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The purpose of this paper is to describe a methodology to measure the circulation area required by a manual or powered wheelchair within a toilet stall and present the range of possible results that can be collected when used in an experimental bathroom setup.

A bathroom environment containing a toilet, grab bars and two transparent acrylic panels suspended on rails to simulate walls was built. Three setups were experimented: 1,500 mm from the walls, 1,500 mm diagonally from the toilet and 1,700 mm from the walls. For each of the participants, markers were placed on the back and on the rear of the wheelchair and one on the toes of the participants. The Vicon® optical motion capture system was used to register the markers’ position in the 3D space.

The methodology proved to be relatively easy to install, efficient and easy to interpret in terms of results. It provides specific points from which it is possible to measure the trajectories of markers and calculate the polygonal projection of the area covered by each participant. The results showed that manual and powered wheelchair users required, respectively, 100 and 300 mm more than the minimum 1,500 mm wall-to-wall area to complete a rotation task in front of the toilet.

These results showed that the 1,500 mm gyration area proposed in the Canadian Code of Construction is not sufficient for manual and powered wheelchair users to circulate easily in toilet stalls. The methodology can provide evidence to support the improvement of construction norms in terms of accessible circulation areas.

The purpose of this paper is to verify whether the horizontal grab bar for the toilet and the bathtub suggested by the Code du bâtiment du Québec conform to users’ preferences. Perceived effort, comfort and safety were considered.

In total, 31 adults and seniors using manual and powered wheelchairs were asked to test different grab bar configurations for both the toilet and bathtub. A questionnaire was designed to evaluate participants’ perceptions and preferences after the trials with each grab bar. Effort was measured using the ten-level Borg scale, while participants’ comfort and safety were assessed with a five-point Likert scale. Participants were finally invited to express an overall personal preference between the two grab bar used in each setup.

Participants showed preference for an L-shaped grab bar for the toilet, and a horizontal grab bar for the bathtub. The authors’ results differ from the recommendations of the barrier-free design standards of the province of Quebec’s construction code, which states that horizontal grab bars should be used for the toilet and bathtub.

This study suggest that despite the limited sample, there is an undeniable need for testing norms for public spaces, whenever is possible and has a direct effect on end-users, before publishing them.

In 1975, private and social housing production in Chile started to become increasingly privatized, in parallel with capital switching into the secondary circuit due to severe deindustrialization of the country. Since then, housing demand has largely drawn on state housing subsidies aimed at middle- to low-income demand, but more recently, a growing financialized mortgage market has increased demand even further, enlarging the mortgage debt burden on Chilean households. Private housing producers achieve higher profits by increasing sales prices, whilst production costs are kept relatively stable by purchasing and developing the cheapest land available, both on the fringes and within the inner sectors of the main metropolitan areas, as a form of accumulation by dispossession in hitherto underexploited, non-commodified land. However, low purchase prices of land create housing unaffordability for numbers of original owner-residents who sell land to redevelopers but cannot then afford replacement accommodation given the soaring housing prices in the main metropolises. It is for this reason that some central areas become gentrified. Focusing on the case of high-rise redevelopment of inner-city areas in Santiago, Chile, this paper addresses the extent to which demand and private developers’ profits increase alongside the risks of a generalized growing level of household debt and the displacement of low-income communities from inner areas. The continuous expansion of the extremely privatized housing market of Santiago responds to the needs of capital expansion rather than to the people’s needs.

Since the mid-1990s, the social model of disability has come under scrutiny. Several researchers have examined the role of ontology (philosophical ideas about the nature of what it means to be human) in relation to disability. In this paper, we situate this burgeoning understanding of disability within the set of post-cartesian ontologies, which disrupt the separation of the mind from the body and its attendant dichotomies. Furthermore, we seek to show how such a change can carry through to the research paradigm and therefore affect tangible outcomes of disability research.

A commitment to an embodied ontology requires first and foremost that researchers rethink what is being studied by focusing on the diverse characteristics of being and its actualization within the world. This will involve an emphasis on the lived experience of the body, including issues of affect, identity and movement, as well as broader issues of embodied being.

Using a research program currently underway at the Center for Interdisciplinary Research in Rehabilitation and Social Integration (CIRRIS) as a detailed example, we draw on the ontological framework to help articulate the way research can be re-organized. We show how projects at different scales can be brought to work together, and highlight how a focus on embodiment issues facilitates such multi-disciplinary, inter-project collaboration. We note that adopting such an ontology-based framework will accomplish three major outcomes: (1) increase the relevance and effectiveness of new projects with regard to the overall vision; (2) enhance cross-project synergies and ensure stronger ties between research and practice; and (3) contribute to shifting the underlying ontology from a more cartesian approach to a post-cartesian embodied perspective.

The new ontologies embrace, integrate and extend the earlier social and biomedical perspectives, and offer a critical perspective on technology. The embodied approach recognizes not only the embodiment of research subjects, but also the embodied experience of the researchers themselves. In addition, the approach leads to a more holistic organization of research within a global, interconnected structure of projects rather than simply a collection of separate projects organized into thematic areas, as was done in previous decades. This reorganization of research enhances the ability to engage academic researchers with practitioners not just in the hospital and clinical settings, but also within the wider community.

This paper serves as an introduction to Risking Capitalism. To this end, I discuss the key questions, aims, and themes driving this collective project. Although the contributions differ in their use of political economy and political ecological with regard to housing, poverty, and climate change, they share a similar concern of interrogating the material, institutional, and discursive features of the production, representation, and governance of risk – a phenomenon that the World Bank views as loss and opportunity. In particular, they chart the relationship between risk, contemporary capitalism and its neoliberal modes of governance. After establishing the objectives of Risking Capitalism, I provide a general context from which to understand the significance and meaning of global risk management (GRM) with reference to the shared policy experiments of the World Economic Forum and World Bank. Mirroring the contributions in this volume, I start from the premise that risk is a social relation. This allows me to argue that GRM represents a new mode of neoliberal governance emergent from the structural violence produced by the expansion of credit-led capitalism. In the final section, I lay out the structure of the volume.

Few studies have analysed how to actively manage strategic networks (SNs) to achieve individual and collective goals and create value. This paper aims to examine the influence of network management on the value created by SNs and the mediation role of resources and relationship quality.

The authors distributed a survey to 126 companies linked to SNs in the Brazilian information and communication technology sector. This study tested the hypothesized relationships using partial least squares structural equation modelling.

This study found that network management directly influences value creation. Furthermore, the exchange and combination of resources mediate the relationship between the two constructs. Surprisingly, the quality of the relationships does not mediate the relationship between management and the value created. However, it positively impacts the exchange and combination of complementary resources.

This study provides a new interpretation of the determinants of value creation in SNs. The results contribute to the theory by demonstrating that the relationship between network management and value creation is strengthened when the exchange and combination of resources between network participants occur. In turn, these are positively influenced by the quality of relationships established in the network, thus providing a new interpretation of the determinants of value creation in SNs.

The present study examined the psychometric properties of the EGame- flow scale in a Mexican sample, presenting evidence of construct validity (exploratory factor analysis and confirmatory factor analysis), reliability (Cronbach’s alpha and McDonald’s omega) and discriminant validity (mean variance extracted).

Participants: Of the 255 Mexican participants in the non-probabilistic sample who had previously interacted with the LOST logistics simulator, 166 (65%) were men and 89 (35%) were women; their ages ranged from 22 to 45. The statistical packages SPSS 25, JASP 0.16 and AMOS 23 facilitated the corresponding analyses. First, we calculated the means and standard deviations of the scale items. Next, we performed an exploratory factor analysis to examine the measurement model’s internal structure and a confirmatory factor analysis to confirm the structure proposed in the exploratory factor analysis. To analyze the internal structure of the measurement model so that the estimates were not affected by multivariate normality problems, we utilized the AMOS bootstrap method (with 500 repetitions, 95% CI), the maximum likelihood (MV) estimation method, and the fit indices: X2, p (chi-square and associated likelihood), Tucker–Lewis index (TLI), standardized statistical mean square residual (SRMR), comparative fit index (CFI) and root mean Square error approximation (RMSEA) with its confidence interval, the values of X2 with p < 0.001; TLI, CFI, AGFI = 0.95; RMSEA and SRMR = 0.08 (Byrne, 2016). Finally, we estimated the reliability of the measurement model with Cronbach’s alpha (a), McDonald’s omega (ω) coefficient and the mean variance extracted (VME).

An exploratory factor analysis with the MV method and obliminal rotation showed a good fit of the data to the model, which aligns with the significance of the Barlette sphericity test (X2 = 8443.2, p < 0.000) and the Kaiser–Meyer-Olkin (KMO) value of 0.94. The indices confirmed the fit of the data to the six-dimensional model for measuring the users' level of enjoyment of online games (X2 = 678.2 gl = 411, p = 0.000; SRMR = 0.05; TLI = 0.95, CFI = 0.95 and RMSEA = 0.05, IC 90% [0.04, 0.05]).

The self-reporting format of the scale increases the social desirability of the responses, but the sample only collects information from a specific geographic location, so these findings cannot extrapolate to populations with very marked cultural differences. Finally, the study did not measure other validity evidence, such as predictive and concurrent validity, which should be considered in future studies.

From a practical perspective, the study offers a measurement scale with fewer items and robust psychometric evidence that ensures the fit of the data to the EGame-flow measurement scale. Further research must continue to learn about the behavior of the EGame-flow scale in different samples that new evidence of psychometric properties continues to appear and that other factors associated with the users' gaming enjoyment experience are analyzed.

The value and originality of the study lie in the type of evidence of psychometric properties that the instrument has and particularly in the style of sample in which the study is carried out, in this case, in the context of Mexico, where there are not enough instruments that measure the flow experience of users.