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A comparison of the difference in chemical nature of re‐dispersible polymer powders useful for the modification of cement based compositions is made. Core‐shell acrylic lattices synthesised by multi‐step sequential polymerisation are formulated and spray‐dried to obtain re‐dispersible powders. The heterogeneous acrylic copolymers prepared are characterised by excellent re‐dispersibility, high chemical stability and good application properties.

Waterborne polyurethane dispersions (PUDs) continue to show growth in commercial usage due to the ever increasing environmental legislation to reduce VOC in coating and adhesive materials. The transition from solvent‐based to waterborne has also been facilitated by advances in both the chemistry and technology employed and the formulation expertise required. This has resulted in coating performance that cannot only match but in some cases surpass their solvent‐based counterparts. This paper gives an overview of PUDs and introduces urethane/acrylic hybrids, giving an insight into the chemistry and technology. Particular emphasis is given to new developments and the application areas where they are finding increasing use. Some formulating techniques are also illustrated.

The crowdsourcing software development platforms organize geographically distributed developers to complete various developing tasks, bringing convenience and efficiency to users. However, with the increasing number of both developers and tasks, it becomes more and more challenging to match tasks and suitable developers, especially for imbalanced data. The purpose of this paper is to propose an accurate and diverse recommendation model for crowdsourcing tasks.

A revised circle loss function is applied to achieve a certain adaptive ability, which is critical for imbalanced data, it guarantees diversity by maximizing the target label score and leveraging mathematical approximation to automatically balance the weights. Besides, the authors leverage the capsule network to obtain the semantic feature of tasks’ descriptions, modify the dynamic routing mechanism to better learn users’ preferences and improve the recommendation accuracy.

The comprehensive experiments conducted on real crowdsourcing platform data demonstrate that the proposed Crowd-CapsNet model can achieve high recommendation accuracy with a certain diversity. It improves around 1% accuracy with only 37% training time of the LSFA approach.

This paper proposes Crowd-CapsNet, an adaptive crowdsourcing task recommendation model. A relatively general feature pre-processing method describes crowd-sourcing tasks and the modified capsule network further obtains the semantic features to improve the recommendation accuracy and diversity.

Posits that, because of environmental awareness and concern for our surroundings, we should be using more friendly technologies such as radiation curing and waterborne systems instead of solvent‐based formulas. The market is getting bigger for these “friendly” systems and discusses here the pros and cons of this. Concludes that a broad range of new applications is available and reduced environmental pollution, safer maintenance and higher product performance are the desired norms.

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the debate on reflexivity in organization and management studies by scrutinizing the possibilities of self‐reflexivity.

By means of auto‐ethnography, the authors analyze their own experiences as (pro‐)feminist men in the field of gender studies.

The authors argue that self‐reflexivity is partial, fragmentary and transient: it surfaces in situations where the authors’ activities and identities as researchers are challenged by others and they become aware of their precarious position.

The paper's perspective complements more instrumental understandings of self‐reflexivity, and stimulates further debate on its limits as well as potential.

In order to understand the driving forces behind intensified job demands (IJDs), the purpose of this paper is to examine demographic factors, structural work-related factors, personal and job resources as antecedents of IJDs.

The study is based on cross-sectional (n=4,963) and longitudinal (n=2,055) quantitative data sets of Austrian employees. Data sets were analyzed via regression analyses.

The results showed that IJDs, as assessed through five sub-dimensions: work intensification, intensified job-related, career-related planning and decision-making demands, intensified demands for skills and for knowledge-related learning, remained fairly stable overtime. The most consistent antecedents of IJDs were personal initiative and ICT use at work. Job resources, e.g. variety of tasks and lacking support from supervisor, related to four sub-dimensions of IJDs.

The findings suggest that personal (being initiative) and job resources (task variety) may have negative effects as they associated with IJDs. Moreover, supervisors’ support is crucial to counteract IJDs.

Employers should recognize that certain personal (e.g. personal initiative) and job-related resources (e.g. lacking supervisory support) might implicate higher IJDs, which, in turn, may cause more job strain as IJDs can be conceived as job stressors.

IJDs have received very little research attention because they are new job demands, which however, can be expected to increase in future due to faster technological acceleration in working life. The study has methodological value as longitudinal design was applied.

Robots have a history of replacing human labor in undesirable, dirty, dull and dangerous tasks. With robots now emerging in academic and human-centered work, this paper aims to investigate psychological implications of robotizing desirable and socially rewarding work.

Testing the holistic stress model, this study examines educational professionals’ stress responses as mediators between robotization expectations and future optimism in life. The study uses survey data on 2,434 education professionals.

Respondents entertaining robotization expectations perceived their work to be less meaningful and reported more burnout symptoms than those with no robotization expectations. Future optimism about life was not affected by robotization expectations alone, but meaninglessness and burnout symptoms mediated the relation between expectations of robotization and future optimism.

Robotization may be viewed as challenging the meaningfulness of educational work by compromising ethical values and interaction. To prevent excess stress among personnel, robotization should be planned together with employees in co-operation negotiations. This implicates the need for co-designing technological changes in organizations especially in the cases of social use of robots.

Work’s meaningfulness in robotization is a novel research topic and a step toward socially sustainable robotization.

This paper aims to establish a systematically constructed defence offset technology transfer (TT) process description and to identify the process pain points and critical success factors from the supplier perspective.

A novel integrated case study and Straussian grounded theory approach under the interpretative assumptions and purposive sampling in a global defence industry organisation are presented.

The TT is approached from the process modelling point of view, and a detailed operations description covering the end-to-end TT process across a defence industrial participation project is presented. The findings suggest that local recipient’s management, financial resources and planning, supply chain management and local production planning are the main factors of an efficient process.

This is a single case study, only reflecting the supplier view. Future research could explore the other dimensions of the process to confirm the identified factors playing a role over time.

To date, the body of TT research has focused on the factors influencing the technology absorption and the identification of meta mechanisms between the supplier and recipient organisations in a context of a multinational corporation and as an intra-firm activity, providing little insight to the actual practical operational level TT process. This study seeks to fill this gap by advancing a more profound understanding of the process activities and the main factors through which the local recipient organisation can best influence the project’s success and manage the inter-organisational TT operations more effectively in a highly technologically complex operational environment.

This study aims to provide insights into the experiences of working from home (WFH) in a global context from the perspective of perceived productivity.

This paper uses a multivariate analysis benefiting from an extensive data set of almost 137,500 respondents from 88 countries.

This paper find that most respondents are satisfied with their productivity when WFH: 70% agree or strongly agree with “My home environment enables me to work productively”. The results further show that socio-demographic factors, as well as the social and physical settings at home, are associated with the perceptions of productivity. Being younger, dissatisfied with the physical setting and the presence of others at home seem to decrease the probability of being satisfied with productivity, whereas being female seems to increase it. However, some differences between countries exist when controlling for socio-demographic factors, presence of others and physical setting at home.

The results enhance understanding of perceived productivity in different countries while WFH and provide valuable insights for employers, employees and policymakers on how to support WFH effectively.

The value of this paper lies in its investigation of socio-demographic factors, as well as the social and physical home environment, in relation to perceptions of productivity within a truly global context, while also comparing differences between countries.

The purpose of this paper is to study the user experiences of the futures wheel method to investigate its suitability to advance futures thinking in the real estate field.

The user experiences of the futures wheel method are investigated through questionnaire answers of 114 master’s level students and real estate experts taking part in future wheel workshops.

The futures wheel method could enhance future-oriented thinking and decision-making in the real estate field. The respondents see futures thinking as an important skill and recognize several advantages concerning the method.

The futures wheel method bears great potential to be used in the real estate sector and it could be a fruitful addition to the curriculums at different education levels in real estate studies.

Futures thinking is essential when aiming for sustainable decisions in the real estate field which again would benefit the whole surrounding society.

This paper is the first published paper concentrating on the user experiences of the future wheel method in the real estate sector. The benefits and the disadvantages of the method are investigated but also the attitudes indicating the potential of the method to be successfully adopted in the field are analyzed.