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Rape culture, described as when “violence is seen as sexy and sexuality as violent” (Buchwald, Fletcher, & Roth, 1993, p. vii), exists online and offline (Henry & Powell, 2014). Much of the research on rape culture focuses on the experiences of heterosexual women, and few studies have explored rape culture in the context of dating apps. This chapter explores how men who have sex with men (MSM) understand and experience rape culture through their use of Grindr and similar dating apps. A thematic analysis of interviews with 25 MSM dating app users revealed problematic user behavior as well as unwanted sexual messages and images as common manifestations of rape culture on dating apps. Participants explained that rape culture extends beyond in-app interactions to in-person encounters, as evident by incidents of sexual violence that several participants had experienced and one participant had committed. Participants were unsure about the extent to which MSM dating apps facilitate rape culture but asserted that some apps enable rape culture more than others. This chapter demonstrates the importance of investigating sexual violence against people of diverse gender and sexual identities to ensure their experiences are not minimized, ignored, or rendered invisible.

The paper aims to considering quality that comes from quality employees taking discretionary efforts, having right perception towards quality, getting satisfied from their contribution. Exploring the relationship of engagement, perception and satisfaction, and mapping the levels and identifying managerial implications for improving the levels.

William Kahn’s employee engagement dimensions, Parasuraman and Zeithaml’s quality dimensions and Harter et al.’s satisfaction dimensions applied and variables framed in health-care context, tested and applied. Survey data collected from randomly selected medical and non-medical employees from south Indian state Tamil Nadu health-care organizations, using structured questionnaire.

Age, experience and roles of the respondents in work have a significant association with the levels. It explores a significant positive relationship of perception, engagement and satisfaction. The study explores an average 28% of employees have high level of engagement, perception (18%) and satisfaction (22%), and the rest fall under moderate and low levels. The roles of the respondents significantly predict the levels.

The study focuses on engagement, perception and satisfaction of employees, not of patients. It registered the responses of trained physicians, nurses and administrative staff. It illustrates human resource strategic importance to improve the levels concerning quality measures.

According to the Project Management Institute, 70% of projects fail globally. The causes of project failure in many instances can be identified as non-technical or behavioral in nature arising from interactions between participants. These intangible risks can emerge in any project setting but especially in project settings having diversity of cultures, customs, beliefs and traditions of various companies or countries. This paper provides an objective framework to address these intangible risks.

This paper presents a structured approach to identify, assess and manage intangible risks to enhance a project team’s ability to meet its objectives. The authors propose a user-friendly framework, Intangible Risk Assessment Methodology for Projects (IRAMP), to address these risks and the factors that cause them. Meta-network (e.g., a network of networks) simulation and established social network analysis (SNA) measures provide a quantitative assessment and ranking of causal events and their influence on the intangible behavior centric risks.

The proposed IRAMP and meta-network approach were utilized to examine the project delivery process of an international energy firm. Data were gathered using structured interviews, surveys and project team workshops. The use of the IRAMP to highlight intangible risk areas underpinned by the SNA measures led to changes in the company’s organizational structure to enhance project delivery effectiveness.

This work extends the existing project risk management literature by providing a novel objective approach to identify and quantify behavior centric intangible risks and the conditions that cause them to emerge.

Currently, people leaving prisons face concurrent risks from the COVID-19 pandemic and the overdose public health emergency. The closure or reduction of community services people rely on after release such as treatment centres and shelters has exacerbated the risks of poor health outcomes and harms. This paper aims to learn from peer health mentors (PHM) about changes to their work during overlapping health emergencies, as well as barriers and opportunities to support people leaving prison in this context.

The Unlocking the Gates (UTG) Peer Health Mentoring Program supports people leaving prison in British Columbia during the first three days after release. The authors conducted two focus groups with PHM over video conference in May 2020. Focus groups were recorded and transcribed, and themes were iteratively developed using narrative thematic analysis.

The findings highlighted the importance of peer health mentorship for people leaving prisons. PHM discussed increased opportunities for collaboration, ways the pandemic has changed how they are able to provide support, and how PHM are able to remain responsive and flexible to meet client needs. Additionally, PHM illuminated ways that COVID-19 has exacerbated existing barriers and identified specific actions needed to support client health, including increased housing and recovery beds, and tools for social and emotional well-being.

This study contributes to our understanding of peer health mentorship during the COVID-19 pandemic from the perspective of mentors. PHM expertise can support release planning, improved health and well-being of people leaving prison and facilitate policy-supported pandemic responses.

This study aims to explore how a microlending digital platform connects social investors in developed countries and micro-entrepreneurs in Africa. However, additional research is necessary to discuss how online auction models are designed and implemented and how existing theories can explain their use in the so-called developing countries.

The research is based on a single case study: an online auction model for microlending named AfricaMC. Two main methods collected empirical data, namely, online participant observation, i.e. real-time participation in the online auction market and in the forum of discussions, where the authors observed the processes of microlending transactions as registered members; analysis of online documents, by reviewing forum discussions, analyzing reports, blogs, chats and other materials.

The results suggest that using sociological and information systems theoretical lenses in a complementary manner could provide greater value than using economics.

The study makes two main contributions. First, it mobilizes a pluralist theoretical approach based on economic, sociological and information systems perspectives to improve the understanding of microlending digital platforms using online auction models. Second, it uses the understanding produced from data analysis of one particular African case to validate propositions derived from these three theoretical approaches that might be applied to other cases.

The purpose of this paper was to explore individual- and firm-level antecedents of the ability of a manufacturing firm's personnel to collaborate and integrate knowledge for organizational resilience practices.

The authors apply hierarchical regression analysis to study a sample of 192 European industrial equipment manufacturers. Data for each firm are collected from surveys of two key informants in each firm, as well as from public sources.

Firms' personnel’s ability to integrate information and knowledge for organizational resilience practices was positively related with the extent of the head of manufacturing's network of personal contacts inside the firm. This effect was stronger in firms with more formalized job descriptions and clearly defined roles. The head of manufacturing's orientation to teamwork and cooperation impacted this ability only in firms that did not financially incentivize cooperation. The authors also found that cooperation incentives and role formalization directly relate to firms' personnel’s ability to integrate information and knowledge for organizational resilience practices.

The study proposes to study organizational resilience practices through a transactive memory systems lens. The study is also the first to link characteristics of individual managers to firm-level resilience practices by examining the antecedents of firms' ability to integrate information and knowledge to recover from operational disruptions. Furthermore, the study serves to enhance the knowledge of resilience practices by examining the role of firm-level antecedents and their interplay with characteristics of individual managers.

This paper aims to present a case study-based approach to identify resource-poor communities with limited abilities to cope with the adverse effects of climate change. The study area is the Nkonkobe Local Municipality, in the Eastern Cape which is one of South Africa’s provinces ranked as being extremely vulnerable to the adverse effects of climate change because of high incidences of poverty and limited access to public services such as water and education. Although adaptive capacity and vulnerability assessments help to guide policy formulation and implementation by identifying communities with low coping capacities, policy implementers often find it difficult to fully exploit the utility of these assessments because of difficulties in identifying vulnerable communities. The paper attempts to bridge this gap by providing a user-friendly, replicable, practically implementable and adaptable methodology that can be used to cost-effectively and timeously identify vulnerable communities with low coping capacities.

A geostatistical approach was used to assess and evaluate adaptive capacities of resource-poor communities in the Nkonkobe Local Municipality. The geospatial component of this approach consisted of a multi-step Geographical Information Systems (GIS) based technique that was improvised to map adaptive capacities of different communities. The statistical component used demographic indicators comprising literacy levels, income levels, population age profiles and access to water to run automated summation and ranking of indicator scores in ArcGIS 10.2 to produce maps that show spatial locations of communities with varying levels of adaptive capacities on a scale ranging from low, medium to high.

The analysis identified 14 villages with low adaptive capacities from a total of 180 villages in the Nkonkobe Local Municipality. This finding is important because it suggests that our methodology can be effectively used to objectively identify communities that are vulnerable to climate change.

The paper presents a tool that could be used for targeting assistance to climate change vulnerable communities. The methodology proposed is of general applicability in guiding public policy interventions aimed at reaching, protecting and uplifting socio-economically disadvantaged populations in both rural and urban settings.

The approach’s ability to identify vulnerable communities is useful because it aids the identification of resource-poor communities that deserve priority consideration when planning adaptation action plans to deliver support and assistance to those least capable of effectively coping with the adverse effects of climate change induced vulnerabilities.

This study aims to investigate the suitability of a multi-step prototyping strategy for producing pneumatic rotary vane actuators (RVAs) for the development of lightweight robots and actuation systems.

RVAs typically have cast aluminum housings and injection-molded seals that consist of hard thermoplastic cores and soft elastomeric overmolds. Using a combination of additive manufacturing (AM), computer numerical control (CNC) machining and elastomer molding, a conventionally manufactured standard RVA was replicated. The standard housing design was modified, and polymeric replicas were obtained by selective laser sintering (SLS) or PolyJet (PJ) printing and subsequent CNC milling. Using laser-sintered molds, actuator seals were replicated by overmolding laser-sintered polyamide cores with silicone (SIL) and polyurethane (PU) elastomers. The replica RVAs were subjected to a series of leakage, friction and durability experiments.

The AM-based prototyping strategy described is suitable for producing functional and reliable RVAs for research and product development. In a representative durability experiment, the RVAs in this study endured between 40,000 and 1,000,000 load cycles. Frictional torques were around 0.5 Nm, which is 10% of the theoretical torque at 6 bar and comparable to that of the standard RVA. Models and parameters are provided for describing the velocity-dependent frictional torque. Leakage experiments at 10,000 load cycles and 6 bar differential pressure showed that PJ housings exhibit lower leakage values (6.8 L/min) than laser-sintered housings (15.2 L/min), and PU seals exhibit lower values (8.0 l/min) than SIL seals (14.0 L/min). Combining PU seals with PJ housings led to an initial leakage of 0.4 L/min, which increased to only 1.2 L/min after 10,000 load cycles. Overall, the PU material used was more difficult to process but also more abrasion- and tear-resistant than the SIL elastomer.

More work is needed to understand individual cause–effect relationships between specific design features and system behavior.

To date, pneumatic RVAs have been manufactured by large-scale production technologies. The absence of suitable prototyping strategies has limited the available range to fixed sizes and has thus complicated the use of RVAs in research and product development. This paper proves that functional pneumatic RVAs can be produced by using more accessible manufacturing technologies and provides the tools for prototyping of application-specific RVAs.