Sustainable urban infrastructure
A. Bouba Oumarou; L. HongXia; C.A. Mbom
Abstract
BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: The duality of Chinese management style called guanxi might have a potential difference between Chinese and African ideologies, and may give rise to injustice in some overseas contracting projects leading to conflicts, fights and safety issues. Therefore, effective action is ...
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BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: The duality of Chinese management style called guanxi might have a potential difference between Chinese and African ideologies, and may give rise to injustice in some overseas contracting projects leading to conflicts, fights and safety issues. Therefore, effective action is needed in improving Chinese contractors-local workers relationships on project sites. Hence, assessing the extent to which Chinese managers practice guanxi on African workers, and how guanxi is affecting conflict and safety standards shows the extent of hope in mitigating risks and improving management. Specifically, this case study attempted to sort out and rank all difficulties Chinese managers encounter while undertaking hydropower projects in Cameroon, to find out whether or not there is a supervisor-worker guanxi relationship on dam construction sites and whether or not guanxi is implicated in Sino-Cameroonian workers conflict and safety.METHODS: SWARA method was used to analyze and rank difficulties, qualitative and quantitative assessments were undertaken for theories studies. After a workshop and semi-interview with Decision Makers a first survey was designed to gather scores of difficulties that ended to a ranking from most to least important using SWARA method. Then two questionnaires were structured and sent to local workers and Chinese project engineers, to gather all information about guanxi, conflicts and safety score. After a consistency study on 526 local workers and 40 Chinese manager’s responses selected from three different hydropower projects, the overall Cronbach’s alpha was 0.93 for supervisors and 0.88 for workers.FINDINGS: The results of SWARA ranking showed that the problem areas giving rise challenges to Chinese contractors are mainly related to the language barrier (W=47.7%) and interpersonal issues (w=13.35%).The findings of hypotheses testing suggest that guanxi is not applied on local workers by Chinese managers with statistics X=4.36<26 and X=2.3514 respectively, thus ,hypotheses H21 and H22 were both supported; yet workers do have conflict relationship and do not feel safe working with Chinese managers stated with statistics 27.4 and 24.9 respectively. However, the application of guanxi may play an important role in positively affecting the conflicts and safety management in Chinese oversea megaprojects. Using these results, recommendations were thrown on project, conflict, and safety management. CONCLUSION: As the number of Chinese investments in infrastructures in Africa keeps increasing, the findings in this research may provide all parties with crucial information for better understanding of local workers they might hire for their numerous projects. This study has shown that Chinese managers do not practice guanxi on the local workers, yet it may help in improving safety and conflict management. Therefore, there is need for
Urban ecology and related environmental concerns
A. Bouba Oumarou; H.X. Li
Abstract
BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: Global Warming is expected to induce grave effects around the world. It is predicted that many communities, mostly in the third world, experience numerous consequences because of climate change. Therefore, effective action is needed and universities play a huge role in addressing ...
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BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: Global Warming is expected to induce grave effects around the world. It is predicted that many communities, mostly in the third world, experience numerous consequences because of climate change. Therefore, effective action is needed and universities play a huge role in addressing Global Warming issues and their impacts through research and innovations. Hence, assessing the extent to which African university students understand climate change and its impacts shows the extent of hope in mitigating the climate related risks. This Case study assesses how deep is the knowledge of young educated Africans on Global Warming causes and risks, how committed they are on fighting the issue and applying solutions.METHODS: A hypothesis testing and descriptive statistics models were employed to analyze a qualified data set collected through an online interview survey among young educated Africans taken from a sample of oversea students in Chinese state universities. After a consistency study, Out of 250 questionnaires received, 224 were useful data, and Cronbach’s alpha was 0.75. Participants were taken from 34 different African nationalities. All analyses were conducted using SPSS24.FINDINGS: The results have shown that 39% of the students are very familiar with the topic, and 33% consider it as a known issue and the participants mostly rely on social media to get information about Global Warming. Two hypotheses were tested at 95% level of confidence; the critical statistic was 41.3 against a 51.2 calculated chi square for H01: Young educated Africans don’t have significant knowledge on Global Warming causes. Similarly, a critical value of 36.4 was compared to a calculated chi-square of 40.6 for H02: Young educated Africans don’t have significant knowledge on Global Warming risks. Hence, both hypotheses were rejected. Consequently, it was deduced that young Africans students do have general knowledge on GW risks and causes, even if some deep aspects are still unclear for some. It was revealed that most of the students (81%) are ready to take actions against climate change, and some have even started to do so; besides, they mostly believe that the solutions should come from every human being at any age or background. Using these results, recommendations were given to different stakeholders. CONCLUSION: In Africa, where education about climate change is generally low, the findings in this study may provide all stakeholders with crucial information for better understanding of Global Warming risks and effective response plans. This study has shown that Young educated Africans report a general sense that global warming can negatively impact people’s lives, but relatively few are willing to personally get involved in the response. Therefore, there is need for practical climate change health and safety education leading to improve behaviors among the most remote communities.