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Over the past decade, architecture, construction and engineering (ACE) industries have been evolving from traditional practices into more current, interdisciplinary and technology integrated methods. Intricate digital tools and mobile computing such as computational design, simulation and immersive technologies, have been extensively used for different purposes in this field. Immersive technologies such as augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) have proven to be very advantageous while the research is in its infancy in the field. Therefore, this study aims to develop an immersive pedagogical framework that can create a more engaging teaching and learning environment and enhance students' skill in the ACE field.

This study developed a BIM-enabled VR-based pedagogical framework for the design studio teaching in architectural courses, using a qualitative approach. A case study method was then used to test and validate this developed framework. Architectural Master Design Studio B, at Queensland University of Technology (QUT) was selected as the case study, with South Bank Corporation (SBC) as the industry partner and stakeholder of this project.

The practicality and efficiency of this framework was confirmed through increased students' and stakeholders' engagement. Some of the additional outcomes of this digitally enhanced pedagogical framework are as follows: enhanced students' engagement, active participation, collective knowledge construction and increased creativity and motivation.

The results have proven that the developed technology-enhanced and digitally enabled teaching pedagogy and framework can be successfully implemented into architectural design studios. This can bridge the existing gap between the technological advancements in ACE industry and higher education teaching and learning methods and outcomes. It is also expected that such innovative pedagogies will future-proof students' skill set as the future generation of architects and built environment workers. A major limitation of this framework is accessibility to the required hardware such as HMD, controllers, high-capacity computers and so on. Although the required software is widely accessible, particularly through universities licencing, the required hardware is yet to be readily and widely available and accessible.

The result of this study can be implemented in the architectural design studios and other ACE related classrooms in higher educations. This can bridge the existing gap between the technological advancements in ACE industry, and higher education teaching and learning methods and outcomes. It is also expected that such innovative pedagogies will future-proof students' skill set.

Such technology-enhanced teaching methods have proven to enhance students' engagement, active participation, collective knowledge construction and increased creativity and motivation.

Despite the advancement of digital technologies in ACE industry, the application of such technologies and tools in higher education context are not yet completely explored and still scarce. Besides, there is still a significant gap in the body of knowledge about developing teaching methods and established pedagogies that embrace the usage of such technologies in the design and architecture curricula.

A sense of collective free-thinking with tangible goals makes co-creation an enlightening experience. Yet despite the freedom and organic flow of the methodology, there remain barriers to deploying co-creation in the real-world context. The aim was to understand the barriers and solutions to co-creation, reflect on applying co-creation in practice and co-create an applicable framework for co-creation.

These reflections and conceptual developments were completed using a Participatory Action Research Approach through the co-creation of the Erasmus+ funded Co-creating Welfare course.

Results presented are centric to the experiences in the United Kingdom but led to application at an international level. Problem formulation led to solutions devised about who should co-create, what co-creation aims to achieve, how to receive management buy-in, co-creating beyond the local face to face context and evaluation.

The Three Co’s Framework is proposed using the outline of: Co-Define, Co-Design and Co-Refine. Those who take part in co-creation processes are recommended to be called co-creators, with less focus on “empowerment” and more about facilitating people to harness the power they already have. Utilising online and hybrid delivery methods can be more inclusive, especially in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The use of co-creation needs to be evaluated more moving forwards, as well as the output co-created.

This paper uses the complex proportionality assessment (COPRAS) method to examine the driving factors of Industry 4.0 (I4) technologies for lean implementation in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).

Adopting I4 technology is imperative for SMEs seeking to maintain competitiveness within the manufacturing sector. A thorough understanding of the driving factors involved is required to support the implementation of I4. For this objective, the multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) tool COPRAS was used to efficiently analyze and rank these driving elements based on their importance. These factors can help small and medium-sized firms (SMEs) prioritize their efforts and investments in I4 technologies for lean implementation.

This study evaluates and prioritizes the nine I4 factors according to the perceptions of SMEs. The ranking offers significant insights into the factors SMEs consider more accessible and effective when adopting I4 technologies.

The author's original contribution is to examine I4 driving factors for lean implementation in SMEs using COPRAS.

The COVID-19 pandemic found deliberate and idiosyncratic adoption of telecommuting and other flexibility practices across industries. With the pandemic waning, many organizations adopted various models for employee work locations. Based on Self-Determination Theory and Social Comparison Theory, the authors examine the impact of the dissonance between employee preference for their work location and enforced work location norms and its impact on general well-being and organizational commitment.

The authors’ empirical study is based on a sample of 881 respondents across multiple industries in India over six months of the COVID pandemic. The authors use PLS-SEM for data analysis to examine the model and the moderating influence of individual resilience on control at work.

The authors find that increased dissonance between work locations reduces general well-being, control and work. Further, higher individual resilience reduces the impact of this dissonance on control at work.

The study informs policy and practices that choice of work location is important for employees to feel a higher sense of control, impacting their affective commitment and general well-being. While implementation of policies across an organization for varying job roles and complexities presents a challenge, practitioners may ignore this need of employees at their peril, as employees are likely to demonstrate lower well-being, engagement and organizational commitment and eventually leave.

This study is significant as it provides relevant scholarship based on the COVID-19 pandemic, guiding practice on future ways of working. This study further supports the impact of an individual's sense of control on where work is done. The authors build a strong theoretical foundation to justify the impact of the lack of autonomy in the emerging working norms on employees' general well-being and organizational commitment.

The aim of this study is to explore employees’ perceptions of the role of human resources (HR) departments in Jordanian organisations and the reasons behind these perceptions.

Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 23 employees who work at different organisations in various industrial sectors in Jordan.

Employees perceive HR roles as: providing transactional services (traditional); working as business partners to facilitate other departments’ roles (limited). Perceptions of HR professionals and the role of HR departments were generally negative, due to: societal-cultural norms and stereotypes of HR departments and HR professionals; the role of Wasta (a localised form of favouritism) in affecting HR practices; employees’ personal experiences with HR departments and HR professionals at their workplace; and the non-availability of human resources management (HRM) degrees in Jordan.

Limited research has explored varying perceptions about HR departments and their impacts on business contexts in emerging markets, including Jordan. This research is unique as it identifies the reasons behind common misconceptions of HR roles in Jordanian organisations. It extends beyond existing literature by integrating employees’ perceptions of the role of the HR departments to understand the consequences for HR practices’ operational effectiveness. It also pioneers consideration of societal culture in shaping these perceptions, which helps us build theories for future testing and generalisation purposes in other contexts with cultural commonalities. This study also highlights the current state of HRM development in Jordan, which helps in setting the agenda for future research in the country and the Middle East and North Africa region.

The global organic market is expanding, and India is in an advantageous position with the highest number of organic producers worldwide. Although many articles have been published on the value chain of organic products from India, no significant studies were found related to the value chain analysis of organic pineapple. This study aims to know the various aspects of the organic pineapple value chain, i.e. network structure, value addition at various stages of chain actors, value chain upgradation and governance structure.

The study is explorative in nature, and primary data from various actors involved in the chain is collected and analyzed. Primary data through a structured schedule and interviews are collected from farmers and traders. A multistage sampling plan has been adopted. A sample of 75 farmers was randomly selected from the study area. For traders, snowball sampling is used due to the nonavailability of the sampling frame. A total of 10 commission agents, 10 wholesalers and 20 retailers were thus selected for the study. For objectives 1 and 4, descriptive statistics are used. For objective 2, a modified formula described by (Murthy et al., 2007) is used to calculate farmer’s net price and marketing margin. For objective 3, Garrett’s ranking technique is used to identify various constraints in upgrading the organic pineapple value chain in Assam.

This study shows that the value chain of organic pineapple is in the initial stage and proper value addition is required to have a complete regulated value chain. Six marketing channel is identified, and products are sold through farmer producer company only in case of export and trade with distant buyers. The marketing efficiency for channels II and III is 1.69 and 0.99, respectively. The degree of value addition for channel II in the hands of the commission agent, wholesaler and retailer is 11.65%, 4.56% and 12.60%, respectively. In the various constraints in upgrading the value chain, farmers rank “policy support” as a major constraint. In the governance structure, trade with distant traders and exports is done formally and through written contracts.

The study performs value chain analysis of organic pineapple in Cachar district of Assam, India for the year January 2022–January 2023. Future studies are encouraged related to various aspects of the supply chain and value chain of organic pineapple from various northeastern states of India and other states.

The study will help policymakers and key actors to know the existing chain and frame a well-coordinated and regulated value chain.

This study is one of the first study to explore the value chain of organic pineapple of Cachar district of Assam, India. Implementation of these findings can help various actors to strengthen the existing value chain.

The process of elaboration of the symbolic universe leads to important insights into the role of symbols in understanding human reasoning. Symbols become explanatory axes of universal global realities. Myths were constructed on these explanatory paths forming a superstructure of all belief systems with paraconsistent logic for the symbolism and a symbolic syntax. Myths and symbols are to be found in all cultures. Some of the most powerful and influential ones occur in popular culture since these often have the greatest immediate social impact.

Semiotic and logical development of the symbols is in mythical systems. The dissolution of the myth and the degradation of the myth's symbols constitute a long-drawn-out process in modern Western society and wherever s influence reaches. Myth is a story that may contain symbolic elements, but compared to the symbols or images of the exceptional, myth is characterized by a “story.”

Starting from a minimal definition to define myths and propose the following definition: Myth is a traditional tale that relates memorable and exemplary actions of extraordinary personages in prestigious and distant times, and myths have various forms and functions, perhaps some more clearly defined with a signifier than others, and different approaches can be combined for a better understanding of the myths. Dispensing with such simplistic assertions, and starting from a minimal definition to define myth, myth is a traditional tale that relates memorable and exemplary actions of extraordinary personages in prestigious and distant times.

Any symbol F originates in a unit that has two aspects and functions when the unit is restored. Thus, the symbol is rather “for something” than “of something” and the symbolic objects express the objects' correspondence in one unit or hendiadys. One semantic characteristic of symbols is “recognition”. The symbol F reveals a reality by means of the homogenous association of the signifier and significance in the symbol's constitution; although reality is separate, there is a homogeneous relation between the symbolizing and symbolized in symbolization.

The purpose of the present paper is to provide a systematic overview of dimensions that need to be enfolded or considered in microfinance policies and strategies designs as well as impact studies aiming to empower or assess the empowerment of a specific category of women, namely women entrepreneurs. Afterward, the study aims to suggest some directions for future studies.

To meet its purpose, the paper applies the systematic review approach. The applied methodology follows guidelines for systematic reviews of social and economic interventions as set out by the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analysis (PRISMA). More specifically, the authors examine 87 empirical papers from 6 databases investigating the impact of microfinance institutions on the empowerment of women entrepreneurs.

Overall, findings of the study suggest that dimensions of the empowerment of women entrepreneurs are formed and conditioned by normative, cognitive and regulative institutional logics. Additionally, the systematic review suggests key research avenues and calls for more inclusive empirical studies in terms of geographical coverage, microfinance services/products assessed and method designs applied.

Findings of the current review provide clear theoretical contribution and useful practical implications in the field of microfinance and the empowerment of women entrepreneurs. On the one hand, the study suggests to scholars key avenues for future studies likely to bring new insights in terms of theory, context and methods. On the other hand, this study extents the understanding of microfinance practitioners on the concept of women empowerment as the field of female entrepreneurship is concerned. This implication is likely to enable the design of appropriate microfinance strategies and policies, allowing women entrepreneurs to achieve an overall empowerment.

The present paper contributes to the debate around the multidimensionality of the concept, “women empowerment.” The multidimensional nature of the addressed concept is well established in the existing literature. However, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, no study has provided a conceptual analysis of empowerment dimensions of a particular category of women, namely women entrepreneurs. Unlike most of the studies assuming that all women face identical challenges, the present paper brings new insights on the topic as it is built on a different assumption. The paper takes ground from the institutional theory and applies it to the specific case of female entrepreneurship.

This paper aims to shed light on the spatial constraints of sex work in Greece. The objective is twofold: to illustrate the intertemporal stance of the Greek state to push sex work at the edge of both the city and the law produces sex workers as always already marginal subjects and to identify how a spatial-based understanding of sex work could help in acknowledging sex workers’ full community citizenship.

This article examines the legal geographies of sex work in modern and contemporary Greece. The author is a doctoral student in critical jurisprudence with a professional background in urban planning law, who also works voluntarily with Athens-based sex worker’s organizations. Law’s materialization within space (Bennet and Layard, 2015, p. 406), namely, the implication of law in the discursive and material production of place, is examined through archival research with primary and secondary sources, including legislations and LGBT publications such as Amfi and Kráximo from the 1980s and 1990s found in the Archives of Contemporary Social History (ASKI) in Athens. Additionally, as the author is currently conducting fieldwork with people who are working or have worked in the past in sex in Greece as a part of her PhD dissertation, the paper contains data provided by ten interlocutors to highlight their own personal experience. The researcher has used the critical oral history method, as it is committed to recording first-hand knowledge of experiences of marginalized community members who are often unheard or untold, with the additional goals of contextualizing these stories to reveal power differences and inequities (Lemley, 2017, Rickard, 2003).

The paper provides insight into how regulationism establishes the brothel – a metonymy of prostitution – as a heterotopia within the urban space. Contemporary approaches, such as LULUs and broken window policies, are used to indicate the historically marginal placement of sex work.

The interviews presented here were conducted in the summer of 2022, in the context of the author’s PhD research. Despite her six years of activist-level involvement with sex workers’ rights organizations, due to ethical constraints, only the findings of interviews conducted up to the writing of this paper are presented here, while details of private discussions with members of these organizations are omitted.

The paper examines a significant and timely matter of place making and spatial justice. Unlike earlier research on prostitution in Greece that focused on the brothel either as a heterotopia or as an undesirable land use, the novelty of this paper is that it highlights the intersections between policing, planning, public hygiene, anti-immigration policies around the regulation of the sex market. By critically discussing the implications of the de facto illegality of sex work in Greece, the study highlights the importance of including the voices of sex workers in decision-making and contributes to the debate around the decriminalization of sex work in Greece.

This study aims to help understand individual donors’ preferences over different designs of humanitarian–business partnerships in managing humanitarian operations and to help understand if donors’ preferences align with their actual donation behavior.

Choice-based conjoint analysis was used to understand donation preferences for partnership designs, and a donation experiment was performed using real money to understand the alignment of donors’ preferences with actual donation behavior.

The results show that partnering with the business sector can be a valuable asset for humanitarian organizations in attracting individual donors if these partnerships are managed well in terms of partnership strategy, partnership history and partnership report and disclosure. In particular, the study finds that the donation of services and products from businesses corporations to humanitarian organizations are preferable to individual donors, rather than cash. Furthermore, donors’ preferences are not necessarily aligned with actual donation behavior.

The results highlight the importance of presenting objective data on projects to individual donors. The results also show that donors value the provision of services and products by business corporations to humanitarian operations.

Partnerships between humanitarian organizations and business corporations are important for the success of humanitarian operations. However, little is known about which partnership designs are most preferable to individual donors and have the biggest chance of being supported financially.