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The purpose of this study is to determine the main challenges that IT security practitioners face in their organizations, including the interplay among human, organizational, and technological factors.

The data set consisted of 36 semi‐structured interviews with IT security practitioners from 17 organizations (academic, government, and private). The interviews were analyzed using qualitative description with constant comparison and inductive analysis of the data to identify the challenges that security practitioners face.

A total of 18 challenges that can affect IT security management within organizations are indentified and described. This analysis is grounded in related work to build an integrated framework of security challenges. The framework illustrates the interplay among human, organizational, and technological factors.

The framework can help organizations identify potential challenges when implementing security standards, and determine if they are using their security resources effectively to address the challenges. It also provides a way to understand the interplay of the different factors, for example, how the culture of the organization and decentralization of IT security trigger security issues that make security management more difficult. Several opportunities for researchers and developers to improve the technology and processes used to support adoption of security policies and standards within organizations are provided.

A comprehensive list of human, organizational, and technological challenges that security experts have to face within their organizations is presented. In addition, these challenges within a framework that illustrates the interplay between factors and the consequences of this interplay for organizations are integrated.

Entrepreneurial Ecosystems (EES) is among the fastest growing entrepreneurship research topics. With even greater vigour, the non-scientific world of economic development agencies, administrations and policymakers has adopted the construct and applies it widely “in the field”, often lacking a solid empirical foundation and pursuing sub-optimal approaches. Improving policy instruments for EES development requires a data driven approach to first understand an EES of a specific region before making any attempts to change it. The paper showcases an empirical approach to create empirically rooted EES policy implications, contributing to closing the gap for insight in regional EES data of sub-national regions.

Exploring a mixed method design, utilising quantitative Global Entrepreneurship Monitor data and combining it with EES stakeholder interviews, focusing on dysfunctions, redundancies, power asymmetries and cut off elements as well as in-layer division and public organisation behaviour.

One finding is, that regional economic development agencies (EDA), as a main public instrument to foster regional entrepreneurial activity, seem to bring the potential of a negative impact on Entrepreneurial Ecosystems bottom-up development and the ability to become self-sustained if they assume the role of competitors towards private organisations and businesses.

As other work on EES, the approach used in this paper only sub-optimally covers temporal system dynamics.

This paper contributes to future EES support policies being rooted in an empirical foundation.

This paper not only progresses the empirical basis for research on regional EES but also lays the foundation for specific policy implications for a sub-national level entrepreneurial ecosystem.

This study seeks to illuminate the managerial tensions inherent in implementing scaled agile (on the organizational, top management, middle management and team levels) and to frame these challenges within the broader context of project management.

The study adopts a grounded theory approach and delves into a qualitative dataset sourced from 34 interviews with subject matter experts actively engaged in scaling agile initiatives within large organizations spanning various industries. Additionally, the data have been enriched through a comprehensive literature review of the existing body of knowledge on scaling agile.

As a result of our investigation, we propose a framework of managerial tensions in scaling agile in large corporate settings and a series of research propositions and questions that may contribute significantly to the body of knowledge surrounding the phenomenon of “deprojectification” and propose agenda for the future studies in the field of project management.

The study also carries significant managerial implications. Firstly, based on the insights from the practice of scaling agile in large corporate setting, management can build awareness of the challenges inherent of transitioning to agile practices. This may help to anticipate the possible problems and proactively develop strategies how to address them. Secondly, management can be instructed about contingencies inherent in scaling agile, along with the potential disfunctions and side effects (unintended outcomes) that may emerge during the transition process. Thirdly, project management practitioners can gain insights on how scaling agile may cause shifts in the approach to managing projects, project team management and competencies that need to be developed to cope with environments where various approaches to managing projects coexist.

These insights can aid in the agile transition process, beginning with directing managerial attention toward contextual factors and progressing through potential challenges at the organizational, top management, middle management and team levels. Furthermore, the study highlights possible dysfunctionalities and side effects of scaling agile, shedding light on the “dark side” of agile.

The study contributes to the expansion of the empirical database on the implementation of agile practices in large organizational settings. It plays a role in defining and delineating the phenomenon of scaling agile within the context of project management and outlines a research agenda for future project management studies. Additionally, our study adds to the ongoing discourse surrounding the “deprojectification” effect that can occur during the scaling of agile. Lastly, it establishes connections between project management and software development literature regarding the implementation of agile at scale.

Sustainable construction deficits are common in developing economies, and resolutions are constrained by the failure to prioritise the plethora of available indicators. This study aims to report on overlapping indicators for benchmarking sustainable construction for construction organisations.

Online survey data were collected from construction professionals, academics and senior managers in government bodies. Pearson chi-squared tests and overlapping analysis were used to determine significant indicators. Kruskal–Wallis tests were used to determine statistically significant differences among the dimensions.

Overlapping analysis determined indicators significant for economic, environmental and social performance. Environmental protection and reporting (pollution and emissions) were significant for all three performance dimensions. The most significant indicators are economic performance (adequate competence of key project staff), environmental performance (environmental protection and reporting – pollution and emissions) and social performance (adequate sustainability expenditure by construction organisations). Significant differences due to dimensions existed for adequate competence of key project staff, sustainable construction and eco-design, adequate governance and organisational excellence of construction projects and satisfactory workers’ morale.

Determining overlapping indicators enables prioritised implementation that ensures sustainable construction. Excluding construction workers was a significant limitation for a holistic interrogation.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to determine overlapping indicators for sustainable construction performance in Zimbabwe.

Libraries need to develop information processing systems for evaluation, budgeting, planning, and operations. Electronic spreadsheets lend themselves to a variety of applications, but are time‐consuming to create. A model template and macros that can be used in many different types of library data analysis have been developed here. The procedures demonstrated here can build an essential set of tools for meeting fundamental goals of administrative efficiency, effective use of library resources, staff motivation, and rational policy making.

‘Subjective well-being comprises of people's emotional responses, domain satisfactions, and global judgements of life satisfaction’ (Diener et al., 1999). The health-related Sustainable Development Goal (SDG-3) aims to ensure ‘good health and well-being’ for all, over the globe. The World Happiness Report (2022) reported a highly significant relation between the SDG-3 and the subjective well-being scores and hence for the improvement of citizen well-being suggested for a holistic approach to economic development. The present chapter examines the impact of global economic crisis 2008–09 on the subjective well-being using time series data for six selected countries for the time period 2004–2019. Considering the crisis as an ‘intervention’, this chapter performs interrupted time series analysis for single- and multiple-group (country) comparisons. The single group analysis finds that in the immediate year of crisis, there appeared to be significant decrease in subjective well-being, followed by a significant decrease in the annual trend subjective well-being relative to pre-crisis for most of the countries. In case of multiple group analysis, the regression results reveal that initial mean level difference between any country and remaining countries was significant for most of the countries. The difference in the subjective well-being trend between a particular country and remaining countries after initiation of the crisis compared to pre-crisis period has appeared to be significantly negative for all the countries considered in the analysis.

Economic mobility means different things to different people, but four major classes of mobility measures have been identified in the literature: positional, directional, mobility as an equaliser of long-term earnings, and earnings risk (or flux). We illustrate some advantages of a multifaceted approach by comparing German and American earnings mobility using multiple indices from each of the four major classes for three panels of 10-year intervals. We anticipate and confirm that due to extensive differences in the German and American labour markets and in other social institutions that influence labour market outcomes, each country dominates in one facet of mobility but not in the others. Thus, a multifaceted approach contributes to a better understanding of the strengths and weakness of the two systems.

Internet technology and social media especially from mobile social commerce are known to have lavish impacts on the economic development. The purpose of this study was to identify the impact of the online market on the level of social welfare of online market traders which is proxies by the level of income. Bulan Terang Utama (BTU) area was used as an object in this study due to the fact that it is a subsidized housing area with a level of middle-income community income. The method used in this study was a quantitative method using the analysis of three-stage least square (3SLS). The results of the 3SLS estimation indicate that there was a significant increase in online seller income with the presence of the BTU online market. This situation happened by the fact that many buyers switch to sellers after they join the BTU Online Market. They began as a buyer and then offered their merchandise through the online market and became a permanent seller in this group. When many residents in these areas are using online markets as their primary place for selling, there will be need for strong connectivity (internet network) in each region to develop current economic activities. Furthermore, the government rule in enhancing technology literacy is also very important especially for the middle to lower regions.

We examine the cardinal gap between wage distributions of the incumbents and newly hired workers based on entropic distances which are well-defined welfare theoretic measures. Decomposition of several effects is achieved by identifying several counterfactual distributions of different groups. These go beyond the usual Oaxaca–Blinder decompositions at the (linear) conditional means. Much like quantiles, these entropic distances are well-defined inferential objects and functions whose statistical properties have recently been developed. Going beyond these strong rankings and distances, we consider weak uniform ranking of these wage outcomes based on statistical tests for stochastic dominance. The empirical analysis is focused on employees with at least 35 hours of work in the 1996–2012 monthly Current Population Survey (CPS). Among others, we find incumbent workers enjoy a better distribution of wages, but the attribution of the gap to wage inequality and human capital characteristics varies between quantiles. For instance, highly paid new workers are mainly due to human capital components, and in some years, even better wage structure.

This chapter proposes a definition of pro-middle class growth derived from the approach of Lasso de la Vega, Urrutia, and Diez (2010) to intermediate polarization. The authors show that a sufficient condition for growth to be pro-middle class is for the growth rate of what we define as the “intermediate median income” of the whole population to be higher than that of the weighted average of the growth rates of the rich and smaller than the weighted average growth rate of the poor, the “rich” and the “poor” being respectively those with an income higher and lower than the median income. An empirical illustration based on Israeli data for the period 1995–2018 indicates that in absolute terms growth was not pro-middle class for any income type. In contrast, growth was pro-middle class in relative terms for all market incomes (individual income from salaried work, individual wage per hour worked, household economic income, total household income and total equivalized income). But growth was not pro-middle class for net income and net equivalized income, even in relative terms. These conclusions appear to be related to the combined effect of developments in labor force participation, welfare policy changes and major modifications in income tax rates. The intermediate polarization measures indicate that in general there was no pro-middle class growth except in the case of specific market income types.