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To evaluate the corrosion performance and nano‐mechanical behaviour of a brass substrate covered by different thick SiO₂ layers deposited by means of plasma enhanced chemical vapour deposition (PECVD) technique.

The comparison between laboratory and “industrial” objects revealed a very good corrosion behaviour and good mechanical performance of both of them: in particular it was possible to modulate the surface treatment to solve various problems from the industrial point of view.

It was possible to reduce the Cu migration into the SiO₂ coating during the PECVD deposition at a negligible level and to control it by the deposition; further, the nano‐indentation tests revealed the great utility of the coating annealing in obtaining a significant improvement of the mechanical properties of the coated objects.

Even if some industrial problems were solved (minimization of the presence of the coating defects and transparency of the coatings), some on the layer hardness (anti‐wear behaviour of the industrial objects) has to be better investigated and possibly solved.

The work reports a deposition process that is carried out industrially over a two year period.

This research reports a PECVD process realized on industrial objects: the originality is in the reached corrosion and mechanical performances that made it possible to realize a satisfactory industrial deposition.

The COVID-19 pandemic and its related economic meltdown and social unrest severely challenged most countries, their societies, economies, organizations, and individual citizens. Focusing on both more and less successful country-specific initiatives to fight the pandemic and its multitude of related consequences, this chapter explores implications for leadership and effective action at the individual, organizational, and societal levels. As international management scholars and consultants, the authors document actions taken and their wide-ranging consequences in a diverse set of countries, including countries that have been more or less successful in fighting the pandemic, are geographically larger and smaller, are located in each region of the world, are economically advanced and economically developing, and that chose unique strategies versus strategies more similar to those of their neighbors. Cultural influences on leadership, strategy, and outcomes are described for 19 countries. Informed by a cross-cultural lens, the authors explore such urgent questions as: What is most important for leaders, scholars, and organizations to learn from critical, life-threatening, society-encompassing crises and grand challenges? How do leaders build and maintain trust? What types of communication are most effective at various stages of a crisis? How can we accelerate learning processes globally? How does cultural resilience emerge within rapidly changing environments of fear, shifting cultural norms, and profound challenges to core identity and meaning? This chapter invites readers and authors alike to learn from each other and to begin to discover novel and more successful approaches to tackling grand challenges. It is not definitive; we are all still learning.

Records management has been heavily influenced by practice in English-speaking countries but is often seen as a foreign import in non-Anglophone countries. This study aims to investigate how using English terminology or translating records management terminology into French in a Francophone environment impacts on the success of recordkeeping strategies.

Semi-structured interviews were conducted with Francophone archivists and records managers in Switzerland to assess their communication strategies and the language used to communicate recordkeeping objectives.

The research findings indicate that in a Francophone environment, archivists and records managers who use French terminology are more successful in promoting recordkeeping objectives than those who use English terminology. Given that research was limited to one Swiss canton, more research is needed to test these findings in other Francophone cantons, provinces and countries.

This study is important for the success of recordkeeping initiatives in non-Anglophone countries. It highlights the need to take into account the local information culture and use terminology with which people are most familiar.

The Waorani are an Amazonian indigenous nationality with a population of 4,000. They inhabit three provinces of Ecuador: Pastaza, Napo and Orellana, and their ancestral lands contain a wealth of natural resources, which attracts the onslaught of the processes of extractivism. Significant social and economic asymmetries have also arisen in the decades since first contact. It is in this context that the Waorani Women's Association was created in 2005. Its main purpose is to end deforestation and illegal hunting of species in Waorani territory by promoting initiatives such as the cultivation of organic cocoa and handicrafts to improve the economy of families and to diminish the reliance on the preponderant economic system of use and abuse of non-renewable resources. This chapter analyzes how the spirituality of the Waorani nationality, manifested by the women who work in cocoa farms and chambira palm crafts, combine syncretism and ancestral knowledge in their daily work. It also analyzes the change of spiritual identity from the first contact with the Summer Language Institute missionaries, and subsequent evangelical, Catholic, Jehovah's Witnesses and the Church of Latter-day Saints missions to their lands.

This essay looks at how various forms of residential tourism or lifestyle migration, produced by people arriving from the cities and territories of the so-called Global North, have triggered complex processes of social-spatial modification in the landscapes and rural environments of Vilcabamba, Ecuador, a small Andean village of approximately 5,000 inhabitants in the southern part of the canton of Loja. The paper aims to discuss this issue.

Residential tourism in rural areas is a phenomenon that can be investigated by combining socio-economic studies with spatial analyses to define the specific characteristics of territories and environments affected by this phenomenon. In the case of Vilcabamba, the relationships and conflicts between imaginations, spaces, ecologies and desires have taken the form of a complex “implicit project”, a “palimpsest-project” intended as a set of territorial descriptions, interpretations and transformation actions triggered by a plot featuring migrant tourists, activists, eco-institutions, schools, artisans, intellectuals and artists. Though weakly connected to one another, these subjects nonetheless produce substantially coherent actions.

Two main hypotheses are given as: the first is that in particular rural contexts, such as the Andean area around Vilcabamba, dwelling practices and economies related to residential tourism have triggered processes through which these areas have progressively become peripheries to distant metropolitan territories and are reconfigured as sets of specialised places. The second hypothesis is that Vilcabamba and its rural surroundings can be viewed as a particular “contact zone” in which different types of residential tourists and local dwellers interact, together with different economies of tourism. In this case the reference is, on the one hand, to the logics and discourses of the so-called extractive tourism, a concept that describes the processes of “extracting” and converting local cultural characteristics, and “indigenousness”. To support these hypotheses, the result is the construction of a spatial representation of the ways in which specific practices of residential tourism are territorialised, and how they modify the meaning and functioning of rural spaces.

What is new in the paper is the attempt to define a spatial representation of transnational spaces trying to highlight relationships between extractive tourism and remittance urbanism.

The purpose of this paper is to illustrate a methodology which can be used: to establish clear customer needs/expectations, draw up a range of services in order to enhance customer satisfaction and to measure the real value of the services offered.

The proposed methodology is based on the quality function deployment (QFD) procedure but it is much more simple to implement.

The paper provides detailed information about how the proposed methodology works through an in‐depth case study discussion.

The proposed methodology has been tested in a limited number of cases and has proved successful. It remains to analyse its more wide applicability.

Firms seeking to meet customer expectations and requirements with personalized, flexible and increasingly comprehensive solutions have to convert their product strategies into product and service strategies. The proposed methodology is a valuable tool to support this approach.

The purpose of this paper is to describe an innovative approach to overcoming a common dilemma in designing negotiation simulations – that of situating a simulation in a real-life or fictitious context. This binary choice, which the authors call the negotiation designer’s dilemma, has profound implications for the types of learning activities and outcomes that can be integrated into the overall learning experience. As a way of overcoming the trade-offs inherent in this dilemma, the authors developed what they term hybrid simulations, which blend elements of fact and fiction in its contextual design in a particular way.

The authors were part of a negotiation simulation design team that used Design Thinking to understand the negotiation designer’s dilemma and to prototype and test a corresponding solution.

This paper demonstrates the benefits, potential applications and the how-to of hybrid simulations within the context of two such simulations the authors have designed at two different Swiss business schools. This paper concludes by discussing the potential and limitations for the application of hybrid simulations, as well as areas of potential further development.

The concept of a hybrid negotiation is a novel design trick that can be used in a variety of negotiation simulation contexts.

Members attending a mass meeting at the American Library Associations's 1990 annual conference passed a resolution calling for libraries to “provide Columbus Quincentennial programs and materials which examine the event from an authentic Native American perspective, dealing directly with topics like cultural imperialism, colonialism, and the Native American holocaust.” But have libraries done anything since then to provide alternatives to the likes of Samuel Eliot Morison's purple prose? What attempts have been made to confront the omissions, half‐truths and myths about Columbus?

Do people prefer a society with an extensive social welfare system with high taxes, or low taxes but lax redistributive policies? Although economists have for a long time investigated the trade-off mechanism between equity and efficiency, surprisingly little information is available about citizens' preferences over the distribution of income in a society. The aim of this paper is to address this shortcoming by identifying, in an empirical study using the World Values Survey, what shapes individuals' preferences for income equality in Spain. We present evidence that social capital is a key determinant to understanding preferences towards redistribution and equality.

Institutional change (IC) programs in the public sector are often driven by sustainability and digitalisation as contextual factors, contributing to the development of digital and sustainable governance (DSG) systems. This study aims to explore the longitudinal impact of ICs on DSG advancements.

We collected and analysed data of 200 public sector organisations in two European countries and conducted a longitudinal analysis, focusing on the impact of European Union-funded IC programs.

Results show that steps towards digital governance (DG) are demonstrably linked to environmental efforts, and EU-funded IC programs could have a long-term positive impact on digital and environmentally sustainable governance in Europe. Findings, however, highlight the unbalanced nature of sustainability governance, as environmental and policy-related conditions and activities seem to be overemphasised.

Environmental policy seems to be established, but future DG initiatives should consider more environmental polity conditions and activities (e.g. dedicated departments), as well as economic and social sustainability to ensure well-balanced governance systems.

To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study that explores empirically how prior IC programs affect future DSG in the public sector.