The rise in urban stresses has prompted the need for preparedness of urban areas to face precarious circumstances. Consequently, the concept of urban resilience has grown in popularity not only to tackle sudden shocks but also to face long-lasting socio-economic tensions. To implement the arrangements for resilience policy, literature suggests that social factors govern the resilience of urban areas. Communities in which the residents work together and have common goals have a stronger willingness to cooperate. To this end, social cohesion has been proven to be significant for subsistence in the event of a catastrophe. Cohesive communities protect residents against threats, care of others during hardships, and ultimately promote community resilience.


Balanced neighbourhood policies aim to strengthen the cohesion between citizens, communities, and social institutions departing from the assumption that social mix fosters social cohesion. Their goal is to increase the social mix of specific areas to avoid the clustering and segregation of disadvantaged households to, as a result, promote resilient actions. There is, however, literature that suggests that the anticipated effects are rather inconclusive and usually not achieved. Instead, balanced neighbourhood policies would promote segregation by forcing the displacement of groups of residents.


The issue arises whether balanced neighbourhoods trigger resilient actions that are pivotal in resilient communities. In other words, does neighbourhood balance increase resilient action of neighbourhood residents? We took a cross-sectional confirmatory approach to understand the social mechanism that triggers resilient action in balanced neighbourhoods based on Partial Least Squares—Structural Equation Modelling (PLS-SEM) and spatial econometrics. To this end, the research tests the assumptions on which the municipality of Rotterdam grounds their Resilience Strategy's balanced neighbourhood policy, the Woonvisie, using a 2019 public survey on social development. Rotterdam's definition of a balanced neighbourhood is defined from a set of conditions for the amount of houses in different house price segments. Therefore, the tested model is based on the grounds that geographically connected people become affected by their neighbourhood's balance to promote resilient action. As such, we use the willingness to help friends and neighbours to characterise informal support as resilient action. Here we show that balanced neighbourhoods are associated with less informal support: the higher the balance, the fewer residents are willing to help their friends and neighbours.


The results indicate that social cohesion is the social mechanism that triggers help between friends and relatives and fully acts as the mechanism for resilient actions triggered by the balance in a neighbourhood. From the multiple combinations of houses in different house price segments that the definition of balanced neighbourhoods allows, we distinguish two associations. On one hand, house price distributions which foment a reduction in polarisation (more middle-priced houses) are negatively associated with social cohesion. On the other hand, balanced neighbourhoods which foment polarisation (more low- and high-priced houses) are positively associated with social cohesion. This indicates that our results are in line with Putnam’s homophily principle, i.e. ‘birds of a feather flock together’. This outcome is opposite to the policy discourse of governments in favour of balanced neighbourhoods, including the municipality of Rotterdam, that mixed neighbourhoods foster social cohesion and therefore resilient action.


The testing of the theory is complemented in two ways. First, we show that social cohesion and informal support are not constrained by administrative boundaries, so the social perceptions and actions in nearby neighbourhoods affects the level of the other neighbourhoods. Second, we found no moderating effect of factors related to the demographics and the built environment that can promote or deter social interactions, and thus are aspects of what can be considered a resilient neighbourhood.


The analysis also shows that Rotterdam's definition of balance allows multiple and dispersed combinations of the amount of houses in each price segment, which can result in counterintuitive conceptions of balance. In addition, the results show apparently contradicting results of the relationship between balance and social cohesion depending on whether the distribution foments house price polarisation. As a result, we argue that the definition is under-specified and can be misleading.


Finally, only 2.1% of the possible balance distributions yielded an acceptable goodness-of-fit of our model. This could be indicative that the model needs to be reevaluated. We found that neighbourhood ethnic heterogeneity and house type heterogeneity are directly associated to social cohesion and informal support, respectively. Future research should elaborate on the theory on which the model is grounded and create coherence to the empirical relationships identified. In contrast, the few fitting distributions could otherwise indicate that that social cohesion and informal support cannot be explained by the balance in a neighbourhood and that the policy should be reevaluated. Under this second interpretation, the study has uncovered which are the balance distributions for the city that can actually show the alleged effects of balance.


Based on these findings, a policy advice is formulated. If the objective is to increase social cohesion and resilient actions, we discourage the municipality of Rotterdam to approach this by building balanced neighbourhoods. Nevertheless, we have seen that building social cohesion is a way to build social resilience, so recently developed city programs focused on the development of neighbourhood organisations, which not only provide a space for social cohesion but also to collect and share resources directly, are a step forward from the Woonvisie. ... Read more

Developed market multinational enterprises (DMNEs) and emerging market multinational enterprises (EMNEs) can serve developed and emerging markets via a strategic alliance, encouraging reverse innovation. The objective of this study is to identify an alliance strategy and alliance dynamics that encourage innovation of low-cost medical devices which have the potential to become reverse innovations. The main research question is therefore as follows: ‘What kind of collaboration framework can ensure collaboration between a DMNE and an EMNE in the context of reverse innovation of medical devices?’ The study found that a joint venture is an appropriate type of alliance strategy and that the alliance dynamics that can be used by managers to stimulate collaboration are: strategic positioning, value alignment, balanced loyalty and bilateral learning. Symmetry is considered as a context dependent alliance dynamic as it is considered important in the scientific literature but was less important in the two analyzed cases. A key means of continuously aligning the values and strategic positioning of the enterprises is the relationships at the senior level of the enterprises and the joint venture. A key means of balancing the loyalty to the joint venture and to the parent companies is to hire people from the enterprise whose organizational culture is in minority in the joint venture or hire people with no history at one of the enterprises. ... Read more

The AEC industry has shown a slower development when compared to other industries, this has aroused interest among researchers to help the industry achieve its objectives. As a result, one important contribution to the industry has been proven to be the encouragement of effective collaboration among project team members, which in fact, is considered as a central element of success in construction projects. Additionally, the birth of new technologies like BIM has facilitated these collaborative practices among team members. Researchers have focused on the technical aspects of BIM itself, and not enough attention has been given to the collaborative aspects of its use. Consequently, this research has focused on studying the collaborative aspects of the use of BIM in construction projects, with the objective of enriching current literature about the topic. More specifically, on the identification of perspectives that members of project teams have on the most important features of BIM collaboration, with the intention of understanding the feeling of members in order to approach to them in a more accurate way, which will more likely engage members in a collaborative environment. In order to identify the perspectives, Q-methodology has been used. A list of 29 statements were sorted by 15 selected participants from different organizations in The Netherlands, which are currently involved in the execution of construction projects. The analysis of the collected data was performed, which gave sufficient information to identify the existence of three perspectives among fourteen participants, while one participant was considered as a non-loader since his perspective did not show any link to the other perspectives. The identified perspectives were named as follows: Protocol Sticklers, Team-Oriented and Task-Oriented. The analysis of each perspective led to propose a framework that consists of: first, the performance of a thorough analysis to identify the perspectives of each member of a project team. Secondly, the strategy adopted to engage team members in a collaborative environment, should consider a combination of the suggested actions in order to guarantee the existence of the necessary antecedents for effective collaboration in BIM-based projects. However, the use of the framework will depend on the perspective that each member has, trying to make use of their perceived importance of a certain aspect of collaboration to share with the rest of the team, as well as working on the aspects they believe to be of less importance, in order to highlight the benefits of its implementation and engage them to promote a collaborative environment. ... Read more