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Describes an organizational spiritual‐development program run for junior managers at the giant Guangxi State Farm Agriculture Group (SFAG).

Draws on the inside information of the author, who is a course tutor, and some of his trainees.

Reports how the program can help junior managers to avoid “counterproductive workplace behaviour” and find greater meaning in their work.

Reveals how the course can help to promote: honest, warm and harmonious relationships in the workplace; loyalty to the company and social sanctions against employees who try to undermine their colleagues and sabotage production; participation in the cultural life of the organization; and a more unified enterprise spirit.

Details how the tenets of the course chime with the wider objectives of Chinese society.

Contains a particularly interesting section about two volunteers who, having practised counterproductive workplace behaviors the past (one served a prison sentence for it), now lead discussion groups on the program.

Although various concepts and techniques are introduced to the built environment to achieve a substantially efficient building production, the effective application of these methods in projects is of immense significance to the field of building construction. Among these initiatives, lean construction and building information modelling (BIM) are mainstream endeavours that share many common principles to improve the productivity of the built environment. This study aims to explore and explain how BIM-based integrated data management (IDM) facilitates the achievement of leanness in a built environment project.

This research is conducted through an ethnographic-action research that relies on the design-science approach and case study through a collaborative research project. As participants of the project, the researchers of this study cooperate with the practitioners to design the project approach and production workflows. Research data and evidence are obtained via participative observation, including direct observation, results of activities, unstructured meetings and self-analysis.

In this study, the project and production perspectives clarify the building design and production process, as well as analyse how BIM facilitates the achievement of leanness in building design and construction. BIM-based frameworks for IDM have been developed to handle miscellaneous information and data, as well as enhance multidisciplinary collaboration throughout the project life cycle. The role of the integrated BIM model as an information hub between the building design and building construction has been identified.

The project and production views of building and construction are used in this study because the research purpose is to link the BIM-based IDM to lean construction. Although this mixed approach can slightly undermine the theoretical foundation of this study, a substantially comprehensive understanding can be gained as well.

This study provides a new perspective to understand how BIM-based IDM contributes to lean construction.

This study provides new insights into IDM in a built environment project with project and production views and presents BIM-based frameworks for IDM to achieve lean construction through the BIM process.

Due to rapid product obsolescence, there is a significant decline in the market prices, which causes that the sale season is often divided into two periods. This paper aims to consider a class of two-period supply contracts that offer the retailer the ordering flexibility in response to the market changes. This paper analyzes the two-period ordering and coordination problem with option contracts.

The authors incorporate call, put and bidirectional option contracts into the two-period ordering model. By applying stochastic dynamic programming, the authors derive the retailer’s optimal ordering policies for two periods. By benchmarking the case without option contracts, they highlight the advantage of option contracts. Through the mutual comparisons, the authors also explore the impacts of different option contracts. On this basis, the authors explore the conditions on which two-period supply contracts containing options can coordinate the supply chain.

This study shows that the retailer is always better off with option contracts. In addition, the effectiveness of different option contracts depends on the option contract parameters. When the parameters are the same for different option contracts, bidirectional option contracts are superior to call and put ones; otherwise, bidirectional option contracts might be superior or inferior to call and put ones. If designed properly, two-period supply contracts containing options can coordinate the two-period supply chain.

This paper is the first to highlight the value of option contracts as well as explore the role of different option contracts on the two-period procurement problem. The insights derived from our analysis can provide a good way on how to help the retailer work more efficiently in a two-period setting.

With respect to the multiple-attribute decision-making problem with subjective preference for a certain attribute whose weight-value range have been given over other attributes whose weight values are unknown, a method based on the mean value of the grey number is proposed to analyse the decision-making problem. This method is used to choose a supply-chain partner under the condition that the decision makers have a preference for a certain attribute of various alternatives. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

First, the middle value of the preferred attribute’s weight-value range is supposed to be its weight value according to the content of the mean value of the grey number. Second, to reflect the decision maker’s subjective preference information, an improved optimisation model that requests the minimum deviation between the actual and expected numerical value of each attribute is constructed to assess the attributes’ weights. Third, the correlated degree and the correlation matrix, which are determined by the weight values of all attributes, are used to rank all the alternatives.

This paper provides a method for making a decision when decision makers have a preference for a certain attribute from an array of various alternatives, and the range of the certain attribute’s weight value is given but the weight value of the other attributes is unknown. When applied to supply-chain partner selection, this method proves feasible and effective.

This method is feasible and effective when applied to supply-chain partner selection, and can be applied to other kinds of decision-making problems. This means it has significant theoretical importance and extensive practical value.

Based on the mean value of the grey number, an optimisation model is built to determine the importance degree of each attribute, then the correlated degree of each alternative is combined to rank all the alternatives. This method can suit the decision makers’ subjective preference for a certain attribute well.