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The growth of last-mile delivery presents challenges like environmental impact, operational inefficiencies and risks of theft or damage. This study explores parcel locker adoption as a potential solution, focusing on the roles of information framing and consumer characteristics in influencing consumer adoption. It offers insights into prioritizing benefits (environmental, security, convenience) in information framing and which consumer traits, such as regulatory focus and gender, to consider in designing and promoting parcel locker networks.

We test our hypotheses with three scenario-based experiments. The first focuses on the key parcel locker benefit of environmental sustainability framing, the second on security framing and the third on convenience framing.

Our results show that consumers are more likely to use parcel locker delivery when exposed to loss-framed environmental or security information, particularly when they are male. Additionally, promotion-focused individuals, particularly males, are the most likely users when presented with loss-framed messages emphasizing the inconvenience and insecurity of home delivery.

Our findings produce a middle range theory of gender and regulatory focus in the context of consumer participation in parcel locker delivery. Specifically, we find that gender and regulatory focus influence consumer reactions to information disclosure, with loss-framed information more strongly influencing consumer intent for promotion-focused individuals.

Managers seeking to introduce parcel lockers or expand existing parcel locker networks should incorporate security and convenience into their locker network decisions. Initial locker bays should be located in or near sites that experience high consumer traffic from promotion-focused males. Additionally, information disclosed should highlight these security and convenience benefits compared to the relative inconvenience and risk associated with home delivery.

While information disclosures often emphasize the environmental benefits associated with parcel locker use, likely users find other benefits more convincing. Highlighting these alternative factors and incorporating them into parcel locker network design will still allow for environmental benefits, including carrier CO2 reduction, to emerge from increased parcel locker use. As locker networks become more established, expanding the network to cater to additional consumers may allow service providers to focus information on environmental benefits.

Prior research assumes an existing parcel locker network or consumer base when studying network design and adoption. This study highlights the importance of tailoring information to consumer characteristics, emphasizing network features that best align with potential parcel locker users. Specifically, we found gender and regulatory focus to influence consumer reaction to information disclosure, where loss-framed information is the most influential particularly for promotion-focus individuals.

This study aimed to investigate the effect of working remotely on new professionals’ learning and adjustment. Organizational socialization is the process of learning and adjusting to a new professional role. Among new professionals working on-site, this learning and adjustment is indicated by a development of role clarity, task mastery and social acceptance. Less is known about the process when working remotely. This was recognized as a key organizational challenge following the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.

In this study, with a longitudinal design with 242 graduates and weekly data collections for the first five weeks following professional entry in 2021, the authors compared the learning and adjustment among individuals working on-site, in hybrid or remotely using longitudinal analyses of mean response profiles.

The group-by-time interaction effects were not statistically significant (i.e. no differences were found in the adjustment of the new professionals of the three groups).

These results indicate that working remotely does not jeopardize the organizational socialization process. Furthermore, a marginally statistically significant result indicated that participants working only remotely experienced a greater development of task mastery over time: This suggests that remote work may even benefit learning and professional adjustment. Theoretical and practical implications of the results are discussed.

Since the 1980s, New public management has fostered the introduction of managerial approaches similar to those of the private sector in public administrations. Recently, the advantages of performing risk management in the public sector have been recognized; however, to the best of our knowledge, research on risk management in public administrations is underdeveloped, and there is a need to understand how risk management is performed. This paper addresses these issues and investigates whether and how risk management is performed in Italian public administration.

This study focused on a sample of 503 Italian municipalities and used a mixed research method. Through a qualitative content analysis of documents published on municipalities’ websites, data and information were collected and elaborated using quantitative indicators.

The main results are that a high percentage of large Italian municipalities perform risk management and comply with theoretical provisions on risk management, sometimes displaying isomorphic behavior in risk management practices.

This study provides a new perspective on risk management in Italian municipalities, contributes to filling a gap in the literature and suggests a theoretical perspective on municipalities’ approaches when introducing new managerial practices.

The cost and duration estimation process is important to be monitored and controlled in construction projects. Estimation variation from actuals presents a problem when attempting to complete a project on planned time and budget. Various studies cover project performance monitoring with different cost and time performance indices. Nevertheless, project monitoring techniques do not take advantage of the available data to assess the performance and accuracy of estimates developed by the estimation team.

This research proposes using statistical process control (SPC) to assess the consistency and stability of the estimation of activities’ costs and durations. The proposed system calculates the deviation of the estimated costs and durations from the actual values. These calculations are the activities’ indices that are used to plot the control chart. The process capability analysis (PCA) is used to determine the accuracy deviation of the estimations from the organization’s targets.

Results of the proposed system application to a real project determine the activities that have inaccurate cost and duration estimations. This result helps the estimation departments to analyze reasons for inaccurate estimations. The proposed system is an easy, effective tool for continuous improvement to the performance of the estimation department.

Some projects are classified as troubled projects when calculating the status of the project with reference to estimations, while the estimations themselves are troubled and need to be corrected. The proposed system of this paper is considered a novel approach by using SPC techniques such as control charts and process capability analysis for continuous monitoring and assessing of cost and duration estimation process performance to improve process accuracy and increase the credibility of estimation teams or departments.

Scaling up smart city infrastructure projects will require a large financial investment. Using public–private partnerships is one of the most effective ways to address budget constraints. Numerous factors have varying degrees of influence on the performance of Public private partnerships (PPP) projects; certain PPP factors are more crucial to the success of a smart city infrastructure project than others, and their influence can be greatly increased when they are fulfilled collectively. This study aims to find out what factors are unique to smart city PPP initiatives, as well as how these factors work together, so that successful smart city infrastructure PPP projects can be scaled up.

The methodology included three sequential stages: identifying the critical success factors (CSF) of PPP for smart cities based on an extensive literature review, collecting data from a sample of 90 PPP practitioners using a Likert scale questionnaire and estimating interrelationships among the CSF and their emergent clusters using structural equation modelling.

The best fit model developed in this study demonstrated the significance of each factor and their interrelationships within their categories in enhancing the performance of PPPs in smart city infrastructure projects. Five categories of critical success factors for PPPs in smart city infrastructure projects have been established: partnership and collaboration; financial sustainability; contractual duties and outsourcing; smart integration; and contract governance.

The proposed model represented the causal interrelationships among relevant critical success factors derived from literature, which may help in directing the organization’s attention and resources to more critical areas, leading to the effective fulfilment of the smart city infrastructure project’s objectives. In addition to the theoretical and methodological contributions, this study produced a usable and readily adaptable list and clusters of critical success factors for research in the area of the implementation of PPP in smart city infrastructure projects.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to identify PPP critical success factors and their themed clusters for smart city infrastructure projects.