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Improving valuation accuracy, especially for sale and acquisition purposes, remains one of the key targets of the global real estate research agenda. Among other recommendations, it has been argued that the use of technology-based advanced valuation methods can help to narrow the gap between asset valuations and actual sale prices. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the property valuation methods being adopted by Australian valuers and the factors influencing their level of awareness and adoption of the methods.

An online questionnaire survey was conducted to elicit information from valuers practising in Australia. They were asked to indicate their level of awareness and adoption of the different property valuation methods. Their response was analysed using frequency distribution, χ² test and mean score ranking.

The results show that the traditional methods of valuation, namely, comparative, investment and residual, are the most adopted methods by the Australian valuers, while advanced valuation methods are seldom applied in practice. The results confirm that professional bodies, sector of practice and educational institutions are the three most important drivers of awareness and adoption of the advanced valuation methods.

There is a need for all the property valuation stakeholders to synergise and transform the property valuation practice in a bid to promote the awareness and adoption of advanced valuation methods, (e.g. hedonic pricing model, artificial neural network, expert system, fuzzy logic system, etc.) among valuers. These are all technology-based methods to improve the efficiency in the prediction process, and the valuer still needs to input reliable transaction data into the systems.

This study provides a fresh and most recent insight into the current property valuation methods adopted in practice by valuers practising in Australia. It identifies that the advanced valuation methods could supplement the traditional valuation methods to achieve good practice standard for improving the professional valuation practice in Australia so that the valuation profession can meet the industry’s expectations.

The study aims to identify and examine the construction organisational environments and its dimensions that have an impact on the performance of contracting companies in South Africa.

The study reports the result of quantitative research that obtained data from 72 construction organisations registered with the South African construction industry development board via a questionnaire survey. Descriptive statistics, non-parametric and exploratory principal component analysis were used to summarise forms of correlations among observed variables and to reduce a large number of observed variables to a smaller number of factors that provide an operational definition for the underlying dimension.

This study identified six exogenous and three endogenous environmental factors that have a varying degree of impact on construction organisation performance. Four dimensions of the environment were also examined, and environmental complexity has the highest variance explained which implies that the complexity of the construction business environment significantly influences the performance of construction firms.

This paper studies the environment of the South African construction industry using cross-sectional data in exploratory research. A confirmatory study should be conducted using a longitudinal panel design with a larger sample in similar future research.

The study offers practical implications to construction organisation owners operating in the South African construction industry to understand the need to acquire market and environmental data and process them in a way that will reduce its uncertainty when making strategic decisions.

This study contributes to the current discourse on organisations’ business environments to better understand their influences on organisational performance.

In these times of globalisation, distances are getting smaller, enhancing the interactions between people of different cultural backgrounds. This is especially true in the area of tourism, a field that is shaped by manifold communication activities. The enormous increases in the numbers of Chinese tourists visiting Europe and other Western destinations require building up intercultural competencies to minimise conflicts and promote mutual understanding. It is therefore necessary to question one’s own cultural view, which is why the debate surrounding de-Westernisation is of crucial importance. The metaphor of the atmosphere – in Chinese qifen – offers a helpful access point to strengthen mutual understanding, because it creates a bridge between eastern and western thinking. Paul Watzlawick (1967) developed his well-known five axioms of communication, the second of which states that every communication has both content and a relational aspect, and the latter classifies the former. This chapter shows why the atmospheric dimension of communication should be established as the third axiom in order to understand communication holistically.

Die Kurtaxe ist ein junges Kind des Kurortes Montreux, der heute die Vollendung des ersten Jahrhunderts seines Bestehens feiert. Während an verschiedenen schweizerischen Kurorten Kurtaxen schon verhältnismässig früh, im 19. Jahrhundert, auftauchten, zum Beispiel 1881 in Baden, 1868 in Bad Ragaz und 1874 in Davos, wurde eine entsprechende Abgabe in Montreux erstmals am 1. Juli 1941 aus der Taufe gehoben durch Inkraftsetzung eines «Règlement relatif à la perception d'une taxe officielle de séjour».

This chapter critically evaluates whether football can attain recognition as a national sport in China. Article No. 11, released by the Chinese government in 2015, aimed to develop a new national strategy centralised on the sport of football to foster consumption and enhance national soft power. Consequently, this also means encouraging Chinese football fans to support the national football team. Comparing the significance of local football clubs and the national football team to Chinese football fans is deemed meaningless and unable to generate useful information to comprehend Chinese people's attitudes towards local and national communities. Through literature comparisons with established Chinese national sports such as Chinese martial arts, badminton and table tennis, the discussion reveals that football currently falls short of meeting the general criteria of invention and popularity to be considered a Chinese national sport. In the specific Chinese context, it also proves that football fails to meet the criterion of politics, hindering its identification as a national sport. Consequently, the chapter rebuts the assumption and advocates for the validity of comparing how fans assess their fandom for local and national football teams.

This paper aims to describe the structure of an aligned Serbian-German literary corpus (SrpNemKor) contained in a digital library Bibliša. The goal of the research was to create a benchmark Serbian-German annotated corpus searchable with various query expansions.

The presented research is particularly focused on the enhancement of bilingual search queries in a full-text search of aligned SrpNemKor collection. The enhancement is based on using existing lexical resources such as Serbian morphological electronic dictionaries and the bilingual lexical database Termi.

For the purpose of this research, the lexical database Termi is enriched with a bilingual list of German-Serbian translated pairs of lexical units. The list of correct translation pairs was extracted from SrpNemKor, evaluated and integrated into Termi. Also, Serbian morphological e-dictionaries are updated with new entries extracted from the Serbian part of the corpus.

A bilingual search of SrpNemKor in Bibliša is available within the user-friendly platform. The enriched database Termi enables semantic enhancement and refinement of user’s search query based on synonyms both in Serbian and German at a very high level. Serbian morphological e-dictionaries facilitate the morphological expansion of search queries in Serbian, thereby enabling the analysis of concepts and concept structures by identifying terms assigned to the concept, and by establishing relations between terms in Serbian and German which makes Bibliša a valuable Web tool that can support research and analysis of SrpNemKor.

Against the grain of the paradigmatic postcolonial analytics of the colonial state, this chapter presents a non-dichotomous comparison of two regimes within the late 18th century Danish empire, which are commonly presumed to be of essentially different kinds – namely the colonial state in Tranquebar in South East India and the metropolitan government of rural Danish society. By focusing, firstly, on practices of policing and, secondly, on the general technology of power that targeted these significantly different socio-political spheres, it is argued that these regimes were governing according to similar strategies: seeking, on one hand, to deploy societal mechanisms of self-regulation and, on the other, to provide a balance and order to the otherwise chaotic forces of the population. On the basis of a Foucauldian vocabulary of government, it is thereby argued that colonialism, at this time and place, had not yet clearly constituted itself as a particular form of rule.

Drawing on the tenets of institutional theory, the purpose of this study is to examine the impact of Confucianism on technology for social good, while also considering the moderating influence of extrinsic informal institutions (foreign culture) and intrinsic formal institutions (property rights).

This study constructs a comprehensive database comprising 9,759 firm-year observations in China by using a sample of Chinese A-share listed firms from 2016 to 2020. Subsequently, the hypotheses are examined and confirmed, with the validity of the results being upheld even after conducting endogenous and robustness tests.

The findings of this study offer robust and consistent evidence supporting the notion that Confucianism positively affects technology for social good through both incentive effect and normative effect. Moreover, this positive influence is particularly prominent in organizations with limited exposure to foreign culture and in nonstate-owned enterprises.

The findings contribute to the literature by fostering a deep understanding of technology for social good and Confucianism research, and further provide a nuanced picture of the role of foreign culture and property rights in the process of technology for social good in China.

The purpose of this paper is to presents a new modeling approach that provides a measurement tool for evaluating the effectiveness of Project Control Systems (PCS) and the improvement of the project control capability as a part of an organization's project management processes.

This study used a project management maturity approach to develop a measurement model of PCS success. The key elements in this model have been identified using the Fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process (FAHP) method to analyze data from a case study involving contractor companies in Saudi's petroleum and chemical industry.

The results identified six critical elements for PCS success: (1) Change Management, (2) Earned Value, (3) Baselined Plan, (4) Resource Loaded, (5) Progress Method and (6) Governance Program. In addition, Project Forecasting and Corrective Action Verification were identified as the main areas where clients and contractors need to focus for the effective deployment of a PCS.

The results of this study were used to create a PCS Maturity Model (PCSMM) and a PCS Success Index (PCSSI). The value of this index can help project managers to identify the maturity level of their PCS and improvement areas that lead to enhanced project performance.

This research presents an alternative maturity model for PCS assessment that provides a practical tool to identify areas for improving the critical elements of PCS success. The study draws a clear distinction between overall project success and the success of the PCS.

The purpose of this paper is to empirically investigate an effective project management practice focusing on planning and control. By doing so, it contributes to the debate on rethinking traditional project management practices and accentuates the need for adjustments based on the project context.

This paper extends the project management theory by proposing a lean project planning (LPP) and control framework, developed and tested in collaboration with ten engineer-to-order (ETO) companies. By following a design science research approach, elements from lean thinking and current project planning and control practices are combined into a maturity model (MM).

ETO project characteristics are identified, and their implications for planning and control are discussed. Nine enablers that transform current project planning and control approaches into a lean approach are defined, allowing the analysis of the underlying complexity of planning and controlling ETO projects and thus facilitating the determination of the actions required to improve project performance.

Once fully embedded in an organization, the presented MM can provide a safe framework for self-criticism and can be used to conduct self-assessments without the need for an external facilitator. Thus, this paper is of particular interest to practicing project managers who aim to implement LPP and control.

To the authors’ best knowledge, this paper is the first to empirically examine the journey toward LPP and control from a MM perspective. This research attempts to describe the enablers of LPP and control.