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To meet the rapidly increasing demand for medical treatment during the outbreak of COVID-19, Huoshengshan and Leishenshan Hospital are rapidly built (9–12 days) in Wuhan. These two urgent emergency projects are unprecedented. In general, substantial literature suggests that the possibility of shortening a schedule by more than a quarter of its original duration is implausible. By contrast, the two projects had successfully compressed the schedules from months and years to about ten days. This study aims to investigate how this was done and provide references for future projects.

The study uses qualitative case study techniques to analyze the project practices in two urgent emergency projects. Data were gathered through semi-structured interviews and archival research. During interviews, interviewees were asked to describe the project practices adopted to overcome the challenges and freely share their experiences and knowledge.

The results illustrate that a high degree of schedule compression is achievable through tactful crashing, substitution and overlapping applications. The successful practices heavily rely on the high capacity of participants and necessary organization, management and technology innovations, such as three-level matrix organizational structure, reverse design method, site partition, mock-up room first strategies and prefabricated construction technology. For instance, the reverse design method is one of the most significant innovations to project simplification and accelerate and worthy of promotion for future emergency projects.

The empirical findings are significant as they evoke new thinking and direction for addressing the main challenges of sharp schedule compression and provide valuable references for future emergency projects, including selecting high-capacity contractors and replacing the conventional design methods with reverse design.

Substantial studies indicate that the maximum degree of schedule compression is highly unlikely to exceed 25%, but this study suggests that sharp compression is possible. Although with flaws in its beauty (i.e. compressing schedule at the expense of construction cost and quality), it is also a breakthrough. It provides the building block for future research in this fertile and unexplored area.

Japanese corporate product development strategies are examined. Product development Japanese style is the dynamic and continuous process of adaptation to change in the environment. A background to the methods currently used, including the strategic role played by top management, self‐organizing project teams, overlapping development phases and multi‐learning, is provided. Strengths and weaknesses of Japanese industrial product development practices are related to the Japanese cultural heritage and the rationale for such practices explained in terms of the Japanese culture. Comments on future implications are made.

This paper aims to critically analyse the transposition implications of Union Directive 2014/95. This Directive identified the need to raise the transparency of the social and environmental information provided by the undertakings to a similarly high level across all Member States.

The paper considers how the European Member States of the European Union (EU) have transposed Directive 2014/95 into their regulations. The focus is on the juridification of social accounting in the pursuit of creating an overlapping consensus through Habermas’s concept of internal colonisation. The paper uses qualitative content analysis to scrutinise the national laws that transpose Directive 2014/95, discussing both what has been accomplished and what can be achieved by the release of future legislative provisions.

Despite the aim of Directive 2014/95 to create a common language for disclosing non-financial information, this study shows an implementation gap among and between Member States and an inconsistent picture of the employment of this Directive. Its implementation in the 28 European countries was considered a process of colonisation in implementing Union directives among European undertakings. However, the implementation process, which exemplifies Habermas’s juridification, has failed due to the lack of balance between moral discourse and actions.

This paper contributes to the ongoing debates concerning the implementation of mandatory disclosure of environmental and social information in the EU Member States, promoting new directions for the EU’s democratic laws on social accounting. In addition, it offers an example of how internal colonisation only catalyses effects when moral laws are legitimised through the provision of procedures.

In the public sector, Training and Experience (T & E) exams assess prior experience and are one of the most often used methods for selecting job applicants. This study uses a KSA approach, where raters judge the quality of job relevant prior experience, not its duration or quantity. It was hypothesized that an additional rater and a consensus meeting between raters would increase reliability and validity.

T & E and supervisory ratings were obtained over a 12-year period for 166 candidates seeking promotion to a budget analyst position. Validity was measured by the correlation between T & E scores and supervisory ratings. Consensus was required only for T & E scores differing by a specific amount (hybrid consensus).

Intraclass reliability was 0.73, 0.84, and 0.95 in the one-rater, two-rater, and hybrid consensus conditions with each coefficient greater than the next (p < 0.05) showing the benefit of multiple raters and consensus for reliability. Validity was significant at 0.21, 0.26, and 0.251 for each rating condition, respectively (two-tail test; p < 0.01). Validity was greater in the two-rater condition than in the one-rater condition (one-tail test; p < 0.05). Consensus did not improve validity beyond that of two raters. For consensus T & Es (n=76), two raters improved validity (one-tail test; p < 0.05), moving from 0.112 to 0.231 but not reliability; consensus improved reliability (two-tail test; p < 0.05) but not validity.

There has been a vacuum in T & E research for close to 20 years. Validity data are difficult to obtain but critical for meta-analysis. T & Es showed validity. Use of two raters improved validity but consensus did not increase the gain.

Central to Martha Nussbaum's development of the capability approach into a theory of social and global justice is her addition of the notion of a capability threshold below which no dignified human life can be lived. This capability threshold identifies a standard for distributive justice that any decent political order must secure for all citizens. It is this threshold that is the intended focus of this paper.

Examining her most recent statement of the capability approach, Nussbaum's arguments that the threshold should be locally set by each nation in accordance with their history and traditions, and that all nations currently fail to satisfy the threshold condition, are assessed.

This paper shows that if Nussbaum's arguments are accepted, then the central function of a threshold as a tool of discrimination is undermined. If all nations fail to meet their locally set threshold, then there is no clear basis for the global redistribution that Nussbaum regards as necessary. Indeed, what basis there is could even justify counter‐intuitive redistribution from poorer to richer nations.

This paper concludes that if the capability approach is to be developed into a theory of social justice, then, rather than being set locally at different levels, the capability threshold may need to be a genuinely global one. Only then can the threshold discriminate between unjust political orders and those that are at least minimally just.

John Rawls’ theory of justice has had a direct impact on public administration, especially work in new public administration. His theory has influenced the obligations of public administrators, the scope of citizen participation in public administration, and the equitable distribution of public services. It has also contributed to the development of administrative ethics. In addition, it suggests ways in which a mediating model of public reason might be developed for public administrators working on deeply divisive social and economic issues.

This paper aims to examine the sixteenth-century Nahua society of central Mexico to answer the question, what commercial ethical norms operated in the sixteenth-century Nahua society? After decades of trying, Western business models and managerial theories have not met expectations in terms of fostering a socially and environmentally sustainable future. Qualitatively different approaches are needed, and one way to find them is to look at business models, norms and practices that operated in societies that were isolated from Western influences.

This paper contributes to efforts to find and analyze historical texts that include business practices. In particular, this study uses grounded theory techniques to examine the presence of ethical commercial norms in one of history’s foundational ethnographic texts, The Florentine Codex, a sixteenth-century study of Nahua society.

This study identified six commercial ethical norms that structured Nahua commerce: “care for others,” “exercise prudence,” “tell the truth,” “be respectful of others,” “show reverence to the gods” and “be humble.” Confidence in these findings was enhanced by their “qualitative degrees of freedom,” whereby these norms were found to operate in other sectors of Nahua society.

This study contributes to the literature by demonstrating ethical norms of commerce that can emerge in isolation from Western cultures; providing a rigorous and novel methodology for deriving norms from historical texts; and expanding knowledge of business practices beyond modern Western contexts.

Introduction: Jürgen Habermas's Critique of the Alienation/De‐alienation Scheme Revisited

This article aims to provide a response to the papers in this issue.

The methodology employed is philosophical.

In her response, Nussbaum thanks the authors for their contributions and addresses their most salient arguments.

Nussbaum in this article responds to the papers in this issue of IJSE and addresses the authors' most salient arguments.

Recently there has been a trend for those governments which provide development aid to put overt and explicit conditions on how the recipients of aid should use development funds to mold their societies. The values endorsed by the developed nations are respect for human rights, moves towards democracy, and steps to establish market economies. Is it appropriate for developed countries to attach strings to the aid they provide to developing countries or does this amount to an unjustifiable interference in the affairs of others? If the developed countries do attach strings, how are we to judge what to do when the strings get tangled? Democracy, human rights, and market economy are the values westerners have signalled they are going to insist on most highly in determining aid.