Search results

This review paper seeks to enhance knowledge of how pre-loading affects reinforced concrete (RC) beams under fire. It investigates key factors like deflection and load capacity to understand pre-loading's role in replicating RC beams' actual responses to fire, aiming to improve fire testing protocols and structural fire engineering design.

This review systematically aggregates data from existing literature on the fire response of RC beams, comparing scenarios with (WP) and without pre-loading (WOP). Through statistical tools like the two-tailed t-test and Mann–Whitney U-test, it assesses deflection extremes. The study further examines structural responses, including flexural and shear behavior, ultimate load capacity, post-yield behavior, stiffness degradation and failure modes. The approach concludes with a statistical forecast of ideal pre-load levels to elevate experimental precision and enhance fire safety standards.

The review concludes that pre-loading profoundly affects the fire response of RC beams, suggesting a 35%–65% structural capacity range for realistic simulations. The review also recommended the initial crack load as an alternative metric for determining the pre-loading impact. Crucially, it highlights that pre-loading not only influences the fire response but also significantly alters the overall structural behavior of the RC beams.

The review advances structural fire engineering with an in-depth analysis of pre-loading's impact on RC beams during fire exposure, establishing a validated pre-load range through thorough statistical analysis and examination of previous research. It refines experimental methodologies and structural design accuracy, ultimately bolstering fire safety protocols.

Applying practices from online role-playing games with multiple players, we employed Reacting to the Past (RTTP) pedagogy to engage students at several universities in a multi-week experience. As a pedagogical method, RTTP is ripe for potential use across an array of leadership education initiatives, including interinstitutional collaborations.

In this essay, we describe this student learning and engagement experience as well as address innovations and potential applications in similar leadership education contexts, preliminary student and facilitator feedback and lessons learned.

As part of The Justice Challenge’s eight-week Colloquium, students developed an understanding of food justice, systems thinking and transdisciplinary collaboration, as well as skills in perspective-taking, persuasion and teamwork. Through the RTTP gameplay, students engaged firsthand with multiple perspectives and goals, differing ways of interpreting information and situations, diverse factions and political pressures.

We believe our use of RTTP in The Justice Challenge is novel for two reasons. First, although RTTP fits remarkably well with the basic philosophy of honors education, it is less explored as a pedagogical approach in leadership education contexts. Second, our use of RTTP in an online, multi-institutional program highlights it as a useful pedagogical tool to foster leadership learning that can work regardless of group size or modality.

This study aims to investigate the influence of corporate governance (CG) on environmental disclosure (ED) practices within UK and US firms, addressing the contemporary challenges confronting firms in both contexts.

Using the dynamic panel regression framework of system generalised method of moment (GMM), this study analyses a sample comprising 121 FTSE and 200 S&P firms from 2010 to 2020.

The findings emphasise the dynamic nature of ED practices among UK and US firms, demonstrating their propensity to swiftly adjust to desired levels whenever deviations occur. Besides, this study identifies board independence and the frequency of board meetings as significant determinants of ED for UK firms. In contrast, for US firms, board independence and audit committee independence are found to be significant determinants of ED.

The research highlights the fundamental role played by CG in shaping how firms in the UK and the US navigate agency problems and respond to diverse stakeholder demands through ED in their annual reports. This study advocates for the promotion of robust governance systems that concurrently serve the purposes of accountability and monitoring to bridge the information expectation gap between firms and stakeholders. The findings reinforce the necessity for regulatory initiatives involving policy formulation and corporate oversight to enhance private sector awareness regarding environmental reporting practices.

This study contributes to the scarce literature on the impact of board and audit committee characteristics on ED practices in the UK and US contexts. In addition, by using the system GMM estimation technique, this study provides robust and updated evidence that addresses the weaknesses inherent in previous studies.

The study sets out to demonstrate how a lifecycle perspective on complex, public-sector procurement projects can be used for making qualitative assessments of procurement policy and practice and reveal those procurement capabilities that are most impactful for operating effectively.

Agency theory, institutional theory and the lifecycle analysis technique are combined to abductively develop a framework to identify, analyse and compare complex procurement policies and practices in public sector organisations. Defence is the focal case and is compared with cases in the Nuclear, Local Government and Health sectors.

The study provides a framework for undertaking a lifecycle analysis to understand the challenges and capabilities of complex, public-sector buyers. Eighteen hierarchically-arranged themes are identified and used in conjunction with agency theory and institutional theory to explain complex procurement policy and practice variation in some of the UK’s highest-profile public buyers. The study findings provide a classification of complex buyers and offer valuable guidance for practitioners and researchers navigating complex procurement contexts.

The lifecycle approach proposed is a new research tool providing a bespoke application of theory by considering each lifecycle phase as an individual but related element that is governed by unique institutional pressures and principal-agent relationships.

To argue current calls to address grand challenges like income inequality are unlikely to succeed until the academy acknowledges how accounting is constitutive of these problems. We demonstrate how accounting is part of the problem because of its adherence to a legal model of the corporation erected on false suppositions.

Using multiple disciplines, e.g. history, economics, law and philosophy, pertaining to the nature of the corporate form, we present a logical argument that the official telos of accounting obstructs any fruitful effort to address grand challenges.

The global legal concept governing corporations (an aggregate of members) makes corporations a major cause of the grand challenges humans face. Adherence to a legal theory of the corporation leads accounting policy to rationalize income and wealth inequality by subsuming the legal powers of corporations to expropriate wealth into a singular maximand labeled “earnings.”

Though accounting is essentially “of” law, scholarly efforts to understand accounting’s social role are based on an information metaphor. We provide reasons for skepticism of any efforts addressing grand challenges until accounting acknowledges the legal nature of its social role as a regulator of business conduct. There are no accounting solutions to grand challenges without acknowledging how the accepted legal nature of the corporate form makes the corporation the cause of the grand challenges we face.

This paper aims to investigate how institutional entrepreneurs in a mature field acquire different forms of legitimacy through various narrative strategies, as revealed by a historical analysis of the Late Qing Dynasty of China. Specifically, the study seeks to illuminate the narrative techniques employed by these entrepreneurs to build multi-level legitimacies for their new systems during the national crises of the late 19th century.

This study employs a qualitative approach based on three historical case studies of Westernization, namely advocates, reformists and revolutionaries during the Late Qing Dynasty of China. It delves into the institutional entrepreneurial activities of these groups, investigating how they navigated and influenced their sociopolitical context through narrative strategies.

The findings reveal that institutional entrepreneurs utilize various narrative techniques to build legitimacy. These include (1) modifying and disseminating narratives at the proper time, (2) ascribing their proposed system to cultural tradition by reinterpreting classical works and (3) offering understandable and concrete promises to stakeholders. The study also identifies an evolving pattern of narratives underpinned by mutual learning and continuous iteration among different factions of institutional entrepreneurs.

This paper adds new insights to the literature on institutional entrepreneurs and, more broadly, to institutional research literature by advancing our understanding of the discursive dynamics underlying institutional changes. It unveils the complex interplay of narrative techniques and legitimacy building in the context of societal and institutional upheaval, providing a nuanced understanding of the role of narratives in institutional entrepreneurship.

The purpose of this research was to seek a more refined understanding of the ways beneficiaries are evaluating nonprofit organisations (NPO), from the beneficiaries’ perspectives. Understanding evaluation from beneficiaries’ perspectives is not only important theoretically, but also for enabling evaluation processes to authentically contribute toward enhanced downward accountability.

Theorisation of immanent evaluation (Deleuze, 1998), the ontological view that there is no form imposed from outside or above but instead an articulation from within, was drawn upon to direct attention toward understanding beneficiaries’ inherent productive evaluative capacity and agency. This theorisation enabled a different way of observing and understanding beneficiary evaluation within a qualitative case study conducted in an Australian NPO. Data was sourced from interviews, observations and document analysis.

Findings suggest beneficiaries largely viewed the NPO’s evaluation processes to be unsatisfactory toward meeting their needs in relation to meaningful engagement. However, beneficiaries’ evaluative capacity was noted to include their own evaluation criteria and evaluative expressions indicating the production of an evaluative account. Here beneficiaries’ evaluative expressions are representations of events of evaluation, initiated by them. Findings enable a more refined understanding of beneficiaries’ engagement in evaluation, moving beyond traditional considerations of participative evaluation, and illustrating beneficiaries’ agency and active role in the production of evaluation.

This research furthers understandings of downward accountability and participative evaluation by detailing how beneficiaries’ evaluative capacity is part of an NPO’s evaluative environment, and as such, conceives of an immanent theory of beneficiary evaluation. Findings highlight how evaluation, as a mechanism of downward accountability, functions from beneficiaries’ perspectives and the type of organisational environment capable of enabling and better supporting beneficiary engagement.