses configuration compared to other spaces in all cases. Furthermore, spatial accessibility has changed over time, and the Safavid period had a higher level of integration and lower level of accessibility (mean i = 7.03) rather than the Qajar period (mean i = 6.34); also, privacy has decreased progressively.

The knowledge of characteristics of this historical architecture needs to be gathered for the preservation and conservation of the built heritage. Hence, the principle behind traditional Iranian courtyards was investigated to recognize the difference between the spatial influence of the courtyard and other spaces and the changes in the courtyard over time.