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For countries with limited funds or nonconvertible currencies, countertrade provides an established trading vehicle. The author describes how this strategy can encourage trade between the U.S. and developing markets.

This case study highlights state-logic influence on hybrid organizations and institutionally complex environments through acts of regulation (and deregulation).

This study presents a 30-year narrative case focused on the significant social achievements of the Bonneville Power Administration within the Northwest United States. It combines the analysis of historical documentation, annual reports issued by the organization and interviews with firm management to observe the wax and wane of regulatory influence through time.

The presented case suggests two ways regulation projects state-logic influence onto hybrid organizations. First, it imposes a “floor” level of baseline social activity that must be met despite pressure from market logic stakeholders. Second, it imposes formal administrative procedures that require interaction with, and often approval from, key social stakeholders. Administrative procedures provide a series of public forums used to promote additional social resource allocation in excess of baseline regulatory mandates.

A narrative case covering a 30-year period will by necessity have to prioritize breadth of analysis over depth. This is a limitation of the analysis presented, but it also provides an opportunity to observe the oscillating impact of state and market-logic influence through time.

The study findings have several implications for the growing accounting literature on institutional complexity and hybrid organization. First, the authors highlight the ways regulation shapes institutionally complex spaces and, as a result, the hybrid organizations formed within those environments. Second, the exogenous nature of regulatory mandates indicate hybrid firms could emerge as both a voluntary and an involuntary adaptation to institutionally complex environments. Finally, this study highlights opportunities to further one’s understanding how state logics influence hybrid organizations through the study of state-owned enterprises (SOEs).

This paper aims to explore the role of management controls in managing heterogeneous interests during extreme situations.

Through interviews and observations, the authors analyse the Swedish Migration Agency’s management controls and study routines during the peak of the European Migrant Crisis.

Prior to the crisis, the strategy used by the employees was to mediate between two interests (labelled legal security and empathy) to create a workable compromise. During the crisis, however, the authors observed filtering in the form of the previous hierarchical ordering of interests was further strengthened as the employees increasingly relied on just a single interest (the interest which they previously had deemed to be the most important) at the expense of the other interest. The findings suggest that behavioural and social controls helped such filtering; social controls helped certain employees to filter the empathy interest as more important during extreme situations and behavioural controls helped other employees to filter the legal security interest as more important. This help us explain why the authors observe less mediation between the two heterogeneous interests and rather a stricter dominance of one of the interests. The authors also illustrate how especially behavioural controls may become unsupportive of the operations during extreme situations as it consisted of rule-based standards, built to cope with “normal” situations. The heterogeneous interests affected the probability of actors, at times, ignoring behavioural controls when such controls were unsupportive. Actors whose day-to-day operations were mainly guided by the legal security interest remained tightly coupled to behavioural controls even when they felt that these controls were no longer useful. On the other hand, actors who were mainly guided by the empathy interest ignored behavioural controls when they felt that they were unsupportive.

The authors acknowledge that bias might arise from the reliance on retrospective views of past processes and events, which the authors primarily gathered through interviews.

The authors highlight an important relationship between heterogeneous interests (i.e. legal security and empathy) and management controls during the crisis and how this relationship can lead actors to fundamentally different actions.

The two bodies of study on the role of management controls in managing heterogeneous interests and the role of management controls during the crisis have been largely unconnected and it is in this intersection that this study contributes.

A library user, who was in a wheelchair, mentioned recently that she had no idea how libraries are organized Or the amount of resources available in them. She explained that until the passage of Section 504 of the National Rehabilitation Act, when public buildings were required to be accessible, she could not get inside a library building.

Project duration and cost play a significant role in fulfilling the objectives of both the contractor and the client. This paper builds upon the assumption that, for a given project quality, there exists a relationship between the project duration and the project cost. The behaviour of this relationship is very much influenced by the nature of the project. The paper proposes a general set of potential mathematical expressions for the above relationship and facilitates the identification of the project duration which yields lowest project cost. These are then applied to ‘Harmony’ type housing projects in Hong Kong. Moreover, while demonstrating the difference between the contractor's optimum cost‐time curve and that of the client, the paper suggests that the parties can select one of three options to reach a compromise. To this end, the paper introduces a set of mathematical expressions to represent these compromise‐solutions.

This study aims to explore the implications of a recent case in spring 2022 where the novel Dracula went “viral” as tens of thousands of Tumblr users participated in a serialized re-reading and discussion of the text through the hashtags #dracula and #dracula daily.

The authors use a mixed-methods sequential explanatory design approach (quant: topic modeling; qual: multimodal content analysis) to examine how users describe their own practices as well as top posts (more than 25,000 likes, comments and reblogs) in the first month of the collective reading of the novel.

The authors found that the serialization of Dracula made space for “wandering reading practices” (Chavez, 2010) relevant to this interpretive community on Tumblr. The quantitative methods determined specific affective, intertextual and serialized aspects of textual play that were salient to readers. In top posts themselves, the authors saw readers creating metaleptic content imagining characters like the protagonist Jonathan in other novels or contexts, as well as processing and playing with their collective emotional responses toward characters. Additionally, readers used irony or satire through multimodal compositions to create literary arguments.

Playfully analyzing literature together through intertextual connections and multimodal memes has the potential to be both emotionally resonant, culturally relevant and supportive of literary interpretive practices. Based on these findings, the authors provide suggestions for teachers working to embrace interpretive play in formal learning spaces.

Based on the expectation of artificial intelligence (Al) the authors established in 1988 an umbrella for research in this area in the construction industry, named the Expert Systems Lab. This paper describes 14 research projects produced since then. For each project a short description is given and the stage and value rating given by industry is reported. It will be seen that the projects generally have been rated very attractive by industry. On the other hand, it is also reported that none of the systems have been implemented in real life. This depressing observation is the main motivation for the paper and possible reasons for the lack of implementation are examined. It is concluded that stand‐alone systems as normally produced are out of harmony with industry, and main emphasis for Al should on the contrary be focused on problems concerning integration, knowledge and information management.

The existence of gender differences in the experience of work‐family concflict has been subject to recent debate. Contemporary research generally suggests that men and women experience work‐family conflict at comparative levels. However the majority of this research investigates direct relationships only, published investigations of the moderating influence of gender are scarce. The importance or salience of a role to an individual is also theorised to influence role perceptions, including conflict. However, role salience is commonly ignored in work‐family conflict research. The current research addresses these oversights by investigating the direct and indirect relationships between gender, work‐family conflict, role demands, and role salience. A total of 130 university students rated their perceptions of their university (work) and family roles. No significant direct relationships between gender and bi‐directional work‐family conflict were produced. However, gender significantly moderated the relationship between role salience and conflict; with females experiencing more conflict as their level of family role salience increased. The opposite results were produced for the male respondents. The implications of these findings for work‐family conflict research are discussed.

Development organisations today are faced with a new set of challenges around the use of research. They are charged with generating credible knowledge, moving it around, using it in policy, and acting on it in partnership with others. Several Northern and Southern development NGOs are attempting to shift from being “service providers” to “knowledge brokers”, for example, in the quest to find new roles and relevance for themselves (Lewis & Wallace, 2000). There has thus been a lot of focus recently on the relationship between research, policy, and practice. Many questions within this field centre on how development organisations can use research in practice, in their work. In this chapter, however, I wish to turn the question around and ask: how does the research fare when it is done on development organisations themselves? And what is the relationship between research and practice in that situation?

A very simple redundant structure is subjected to temperature cycling, primarily to determine the influence of the yield stress/temperature relation on its behaviour: the range and periodic time of the temperature cycle are included as subsidiary variables. It is found that improving the strength of the material at elevated temperatures may have the undesirable effect of hastening incremental collapse of the structure, and that the most rapid incremental collapse is not necessarily associated with maximum values for the range and periodic time of the temperature cycle. It is also found that the common assumption that the strength of the material is independent of temperature may in some circumstances be ambiguous, since there may be a sudden discontinuity in behaviour between a structure made from a material having a slight negative strength/temperature gradient and one made from a material having a slight positive gradient.