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This leadership education evaluation study explored the leadership development outcomes of potential county extension directors and the ways to improve the program. The leadership education program aimed to improve participants’ leadership abilities in understanding self, building relationships and managing resources. The analysis of quantitative and qualitative data confirmed that the leadership training institute was effective in building participants’ leadership skills and improving leadership behavior. The incorporation of participants’ learning needs into the program, use of hands-on experiential learning activities and problem solving activities combined with small group discussions were the contributing factors for the success of this leadership education program. The participants suggested the use of more hands-on and problem solving activities, team building exercises and condensing the time gap between the pre and post sessions as strategies for further improvement of this program.

There is ample evidence that many firms do not fully disclose environmental liabilities. Since it is likely that full disclosure of these liabilities may lead to greater accountability by a firm, it is important to identify factors related to the treatment and disclosure of these specific liabilities. This study reports on factors found to be related to the intentions of 263 financial executives to accrue and disclose environmental liabilities based on scenarios developed for this research. Using the Theory of Planned Behavior, we find that intentions to accrue and disclose environmental liabilities are positively related to an executive's attitudes, subjective norms, perceived behavioral control, and sense of obligation. We also provide evidence that the magnitude of the environmental and financial consequences has a positive, significant relation to these intentions and find that financial executives from privately held companies are less likely to accrue and disclose environmental liabilities than those from companies that are publicly traded. These findings suggest that encouraging positive attitudes toward environmental accruals and disclosures, enhancing the behavioral control of financial executives over the accrual decision, and heightening their moral obligation to disclosure these liabilities may lead to better accounting treatment and transparency of environmental matters.

To improve building performance and meet statutory carbon reduction targets, a radical transformation of existing UK building stock is needed. Much previous research on building performance has focussed on large-scale construction. However, retrofit of existing housing stock – which will contribute the majority of the requisite efficiency improvement – is carried out by practitioners in the repair–maintain–improve (RMI) subsector. These practitioners are the sole traders and micro-firms who constitute two-fifths of employment in the construction sector. The study aims to examine the factors influencing these practitioners in RMI work to understand how better to engage them with improved building performance.

A total of 31 semi-structured interviews were conducted with RMI professionals from around the UK and analysed using template analysis.

The analysis identified capabilities of the practitioners who influence building performance, including knowledge and co-ordination of people and resources; opportunities including state action and customer demand; and motivations including pride in work, customer care and satisfaction, maintaining a viable business and working relationships.

The participants were a small, mixed group in terms of firm size and specialisation. The qualitative approach adopted provided detailed insights but does not make claims for statistical generalisability or representativeness of the findings. Future work could look to extend the findings with a statistically representative survey.

For a successful transition to high standards of building performance, modelling is not enough. Initiatives are needed to address the multiple factors which determine engagement in energy-efficient retrofit: capacities, opportunities and motivations. The desire of RMI practitioners to meet customer expectations could be used to develop pragmatic building performance evaluation, guided by householder satisfaction criteria.

The study examined the attitudes and experiences of an under-researched sector who are essential to the delivery of improved building performance. This study makes a novel contribution by applying an established psychological model of behaviour change, the capability, opportunity, motivation – behaviour model, for the first time in this domain.

This paper aims to use stakeholder theory and the guanxi perspective to examine the determining factors of water resources information disclosure among Chinese enterprises in the context of authoritarian and normative pressures.

Content analysis is first applied to analyze the environmental sustainability reports of the sample enterprises from 2010 to 2017. Afterward, logistic regression analysis is used to analyze the coded data and examine the proposed hypotheses.

The empirical evidence shows that having the state as the largest shareholder is positively, but not significantly, related to disclosure of water resources information. Water-sensitive industries are positively and significantly related to the disclosure of water resources information. Guanxi is negatively related to disclosure of water resources information, but not to the level of significance. The effect of the interaction term (Guanxi × Large) on disclosure is negative and also significant.

It is necessary for enterprises to build environmental awareness, increase information transparency for better communication with stakeholders and also establish accountability mechanisms. For effective disclosure and higher information transparency, the Chinese Government should take measures to avoid the disruption of guanxi and ensure effective enforcement of laws.

Industrial organizations or supervisory institutions are advised to encourage firms to build awareness of water-related risks and environmental sustainability and to improve how they disclose water resources information to stakeholders.

This study offers evidence of the determining factors of water resources information disclosure, a topic that has been rarely studied before. The evidence sheds light on how firms, especially those in China, have dealt with disclosure of water resources information in the context of authoritarian and normative pressures.

A mixed approach to large strain elastoplastic problems is presented in a somewhat different way to that usually used within the context of the additive split of the rate of deformation tensor into an elastic and plastic part. A non‐linear extended mixed variational equation, in which the Jacobian of the deformation gradient and the pressure part of the stress tensor appear as additional independent variables, is introduced. This equation is then linearized in the accordance with the Newton‐Raphson method to obtain the system of linear equations which represent the basis of the mixed finite element procedure. For the case of a bilinear isoparametric interpolation of the displacement field, and for piece‐wise constant pressure and Jacobian, simplified expressions, differing from similar expressions corresponding to mixed finite element implementations, are obtained. The effectiveness of the proposed mixed approach is demonstrated by means of two examples.

From these and similar clinical experiments, together with the results of animal experimentation, it may be said that most modern authorities include xerophthalmia and night blindness among the diseases resulting from deficient diet. Night blindness, in fact, is considered to be a delicate test of vitamin A deficiency.

The purpose of this paper is twofold: first, to identify and rank the challenges influencing the delivery of the housing public-private partnership (HPPP) in Tanzania; and second, to suggest solutions in the form of a conceptual public-private partnership (PPP) framework model that will address the identified challenges and boost the chances of success.

Using a convergent parallel (concurrent) mixed method approach, data were collected from 28 stakeholders involved with HPPP projects in Tanzania using a hand-delivered and e-mail survey and 13 semi-structured interviews with public and private sector respondents. The quantitative data included subjecting the 19 challenges as identified from the literature to parametric tests such as one-sample t-tests and descriptive statistics tests such as measures of central tendencies and frequency analysis through Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS 22.0). Qualitative data employed content analysis. The research was further underpinned by a number of theoretical perspectives such as Gidden’s structuration theory, contingency theory, relational and equity theory.

The top five ranked challenges influencing the delivery of HPPP were “inadequate PPP skills and knowledge”; “poor contracting and tendering documents”; “inadequate project management”; “inadequate legal framework”; and “misinformation on financial capacity of private partners”. The least six ranked and most significant challenges based on the one-sample (single) t-tests were as follows: “Poor risk allocation”; “inexperienced private partner”; “unequal qualification and contributions of expertise”; “poor enabling environment to attract competent partners”; “inadequate mechanisms for recovery of private investors’ capital”; and “high costs in procuring PPP projects”. The qualitative study further confirmed the challenges and cited the reason for the failure of joint venture projects as the lack of motivation for undertaking similar PPP projects. Despite the increased awareness of PPP projects and associated marginal benefits, the main impediment to the uptake and delivery of PPP housing projects remained the lack of skills and expertise.

The proposed framework model is not yet tested, but since this paper is part of the ongoing research, the next stage involves the testing and validation of the model. Future studies could test the applicability of the proposed framework in other HPPP projects in Tanzania, and in other similar developing countries. Second, the validated framework can contribute towards addressing similar challenges as well as providing guidance. The proposed framework model is not yet tested, but since this paper is part of the ongoing research, the next stage involves the testing and validation of the model. Furthermore, recommendation for future research is to test the alignment of the identified challenges to the proposed remedial solutions across the five phases within the proposed PPP framework with a number of case studies.

The identified challenges were used to form the basis of the framework presented in this paper. Furthermore, these provide useful information, thus leading to increased awareness to enable successful delivery of HPPP in Tanzania. Similarly, both the government and policy makers could use the findings as the basis for re-examining the existing PPP policy and regulations, and reflecting on the existing situation with a view to improving the delivery of future HPPP projects.

The empirical study is among the first that identifies and ranks the challenges of PPP for housing projects delivery within the Tanzanian context. The identification of the challenges enabled their ranking, resulting in the mapping out of the most critical challenges. Furthermore, using the Gidden’s structuration theory, the study illustrates how institution mechanisms (structures) address these delivery challenges, thus influencing the implementation of HPPP in Tanzania, and how individual stakeholders (human agents or agency) are able to make choices (advocated solutions) in dealing with the challenges. More so, these constraints (challenges) as identified and viewed through the contingency and equity theoretical lenses form the foundation for developing the PPP conceptual framework. The proposed framework would thus serve as a mechanism for providing practical solutions as well as reducing the level of severity of the identified challenges.

The purpose of this study is threefold. First, to provide a taxonomy of innovations in the housing sector. Second, to create a coherent framework that includes the mechanisms that stimulate and hinder the adoption of innovation in the housing sector. Third, to develop propositions for future innovation adoption research.

A search in Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science, Elsevier’ Scopus and the ARCOM database, followed by ‘snowballing’ as a backward search technique, revealed 94 scientific studies about innovation adoption in the housing sector. These studies were used to conduct a systematic narrative literature review about innovation adoption in the housing sector.

This study presents the state of knowledge about the adoption of innovation in the housing sector. Based on the unit of analysis by the studies included in our review, we present a taxonomy of housing innovation and we conclude that, typical for low-tech industries, no radical, discontinuous innovations were reported in the field of housing. Based on the data set of this review, a coherent framework has been developed, which includes four categories of determinants and underlying variables. Subsequently, 21 propositions have been deduced, which reflect the key mechanisms affecting the adoption of innovation in housing.

This paper is the first in which the various innovation adoption mechanisms for housing projects are integrated in a coherent innovation adoption framework. This framework not only provides an explanatory overview about innovation adoption in the housing sector but also provides insight to managers how to increase the chances to get their innovations adopted in the housing sector.

Recent publications have highlighted the effectiveness of using a consistent tangent modulus when solving elastic‐plastic problems. The formulation of a consistent tangent modulus is closely related to the scheme used to integrate the constitutive equations. Recent work has shown how many of these schemes currently in use can be derived from certain broad classes of algorithms. In this paper these procedures are examined for a number of commonly used yield/failure criteria. For certain cases a remarkably simple formulation results which can lead to considerable savings in computational time.