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This study aims to integrate perspectives of transaction costs and capabilities to investigate how the configurational fit between outsourcing strategies, asset specificity of projects and the capabilities of general contractors could achieve high outsourcing performance.

Employing fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis, this study analyzes 31 outsourcing cases in construction projects to examine outsourcing performance under different combinations of transaction costs and capabilities.

The findings highlight six different but functionally equivalent configurations to high outsourcing performance, which vary according to attributes of projects and capabilities of contractors. Further, this study develops four context-dependent paths that link outsourcing strategies to high outsourcing performance: leading practitioner, collaborative manager, partnership dependent, and struggler.

How do contractors in construction projects navigate outsourcing practices to high performance? This study provides a configurational perspective to make outsourcing strategy decisions. Based on the firm’s capabilities and project asset specificity, contractors are encouraged to select from six different but functionally equivalent combinations and thereby four outsourcing strategies, namely leading practitioner, collaborative manager, partnership dependent, and struggler, to achieve high outsourcing performance.

This study contributes to the body of knowledge by offering a holistic perspective that integrates production and transaction costs to analyze contractors’ outsourcing strategies, contributing to the integration of the transaction cost perspective and capability perspective.

This study aims to first identify influencing factors of outsourcing decisions in construction projects systematically and further to unravel the interactions of these influencing factors from a holistic perspective.

This study concerns the design and analysis of two-stage studies, where, at the first stage, a systematic literature review and 48 semi-structured interviews with senior practitioners in construction firms were conducted to identify influencing factors in outsourcing decisions in construction projects. At the second stage, the decision-making and trial evaluation laboratory (DEMATEL) method was employed to explore the interactions between influencing factors and pathways of outsourcing decisions.

Three focuses for outsourcing decisions are outlined, revealing that outsourcing restrictions, strategic needs and cost objectives need to be considered in outsourcing decisions. In addition, the finding contributes to the integration of transaction costs perspective and capability perspective by unravelling the mechanism of how different factors work together.

This study outlines 18 influencing factors and three sequential focuses for outsourcing decision-making, providing a clearer understanding of each factor’s contribution for decision-makers.

Most of the existing studies stressed the net effect of individual outsourcing factors from a single logic and paid little attention to their complex causal relationship. This study develops a holistic perspective of the influencing factors of outsourcing in construction projects by contending the overall knowledge of outsourcing and analyzing the causal relationship between them.

With the rise in the opportunity to go to college, the purpose of this paper is to identify if China's rural poor are being excluded from the university system, and if so, why.

Two sets of the authors' own primary survey data were used: a group of randomly selected high school students in Shaanxi Province and a census of all freshmen entering into four universities in Sichuan, Anhui and Shaanxi. The intention was to show if the rate of the rural poor attending universities is lower than that of urban students and that of rural non‐poor; also to identify the barriers to education (if they exist) that are keeping enrollment rates low for the rural poor. The authors used ordinary least squares method to make the estimations.

Matriculation rate of the poor into college was found to be substantially lower than the students from non‐poor families. Clearly, barriers exist that are excluding the rural poor; however, the authors demonstrate that the real barriers are not at the point of college admissions, but before students have even matriculated into high school.

This is the first empirical work which studies the barriers that keep the poor out of university.

This paper aims to understand the characteristics and contributions of the secure and trustworthy cyberspace (SaTC) projects funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF). These research projects were funded during the period of 2015–2023.

The authors applied a data analytics approach to proposal records of 1,025 NSF SaTC projects. These records were downloaded from the NSF proposal database via its search function. The analysis includes bibliometric analysis, shallow natural language processing and manual content analysis.

About 11 NSF divisions or units have sponsored SaTC research. About 214 universities or organizations in 44 states received SaTC funds. The key concepts of these projects include adversarial attacks, cryptography, cloud computing, internet of things, differential privacy, mobile devices and others. These projects were motivated by a lack of understanding or investigation of one or more technologies in the cybersecurity domain or the inefficacy of existing tools or algorithms. The objectives of these proposals included providing new insights and developing new tools, methods, frameworks, training courses and organizing workshops with support for workshop attendees. Among the funded projects, 60.82% proposed providing educational materials that would be beneficial to K-12 students, college students and the public.

The present data range from 2015 to May 2023. New projects awarded after May 2023 were not included.

The findings provide rich and useful information for the funding agency, SaTC researchers and students. The funding agency may want to review their funding focus and fund distributions; SaTC researchers could refer to the topics and the objectives discussed in funded proposals when developing their new projects; and students at all levels could refer to SaTC topics, participating researchers and institutions for their learning.

This study is the first attempt, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, to analyze NSF SaTC projects. The analysis benefits researchers and students to gain an understanding of NSF-funded projects and insights into secure and trustworthy cyberspace areas.