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The purpose of this paper is to identify critical factors that affect labour turnover in the New Zealand construction sector and develop a framework for addressing this issue.

A mixed-method approach was adopted. A questionnaire survey combined with interviews was used to capture the personal experiences and views of 157 construction workers regarding labour turnover.

The statistical analysis revealed that level of pay, employment relationships, employee welfare, opportunities for career development, commuting distance to work and domestic relationships were the top five factors considered as primary determinants leading to the turnover decisions of most of those surveyed. Factor analysis further categorised the critical factors in three categories, namely, (1) nature of the job, (2) employee satisfaction and (3) employer commitment to staff retention and development.

While high labour turnover rates take a toll on many construction businesses, the findings from this research will hopefully provide guidance on areas of improvement to create a sustainable construction workforce at both organisational and sectoral levels.

Although the study is New Zealand-focused, it increases understanding of the factors affecting labour turnover in the construction sector, and the framework developed will provide construction organisations with directions in workforce retention and development to reduce the effects of labour turnover on organisational performance.

Prefabricated construction has proven to be superior in terms of affordability and sustainability over the years. As a result of sustainable production, prefabricated housebuilding has evolved into a distinct industry reliant on supplier companies acting as supply chains (SCs) for housing projects. These companies' performance is critical to the successful implementation of prefabricated housebuilding technologies. However, in comparison to those choosing manufacturing as a strategy in other industries, the life span of these companies, providing innovative housing solutions, is relatively short. This is due to critical factors influencing the performance, but the inter-relationship of the performance dimensions is more significant. This study establishes the inter-relationship of the companies involved in house building with steel prefabricated housebuilding technologies.

The most recent factors were extracted from the literature. The relationships were developed using the interpretive structural modeling (ISM) method with the input from industry experts, and the driving factors were determined using the Matrice d'Impacts Croisés Multiplication Appliqués à un Classement (MICMAC) technique.

Critical performance factors were classified according to performance dimensions, ranked and classified based on driving and dependence power. The inter-relationships among the performance dimensions of time, quality, cost, delivery, features and innovation were determined. Key performance strategies were proposed for prefabricated housebuilding companies involved in manufacturing and/or assembly of steel products.

This study established the interrelationship of performance dimensions for prefabricated house building (PHB) companies to develop strategies against critical challenges to remain competitive in the housing market. Previous research had not looked into interrelationship among the performance dimensions. The proposed performance strategies are applicable to supplier organizations using steel prefabricated technologies in similar markets around the world.

Information technology provides important support for on-site decision-making of field personnel. Most literature focuses on the technological aspects of decision-support systems, without fully understanding the information required for effective decision-making. This study aimed to formalize decision-makers’ requirements in terms of the major goals, decisions and information.

The situation awareness (SA) approach was applied through the goal-directed task analysis (GDTA) method, narrowing the scope to field managers’ decision-making during indoor construction activities. This method was based on a series of interviews to define, revise and validate the decision-making requirements for the given scope.

The study yielded 1,056 highly interrelated elements. The results indicate that the field manager’s overall goal is to execute and handoff work within the established deadlines, with the required quality, maximizing profits, within a safe work environment. The overall goal construes into five main goals regarding work progress, quality, costs, safety and communication. These goals include subgoals, decisions, and the information necessary to attain them, depicted in diagrams.

The findings allow enhancing the design of decision-support solutions by identifying information required for future developments and showing the interrelations between goals and information requirements that need to be addressed to present interfaces for effectively assisting on-site decision-making. Moreover, the results allow for the assessment of solutions regarding the sufficiency of information.

This is the first effort to fully understand the information required by field managers for on-site decision-making during indoor construction activities.

Globally, prefabrication in housebuilding has evolved as an innovative approach to attain sustainability and affordability. However, the SC, including non-producers and producers, of prefabricated housebuilding projects is still not perceptually aligned, hindering innovation diffusion. This paper investigates the contemporary industry perspective on PHB for conceptualisation, market share and growth, innovation diffusion and the producer's role in the context of New Zealand.

An exploratory qualitative research design was chosen to learn the perceptual stance of the industry. A semi-structured survey was conducted, followed by interviews with selected supply chain participants, who were producers and non-producers and had relevant experience in the PHB industry.

This study reports the common terminologies used by supply chain members, with justification and explanation. Further, the perceived market share and growth of the PHB industry are obtained and compared with subsequent studies to determine the capability and capacity. The perception of the diffusion of PHB by type is reported to portray the overall trend of the industry. In the last, the role of producers as the suppliers of PHB projects is investigated to establish the stakeholder positional criticality.

This study can help researchers and practitioners gain insight into the PHB industry from a multi-dimensional perspective. This study is a potential first step to formalise the policy, programme, strategies and action plan for the uptake of the PHB in the New Zealand.

PHB diffusion in the supply chain perspective, considering multi-dimensional aspects, has not been considered in previous studies as government agencies produce most of the literature. This academic research establishes the theoretical linkage towards PHB diffusion and reports the current status.

In this paper, we present a critical survey of experiments on political clientelism and vote-buying. We claim that through randomization and control, field experiments represent an important tool for answering causal questions, whereas list experiments provide useful methods that improve the hard task of measuring clientelism. We show that existing experimental research gives answers to the questions of why clientelism is effective for getting votes and winning elections, who relies more on this strategy – incumbents or challengers – how much clientelism takes place, and who tend to be the favorite targets of clientelistic politicians. The relationship between clientelism and other illicit strategies for getting votes, such as electoral violence and fraud, has also been analyzed through experimental interventions. Experiments have also studied mechanisms and policies for overcoming clientelism. Finally, we show that external validity is a major source of concern that affects this burgeoning literature.

This paper examines disaster capitalism in Chile, that is, the relationships between disasters and neoliberalism. It looks at two post-disaster dimensions: disasters as windows of opportunity to introduce political reforms and disasters as occasions for the corporate class to capitalize on such disasters.

Two indices, disaster capitalism (DC) and post-disaster private involvement (PDPI), are proposed for cross-case analysis. They are based on legal records, institutional reports and economic data. The DC assesses the introduction of reforms following disasters, while PDPI evaluates the share of public-private funding used for recovery. Both indices are applied here to two disasters in Chile: the 2010 Maule earthquake, and the 2008 Chaitén volcanic eruption.

Results show that the highly neoliberal Chilean context leaves limited space for new neoliberal reforms. Although recovery is implemented predominantly through the private sector, the state still assumes greater responsibility for recovery costs. Results also detect poor levels of participation from the private sector in accounting their efforts and making them publicly available. Likewise, the research suggests that neoliberal reforms become more likely after disasters. However, the preexisting politico-economic context matters. Finally, there is clearly a need for data systematization in post-disaster recovery.

In the Chilean context, the indices proved beneficial as a strategy for data collection and a method for scrutinizing the implications of neoliberal policy implemented in the wake of disasters, as well as in evaluating the role of the corporate class during recovery.

This chapter's objective is to analyze, with a long-term perspective, the formation of an entrepreneurial culture in Mexico's Midwest, specifically in the state of Jalisco, in terms of the geographical environment, the culture in general, and the local economic institutions that, when viewed interconnectedly, will globally impact the practices, representations, and imaginaries of persons who at a given time have made the decision to undertake profitable economic activities – individual and collective entrepreneurs, in other words. To this end, we have divided the text into two sections. In the first, we conceptually review what we understand as entrepreneurial culture; in principle, we deconstruct its terms and then conjugate them from a social science perspective. We also emphasize the importance of studying the milieu as a scenario of action with different arenas, where a variety of agents have been involved. In the second part, without sidelining conceptual analysis, we present concrete empirical evidence of the role played by culture and local economic institutions that shape entrepreneurial culture in Midwestern Mexico over time, specifically in Jalisco. The text ends with some final considerations.

The purpose of this paper is to gain a better understanding of the antecedents of the quality of graduates’ jobs when they enter the job market after university graduation.

Survey data collected from 173 Spanish bachelor and master’s degree university graduates at two time points (two months before and six months after graduation, approximately) were analyzed by means of path analysis.

A moderated mediation model was tested, where the relationship between the horizontal fit (HF) between the university degree subject and the student’s job and the quality of the graduate’s job after graduation is mediated by self-perceived employability and moderated by the time devoted to a student job. Results showed that the relationship between HF and job quality was partially mediated by self-perceived employability. However, contrary to the proposed hypothesis, this relationship did not depend on the time devoted to a student job.

This study contributes to improving the understanding about how and why university students’ work experience is related to the quality of their jobs as fresh graduates.

Impedance data obtained by electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS) are fitted to a relevant electrical equivalent circuit to evaluate parameters directly related to the resistance and the durability of metal–coating systems. The purpose of this study is to present a novel and more efficient computational strategy for the modelling of EIS measurements using the Differential Evolution paradigm.

An alternative method to non-linear regression algorithms for the analysis of measured data in terms of equivalent circuit parameters is provided by evolutionary algorithms, particularly the Differential Evolution (DE) algorithms (standard DE and a representative of the self-adaptive DE paradigm were used).

The results obtained with DE algorithms were compared with those yielding from commercial fitting software, achieving a more accurate solution, and a better parameter identification, in all the cases treated. Further, an enhanced fitting power for the modelling of metal–coating systems was obtained.

The great potential of the developed tool has been demonstrated in the analysis of the evolution of EIS spectra due to progressive degradation of metal–coating systems. Open codes of the different differential algorithms used are included, and also, examples tackled in the document are open. It allows the complete use, or improvement, of the developed tool by researchers.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the role played by different types of firm innovation on employee downsizing. Drawing on economic and management views, the authors aims to assess the potential positive or negative effect of different types of processes (i.e. new technology via the introduction of new equipment as well as new methods of organizing the workforce) and product (i.e. number of innovations) innovations on employee downsizing.

The empirical setting is a sample of Spanish manufacturing firms over the period 1994‐2006. The authors employ probit models for panel data as an empirical tool.

The results show a negative and significant effect of process innovations associated with acquiring and deploying new production equipment and product‐oriented innovations on the probability of carrying out important reductions in workforce. However, a positive and significant effect is found when process innovations are linked to the adoption of new methods of organizing the workforce.

Managers might play a significant role in employment creation, especially when they carry out process innovations related to the acquisition of complementary production assets (i.e. new equipment) and market highly innovative products. Policy makers might contribute to diminish the potential number of employees affected by firms’ downsizing strategies by designing, for example, public subsidies systems that deliberately prompt both types of innovations.

The authors make an effort to provide alternative explanations about why firms downsize, as they analyze different types of process and product innovations whose effects on employment (and, thus, downsizing) do not seem to be clear. Moreover, the paper furthers one's understanding of the effect of firm innovation by focusing on the potential effect of one type of process innovation which has not been examined until now: the adoption and implementation of new methods of organizing the workforce owing to new technology.