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The inclusion of pozzolans like pulverised fuel ash (PFA), silica fume (SF) and metakaolin (MK) enhances the properties of concrete both in fresh and hardened states. In the case of high performance concrete (HPC), their role in enhancing the workability, strength and durability is extremely significant. However HPC has been observed to be more vulnerable than normal strength concrete when exposed to elevated temperatures. This paper presents an overview and discusses the strength and durability performance of high‐performance pozzolanic concretes incorporating PFA, SF, and MK subjected to elevated temperatures. Various researchers have demonstrated that addition of silica fume causes HPC to perform poorly when subjected to elevated temperatures. Higher loss of strength and spalling risks are also associated with it. Addition of PFA and MK has been found to improve the fire performance of HPC both in terms of residual strength and durability.

This paper presents an overview and discusses the applications of fibre reinforced polymer (FRP) bars as reinforcement in civil engineering structures. Following a discussion of the science underpinning their use, selected case studies where FRP reinforcement has been used are presented. The use of FRP reinforcement is rapidly gaining pace and may replace the traditional steel due to its enhanced properties and cost‐effectiveness. In addition, FRP reinforcement offers an effective solution to the problem of steel durability in aggressive environments and where the magnetic or electrical properties of steel are undesirable.

Presents an overview and discusses the applications of fibre reinforced polymer (FRP) sheets and plates in the strengthening of concrete structures. An insight may be obtained from the discussions made to enhance the use of these techniques for productive use. In addition, selected case studies have been furnished where FRP materials have been used for repairing/retrofitting, emphasizing the application of different types of FRP materials in strengthening concrete structures. Concludes that the use of FRP material is rapidly gaining pace and replacing the traditional steel or metal based materials due to its enhanced properties and cost effectiveness.

Fibre reinforced polymer (FRP) materials are currently used for concrete structures in areas where corrosion problems are serious. Recent applications of FRP rebars in normal reinforced concrete structures in fact cannot fully utilise the strength of FRP. A more rational use of FRP would be in the area of prestressed concrete (PC) structures. In spite of the superb strength provision of FRP tendons over steel tendons, use of FRP PC members is often questioned by practising design engineers. This is largely due to the brittleness of FRP tendons and lack of ductility in FRP RC structures. Recent research has demonstrated some important findings in promoting the confidence of adopting FRP RC beams. This paper reviews some recent work on the use of FRP in PC structures. Future possible research areas are also highlighted.

The purpose of this chapter is to investigate the relationship between corporate governance and greenhouse gas (GHG) disclosures using evidence from the United States.

The study is based on a sample of 168 firms listed on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) in the United States. Panel data are used covering a period from 2017 to 2020 involving 672 observations.

The results indicate that board size has a positive and significant effect on GHG disclosures while the effect of ownership concentration and insider ownership is negative and significant. The proportion of non-executive directors is not significant. In terms of control variables, firm size and financial slack have a positive effect on GHG disclosures.

The study results add evidence to the already existing literature on the relationship between corporate governance and GHG disclosures using evidence from the United States.

In this chapter, we conduct a metadata analysis of articles published in accounting, business and finance journals ranked by Australian Business Dean Council (ABDC), and benchmarked against the Chartered Association of Business Schools (ABS) ranking, that discuss firm- and country-level greenhouse gas (GHG) emission practices and reporting. Number of publications on GHG research, research methods, number of citations and ratio, across countries and continents are some of the topics we cover. We employ a list of articles on accounting, business and finance journals ranked A* and A in the ABDC journal rankings from 2015 to 2022. The study uses a structured literature review to analyse 74 papers on GHG reporting practices at the firm- and country level. Although this line of enquiry is still nascent and developing, the study found underrepresentation of Africa and the Middle East in GHG literature generally. In addition, majority of the articles examined also concentrate on quantitative methods. Most of the articles on GHG research are A-ranked in the ABDC ranking scheme. It was also found that few studies focus on the countries and companies with the highest emissions. While there has been some progress in interrogating GHG across the globe, there is still much room for further research. A key area of future research is exploring the GHG reporting practices in the African and the Middle Eastern sub-regions. There is also a need to examine countries and companies with high emissions. A further study needs to explore the benefits of other research methods in addition to quantitative methods, as different research methods could yield different insights that would enhance research-based conclusions.

This paper attempts to evaluate the impact of intellectual capital on bank performance in Bangladesh.

The authors analyze an unbalanced longitudinal data of 32 banks, which cover 318 observations of bank-year from 2010 to 2019. The study employs a dynamic panel model with the two-step system generalized methods of moments (SGMM).

The results show that bank performance is significantly positively affected by the intellectual capital (IC) in Bangladesh. In addition, the findings show that capital employed efficiency (CEE) is an essential determinant of bank performance rather than structural capital efficiency (SCE) and human capital efficiency (HCE) for the Bangladeshi banking sector.

This work is unique as no one has explored the impact of intellectual capital on Bangladesh's bank performance. The findings suggest that business owners, managers and policymakers who want to improve the efficiency of their organizations should spend continuously on IC and expand their investment into CEE, which includes both financial and physical resources, in order to obtain better bank performance.

This study aims to examine the influence of relational capital quality on client loyalty, comprising both behavioral and attitudinal, in the pharmaceutical industry of Pakistan.

The partial least squares technique is used to test the relationship using a sample of 111 pharmaceutical firms. We applied a non-parametric procedure, the bootstrapping method, to estimate the coefficient path of the relationships. Appropriate construct measures were used based on past studies to measure the dimensions of relational capital quality and client loyalty.

The findings suggest that relational capital quality significantly affects client loyalty. All three dimensions of relational capital quality, commitment, satisfaction and trust, have a significant and positive influence on both attitudinal and behavioral loyalty. However, client satisfaction is found to exert the strongest impact on behavioral and attitudinal loyalty.

It is important for the pharmaceutical firms in Pakistan to improve client satisfaction to establish behavioral loyalty and sustain their clientele base. Trust and commitment should be managed independently, depending on the focus of firms, either attitudinal loyalty or behavioral loyalty.

This study is among the few that was able to empirically examine the role of various dimensions of relational capital quality in influencing clients’ attitudinal and behavioral loyalty. In addition, the study uses a new firm-level data set, compiled from a survey of the pharmaceutical industry in Pakistan, which is currently facing challenges in terms of customer–supplier sensitivity.

The current research provides a conceptual framework that explains how sales managers' aggression across business-to-business (B2B) sales organizations triggers salespeople's surface acting, deep acting and service recovery performance. It also investigates the moderating role of ethical leadership through sales managers' aggressiveness on service recovery performance.

The authors test the model using multilevel analysis with cross-sectional data of 367 salespeople from different sales organizations.

The study shows that the aggression of sales managers has an adverse influence on service recovery performance. Additionally, aggressiveness among sales managers is positively connected with surface acting while adversely affecting deep acting. The study’s findings also indicate that ethical sales leadership is positively moderate among sales managers' aggressiveness and service recovery performance.

The authors collected data from individual salespersons, which is the limitation; however, future studies could collect data using the dyadic approach, such as matching responses from both managers and salespersons. This method could enhance the model's internal validity.

Several studies have mainly focused on positive supervision styles in the literature on service recovery. At the same time, building a negative supervision model in the B2B service recovery context, which has been persistently ignored, is noteworthy.

Consensus on how intellectual capital (IC) affects corporate performance is limited because of various measurement models of IC and corporate performance. This study thus aims to further the debate on the relationship between IC and corporate performance from the perspectives of nonlinearity, the capital values of IC and the use of a holistic measure of corporate performance.

Using 1,395 firm-year observations derived from Vietnamese listed companies from 2010 to 2018, this study focuses on (1) presenting an IC model benchmarked on value-creating expenses; (2) using a directional distance function (DDF)-based stochastic nonparametric envelopment of data (StoNED) framework to scrutinize multiple performance indicators and the capital values of people, structures and relationships simultaneously; and (3) adopting firm-year cluster-robust regressions to analyze the nonlinear association between IC and corporate performance empirically with an appropriate U test.

Results suggest that human capital (HC), structural capital (SC) and relational capital (RC) are the main contributors of high corporate efficiency, whereas only HC and RC contribute to high corporate profitability. These results are absent when this study employs the conventional data envelopment analysis (DEA), which is also a multidimensional framework, as the dependent variable. More importantly, IC and its components can improve corporate performance, namely, both corporate efficiency and corporate profitability up to a critical point, after which the effects would drop.

Overall, this study highlights not only the need to invest in IC but also its associated costs. That is, policymakers also need to note the marginal cost of investing in IC, which may in the end outweigh the benefits from IC.

This study extends IC-related studies by investigating the nonlinear relationship between IC and corporate performance. Moreover, the value of this study also lies in the multidimensional DDF-based StoNED framework.