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Modern construction projects are increasingly complex and rely heavily on multi-discipline collaboration, and this leads to a more and more decentralized project-based structure widely adopted in the construction industry. While job satisfaction (JS) and job performance (JP) have been heavily studied previously, few considered the impact of organizational structure and none investigated the relationship between the organizational decentralization degree with JS and JP. This research aims to fill this research gap and investigate the impacts of organizational decentralization degree on JS and JP and facilitate a better project management practice for large-scale construction projects.

This research firstly establishes four hypotheses based on the literature review on general project-based organizations, then the hypotheses are tested by a survey covering 25 large complex construction projects in China. A hierarchical linear model analysis was carried out to analyze the survey data and to study the relationships between organizational decentralization degree, job satisfaction and job performance.

Analysis results show that projects' employees' JS and JP are positively correlated with the construction project organizations' decentralization degree, respectively. The decentralization degree has a higher impact on JS than on JP. Employees' JP is positively correlated with their JS, and a higher decentralization degree leads to a more significant positive impact that JS puts on JP.

The findings are new evidence of how construction organization structure and its decentralization degree can affect project employees' JS and JP. This research provides valuable guidance for the industry's management practice and is particularly important for large, complex and highly decentralized construction projects.

The COVID-19 pandemic, having emerged early in the year 2020, had a devastating impact on the whole aviation industry. Airlines were particularly hit hard, given unprecedented border closures, the inability to adapt to highly volatile demand, and an embarrassing lack of overall pandemic preparedness. As of summer 2022, the airline industry seems on the track of strong recovery, with many airlines returning to profits and passenger numbers occasionally exceeding those of pre-COVID-19 levels. This study investigates the induced pandemic cycle, from January 2020 to December 2022, through tools from the network science literature. We model airline networks as a collection of nodes, representing airports, and a collection of links, representing direct flights between airports. This analysis has a strong focus on spatiotemporal evolution of airlines worldwide during the COVID-19 pandemic, leading to a comprehensive description of network science effects and counter measures during this excessive health and economic shock. Such an analysis could be helpful for better dealing with future pandemics, which are likely to emerge, if potential lessons learned are not implemented by the aviation industry.

In contrast to other Chinese sports, which attract enormous commercial interests and relates to a kind of political kudos and ideological significance, Chinese baseball represents a singular case for the author to investigate the way in which China responds to sport globalisation due to its peripheral position in, and limited resource from, the domestic sport system and powerful stakeholders from the global society. The study examines the development of Chinese baseball and its interplay with the global sport giants and international events (i.e. the Olympic Games and the Major League Baseball [MLB]). Given the influence of sport globalisation, the author also identifies the consistent dominance of Chinese sport authorities and the spectrum of local stakeholders' reaction towards globalisation. The chapter ends with a discussion of the relationship between marginal position of Chinese baseball in the local sport system and the rationale of its response to sport globalisation.