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Avoided emissions refer to greenhouse gas emission reductions that are a result of using a product or are emission removals due to a decision or an action. Although there is no uniform standard for calculating avoided emissions, market actors have started referring to avoided emissions as “Scope 4” emissions. By default, making a claim about Scope 4 emissions gives an appearance that this Scope of emissions is a natural extension of the existing and accepted Scope-based emissions accounting framework. The purpose of this study is to explore the implications of this assumed legitimacy.

Via a desktop review and interviews, we analyse extant Scope 4 company reporting, associated accounting methodologies and the practical implications of Scope 4 claims.

Upon examination of Scope 4 emissions and their relationship with Scopes 1, 2 and 3 emissions, we highlight a dynamic and interdependent relationship between quantification, commensuration and standardization in emissions accounting. We find that extant Scope 4 assessments do not fit the established framework for Scope-based emissions accounting. In line with literature on the territorializing nature of accounting, we call for caution about Scope 4 claims that are a distraction from the critical work of reducing absolute emissions.

We examine the implications of assumed alignment and borrowed legitimacy of Scope 4 with Scope-based accounting because Scope 4 is not an actual Scope, but a claim to a Scope. This is as an act of accounting territorialization.

The authors extend the literature on decoupling by analyzing the microlevel effects of institutionalized practices within the framework of international standards. This study investigates the specific informal management practices that decision-makers embrace in order for organizations to achieve ISO 9001 certification without all regulations being adopted and followed according to the standard's original design and purpose.

As the basis for its research framework, this paper adopts the neo-institutional theory. The research employs the comparative case study method and draws its data from a sample of 21 ISO 9001:2008 certified organizations in Bulgaria.

The results show ambivalent behavior toward the ISO 9001 standard's formal requirements. This behavior is expressed through targeted noncompliance with (certain) regulations and procedures regarding top management commitment, as well as documented information which are formally adopted within the organization and certified as complying with the standard.

The study has implications for future research into decoupling, organizational learning, and standardization. In terms of limitations, the authors examined the process of decoupling from a micro perspective in Bulgaria only. Noncompliance with international standards such as the ISO 9000 may exhibit specific regional or national characteristics.

Findings from this research encourage the International Standards Organization to respond to previous calls for revising the formal structure of ISO 9000 and other international management standards by considering a more flexible and liberal point of view.

As opposed to previous studies which have explored decoupling from a macro perspective, this study focuses on how the internal constraints imposed by the standard's universal requirements are being mitigated at a micro level. That is, the authors provide a detailed account of the specific informal management practices which managers (deliberately) adopt in order to achieve certification without fully integrating the formal criteria imposed by international standards (e.g. ISO 9001).

Regarding human resource and labour relations management, academia focuses mainly on cities; however, rural areas are an integral part of China's economic structure. This study focuses on the movie projection industry in China's rural areas and explores how human resource practices (HRPs) are transformed and the labour process is reconstructed in digital transformation.

We adopt a case study of a rural movie projection company. The company's HRPs reconstructed the labour process of movie projection, and they have been promoted as national standards. Data were collected from in-depth interviews, files and observations.

Rural movie projection companies combine high-performance and paternalistic HRPs in the media industry's digital transformation. HRPs and digital technology jointly reconstruct the labour process. First, the HRPs direct labour process practices towards standardisation. Second, the digital supervision platform guides the control style from simple to technical, placing projectionists under pressure while increasing management efficiency. Third, rural movies made using digital technology have disenchanted rural residents. Accordingly, the conventional relationships between the “country and its citizens,” “individuals themselves,” and “models and individuals” have been removed, and a new relationship between “individuals themselves” is formed thanks to the novel HRPs.

This research plays a crucial role in exposing researchers to the labour process of rural movie projection, which is significant in China but often ignored by Western academia and advances the Chinese contextualisation of research on labour relations.

Drawing on a dynamic capability view, this study develops a decision support model that determines the most suitable configuration of strategies and challenges to adopt additive manufacturing (AM) to expedite digital transformation and performance improvement of the surgical and medical device (SMD) supply chain.

To investigate the research objective, a multi-method and multi-study research design was deployed using quality function deployment and fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis.

The study finds that only resilience strategies or negation (i.e. minimisation) of challenges are not enough; instead, a configuration of resilience strategies and negation of challenges is highly significant in enhancing performance.

SMD supply chain decision-makers will find the decision support model presented in this study as beneficial to be resilient against various challenges in the digital transformation of service delivery process.

This study builds new knowledge of the adoption of AM technology in the SMD supply chain. The decision support model developed in this study is unique and highly effective for fostering digital transformation and enhancing SMD supply chain performance.

Many economic, political and socio-cultural events in the 2020s have been strong headwinds for architecture, engineering and construction (AEC). Nevertheless, technological advancements (e.g. artificial intelligence (AI), big data and robotics) provide promising avenues for the development of AEC. This study aims to map the state of the literature on automation in AEC and thereby be of value not only to those researching automation and its composition of a variety of distinct technological and system classes within AEC, but also to practitioners and policymakers in shaping the future of AEC.

This review adopts scientometric methods, which have been effective in the research of large intra and interdisciplinary domains in the past decades. The full dataset consists of 1,871 articles on automation in AEC.

This overarching scientometric review offers three interdisciplinary streams of research: technological frontiers, project monitoring and applied research in AEC. To support the scientometric analysis, the authors offer a critical integrative review of the literature to proffer a multilevel, multistage framework of automation in AEC, which demonstrates an abundance of technological paradigm discussions and the inherent need for a holistic managerial approach to automation in AEC.

The authors underline employee well-being, business sustainability and social growth outcomes of automation and provide several managerial implications, such as the strategic management approach, ethical management view and human resource management perspective. In doing so, the authors seek to respond to the Sustainable Development Goals proposed by the United Nations as this becomes more prevalent for the industry and all levels of society in general.

Housing provides constructed space for human activities. Literature indicates that housing impacts wealth, education attainment and health outcomes, among others. Because of its contributions to society, it is essential to develop and implement strategies that address the housing shortage experienced in most cities across the globe. This study aims to unpack the factors affecting housing production in the UK and chart the way forward.

In addressing this study's aim, an interprivitst approach was adopted and semi-structured interviews were conducted with 18 experienced professionals. Data were collected across the four nations of the UK (England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland).

The results indicated that the opportunistic behaviour of stakeholders is one of the main factors affecting housing production in the study area. Also, modern construction methods, collaborative practices, government intervention and affordable housing schemes were identified as key strategies for addressing housing production factors.

This study identified strategies for mitigating housing production issues that provide a focal point to all stakeholders keen on filling the housing shortage gap and improving productivity to channel their resources and effort accordingly.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is one of the first to empirically analyse the influencing factors on the housing gap in the UK from the perspective of the supply side to provide information that could lead towards closing the said gap.

In the last 3 decades, organization-wide programs and practices based on the Total Quality Management (TQM) philosophy have become central to continuous improvement (CI) strategy in both public and private enterprises. However, there is paradoxical evidence of TQM-firm performance linkage in non-Japanese contexts. This study presents a meta-analysis of empirical research on TQM-firm performance linkage and investigates the moderating influence of national cultural (NC) values on this relationship.

Meta-analytical procedures are adopted to analyse 364 effects accumulated from 135 independent samples across 31 nations, for 30,015 firm observations. Additionally, weighted least square (WLS) meta-regression is used to test the moderation effects of four NC dimensions based on the Global Leadership and Organizational Behavior Effectiveness (GLOBE) model.

The meta-analysis results reveal that the strengths of the association varied across five soft and hard TQM dimensions and three firm performance dimensions Meta-regression indicate that the effectiveness of the TQM program is high in cultures which reward collectivist behaviours, equity of power distribution and avoidance of ambiguity in rules/structures.

The study contributes to international operational management theory on cultural influences on the effectiveness of operations strategies and decisions.

Coastal zone ecological restoration project is of great significance to alleviate marine ecological degradation. Evaluating the effect of coastal ecological restoration projects and identifying the obstacle factors affecting their restoration level can provide an empirical basis for future Marine ecological restoration projects.

However, due to the initial stage of coastal zone ecological restoration projects, the actual monitoring data of coastal zone ecological restoration is relatively lacking. Based on the CRITIC-TOPSIS (combination of CRITIC method and TOPSIS method) method, combined with the subjective perception of the public and the actual data of the restoration project, this paper proposes an evaluation method of the coastal zone ecological restoration effect to obtain the specific implementation effect of the coastal zone ecological restoration project. The main obstacle factors affecting the evaluation of coastal ecological restoration effect are identified by using the obstacle degree model.

This paper conducted an empirical study on the restoration of sandy shoreline and coastal wetland in Qinhuangdao city. Based on the data of restoration projects and the subjective perception of ecological restoration by the public in Qinhuangdao city, the research results showed that the coastal zone ecological restoration effect of Qinhuangdao city was general. The quality of the restoration project and the public perception have an important influence on the evaluation of the restoration effect. Improving the quality of the restoration project, strengthening the public's participation in ecological restoration and allowing the public to better participate in the ecological restoration of the coastal zone can improve the effect of ecological restoration of the coastal zone in an all-round way.

The research results of this paper have a guiding role in the ecological restoration of coastal cities in the future, and also have a demonstration and reference role for the assessment of the effect of ecological restoration of coastal zones.

The study examined a wide range of proactive supply chain practices to demonstrate a cross-linkage among them and to understand their effects on both practitioners of previous decision-making models, frameworks, strategies and policies. Here, six supply chain practices are empirically evaluated based on 28 constructs to investigate a comprehensive model and confirm the connections for achieving performance and competence. The study presents a conceptual model and examines the influence of many crucial factors, i.e. supply chain collaboration, knowledge, information sharing, green human resources (GHR) management and lean-green (LG) practices on supply chain performance.

Structural equation modeling (SEM) examines the conceptual model and allied relationship. A sample of 175 respondents' data was collected to test the hypothesized relations. A resource based view (RBV) was adopted, and the questionnaires-based survey was conducted on the Indian supply chain professionals to explore the effect of LG and green human resource management (GHRM) practices on supply chain performance.

The study presented five constructs for supply chain capabilities (SCCA), five constructs for supply chain collaboration and integration (SCIN), four constructs for supply chain knowledge and information sharing (SCKI), five constructs for GHR, five constructs for LG practices (LGPR) and four constructs for lean-green SCM (LG-SCM) firm performance to be utilized for validation by the specific industry, company size and operational boundaries for attaining sustainability. The outcome emphasizes that SCCA positively influence GHRM, LG practices and LG supply chain firm performance. However, LG practices do not influence LG-SCM firm performance, particularly in India.

The study exploited multiple practices in a conceptual model to provide a widespread understanding of decision-making to assist in developing a holistic approach based on different practices for attaining organizational sustainability. The study stimulates the cross-pollination of ideas between many supply chain practices to better understand SCCA, SCIN, SCKI, GHRM and LG-SCM under a single roof for retaining organization performance.

Platform-based enterprises, as micro-entities in the platform economy, have the potential to effectively promote the low-carbon development of both supply and demand sides in the supply chain. Therefore, this paper aims to provide a multi-criteria decision-making method in a probabilistic hesitant fuzzy environment to assist platform-type companies in selecting cooperative suppliers for carbon reduction in green supply chains.

This paper combines the advantages of probabilistic hesitant fuzzy sets (PHFS) to address uncertainty issues and proposes an improved multi-criteria decision-making method called PHFS-DNMEREC-MABAC for aiding platform-based enterprises in selecting carbon emission reduction collaboration suppliers in green supply chains. Within this decision-making method, we enhance the standardization process of both the DNMEREC and MABAC methods by directly standardizing probabilistic hesitant fuzzy elements. Additionally, a probability splitting algorithm is introduced to handle probabilistic hesitant fuzzy elements of varying lengths, mitigating information bias that traditional approaches tend to introduce when adding values based on risk preferences.

In this paper, we apply the proposed method to a case study involving the selection of carbon emission reduction collaboration suppliers for Tmall Mart and compare it with the latest existing decision-making methods. The results demonstrate the applicability of the proposed method and the effectiveness of the introduced probability splitting algorithm in avoiding information bias.

Firstly, this paper proposes a new multi-criteria decision making method for aiding platform-based enterprises in selecting carbon emission reduction collaboration suppliers in green supply chains. Secondly, in this method, we provided a new standard method to process probability hesitant fuzzy decision making information. Finally, the probability splitting algorithm was introduced to avoid information bias in the process of dealing with inconsistent lengths of probabilistic hesitant fuzzy elements.