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The oil and gas industry form the main resource of economy in Iraq and constructing any project in such sectors requires a huge amount of expenses due to the unique requirements that oil and gas facilities required in such projects. Therefore, adopting an appropriate technological approach such as building information modeling (BIM) which is unfortunately not adopted yet in Iraq is essential to successfully deliver these projects. Thus, this paper aimed to introduce BIM to Iraq through Basra Oil Company (BOC) which is one of the biggest public oil and gas companies in Iraq.

The related literature of journals articles, conference proceedings and published reports have been reviewed. As a result, firstly: a hypothesis has been derived that is “If Basra Oil Company (BOC) adopts and applies BIM approach instead of the 2D approach currently used to manage its projects, the company can overcome several constraints in managing its projects that associated with such 2D traditional approach”; secondly: homogenous, consistence and reliable web-based questionnaire has been designed as its Cronbach’s alpha equal to 0.897 and 0.711 for BIM benefits and barriers, respectively. This questionnaire distributed to the BOC related professionals to test such hypothesis by investigating their readiness and accepting of BIM approach and to rank BIM barriers based on five-point Likert scale.

Based on the analysis using IBM SPSS Statistics 26 of 115 responses, almost 50% of the respondents had experience 11–15 years, while 22.6% had experience more than 15 years in oil and gas industry construction projects. Those participants were from diverse engineering majors that are: 4.3% Architectural Engineers, 31.3% Civil Engineers, 20% Mechanical Engineers, 22.6% Electrical Engineers and 21.7% from other engineering majors. The respondents’ departments demography was 16.5% of design department, 12.2% of construction department, 20.9% of Project Management Department, 12.2% of Maintenance department, 4.3% of HSE Department, 13% of Production Department and 20.9% of “Other Department.” The study resulted in 1: accepting BIM approach to be an alternative of current 2D-traditional approach used by the company to manage and construct its projects, since mean of collected data is (4.4332), Kruskal–Wallis H test significance values were 0.398 and 0.372; and ANOVA test significance values were 0.433 and 0.599 among Engineering Majors groups and Company’s Department groups, respectively. 2: Disclosed and sequenced BIM barriers in the company based on their criticality. 3: verifying reliably how BIM attributes are important to oil and gas construction projects in Iraq, 4: the company top management and company policies are the most critical potential factors to hinder or adopt and implement BIM in the company, 5: while cost is not seen a critical barrier to implement BIM in the oil and gas sector.

The limitation of this study is the excluding of decision makers of BOC, thus more profound future studies need to be conducted where top management and decision makers are involved, particularly the present study demonstrated that support of company top management is the most critical factor which can help the company to adopt (BIM).

The study concludes that BIM approach is valuable for managing projects in oil and gas sector in Iraq and identify the originality in output by using the research method. This noble study provides a leverage for enhanced research to adopt and implement building information modeling (BIM) in Iraq as the study originally demonstrates benefits and identifies the critical barriers in BIM implementation to push the boundaries toward adopt Digitalization and reduce CO2 emission in Iraqi oil and gas sector. The study can be used as evidence and platform to encourage professionals and practitioners to present more sophisticated tools of BIM in the oil and gas industry, especially for facility and operation management. These findings achieved via oil and gas experts, and it is first time to achieve such findings from a case study in Iraqi oil and gas sector.

The purpose of the current study is to assess Omani teachers’ performance on tasks related to the stages of engineering design. To achieve this, data from an engineering design test was used, and demographic variables that are correlated with this performance were identified.

This descriptive study employed a cross-sectional design and the collection of quantitative data. A sample of preservice science teachers from Sultan Qaboos University (SQU) (n = 70) participated in this study.

Findings showed low and moderate levels of proficiency related to the stages of engineering design. Differences between males and females in terms of performance on engineering design tasks were found, with females scoring higher overall on the assessment. Biology preservice teachers scored higher than teachers from the other two majors (physics and chemistry) in two subscales. There were also differences between teachers studying in the Bachelor of Science (BSc) program and the teacher qualification diploma (TQD) program.

This study provides an overview, in an Arab setting, of preservice science teachers’ proficiency with engineering design process (EDP) tasks. It is hoped that the results may lead to improved instruction in science teacher training programs in similar contexts. Additionally, this research demonstrates how EDP competency relates to preservice teacher gender, major and preparation program. Findings from this study will contribute to the growing body of research investigating the strengths and shortcomings of teacher education programs in relation to science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) education.

The purpose of the present study is to investigate the extent to which female and male university students from low-income countries express different entrepreneurial intentions. Specifically, the study empirically tests whether the anticipated financial returns to entrepreneurship versus salaried employment, or the perceived barriers to entrepreneurship exert a stronger influence on the relationship between gender and entrepreneurial intentions.

To test the relationship of anticipated rewards versus barriers to entrepreneurship on gender and entrepreneurial intention, the study uses new data from a field survey in Sierra Leone and employs multiple mediation analyses.

The authors find that the relationship between gender and entrepreneurial intentions operates through the mediator of perceptions of the financial returns to entrepreneurship but not perceived barriers to entrepreneurship.

The authors study intent, not behavior, acknowledging that cognitive intent is a powerful predictor of later behavior. Implications for future research on entrepreneurship in the African context are discussed.

The results from this study can be applied to both pedagogic and business settings in the field of entrepreneurship, with concrete implications for policymakers.

Results suggest that the gender gap in entrepreneurial intentions (EI) for science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM)- and business-educated students in Sierra Leone is predominantly influenced by anticipated financial returns to occupational choices, as opposed to perceived barriers to entrepreneurship, a more frequently studied antecedent to EI.

Prior studies on major customer relationships (i.e. embedded ties) focus mostly on the ties between a focal firm and its immediate customers, hindering the understanding of the influence of indirect ties (both upstream and downstream) on a focal firm's operational performance. In this study, the authors analyze how a focal firm's upstream and downstream connectedness and network location affect its productive efficiency.

Utilizing Compustat segment files, the authors constructed large-scale major customer networks covering the period 2007–2013. The authors applied a fixed-effect panel stochastic frontier model to conduct estimation. Moreover, the authors applied an endogenous panel stochastic frontier model to ensure the robustness of the main analysis.

The authors found that a focal firm's upstream and downstream connectedness both have a positive influence on a firm's productive efficiency, whereas a focal firm's centeredness in the major customer network has a negative influence on productive efficiency. Moreover, it was found that centeredness lessens the positive influences of upstream and downstream connectedness on productive efficiency. The post hoc analysis further confirmed that a focal firm's indirect ties, both upstream and downstream, positively influence a focal firm's productive efficiency.

This study contributes to the literature by evaluating the relative effectiveness of a focal firm's direct and indirect major customer ties, both upstream and downstream. More importantly, this study suggests potential exploitation–exploration trade-offs (i.e. productive efficiency vs. innovation) triggered by a firm's network location.

Understanding electricity use behaviour is considered one of the strategies to achieve sustained electricity management in buildings. The lack of understanding of occupants’ electricity use behaviour has been found to cause various environmental and ecological issues. This paper aims to investigate the factors influencing occupants’ inefficient use of electricity in buildings becomes a vital area of study to achieve maximum benefit in the area of electricity management.

The study adopted a quantitative survey and questionnaire as instruments for gathering relevant information from end-users in the study area, and the data collected were analysed using descriptive and inferential statistics.

The major factors influencing the electricity use behaviour of students in the study area were attributed to their level of awareness, personal beliefs and attitude towards electricity, managerial influences and economic factors.

The threats to the environment and ecology necessitate immediate attention to the elements that impact students’ electricity use habits. This research explains the key elements that might impact students’ electricity consumption habits in buildings. Understanding these key characteristics will provide policymakers with vital knowledge of its prevalence.

The effectiveness of rhetorical structure is essential to communicate key messages in research articles (RAs). The interdisciplinary nature of library and information science (LIS) has led to unclear patterns and practice of using rhetorical structures. Understanding how RAs are constructed in LIS to facilitate effective scholarly communication is important. Numerous studies investigated the rhetorical structure of RAs in a range of disciplines, but LIS articles have not been well studied.

In this study, the authors encoded rhetorical structures to 2,216 articles in the Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology covering a period from 2001 to 2018 with the approaches of co-word analysis and visualization. The results show that the predominant rhetorical structures used by LIS researchers follow the sequence of Introduction-Literature Review-Methodology-Result-Discussion-Conclusion (ILMRDC).

The authors' temporal examination reveals the shifts of evolutionary pattern of rhetorical structure in 2008 and 2014. More importantly, the authors' study demonstrates that rhetorical structures have varied greatly across research areas in LIS community. For example, scholarly communication and scientometrics studies tend to exclude literature review in articles.

The present paper offers a first systematic examination of how rhetorical structures are used in a representative sample of a LIS journal, especially from a temporal perspective.

This study attempts to answer the question: “how are the two drivers, accountability focus and organizational learning, independently and interactively associated with public agencies’ proactive policy orientation?” The first driver is the multiple accountabilities that public agencies pursue: (1) bureaucratic, (2) legal, (3) professional and (4) political. The second driver is the organizational learning activities of public agencies: (1) socialization, (2) externalization, (3) combination and (4) internalization.

For data, 800 respondents from the public agencies in South Korea were surveyed.

The analysis provided several findings: (1) the discretionary accountabilities (professional and political) have a greater positive influence on the proactive policy orientation; (2) the conventional accountabilities (legal and bureaucratic) tend to have negative impacts on the proactive policy orientation and (3) among the four types of accountability, legal accountability can be more significantly complemented by organizational learning activities, which can enable both visionary and realistic administration in a balanced manner.

This study provides a unique insight on how organizational proactivity can be ensured through the interactions of organizational accountabilities and organizational learning.

The purpose of our study is to investigate the impact of corporate culture on sales order backlog.

The authors use regression analysis to examine the relation between corporate culture and the level of sales order backlog, an important leading indicator of firm performance.

Using a large panel sample of US firms for the period of 2003–2021, the authors find a significant and positive relation, suggesting that firms with strong corporate culture have a higher level of sales order backlog.

The study findings contribute to two separate areas of research: corporate culture in management literature and sales order backlog in accounting literature. Prior study has focused on the impact of corporate culture on current firm performance. This study extends prior research by investigating the impact of corporate culture on order backlog, an important leading indicator of future performance.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the dynamic of consumers' perceptions of GM food and explore whether their knowledge of GM technology is associated with a significant change.

This paper presents a meta-analysis of 156 primary studies reporting a total of 225 attitudes toward genetically modified foods. To identify the impact of consumers' knowledge of GM technology, the authors estimate multivalued treatment effects model.

The results of this study show that consumers' attitudes show a U shape during 2001–2022. That is, the rise in opposition to genetically modified foods has been reversed. In addition, this study also shows that the increase in consumers' knowledge of genetically modified technology contributes to their changes in attitude.

This paper is the first study that empirically investigates the dynamics of Chinese consumers' attitude to genetically modified foods, and shows the rise in opposition to genetically modified foods has been reversed, which has important implication for commercialization of genetically modified crops in China.

This study aims to explore the effect of digitalization on the promotion of enterprise R&D cooperation, and it analyzes the microimpact mechanism and boundary conditions of enterprise digitalization on enterprise R&D cooperation.

Based on survey data sourced from the World Bank Enterprise Surveys of the business environment of Chinese enterprises in 2012, this study applies multiple regression methods to test theoretical hypotheses.

Enterprise digitalization positively affects the breadth and intensity of enterprise R&D cooperation. Employees’ digital literacy plays an intermediary role between enterprise digitalization and enterprise R&D cooperation. The subordinate attributes of enterprises weaken the positive relationship between enterprise digitalization and the breadth and intensity of enterprise R&D cooperation. The shareholding of state-owned enterprises reinforces the positive relationship between digitalization and the intensity of enterprise R&D cooperation. However, such shareholding shows no significant regulatory effect on digitalization and the breadth of enterprise R&D cooperation.

Focusing on the digital transformation of the enterprise, this study discusses its impact mechanism on enterprise R&D cooperation, including the impact on the intensity and breadth of R&D cooperation. The study further examines the regulatory effect of organizational inertia on enterprise digital and R&D cooperation from two aspects: resource rigidity and routine rigidity. It emphasizes the significance of the digital literacy of employees in enterprise digitalization and discusses the micromechanism of enterprise digitalization and enterprise R&D cooperation.