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The study, within the Increasing Resilience of Cultural Heritage (ResCult) project, aims to support civil protection to prevent, lessen and mitigate disasters impacts on cultural heritage using a unique standardised-3D geographical information system (GIS), including both heritage and risk and hazard information.

A top-down approach, starting from existing standards (an INSPIRE extension integrated with other parts from the standardised and shared structure), was completed with a bottom-up integration according to current requirements for disaster prevention procedures and risk analyses. The results were validated and tested in case studies (differentiated concerning the hazard and type of protected heritage) and refined during user forums.

Besides the ensuing reusable database structure, the filling with case studies data underlined the tough challenges and allowed proposing a sample of workflows and possible guidelines. The interfaces are provided to use the obtained knowledge base.

The increasing number of natural disasters could severely damage the cultural heritage, causing permanent damage to movable and immovable assets and tangible and intangible heritage. The study provides an original tool properly relating the (spatial) information regarding cultural heritage and the risk factors in a unique archive as a standard-based European tool to cope with these frequent losses, preventing risk.

The paper aims to provide an understanding of how the transfer of progressive human resource management (HRM) practices may or may fail to render multinational enterprises (MNEs) institutional entrepreneurs creating change in job quality and decent work to underprivileged workers in the low-pay retail sector in Japan.

The paper draws on survey questionnaire data and interviews with workers and management in a foreign retailer in Japan.

The findings suggest that even where MNEs may provide some measurable material improvements in job quality, in this case equal pay for equal work, the total outcomes are nevertheless shaped by institutional context and constraints. In this case, the improvement in pay was intertwined with flexibility demands that were possible to meet for some workers but not others. In particular, women with care responsibilities and competing demands on their time were not able to experience “decent work” in the same way as others.

The study had a relatively low response rate, due to lack of discretion over time experienced by workers in Japan, as well as limited data on program outcomes, with interviews conducted with a small number of participants.

The study suggests that spaces and opportunities exist for MNEs to diverge from dominant practices in given host country locations and exercise a level of agency as emissaries of decent work but successful outcomes require a very thorough understanding of individual worker experiences within the institutional constraints of given environments.

The study offers insights into the complexities of initiatives by MNEs to contribute to the provision of decent work, particularly for workers in underprivileged positions including women in low-pay sectors such as retail, as firm-level practices lead to variable outcomes when filtered through local institutions.

The study brings together a focus on firm-level practices that inform much of the international HRM and international management scholarship with an emphasis on the experiences of workers, which is pursued in the sociology of work, to investigate whether MNEs can be actors in the realising of the Sustainable Development Goals around decent work.

This research was conducted to understand how vulnerable communities used social media (SM) tools to face the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. Affected by the lack of information and the absence of effective public policies, residents from slums in the city of Rio de Janeiro displayed new and unexpected uses to SM tools to tackle the health and socio-economic impacts of the pandemic.

The research methodology consisted of a qualitative, exploratory study, combining a series of in-depth interviews with the analysis of various posts, containing videos and texts, extracted from SM during the first six months of the pandemic. The data were collected in the context of 10 different communities in Rio de Janeiro city.

In the context of the pandemic, people combined different uses of SM not only to inform themselves and communicate with others but also to articulate and execute fundraising and food donation strategies within vulnerable communities. Accordingly, this SM use is characterized by improvisation, learning by doing and building resilience, which are all constructs related to the concept of bricolage. Users had no specific SM knowledge, and adjusted these technological tools to emergent new activities in practice, which is characteristic of sociomaterial process. In addition to emphasizing the importance of context for the emergence of the phenomenon, this work also highlights reliability, validity and authority as characteristics related to the citizen-led participation approach that was observed.

Future research can develop approaches based on pandemic sociomaterial bricolage (PSB) aspects, which could guide governments and practitioners on building innovative solutions for the use of SM by the population, especially in emergency situations.

This study proposes a framework, termed PSB, to represent SM usage promoted by the pandemic context, which emerged from the triangulation of empirical data and an analysis based on the concepts of bricolage and sociomateriality.