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This paper aims to present the development of a holistic campus facility management (CFM) performance assessment framework that incorporates a fuzzy logic approach and integrates a comprehensive set of key factors for successful management of campus facilities. The devised framework aims to cater to the needs of campus facilities management firms and departments for the purpose of gauging and assessing their performance across different management domains. Through this approach, facility management organizations can detect potential areas of enhancement and adopt preemptive steps to evade issues, foster progress and ensure success.

After a comprehensive analysis of the literature, conducting in-depth interviews with industry experts and employing the Delphi technique in two rounds, a total of 45 indicators critical to CFM success were identified and subsequently sorted into seven distinct groups. Through an online questionnaire, 402 subject-matter experts proficiently assessed the significance of the critical success indicators and their groups. A fuzzy logic framework was developed to evaluate and quantify a firm's compliance with the critical success indicators and groups of indicators. The framework was subsequently weighted using computations of the relative importance index (RII) based on the responses received from the questionnaire participants. The initial section of the framework involved a comprehensive analysis of the firm's performance vis-à-vis the indicators, while the latter part sought to evaluate the impact of the indicators groups on the overall firm's performance.

The utilization of fuzzy logic has uncovered the significant effects each effective CFM key indicator on indicators groups, as well as the distinct effects of each CFM indicators group on the overall performance of CFM. The results reveal that financial management, communications management, sustainability and environment management and workforce management are the most impactful indicators groups on the CFM performance. This suggests that it is imperative for management to allocate increased attention to these specific areas.

This study contributes to the advancement of current knowledge by revealing vital indicators of effective CFM and utilizing them to construct a thorough fuzzy logic framework that can assist in evaluating the effectiveness of CFM firms worldwide. This has the potential to provide crucial assistance to facility management organizations, facility managers and policymakers in their quest for informed decision-making.

This study aims to investigate the role and spillover effects of the financial sector on the size of the informal economic activity in Turkey.

Time series analysis has been adopted for annual data of the 1970-2017 period. New approaches in unit root and cointegration tests have been used in this study. Estimations have been done via dynamic ordinary least squares and fully modified ordinary least square approaches.

Results confirm the existence of a long-run equilibrium relationship between the financial system and informal economic activities in Turkey. At the earlier stages of financial development (FD), informality tends to rise while in further stages, informality tends to decline over time. This study confirms the U-shaped relationship between FD and the informal economy in Turkey.

This study has used logarithmic values of series in the econometric analysis except for real interest rates because of negative values in some periods. Thus, by using level forms of real interest, missing values would be avoided.

Increasing efficiency, control and institutional quality, as well as the quality of governance environment, would be useful tools in reducing the size of informality, as this study finds that spillover effects of financial services on the informal economic activity are adverse.

This study is the first of its kind to the best of the knowledge in the case of Turkey, which estimates the spillover effects of FD on informal economic activity.

The Toyota Way was developed as an efficiency framework to streamline Toyota Motor Corporation’s operational procedures. The collection of Toyota Way principles is often termed “lean”. Over the last few years, nonmanufacturing organisations have begun to recognise the value and applicability of lean methods for their operations. Architectural and engineering design (AED) firms are no exception. This study aims to explore the perspectives of employees at AED firms on the implementation of lean production principles (LPPs) into their operations. Due to the limited resources available to facilitate our measurement of employees’ views regarding the adoption of lean approaches, this study adopts a more scoped approach to employees’ perceptions of these principles within AED firms.

Fifty-two respondents participated in the survey. The interviewees were from firm A and firm B, an architecture firm and an engineering firm, and were chosen to help us gain a more in-depth understanding of their views regarding the LPPs.

Our study indicates that AED offices were unfamiliar with the concepts of lean principles, even though they were aware of its importance in their daily operations. Despite their scepticism about the implementation of lean concepts, some lean principles are implemented in their own fields of work.

This study complements earlier work on lean design that investigated the use of a particular lean technique by looking at the lean principles where some are implemented to a large extent, and some are not.

Although there is a boom in the construction industry in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA), it is yet to fully adopt building information modeling (BIM), which has received a lot of attention in the US, UK and Australian construction industries. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to provide the current state of the art in BIM implementation in Saudi Arabia, as well as perceived benefits and barriers through a case study.

A broad overview of BIM, the construction industry in KSA and the research and implementation of BIM in KSA was presented in this study. The research further established the perceived benefits and barriers of BIM implementation through a case study of a local AEC firm. A questionnaire survey was used to obtain lessons learned from the BIM team of the pilot project and was further analyzed using the RII approach.

The study’s findings include the lack of policy initiatives in KSA to enforce BIM in the construction industry, as well as the lack of sufficient research in the domain of BIM in KSA. Furthermore, the case study also revealed that the most important benefit of BIM adoption is “detection of inter-disciplinary conflicts in the drawings to reduce error, maintain design intent, control quality and speed up communication,” whereas the most important barrier is “the need for re-engineering many construction projects for successful transition towards BIM.”

The study provides a background for enhanced research towards the implementation of BIM in Saudi Arabia and also demonstrates the potential benefits and barriers in BIM implementation.

The aim of this paper is to review and synthesize an interdisciplinary literature on ethnic entrepreneurship studies from a spatial perspective. The major goal is to develop an analytical framework for understanding how place plays a role in ethnic entrepreneurship processes at different geographic scales.

The article starts with a review of perspectives on ethnic entrepreneurship from multiple disciplines in social sciences, mainly from a non‐spatial approach. It then critically discusses the spatial inquiries on ethnic entrepreneurship, with a focus on identifying the gaps across disciplines. Based on these discussions, a comprehensive, multilevel spatial framework is finally conceptualized. Following that, the concluding remarks highlight future directions and public policy significance by implementing this suggested social‐spatial approach.

As the central social actors, ethnic entrepreneurs weave through multiscaled geographic contexts in the process of creatively mobilizing and capitalizing entrepreneurial resources in the labor markets. The multiscaled geographic contexts provide a milieu of social, economic, political, cultural, and regulatory factors and forces. The interaction between the social actors and their social‐spatial contexts further influences entrepreneurs’ values of entrepreneurship, perception of entrepreneurial opportunities, practical management strategies, and ultimately their business performances.

This study provides significant policy implications for entrepreneurship related public policies on regional development, economic recovery, and neighborhood revitalization especially when race and ethnicity are concerned.

By identifying gaps of knowledge in ethnic entrepreneurship and incorporating a multidisciplinary literature, this paper extends the discussion of “contextual effects” from spatial dimensions, explicitly brings race and ethnicity to the spatial framework of entrepreneurship.