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Customization is a paradox in architecture, providing necessary modernization for buildings but potentially damaging their architectural integrity. In this paper, the authors introduce the Inhabitant-Driven Customization approach for avoiding this paradox; this approach lets inhabitants design the customization from options created by architects that safeguard architectural rules. As a first implementation of the Inhabitant-Driven Customization approach, the MyChanges tool is presented. The authors assess whether the approach avoids the customization paradox by a qualitative stakeholder evaluation of the MyChanges tool and by a comparison of the Inhabitant-Driven Customization approach with existing approaches to housing customization.

MyChanges is a shape grammar-based design tool developed to enable inhabitants of the Álvaro Siza Vieira Malagueira housing complex to customize their houses in accordance with the architectural language of the complex. In this study, the authors qualitatively evaluated MyChanges with architects and other professional stakeholders. MyChanges is used in this paper to assess if the Inhabitant-Driven Customization approach avoids the paradox of customization. The initial reception of MyChanges produced diverging outcomes, suggesting that Inhabitant-Driven Customization is also unable to avoid the customization paradox. For analyzing this possibility further, this paper describes the main existing approaches to housing customization, including the Inhabitant-Driven Customization approach, formulates nine conditions for these approaches, and provides a qualitative comparative assessment of the approaches.

The customization paradox is demonstrated in the outcomes of the interviews with professional stakeholders on the MyChanges customization tool for the Malagueira housing complex. An argument is given that makes plausible that the Inhabitant-Driven Customization approach avoids the customization paradox by creating a co-design process in which inhabitants and architects alternately shape customization.

The originality of this paper lies in the introduction and discussion of the paradox of customization in housing. The paper identifies the conditions advanced in architecture for assessing housing customization approaches. Additionally, the authors propose a new customization approach and a design tool that to a large extent fulfills those conditions and avoids the customization paradox.

This empirical research aims to provide organisations with useful information on how teleworking has affected employee commuting, allowing organisations to adapt working conditions to the new social context. This research sets out to provide evidence on the behaviour of teleworkers in terms of the mode of transport chosen when commuting to work physically.

This research is based on a survey conducted in Madrid based on a theoretical approach grounded in the theory of planned behaviour (TPB) and discrete choice models. Exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and discriminant analysis have been used to determine the variables that influence the mode of transport chosen by teleworkers when commuting in person.

The results indicate the prevalence of private car use by teleworkers when working at the office, finding that attitudes and satisfaction with modes of transport significantly influence their choice. The characteristics and frequency of teleworking, however, are not significant, which indicates that teleworkers attach greater importance to their preferred mode of transport, regardless of the disadvantages.

This research provides empirical evidence using an inductive approach to understand the challenges that organisations are facing with regard to teleworking since commuting behaviour has changed for teleworkers. This requires organisations to give significant reconsideration to the issue of commuting as an important component of working time that could condition employee satisfaction and, therefore, the retention or recruitment of talent. Furthermore, residence and mobility changes afford organisations better access for recruitment, notwithstanding urban planning implications.

Stakeholders of the Architecture, Engineering and Construction (AEC) sector require information on the buildings economic performance throughout its life cycle. This information is neither readily available nor always accurate because building management (BM) professionals still face difficulties to fully incorporate the life cycle cost (LCC) concept into their daily practice. The purpose of this paper is to identify and contribute to solving these difficulties.

This paper provides a background knowledge review and set the ground for a structured research roadmap and a management framework that highlight the links and limitations to be addressed within and between LCC and BM. A six-stage method was used for developing conceptual frameworks targeting six goals: establishing a point of departure; mapping sources of information; literature research; notion deconstruction and conceptual categorization; overview of the applicable background knowledge; and structuring of a framework for LCC-informed decisions in BM.

Management solutions for the built context are necessarily connected with LCC and BM current concepts such as asset management, project, program and portfolio management, facility management and data management. These management approaches highlight the importance of incorporating life cycle concepts and promote LCC effective application within the AEC sector.

This paper identifies and discusses current limitations on the information availability for the economic performance of buildings throughout its life cycle. This work also identifies LCC-related topics that need to be further explored or addressed by both the scientific community and practitioners to overcome these limitations and facilitate the integration of the LCC concept into BM activities.

In the present-day context of a sharp decrease in economic and ecological resources, planned conservation and community empowerment are key strategies for sustainable heritage management, because of their cost effectiveness, increased preservation of authenticity and socially development. However, there are still very few practical implementations, so the purpose of this paper is to present applied research to real case studies, as well as to demonstrate that preventive-planned conservation is increasingly successful when linked with the empowerment of local communities and users.

This paper proposes a methodology that focuses on two complementary aspects: planned conservation (material component) – undertaken directly on buildings, through inspection, monitoring, maintenance and repair activities; community empowerment (intangible component) – afforded indirectly to users, through participatory strategies and training in prevention, maintenance and use.

Based on an estimation of costs, this paper suggests that preventive-planned conservation strategies (pre-damage) can be one-third cheaper than the reactive and interventionist approach (post-damage). Moreover, this study also develops innovative ICT tools for the planned conservation of the built heritage, namely a specifically designed computer software/App (“MPlan”) that can be used to compile maintenance plans.

The case studies are among the first applications of preventive-planned conservation strategies to the built heritage in Portugal. Different types of case studies are provided to better illustrate the methodological approach adopted and the results obtained. Special attention is given to the Romanesque Route, a cultural itinerary with 58 monuments (monasteries, churches, bridges, towers and a castle). illustrated manuals contribute to the empowerment of local communities and users.

This research theorizes the condition of human beings reduced to being users (and only users) in human-computer interaction (HCI), a condition that favors them becoming objects or targets of commercial dark patterns, racialized profiling algorithms, generalized surveillance, gendered interfaces and heteromation.

The reconceptualization of the users’ condition is done by confronting HCI theories on users with a dialectical-existential perspective over human ontology. The research is presented as a conceptual paper that includes analyzing and revising those theories to develop a conceptual framework for the user oppression in HCI.

Most HCI theories contribute to the user oppression with explicit or implicit ontological statements that denies their becoming-more or the possibility of users developing their handiness to the full human potential. Put together, these statements constitute an ideology called userism.

HCI needs to acknowledge its role in structuring oppression not just in sexism, racism, classism and ableism, but also the specific relation that pertains to HCI: userism. Similar to other fields, acknowledging oppression is the first step toward liberating from oppression.

The user is an existential condition for HCI theories, yet few theories can explain in depth how this condition affects human development. From the dialectical-existential perspective, the user condition can be dehumanizing. Computers may intensify existing oppressions through esthetic interactions but these interactions can be subverted for liberation.

This paper constitutes the first academic study to be made of Google Discover as applied to online journalism.

This paper constitutes the first academic study to be made of Google Discover as applied to online journalism. The study involved conducting 61 semi-structured interviews with experts that are representative of a range of different professional profiles within the fields of journalism and search engine positioning (SEO) in Brazil, Spain and Greece. Based on the data collected, the authors created five semantic categories and compared the experts' perceptions in order to detect common response patterns.

This study results confirm the existence of different degrees of convergence and divergence in the opinions expressed in these three countries regarding the main dimensions of Google Discover, including specific strategies using the feed, its impact on web traffic, its impact on both quality and sensationalist content and on the degree of responsibility shown by the digital media in its use. The authors are also able to propose a set of best practices that journalists and digital media in-house web visibility teams should take into account to increase their probability of appearing in Google Discover. To this end, the authors consider strategies in the following areas of application: topics, different aspects of publication, elements of user experience, strategic analysis and diffusion and marketing.

Although research exists on the application of SEO to different areas, there have not, to date, been any studies examining Google Discover.

The peer-review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/OIR-10-2022-0574

Cities have recognised information and communication technology (ICT) as a major enabler for transforming into “smarter” service providers. Mauritius is considering embarking on a smart island initiative, and as such, the existing towns in Mauritius have a major role to play in the transformation process. This study aims to focus on a systematic analysis of ICT architectures. This study proposes recommendations with regard to ICT infrastructures. This study elicits the contribution of those services towards the overall transformation of the towns, which in turn will form an integral part of the smart island initiative of the country.

A first step towards developing a smart ICT architecture is to understand what a smart ICT architecture constitutes of and the frameworks that can be used to develop these architectures. The main objectives of this systematic literature review (SLR) are as follows: understand what a smart ICT architecture consists of and derive a definition that will be used throughout the research for the development of ICT architecture for the smart local councils for Mauritius; analyse various frameworks, architectures and models that have been used in existing literature for the development of smart ICT architectures.

This SLR was conducted with a view to investigate ICT architectures with respect to smart governance. An in-depth review, followed by a critical analysis was performed based on the research questions set. The contribution of this study include the formulation of a definition for ICT architecture for smart local councils, which can be applied to any sphere characterised by similar aspects with reference to smart local governance. Albeit existing frameworks such as The Open Group Architecture Framework, Federal Enterprise Architecture and Zachman Framework, it was observed that in most cases, ICT architectures were built from scratch potentially because of specificities of each country/city.

This work proposes ICT architectures for smart local council.

This research proposes analytical valuation models throughout football players' life cycles based on crowd valuations from social media to produce dynamic sporting human capital disclosures, and therefore, supplying further useful information to capture the intellectual capital (IC) of football clubs.

This work is carried out using an econometric model that includes 658 observations of crowd judgments versus their transfer fees, for the best footballers of the three major European Leagues between 2006 and 2018. To make the model more parsimonious, the set of independent variables that really add value has been found across the stepwise methodology.

The significant differences between both models are analyzed, integrating previous academic literature based on the existence of negotiation elements in prices, and in the capacity of crowdsourcing to explain assessments of football players, from a dynamic perspective, alongside a new variable: injuries, which has not been explained before.

The broader assessments from crowdsourcing should be integrated in intellectual capital disclosures (ICD), from a critical, novel and dynamic perspective, creating a virtuous cycle between managers and fans, to increase transparency of financial information for stakeholders and society.

This study aims to build a global environmental quality protection convention to jointly address the problems of environmental pollution governance worldwide.

From the perspective of environmental pollution of the air, ocean, forest, water and solid waste, the authors summarize the main important measures and mechanisms of environmental pollution governance in various countries.

The results indicate that management research on biodiversity and natural resources must be strengthened, the relationship between economic development and environmental quality management needs to be balanced, the comparative study of domestic and international environmental governance theories and practices should be strengthened, empirical and applied research on environmental governance needs to be focused on, and complete system research on environmental governance and management should be explored. In the future, further strengthening environmental awareness, addressing environmental pollution and managing environmental quality are necessary.

The environment is the foundation of human survival and development. With the development of economy, contradictions between human and natural environment (e.g. air, ocean, forest and water) have become prominent. Environmental pollution governance cannot only help address existing environmental problems but also solve economic problems of various countries. The prerequisite for sustainable development is to lay a solid foundation for the coordinated development of economic growth and pollution management.

The purpose of this study is to propose a comprehensive benchmarking approach to help subsidiaries of a company to implement continuous improvement (CI).

The proposed approach classifies subsidiaries of a company into the three stages of CI. After that, the proposed approach employs data envelopment analysis (DEA)-super slacks-based measure (SBM) model and Malmquist Productivity Index (MPI) to evaluate the operational efficiency of the subsidiaries and selects benchmarking targets and sets benchmarking goals based on the operational efficiency for benchmarking of input and output criteria. Then, the proposed approach suggests a four-step benchmarking process for benchmarking of detailed efficiency. Finally, the proposed approach makes the subsidiaries achieve CI by implementing the input and output benchmarking and the efficiency benchmarking.

The results show that the proposed approach can help subsidiaries of a company to implement a staged benchmarking which considers input and output criteria and Malmquist productivity and efficiency comprehensively.

Generally, benchmarking is implemented in many aspects. However, due to the restriction of a company’s resource level, a practical and staged benchmarking is preferred. This study proposes a comprehensive approach to benchmark systematically and gradually, and provides a more reasonable benchmarking process for implementing CI.