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Highlights • A methodology is introduced to rank a set of buildings based on energetic performance of occupants. • Ranking is done in two levels, each one gives specific information about occupants of a single building. • The underlying factors that create the ranks are examined to give occupants clues on how to improve their rank and reduce energy consumption. Abstract Identifying the impacts of occupants on building energy consumption has become an important issue in recent years. This is due to the interrelationship of influencing factors such as urban climate, building characteristics, occupant behavior, and building services and operation, which makes it challenging to identify the role of occupants in energy consumption. The research problem in this study lies in the fact that the occupants of a building may not be cautious regarding energy savings, and there exists no ground to assess their energy consumption behavior. One solution is the development of a systematic comparison procedure between similar buildings. This paper introduces a new procedure for comparison between occupants of several buildings to show the rank of each building among others and suggest occupants on reducing their energy consumption and improving their rank. The proposed framework is developed based on multiple data-mining methods, including clustering, association rules mining, and neural networks. The proposed methodology is composed of two levels. The first considers the amount of energy usage by occupants after filtering effects unrelated to the occupant behavior. The second ranks the buildings in terms of achieved and potential savings during the time under investigation. To demonstrate the application, the methodology was applied on a set of monitored residential buildings in Japan. Results suggest that the proposed method enhances the evaluation of buildings' energy-saving potential by revealing the occupants' contribution. It also provides diverse and prioritized strategies to help occupants manage their energy consumption by revealing the building energy end-use patterns. Graphical abstract Image, graphical abstract [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Buildings are our homes and our workplaces. They directly affect our well-being, and they impact the natural global environment primarily through the energy they consume. Understanding the behavior of occupants in buildings has vital implications for improving the energy efficiency of building systems and for providing knowledge to designers about how occupants will utilize the spaces they create. However, current methods for inferring building occupant activity patterns are limited in two primary areas: First, they lack adaptability to new spaces and scalability to larger spaces due to the time and cost intensity of collecting ground truth data for training the embedded algorithms. Second, they do not incorporate explicit knowledge about occupant dynamics in their implementation, limiting their ability to uncover deep insights about activity patterns in the data. In this paper, we develop a methodology for classifying occupant activity patterns from plug load sensor data at the desk level. Our method makes us of a common unsupervised learning algorithm—the Gaussian mixture model—and, in addition, it incorporates explicit knowledge about occupant presence and absence in order to preserve adaptability and effectiveness. We validate our method using a pilot study in an academic office building and demonstrate its potential for scalability through a case study of an open-office building in San Francisco, CA. Our method offers key insights into spatially and temporally granular occupancy states and space utilization that could not otherwise be obtained. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to establish the role of training in building employee commitment and the task of job satisfaction in the association between training and employee commitment in the banking sector in Uganda.Design/methodology/approach The authors used correlation, regression and MedGraph to investigate the hypotheses.Findings The findings revealed that there is a positive relationships between training and employee commitment (r = 0.507**, p < 0.01), a positive relationship between training and job satisfaction (r = 0.744**, p < 0.01) and a positive relationship between job satisfaction and employee commitment (r = 0.519**, p < 0.01). The regression model showed that the predictor variables explain at least 29.7 per cent of the variance in employee commitment (adjusted R2 = 0.297). MedGraph results revealed a partial type of mediation because the correlation between training (independent variable) and employee commitment (dependent variable) decreased from 0.507*** to 0.271*** by inclusion of job satisfaction (mediating variable).Originality/value This study is one of the pioneers to extend the employee commitment debate to Ugandan banking sector. It provides an explanation with empirical evidence by demonstrating that training extends direct positive effect on employee commitment in the banking sector in Ugandan situation. The study also demonstrates that, in the banking sector in Uganda, job satisfaction helps to partially transmit the effect of training on employee commitment. This study further builds a model that will help researchers and practitioners in investigating and explaining employee commitment in the banking sector in Ugandan situation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to demonstrate how the exhibition form and content created a powerful dialectic in the Exhibition of the Building Workers Unions (Berlin, 1931). Interactive display techniques designed by Herbert Bayer, László Moholy-Nagy and Walter Gropius supported messages advocating the crucial societal and economic role played by construction-sector labour unions. Designed to promote the system of free trade unions in Germany, the show demonstrated the potential effectiveness of photography as an integral part of a didactic system, choreographed into various displays that combined images with dynamic graphics and informative texts. To foster interest in the material, the artists used audience-involving strategies including startling viewpoints, photo-strips mounted on moving laths, and touch stations that would beckon the viewer. Taken together, the techniques constituted one of the boldest inter-war attempts to stimulate viewers through multi-sensory empowerment, and incite collective awareness at a time of immense political stakes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of the article is the identification of the internal sources of risk in the process of improving the system of safety and work hygiene management. After conduction of the analysis the conclusion is that the significant source of risk in the process of improvement of safety and work hygiene management is the human factor and, in particular, the lack of employees' awareness concerning the importance of their attitudes in the improvement of the system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research paper aims at understanding the need of creating an engaged workforce through effective performance management. The major objective is to find whether there exist a significant relationship between Performance Management and Employee Engagement. The research is divided into two phases. Phase 1 is the pilot study where primary data is collected with the help of a survey conducted amongst 20 middle level executives in 2 financial services companies in Mumbai using convenience sampling. The findings of the Pilot Study helped to validate the performance management scale developed by the researcher. Phase 2 of the research is the main study with survey conducted on 101 middle level executives of 6 financial services companies in Mumbai. The tools used for the survey are UTRECHT Work Engagement Scale, and Performance Management Scale (Own Construct). The findings will indicate the degree of relationship between performance management and employee engagement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This case study explores a union organizing drive that revolved in large part around a group of temporary foreign workers. The impact of this group of workers on the union's organizing strategy and the implications of the workers' limited residence and labour rights are examined. This article also considers the factors that appeared to make the Justice for Janitors organizing model effective in this case as well as the potential risks associated with this approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This discussion draws on a series of field-work visits to the Shanghai Television University and the Shanghai Media Group between 2003 and 2006. In that period the impact of a new economic rationale, whereby workers must skill up or ship out of the workforce, was keenly felt both in the service industries and in the lower echelons of professions. The University provided an opportunity to adapt oneself through new qualifications and thus through a constant re-figuration of the working self. At the same time as it supplied these opportunities, the University itself was a site in which these changes were played out and where workers were aware of the pressures in their own lives. In particular, the difficult relationship between media as entertainment and media as a platform for educational content demonstrates the tension between adaptation and creativity as value-laden descriptions of the processes of up-skilling and meeting market demands. Given that this case study is in Shanghai, a city with an extremely mixed reputation for both creative dynamism and the deadening hand of government power plays, the media's role in the Chinese workforce is an ambivalent one. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many scholars have conceptualized immigrant social networks as "social capital" and have focused on the benefits of social ties. However, the concept of "social capital" is unable to explain who benefits from social networks, to what degree, and under which circumstances. Based on an ethnography of Mexican and Central American undocumented immigrants in the Los Angeles janitorial industry. I argue that immigrant social networks may also become exploitative. Decentralized employment relations, hostile immigration and labor legislation, and a working-class community created a context in which recruitment through soda! networks facilitated restructuring. Within this context, benefits from the workers' networks accrued not to the workers themselves but to building owners. In this way, ties to family and friends constitute networks of exploitation rather than resource network This case suggests that more analytical attention be paid to how the benefits of social networks may change when the jobs themselves change. More broadly, it calls for attention to the contexts within which social networks become mechanisms for downgrading rather than platforms for upward mobility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article recounts the unionization of employees at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut from 1931 to 1985. The institution provides a particularly valuable case study of the interaction of the multiple constituents of a major academic institution in the formation of labor policy. The proper treatment of non-faculty employees at Yale has been a controversial subject since the dissatisfaction of its blue collar workers first surfaced in the early 1930s. Campus and community pressure consistently has forced the Yale administration to modify its resistance to unionization. Although the service and maintenance employees constitute only a fraction of the Yale labor force, they have learned to compensate for their inability to close down the university by exercising their power to tarnish a school's asset--its public image as a liberal institution.

This article focuses on the operations research models, which are designed to support business applications, and can be measured in terms of insights that management gains from using models. Management, to cut costs, wanted to reduce the number of janitors in a particular building. Researchers discovered that the janitors' contract included job specifications that were "linear," for example, mopping 1,000 square feet would require 2 hours, mopping 2,000 square feet would require 4 hours, and so forth. They asked the building occupants for their perceptions on the utility of all the tasks the janitors performed. This led to two linear programming formulations. The first maximized the occupants' utility subject to constraints on the number of janitors and, in effect, yielded a task list for the janitors. The second formulation minimized the number of janitors subject to a constraint on the level of utility. Management virtually ignored both formulations. What they did not ignore were the insights gained from doing the analysis. This was the first time the building occupants had said what janitorial functions were important to them.

Discusses the advantages of janitorial service by contract. Reason the Board of Education of Cincinnati had difficulty in controlling school janitors; Information on a plan of a superintendent which has worked with the highest degree of success; Announcement made by the superintendent with regards to janitorial service contract.