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The work on bridge resilience assessment includes quantitative and qualitative approaches to compare the multiple bridges based on their resilience. But still, the bridge resilience obtained by these assessment approaches is inefficient when prioritising multiple bridges to improve their resilience. Therefore, this study aims to develop a methodology for prioritising the bridges to improve their resilience.

The research methodology follows three sequential phases. In the first phase, criteria importance through intercriteria correlation (CRITIC) technique is used to compute the criteria weights. The criteria considered are age, area, design high flood level, finish road level FRL and resilience index of bridges. While 12 river-crossing bridges maintained by one bridge owner are considered as alternatives. Then, in the second phase, the prioritisation of each bridge is evaluated using five techniques, including technique for order of preference by similarity to ideal solution, VIKOR (in Serbian, Visekriterijumska Optimizacija I Kompromisno Resenje), additive ratio assessment, complex proportional assessment and multi-objective optimisation method by ratio analysis. Finally, in the third phase, the results of all five techniques are integrated using CRITIC and the weighted sum method.

The result of the study enables bridge owners to deal with the particular bridge that requires resilience improvement. The study concluded that it is not enough to consider only the bridge resilience index to improve its resilience. The prioritisation exercise should consider various other criteria that are not preferred during the bridge resilience assessment process.

The proposed methodology is a novel framework based on the existing multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) techniques for contributing knowledge in the domain of bridge resilience management. It can efficiently overcome the pitfall of decision-making when two bridges have the same resilience index score.

India liberalized its economy in 1991, which resulted in intense global competition, quality-conscious and demanding customers. Additionally, significant technological advancements lead to enhancements in products and processes. These forced Indian organizations to adopt innovative business strategies in the past 30 years. Meanwhile, the Lean Six Sigma methodology has significantly grown with vast applicability during the past 30 years. Thus, the purpose of this study is to develop the learning on Lean Six Sigma methodology in the Indian context through investigation of literature.

A three-stage systematic literature review approach was adopted to investigate the literature during the present study. In total, 187 articles published in 62 journals/conference proceedings from 2005 to 2022 (18 years) were shortlisted. The first part of the article summarizes the significant milestones towards the quality journey in the Indian context, along with the evolution of the Lean Six Sigma methodology. The second part examines the shortlisted papers on Lean Six Sigma frameworks, their applicability in industrial sectors, performance metrics, outcomes realized, publication trends, authorship patterns and leading researchers from the Indian perspective.

Lean Six Sigma has emerged as a highly acclaimed and structured business improvement strategy worldwide. The Indian economy has seen remarkable growth in the past decade and is one of the fastest-growing economies in the 21st century. Lean Six Sigma implementation in India has significantly increased from 2014 onward. The study revealed that researchers have proposed several different frameworks for Lean Six Sigma implementation, the majority of which are conceptual. Furthermore, the balanced applicability of Lean Six Sigma in manufacturing and service sectors was observed with the highest implementation in the health-care sector. Additionally, the widely adopted tools, techniques along with performance metrics exploring case studies were reported along with a summary of eminent and leading researchers in the Indian context.

This study is confined to reviewed papers as per the research criteria with a significant focus on the Indian context and might have missed some papers due to the adopted papers selection strategy.

The present study is one of the initial attempts to investigate the literature published on Lean Six Sigma in the Indian context, including perspective on the Indian quality movement. Therefore, the present study will provide an understanding of Lean Six Sigma methodology in the Indian context to graduating students in engineering and management and entry-level executives. The analysis and findings on Lean Six Sigma frameworks, research approach, publications details, etc., will be helpful to potential research scholars and academia. Additionally, analysis of case studies on Lean Six Sigma implementation by Indian industries will assist the managers and professionals in decision making.

Scant attention has been paid to the influence of professors on science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) students' learning and lives at the tertiary level. To fill this void, this chapter examines the influence of professors on students' entering and remaining in the STEM disciplines and pursuing STEM careers within the context of six funded STEM grants in the southern United States. We examine professor–student interactions using the students' storied experiences as the fodder for our narrative inquiry. We present narrative exemplars from which the following themes emerged: (1) agency as a student and agency as a human being, (2) development of students' multilayered identities, and (3) professors' engagement of themselves in their interactions with students. A discussion of learner-centeredness and professors' professional development in higher education concludes this study of professors' influence on students' learning and intended careers.

This study aims to explore the underdog brand biography dimensions that emerging-country consumers identify with (Study 1) and attempts to uncover the effects of these dimensions on brand affinity and purchase intention moderated by self-identity and brand trust (Study 2).

Study 1, using data from 359 young Indians, reveals three underlying dimensions integral to underdog brand biography in emerging markets. Study 2 uses an experimental setup with a single-factorial design among 332 young Mexican consumers to investigate the direct effects of three identified underdog brand biography dimensions on purchase intention, mediated by brand affinity and moderated by consumer self-identity and brand trust.

Study 1 reveals three dimensions underlying underdog brand biographies: unfavorable circumstances, striving in adversities and passion, and persistent will to succeed. Study 2 reveals that consumers with higher self-identity demonstrate greater purchase intentions for an underdog brand than a top dog one.

The results indicate that marketers can successfully use underdog narratives to influence consumer decision-making, thereby increasing brand affinity and purchase intention.

This study delineates the link between different dimensions of underdog brand biographies with brand affinity and purchase intention in emerging countries and builds on the understanding of the moderating role played by self-identity and brand trust.

Despite having strategic inflection, retail set-ups in India have been continuously raising a challenge for suppliers of retail products aiming to all to target the right consumers in accordance with their ever-changing preferences. This adds a complexity to retailers offering services who seek valued information to devise a retail strategy by segmenting markets on the basis of consumer shopping orientations. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to develop and validate the consumer profile of out shoppers based on the shopping orientations.

The study has used descriptive research design. A total of 298 consumers from urban and rural areas of North Gujarat, India, were selected through quota-based sampling method and contacted personally to fill the self-rated structured questionnaire.

Collected data were edited and processed for first exploratory factor analysis to exactly know the factor structure of consumer perceived shopping orientation. Thereafter, cluster analysis was performed to identify consumer groups which were validated through multiple discriminant analysis. Three groups, namely, outshoppers, community-oriented in-shoppers and time-effective in-shoppers were cross-tabulated with consumers’ socio-demographics to extract the profile through chi-square analysis. Results were fairly consistent with the past studies.

The results of this study indicate consumers’ profiles based on shopping orientation to provide an input to retail services markets to devise strategy for targeting and positioning emphasising on outshoppers segment. Marketers do not consider them as an identical segment. Henceforth, more specific approach can be used for consumers who are frequently reflected through their psychographic portrait.

At macro level, study reveals some opportunities to retailers for penetrating into other segments of outshoppers. Furthermore, segmenting for retail services marketers has been ignored in past literature; the study addresses this gap by proposing bases in outshopping context for Indian businesses.

Outlines research work [by the Machine Vision Group at Royal Holloway] into an x‐ray inspection system able to detect contaminants in packaged food products. Describes the analysis of a four‐stage machine vision structure that includes image formation, pre‐processing, feature extraction and decision. The system was tested on various food products and contaminants with the resultant conclusions that the contamination detection system was adaptive and worked with many types of products and contaminants. Refinements in the final decision making stage are being implemented by the use of expert [neural] networks.

Several decades of mental health research in the UK repeatedly report that people of African-Caribbean origin are more likely than other ethnic minorities, including the White majority, to be diagnosed with schizophrenia and related psychoses. Race-based inequalities in mental healthcare persist despite numerous initiatives such as the UK’s ‘Delivering Race Equality’ policy, which sought to reduce the fear of mainstream services and promote more timely access to care. Community-level engagement with members of African-Caribbean communities highlighted the need to develop culturally relevant psychosocial treatments. Family Intervention (FI) is a ‘talking treatment’ with a strong evidence-base for clinical-effectiveness in the management of psychoses. Benefits of FI include improved self-care, problem-solving and coping for both service users and carers, reducing the risk of relapse and re-hospitalisation. Working collaboratively with African-Caribbeans as ‘experts-by-experience’ enabled co-production, implementation and evaluation of Culturally adapted Family Intervention (CaFI). Our findings suggests that a community frequently labelled ‘hard-to-reach’ can be highly motivated to engage in solutions-focussed research to improve engagement, experiences and outcomes in mental health. This underscores the UK’s Mental Health Task Force’s message that ‘new ways of working’ are required to reduce the inequalities faced by African-Caribbeans and other marginalised groups in accessing mental healthcare. Although conducted in the UK (a high-income multi-cultural country), co-production of more culturally appropriate psychosocial interventions may have wider implications in the global health context. Interventions like CaFI could, for example, contribute to reducing the 75% ‘mental health gap’ between High and Low-and-Middle-Income counties reported by the World Health Organization.

University–industry collaborations are an important driver of innovation that highlights the benefits of collaborative processes across organizational boundaries. However, like in most collaborative processes, many challenges remain when trying to manage the process of knowledge sharing and interaction in university–industry partnerships. In this chapter, the authors specifically investigate how leadership as a managerial dimension facilitates collaboration within university–industry joint laboratories. The authors present an explorative and inductive case study of eight joint laboratories set up by Telecom Italia within five major Italian universities. The results show that the laboratory directors play a crucial role in providing a dynamic and socially active working environment, which is enabled through a process of sensemaking and sensegiving. The authors, moreover, find that this process plays a crucial role by shaping effective communication channels that facilitate knowledge sharing and transfer of information. The authors find that this process ultimately acts as a mediator between charismatic leadership on the individual level and distributed leadership on the collective level.

This paper examines the process of assessing mental health needs for people with learning disabilities, considering questions of targeting, mental illness and challenging behaviour, diagnostic assessment and quality of life. It recommends comprehensive assessment within an integrated care approach.

The goal of this chapter is to introduce the network paradigm for analyzing relational phenomena and organizing knowledge in higher education research. This introduction is presented by example: it analyzes knowledge on inter-organizational relationships of higher education institutions. The formation, maintenance, and impact of relationships are implicitly relational, although they have largely been understood as a consequence of institutional practices. Through the network paradigm, we show that focusing on relations we can develop new and more precise models to understand the antecedents, consequences, and characteristics of these networks.