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The Group of 20 (G20) is tasked with responding to economic shocks in the global financial system, with COVID-19 having proved to be the most significant shock since the G20's inception. COVID-19 also represents the first economic crisis accompanied by a concerted attempt to “build back better”, principally through a climate-compatible recovery. In 2021, there is little clarity as to the G20's response to this challenge, primarily due to considerable divergence in the green stimulus practices of its member states. The paper aims to investigate whether the G20, climate change and COVID-19 are critical juncture or critical wound.

Historical institutionalism (HI) suggests that one can explain an institution's future response by reference to its developmental pathway to date. This contribution adopts its concept of “critical junctures” to shed light on the G20's possible institutional response to COVID-19. The contribution undertakes a comparative analysis of the global financial crisis (GFC) and COVID-19 as possible critical junctures for the G20.

In doing so, the work demonstrates that the G20 “building back better” from COVID-19 requires a shift away from its institutional orthodoxy to a much larger degree than its response to the GFC. Accordingly, whilst both the GFC and COVID-19 may be considered critical junctures for the G20, only COVID-19 has the potential to be a “critical wound” that leads to institutional redundancy.

Through interrogating this further, this exposition prospectively outlines two possible futures the G20 faces as a consequence of COVID-19: reform or redundancy. In this way, it offers an ex ante perspective on policy-reform options for the G20's ongoing response to COVID-19.

Whichever choice the G20 makes in its response to COVID-19 has profound consequences for global governance in an increasingly unpredictable world.

Herein lies the importance of an exploratory assessment of COVID-19 as a critical juncture or a critical wound for the G20.

The study systematically analyses the path dependency and path-shaping of borrowed education policy, tracing it from the global through the national to individual schools. It also revisits the case schools after five years to map the school level policy paths.

Recently, path-dependency heuristics have drawn attention in predicting educational policy trajectories. However, these studies are primarily theoretical, and those empirical studies do not capture what happens at the school level. This paper fills the research gap by presenting a model that synthesises the research from diverse fields and is informed by findings from a longitudinal case study of educational outsourcing in public schools in Hong Kong and Korea.

The findings highlight path dependency interactions across educational levels diachronically and synchronically, while aptly incorporating the creative ways school leaders exercise their agency therein. The paper concludes with new insights into policy trajectory and education outsourcing.

The study substantiates and extends previously suggested theoretical models on the paths of travelling educational policies and identifies the factors that shape the paths. It also sheds light on how school leaders navigate the structures that constrain their actions or create a new path and pursue their educational goals.

While aiming to create methods for fibre recycling, the question of colours in waste textiles is also in focus; whether the colour should be kept or should be removed while recycling textile fibre. More knowledge is needed for colour management in a circular economy approach.

The research included the use of different dye types in a cotton dyeing process, the process for decolourizing and the results. Two reactive dyes, two direct dyes and one vat dye were used in the study. Four chemical treatment sequences were used to evaluate colour removal from the dyed cotton fabrics, namely, HCE-A, HCE-P-A, HCE-Z-P-A and HCE-Y-A.

The objective was to evaluate how different chemical refining sequences remove colour from direct, reactive and vat dyed cotton fabrics, and how they influence the specific cellulose properties. Dyeing methods and the used refining sequences influence the degree of colour removal. The highest achieved final brightness of refined cotton materials were between 71 and 91 per cent ISO brightness, depending on the dyeing method used.

Only cotton fibre and three different colour types were tested.

With cotton waste, it appears to be easier to remove the colour than to retain it, especially if the textile contains polyester residues, which are desired to be removed in the textile refining stage.

Colour management in the CE context is an important new track to study in the context of the increasing amount of textile waste used as a raw material.

A standalone microgrid (MG) is able to use local renewable resources and reduce the loss in long distance transmission. But the single-phase device in a standalone MG can cause the voltage unbalance condition and additional power loss that reduces the cycle life of battery. This paper proposes an energy management strategy for the battery/supercapacitor (SC) hybrid energy storage system (HESS) to improve the transient performance of bus voltage under unbalanced load condition in a standalone AC microgrid (MG).

The SC has high power density and much more cycling times than battery and thus to be controlled to absorb the transient and unbalanced active power as well as the reactive power under unbalanced condition. Under the proposed energy management design, the battery only needs to generate balanced power to balance the steady state power demand. The energy management strategy for battery/SC HESS in a standalone AC MG is validated in simulation study using PSCAD/EMTDC.

The results show that the energy management strategy of HESS maintains the bus voltage and eliminates the unbalance condition under single-phase load. In addition, with the SC to absorb the reactive power and unbalanced active power, the unnecessary power loss in battery is reduced with shown less accumulate depth of discharge and higher average efficiency.

With this technology, the service life of the HESS can be extended and the total cost can be reduced.

Combining two organizational change theories, life cycle and organizational development, this study examines how strategic change cycle has been adopted and implemented across three different organizations, a public organization, an NGO and an intergovernmental organization toward achieving their goals.

This study triangulates three different qualitative research methods: open-ended semi-structured interviews conducted with UN Women Egypt's director, text analysis of the three organizations' websites and the discourse analysis of the Tri-County Foundation's leaders.

Strategic change cycle has been differently formulated, adopted and implemented by the three organizations based on their goals, resources and contexts. While Office Board of Investment adopted a comprehensive reactive change, Tri-County Foundation followed a partial proactive transformation and UN Women Egypt developed a partial reactive strategy. Henceforth, public organizations and nonprofit organizations can develop different strategies of change in function of needs, resources, goals and context.

This study advances a theoretical framework on organizational change by integrating two theories, life cycle and organizational development, presenting four patterns of change: comprehensive reactive, comprehensive proactive, partial reactive and partial proactive.

The aim of this paper is to identify ways and motives of application of e-commerce in the foreign expansion of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) fashion brands.

A multiple case study was used as the research method. Data were obtained from primarily in-depth interviews with managers of four Polish SMEs –fashion brands owners, whose products are sold in the foreign markets using e-commerce, and secondary sources.

Through this study the authors identified both strategic-proactive and market-reactive motives of e-commerce applications in SMEs’ fashion brands in the internet-enabled foreign expansion and three different models of usage of e-commerce in the foreign expansion of SMEs.

The research was based on the multiple case study of only Polish SMEs in the fashion industry. The conclusions of this study can be applied by fashion companies in their internet-based foreign expansion.

This study contributes to the existing body of literature on the internationalization process of SMEs, and particularly on the application of cross-border e-commerce in the foreign internet-enabled expansion of fashion SMEs by identifying three various models of applying e-commerce, in the internet-enabled foreign expansion and their both proactive and reactive motives.

The purpose of this study is to identify the practices used by service providers to manage the customer service experience (CSE) across multiple phases of the customer journey in a business-to-business (B2B) setting.

This study comprises an ethnography that investigates in real time, from a dyadic perspective, and the CSE management practices at two service providers operating in knowledge-intensive service industries over a period of eight months. Analytically, the study concentrates on critical events that occurred in phases of the customer journey that in some way alter CSE, thus making it necessary for service providers to act to keep their customers satisfied.

The study uncovers four types of service provider practices that vary based on the mode of organization (ad hoc or regular) and the mode of engagement (reactive or proactive) and based on whether they restore or bolster CSE, including the recurrence of these practices in the customer journey. These practices are conveniently presented in a circumplex typology of CSE management across five phases in the customer journey.

This paper advances the research in CSE management throughout the customer journey in the B2B context by showing that CSE management is dynamic, recurrent and multifaceted in the sense that it requires different modes of organization and engagement, notably during interaction with customers, in different phases of the customer journey.

The circumplex typology acts as a tool for service providers, helping them to redesign their CSE management practices in ongoing service and dialogical processes to keep their customers more engaged and satisfied.

This paper is the first to infuse a dyadic stance into the ongoing discussion of CSE management practices in B2B, in which studies to date have deployed only provider or customer perspectives. In proposing a microlevel view, the study identifies service providers' CSE management practices in multiple customer journey phases, especially when the situation becomes critical.

Risks can easily disrupt the demand–supply match targeted by sales and operations planning (S&OP). As surprisingly little is known of how organizations identify, assess, treat and monitor risks through tactical planning processes, this paper zooms in on the S&OP set-up and process parameters to explore how risks are managed through S&OP.

A multiple case study analyzes the S&OP processes of seven organizations in the process industry, drawing on 17 in-depth interviews with high-ranking representatives, internal and external documents, and a group meeting with participating organizations.

The study finds that organizations proactively design their S&OP based on their main risk focus stemming from the planning environment. In turn, such designs proactively support organizations' risk identification, assessment, treatment and monitoring through their S&OP execution. Reactively, a crisis S&OP meeting – making use of the structure of S&OP – can be used as a risk-treatment tool, and S&OP design can be temporarily adapted to deal with emerging risks.

This study is among the first to empirically elucidate risk management through S&OP. S&OP design, execution and adaption are identified as three interconnected strategies that allow organizations to manage risks. The design enables risk management activities in the monthly execution of S&OP. The reactive role of S&OP in risk management is particularly novel.

The purpose of this study is to discover the learning mechanisms and temporal dynamics of implementing systems (Six Sigma) as it unfolds over time.

The data come from a European engineering company that was implementing a Six Sigma-based quality management system (QMS) over a seven-year period. The analysis is based on an event-sequence reconstruction of the implementation process as it unfolded over time and discovers four different learning mechanisms that emerged: programmatic, persistent, adaptive and dialectical learning mechanisms. The research follows a process design study, where the authors study how the process unfolds over time.

Much of the literature on implementing management systems suggests that implementation follows a prescribed sequence of “turn-key” steps. However, the findings show that only 40% of all events were driven by prescribed “turn-key” generic practices, while 56% of events required constructing new practices via adaptive and dialectical learning. Moreover, the implementation process did not proceed in a linear programmatic fashion, but instead followed a punctuated equilibrium pattern, which alternated between periods of incremental change and major organizational change. The study also found that implementation required changing many complementary organizational structures and practices that were interdependent with the management system (i.e. Six Sigma). By understanding the implementation process, managers can better assess the time and effort involved, better adapt the system to their situated context and predict critical junctures where implementation could break down.

This research complements the few studies that have examined the process of implementing management systems. Most studies examine factors or conditions that result in implementation success (the what of implementing systems), but few examine the process of implementation and the learning that takes place during implementation (the how of implementing systems), which is a complex nonlinear process that involves different modes of learning.

Although first rank symptoms focus on positive symptoms of psychosis they are shared by a number of psychiatric conditions. The difficulty in differentiating bipolar disorder from schizophrenia with affective features has led to a third category of patients often loosely labeled as schizoaffective. Research in schizophrenia has attempted to render the presence or absence of negative symptoms and their relation to etiology and prognosis more explicit. A dichotomous population is a recurring theme in experimental paradigms. Thus, schizophrenia is defined as process or reactive, deficit or non-deficit and by the presence or absence of affective symptoms. Laboratory tests confirm the clinical impression showing conflicting responses to dexamethasone suppression and clearly defined differences in autonomic responsiveness, but their patho-physiological significance eludes mainstream theory. Added to this is the difficulty in agreeing to what exactly constitutes useful clinical features differentiating, for example, negative symptoms of a true deficit syndrome from features of depression. Two recent papers proposed that the general and specific cognitive features of schizophrenia and major depression result from a monoamine-cholinergic imbalance, the former due to a relative muscarinic receptor hypofunction and the latter, in contrast, to a muscarinic hypersensitivity exacerbated by monoamine depletion. Further development of these ideas will provide pharmacological principles for what is currently an incomplete and largely, descriptive nosology of psychosis. It will propose a dimensional view of affective and negative symptoms based on relative muscarinic integrity and is supported by several exciting intracellular signaling and gene expression studies. Bipolar disorder manifests both muscarinic and dopaminergic hypersensitivity. The greater the imbalance between these two receptor signaling systems, the more the clinical picture will resemble schizophrenia with bizarre, incongruent delusions and increasingly disorganized thought. The capacity for affective expression, by definition a non-deficit syndrome, will remain contingent on the degree of preservation of muscarinic signaling, which itself may be unstable and vary between trait and state examinations. At the extreme end of muscarinic impairment, a deficit schizophrenia subpopulation is proposed with a primary and fixed muscarinic receptor hypofunction.

The genomic profile of bipolar disorder and schizophrenia overlap and both have a common dopaminergic intracellular signaling which is hypersensitive to various stressors. It is proposed that the concomitant muscarinic receptor upregulation differentiates the syndromes, being marked in bipolar disorder and rather less so in schizophrenia. From a behavioral point of view non-deficit syndromes and bipolar disorder appear most proximate and could be reclassified as a spectrum of affective psychosis or schizoaffective disorders. Because of a profound malfunction of the muscarinic receptor, the deficit subgroup cannot express a comparable stress response. None -theless, a convergent principle of psychotic features across psychiatric disorders is a relative monoaminergic-muscarinic imbalance in signal transduction.