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To assess which partnerships were most critical during the recovery planning process following Hurricanes Maria and Irma. We discuss the roles and impact of different types of partners, barriers and facilitators to partnerships and lessons in collaboration during the development of the economic and disaster recovery plan for Puerto Rico.

The Homeland Security Operational Analysis Center (HSOAC) was tasked with assisting the Puerto Rican government with an assessment of damages from Hurricanes Maria and Irma and the development of the Recovery Plan. During the process, a small team compiled and coded a database of meetings with non-HSOAC partners. The team was divided into sector teams that mirrored FEMA’s Recovery Support Functions. Each sector completed two surveys identifying high impact partners and their roles and contributions, as well as barriers and facilitators to partnerships.

A total of 1,382 engagements were recorded across all sectors over seven months. The most frequently identified high impact partners were federal and Puerto Rican governmental organizations partners. NGOs and nonprofits were noted as key partners in obtaining community perspective. Sector teams cited a lack of trust and difficulty identifying partners as barriers to partner engagement. Given the expedited nature of disaster response, establishing partnerships before disasters occur may help facilitate community input. Early networking, increased transparency and defining roles and responsibilities may increase trust and effectiveness among partnerships.

To our knowledge, this is one of the few studies that quantifies and illustrates the partnerships formed and their contributions during recovery planning, and lessons learned.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how business ecosystems evolve, what is the identity of business ecosystem and is the ecosystem identity static or dynamics. To understand the above questions, this paper is conducted on stone carving clusters in India.

The author engaged the ethnographic approach in this study. To sample stone carving clusters of India, the author followed the snowball sampling method. Further, the author did collect the information by informal personal discussions, focus group discussions and participant observations. Furthermore, the thematic analysis and interpretative phenomenological analysis were applied to process the data. The validity and reliability of the method was ascertained by testing the credibility, dependability, confirmability and transferability.

The author found that the business ecosystem of stone carving was dynamic, and it was transformed from the buyer-driven ecosystem to the supplier-driven ecosystem. The identities of the early stage business ecosystem and the late stage ecosystem were analyzed through product, network and information flow. The author developed a structural framework to conceptualize the identity domain of the business ecosystem and the author named it as “nature-conduct-performance model.” Also, the author conceptualized the identity evolution, the influence of social system on business ecosystem identity, and identity-based conflicts and identity-based cooperation in the stone carving business ecosystem.

This study is making additional theoretical contribution in conceptualize the business ecosystem from the identity construct.

Artificial intelligence-related inventions raise complex questions of how to define the boundaries around patentable subject matter. In the United States, many claim that the recent doctrinal developments by the Supreme Court have led to incoherence and excessive uncertainty within the innovation community. In response, policymakers and stakeholders have suggested legislative amendments to address these concerns. We first review these developments, and subsequently use the patent examination record to empirically test the claims of increased uncertainty. We find that, although uncertainty did spike following the Supreme Court's holding in Alice, it quickly returned to levels comparable to its historic norm. This has implications both for those advocating for legislative changes to the law of eligible subject matter, as well as other jurisdictions considering adopting a test similar to that applied in Alice.

Professional careers have become more precarious in recent decades. Corporations today engage in downsizing even during profitable times, a practice that impacts workers throughout the labor force, including those with advanced degrees. Using a case study of women geoscientists in the oil and gas industry, I investigate how the increasing precariousness of professional careers reinforces gender inequality. The compressed cycle of booms and busts in the oil and gas industry permits an investigation into how women fare in precarious professional jobs. Extending gendered organization theory, I argue that three mechanisms are built into professional careers today that enhance women’s vulnerability to layoffs: teamwork, career maps, and networking. I illustrate how these mechanisms disadvantage women with in-depth portraits of three geoscientists who lost their jobs during the recent downturn in oil prices. Their personal narratives, collected over a 3-year period of boom and bust, reveal how a particular multinational corporation is structured in ways that favor the white men who dominate their industry. The rhetoric of diversity obscures the workings of gendered organizations during good times, but when times get tough, management’s decisions about whom to lay off belies the routine practices the reproduce men’s advantages within the industry.

South Africa has witnessed an increase in self-initiated academic expatriates (SIAEs) coming into the country from all over the world. This movement of labour can result in South Africa performing better than any other African country. However, expatriation is accompanied by several challenges which affect both work and non-work scopes. Given that more is needed to understand the lived experiences of the expatriates, especially self-initiated expatriates from and in Africa, the purpose of this paper is to provide the basis for interventions to assist the expatriates in overcoming challenges by understanding their lived experiences.

The study used an interpretivist approach to understand the lived experiences of SIAEs. The data were collected through the use of unstructured interviews of 25 expatriate academics within South Africa. The individual narratives were analysed through structural and thematic analysis to develop themes.

Through the stories and narratives, the expatriation experience was one framed to be a challenging process. The lived experiences can be grouped into life and career experiences. The life experiences consist of immigration difficulties, family separation, social adjustment difficulties and unavailability of accommodation. Career experiences include remuneration differences, gender discrimination, limited professional development opportunities and communication difficulties, which affect both work and non-work experiences. Person–environment fit did not play a significant role in the experiences of the academic expatriates.

The findings showed that the lived experiences of SIAEs in Africa were mostly negative. Higher education institutions looking at hiring academic expatriates should assist the expatriates to have better experiences not only for individual benefit but for institutional benefit as well. However, this role is not only placed in the hands of the organisation but may also require individual effort.

The findings outlined in this study provide a picture of the lived experiences of SIAEs in an African context. The findings are fundamental in understanding this neglected sample group in the extant literature. They also assist in advancing literature and proposing possible solutions. All this is important, given global talent shortages which have warranted the need for highly skilled employees in countries like South Africa.

The purpose of this paper is to engage with challenges the authors encountered in duoethnographic inquiry, including questions about what it means to tell the truth, and the decisions the authors made about what stories to include and exclude. The focus is on the ethical challenges involved in duoethnography and the ways in which the authors chose, and or felt compelled to, overcome them. The authors provide an argument for the need of intimate, eclectic and open-ended inquiry-based research that poses questions, challenges dominant discourses and promotes a compositional methodology in which to explore lived the experience of participants.

The authors’ own duoethnographic process, embedded in an anthropological hermeneutics (Ricoeur, 1991), within a mode of narrative inquiry, developed over a period of three to four months. The authors had a number of formal and informal conversations – some recorded and transcribed, others remembered and reflected on later in e-mails or in draft academic papers. The authors shared articles, e-mailed, conversed with family and examined photos. Reflecting on some of these conversations, the authors were sometimes uncomfortable with the way the stories they shared had the potential to expose aspects of themselves and those the authors are close to. The authors developed fictionalising techniques and poetry in order to tell these stories.

Duoethnography engages with method that reveals truth as layered, contradictory and necessarily intersubjective. It is this tentative and contingent nature of truth that augers for a hyper-consciousness of the relationship between transgression and transformation. Using fictional ways of knowing: poetry, scripting and metaphor; and the usual technologies of research: anonymisation, de-identification; and drawing on notions of redaction and under erasure the authors found safe ways to represent particularly challenging issues. The process involved intimate revealing – small stories that the authors shared here to argue for the importance of the affective in transformative educational research.

The authors continue to work in uncomfortable places and suggest that ethics often involves irreconcilable and incommensurate discourses which cannot always be accounted for in normalised codes of ethics. The authors argue that this tension provides an important on-going ethical encounter where, as researchers, the authors continue to generate and implement creative and innovative methodologies.

Throughout the paper the authors have suggested ways to challenge the linear, logical and the predictable as the authors wrestled with how personal narratives may reveal personal truth and transformation that may open ways for larger transformative actions.

Nowadays, there are various internet of things (IoT) applications covering many aspects of daily life. Many people own numerous smart objects that use these IoT applications. The purpose of this study is determining suitable IoT applications for each user which is a relevant challenge because it is amulti-criteria decision-making.

To solve this challenge, the authors propose fuzzy analytical hierarchy process model. Based on the opinions of IoT experts, the model and the hierarchy were designed to assess and compare three crucial IoT criteria, namely, object, application and providers.

The results indicated that the application criterion is far more relevant for users other than the two criteria. The findings of this study offer insights into more effective decision-making for IoT application developers and providers.

This study contributes to the IoT through proposing a fuzzy model to classify IoT applications. The findings provide meaningful implications for IoT application providers.

Brand strategy, marketing strategy, service marketing, hospitality management and international marketing strategy.

Post-graduate-level students; practitioners from the hospitality sector, brand management, corporate social responsibility (CSR) and the arts and culture field may also benefit from the case.

Jumeirah Group is a luxury hospitality company that is implementing a global brand strategy after developing a strong-regional reputation. Jumeirah's strong cultural alignment to its Dubai heritage in the form of its hallmarks and communication tag line “Stay Different” is being translated into events, activities, sponsorship and more importantly in terms of service to create a symbolic and experiential brand strategy. For Alice Royton, the Director of Branding for Jumeirah Group, the dilemma was how to maintain the thrust forwards as a top luxury brand and keep brand synergy especially as Jumeirah was increasing its portfolio and the competitive arena heats up in the international market place.

Creation of stakeholder value, brand strategy looking at various brand levels, using arts and culture as part of CSR initiative; communication strategy, emotional touch points and moment of truth as part of interactive service strategy; CRM and loyalty.

Teaching notes.