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The study examines the instigating factors behind the development of the local content (LC) policy in Ghana and it further investigates the accountability mechanisms that drive the LC policy implementation to promote sustainable development.

The study reports on a series of interviews with key actors using Institutional Theory and the application of Bovens’ (2010) Global Accountability Framework as a lens for discussion and interpretation of results.

The results reveal that two forces instigated LC policy enactment. One is external funding pressure from the Norwegian government and the World Bank. The other is the government’s engagement of Civil Society Organisations and other internal stakeholders to justify its activities and missions to signal adherence to impartiality, neutrality, and, to a lesser extent, solidarity. The analysis also reveals tensions in how accountability legitimacy relates to implementation of the LC policy. The study further discovers that while participation, transparency, monitoring, and evaluation are frequently invoked as de jure institutional legitimacy in oil and gas contracts, actual practices follow normative (de facto) institutionalism rather than what the LC policy law provides.

The interview had a relatively small number of participants, which can be argued to affect the study’s validity. Nevertheless, given the data saturation effect and the breadth of the data obtained from the respondents, this study represents a significant advancement in LC policy enactment knowledge, implementation mechanisms and enforcement in an emerging O&G industry.

The findings of this study suggest that future policy development in emerging economies should involve detailed consultations to increase decision-maker knowledge, process transparency and expectations. This will improve implementation and reduce stakeholder tension, conflict and mistrust.

The findings of this study build on earlier investigations into legitimacy, accountability and impression management in and outside the O&G sector. Also, the findings reveal the legitimising tactics used by O&G actors to promote local content sustainable development targets.

The implementation of BIM in the construction industry requires the coevolution of the various aspects of the BIM ecosystem. The human dimension is a very important dimension of the ecosystem necessary for BIM implementation. It is imperative to study this aspect of the BIM ecosystem both from the employer perspective and employee availability to provide insights for stakeholders (job seekers, employers, students, researchers, policymakers, higher education institutions, career advisors and curriculum developers) interested in the labour market dynamics.

To understand the BIM actor roles through the employer lens and the actual BIM actors in the construction industry, this study employed data mining of job adverts from LinkedIn and Mncjobs website. Content analysis was employed to gain insights into the data collected. Also, through a quantitative approach, the existing BIM actor roles were identified.

The study identified the employers' expectations of BIM actors; however, it is noted that the BIM actor recruitment space is still a loose one as recruiters put out open advertisements to get a large pool of applicants. From the data analysed, it is concluded that the BIM actor role is not an entirely new profession. However, it simply exists as construction industry professionals with BIM tool skills. Also, the professional development route is not well defined yet.

This study presents a realistic angle to BIM actor roles hence enhancing BIM implementation from the human perspective. The findings present an insight into the preferred against the actual.

It is no news that Chinese construction companies are highly motivated to invest in Africa in terms of infrastructure and construction. This influx from the beginning of the millennium marked a game-changer for infrastructural development in most African countries. This study, therefore, explores how the partnership between China and Africa has impacted the construction industry in Africa with a focus on Nigeria.

A quantitative approach was adapted for the study, which is descriptive in nature, and the primary participants of the study were core construction professionals within the Nigerian construction industry. Data was collected via a structured questionnaire, and multivariate statistics was used to analyse the data.

The study results revealed that the benefits accrued from Chinese participation in the African construction industry can be classified into three distinct categories: socio-economic development through construction, land transportation system development and construction industry development. The study further revealed that Chinese involvement has been most beneficial to the development of the land transportation system in Nigeria with more investment in the construction and maintenance of roads and railways.

The study will serve as a basis for making informed future decisions on Chinese participation in the Nigerian construction industry as it exposes the impacts of the relationship within the current system. The outcome of this study can be used to refocus the partnership to ensure the optimum development of the local construction industry. The government and other relevant agencies can use the findings from this study to ensure that there is sustainable growth in the local construction industry through Chinese participation.

The purpose of this paper is to determine the impact of private and public initiatives (financial literacy, entrepreneurship, remote work and government aid) on individual job loss and decrease in income during the COVID-19 pandemic in Peru.

The authors used an unbalanced panel data analysis with the National Household Survey for 2019–2020. The hypotheses are tested with a probit panel data model since the dependent variables are binary.

The study findings indicate that financial preparedness reduced the probability of having a decrease in income, but only to informal workers in metropolitan Lima. Furthermore, entrepreneurship helped mainly female informal workers to reduce their probability of becoming unemployed in metropolitan Lima. Besides, the implementation of remote work as a substitute of face-to-face work was not enough to avoid the decrease in income in the case of informal workers and it was only effective to avoid unemployment in the case of formal workers in metropolitan Lima. Finally, public aid proved to be instrumental in mitigating the decrease in income, but only to informal workers in Metropolitan Lima.

The study results only apply for the first year of the pandemic.

Policymakers should focus on increasing the financial preparedness of informal workers, especially in provinces.

Policymakers must expand unemployment benefits, and design public aid programs targeting informal workers in provinces.

This is the first study that analyses the impact of private and public initiatives on the decrease in income and unemployment situation of Peruvian individuals during the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The purpose of this paper is to identify the areas and logic of integration of different stakeholders using different methods and to analyse their applicability and challenges in practical projects. The main aim is to describe how these different methods impact value creation.

Action design research was carried out in a large hospital construction project where the first author acted as an “involved researcher” and the second author acted as an “outside researcher”. Two workshops were organised to evaluate the direct and indirect challenges and benefits of the applied four methods and to explain how different methods enable value creation.

All the studied methods provide good results in terms of usability and commitment to the aims of the project, thus delivering the direct benefits expected. Process, people and tools logic works well in this case project when applying the methods properly. Significant evidence was provided on secondary deliverables of the methods, and all analysed methods had a significant impact in the area of leading people, clarifying what “focus on people” means and how it is enabled.

Focus on people can be achieved through different operative methods if applied in the right way. It is necessary to select the most suitable methods based on all the direct and indirect deliverables.

This case project offered a platform to analyse integration methods in a real-life project using the collaborative contract method. The authors were able to participate in the analysis by taking action from the very beginning of the project in terms of training, learning, continuous development and coaching of these methods and evaluating the applicability.

Responding to the continuing separation of participants and researchers in LIS participatory research, a new methodology is proposed: action partnership research design (APRD). It is asserted that APRD can mitigate or remove the hierarchical structures often inherent in the research process, thus allowing for equal contribution from all.

Building on the bonded design (BD) methodology and informed by a scoping literature review conducted by the same authors, APRD is a human-centered research approach with the goal of empowering and valuing community partnerships. APRD originates from research investigating the use of participatory design methods to foster collaboration between two potentially disparate groups, firstly with adult researchers/designers and elementary school children, and secondly with university faculty and IT professionals.

To achieve this goal, in addition to BD techniques, APRD draws inspiration from elements of indigenous and decolonization research methodologies, particularly those with an emphasis on destabilizing power hierarchies and involving research participants as full partners.

APRD, which emerged from findings from previous participatory design studies, especially those of BD, is based on the premise of partnership, recognizing that each member of a design team, whether researcher or participant/user, has unique expertise to contribute. By considering participants/users as full research partners, APRD aims to flatten the hierarchies exhibited in some LIS participatory research methodologies, where participants are treated more like research subjects than partners.

This paper aims to highlight a broader definition of good building performance that goes beyond the traditional emphasis on technical aspects, only adopting the lens of the social construction of technology (SCOT) in the empirical space of the workplace sector. Several building performance evaluation (BPE) methods focus on technical aspects such as energy consumption, indoor environmental conditions and compliance with building regulations and standards. Technical aspects, albeit important goals, only embed a partial component of what buildings are expected to deliver. There is growing interest in considering the organisational and experiential expectations of building performance, particularly integrating various views of performance as expected by different user groups.

The paper adopts an archival research method to analyse the archive of the workplace consultants DEGW, particularly focusing on their work on London’s Broadgate development in the 1980s and the 1990s.

The findings reveal how voices from a pluralistic client organisation can be addressed to articulate a broad definition of building performance that integrates different viewpoints encompassing technical, organisational and experiential expectations. In DEGW’s work, the views on building performance of various stakeholders involved in the everyday use and management of buildings are identified without imposing predetermined agendas or research notions of performance. Particular emphasis is given to understanding clients as not a homogenous entity but consisting of different interest groups, which implies multiple conceptualisations of building performance and the building itself.

The performance expectations of a building vary between organisations and even within any organisation. Moreover, the needs of an organisation will change over time, and the BPE criteria need to be changed to ensure better alignment between organisations and the physical spaces they occupy. A critical reflection on the conceptualisation of “users” and “building” in BPE methods is required to create an integrated approach towards building performance.

The paper offers insights by adopting the theoretical lens of SCOT to explore an integrated approach to building performance that captures the varied needs of building users through the example of London’s Broadgate development.