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At one time, a manufacturer's supply base was determined solely through competitive bids and price. Manufacturers worked to beat down prices without regard to overall cost, while suppliers focused entirely on making as much money as possible off manufacturers. For years, US manufacturers and suppliers lingered in this uneasy, antagonistic relationship.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how the generally accepted notion of Chinese “lawlessness” distorts the Chinese behavior by trying to understand it through the Western concept of the “rule of law” and to examine how the concept of “storied space” offers a more contextual understanding of the Chinese style of maintaining social order.

The paper adopts a theoretical approach.

Recent developments in fields ranging from neurobiology to complexity thinking and storytelling are coming together in a way of thinking about human social systems that has been called “storied space.” Applying this way of thinking suggests that current efforts, among both Chinese and Westerners, to apply the Western “rule of law” may actually distort the understanding of a series of behaviors often called “Chinese lawlessness”. A storied space approach suggests a different understanding and the need for a different way of addressing these concerns.

At a time when economic and political cooperation between Chinese and Westerners is becoming more important, this approach offers what may be a more efficacious way of understanding each other and, therefore, addressing the very real differences.

This paper would be the first published attempt to apply the idea of storied space to the legal issues that arise from the different ways in which Chinese and Western culture maintain social order.

This research investigates the presence of communitarian philosophy within contemporary Scottish public library strategy, exploring links between philosophy, politics and practice.

The paper follows a qualitative research approach, combining content analysis and discourse analysis methodologies for the analysis of a corpus of Scottish public library trust documentation according to a thematic framework of communitarian values.

The analysis revealed strong links between trust strategy and communitarian values but also highlighted contradictions within this form of communitarianism which belied a deeper neoliberal philosophical foundation. The research therefore identified a communitarian strategic service shift which introduced benefits of social inclusion, community autonomy and common good but also brought concerns of an inherently weakened communal foundation and the survival of a neoliberal status quo.

The analysis is focused on strategy in Scotland only and thus can only claim to be representative of that country. However, the growth in communitarian strategies in the public sector is informed from the analysis undertaken.

The paper provides a novel analysis of public library strategy and thus contributes to the understanding of public library practice in the modern era.

The impacts of communitarian philosophy in the public sphere are under-researched and how these changes impact the mission of libraries needs to be better understood.

This is the first analysis to consider public library strategy from a communitarian point of view. As such, it provides novel insights into a growing area of public service development.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the influence of mindfulness on organizational role stress (ORS) based on the Monitor Acceptance Theory (MAT) perspective.

This study is based on a cross-sectional data analysis collected from 137 employees working at an Indian IT organization located in Bangalore (India). ORS and MAAS scales have been used for measuring ORS and mindfulness, respectively.

Overall, the study findings have indicated a negative relationship (r = −0.588) between mindfulness (M) and ORS. First, both personal inadequacy (PI) and self-role distance (SRD) are found to be predominantly impacted by M, whereas both role erosion (RE) and role overload (RO) appear to be less affected by mindfulness. Second, SRD appears to be the highest ORS sub-dimension among IT employees. Third, building on the extant literature, it can be inferred that “no one size fits all”, ORS is both organization and context specific.

This study pioneers to establish empirical evidence between M and ORS. Training employees on M can help in effectively handling ORS.

Prefabricated construction is an innovative technique for decreasing carbon emissions in the construction industry. However, as the investors of housing projects, a majority of developers are unwilling to adopt prefabricated housing in practice. To promote prefabricated housing, this study aims to develop an integrated framework of fuzzy-decision making trial and evaluation laboratory (fuzzy-DEMATEL) and system dynamics (SD) to understand the underlying influencing mechanism of developers' willingness.

Through literature review, a total of 17 influencing factors were identified. Then, the interrelationships among the factors were evaluated by 10 experienced professionals, and the impacts given and received by each factor were further analyzed through fuzzy-DEMATEL. Based on the technology acceptance model (TAM), a SD model was developed to explore the influencing mechanism.

The major cause factors were identified, including mandatory implementation policies, economic incentive policies, environmental protection policies, component standardization and developers' economic strength. This group of factors was expected to be given priority attention in the case of limited resources. On the other hand, the results indicated that economic incentive policies and mandatory implementation policies could affect the developers' willingness via perceived usefulness, while the others mainly influenced perceived ease of use.

Little research has focused on the interrelationships among the influencing factors of developers' willingness to adopt prefabricated housing. This study contributed to understanding the mechanism of developers' willingness from a systematic view and providing the priority of influencing factors. Several strategies were proposed to improve the practical implementation of prefabricated housing development.