ABSTRACT
The COVID-19 pandemic has considerably impacted pedestrians' perceived comfort in a public setting. The virus's transmissibility and social distancing restrictions have resulted in a shift in pedestrians' perceived comfort, with more pedestrians becoming more conscious of other pedestrians and the distance between pedestrians. The changes in pedestrians' perception have resulted in the Pedestrian Level Of Service (PLOS) models becoming outdated. The models may not accurately portray the actual status of pedestrians' Level Of Service (LOS) according to the pedestrian needs during a pandemic, which generally lasts for a couple of years. These pandemics will happen in the future;hence, their impact on pedestrian comfort on sidewalks is worth considering. This research aims to analyse the effect of COVID-19 on PLOS by compiling data using a face-to-face questionnaire survey in the Melbourne Central Business District (CBD). From the 445 completed surveys, 72% of respondents extensively considered social distancing due to COVID-19 when commuting in the CBD, and 49% preferred a 1–1.5 m distance between pedestrians. In conjunction with an in-depth analysis of the data, an ordinal regression model has been used to analyse the factors that influence the perceived comfort of the pedestrians and estimate the PLOS. The model results show that pedestrian density, COVID-19 social distancing, continuous footpath, and pedestrian flow in opposite directions on the sidewalk greatly impacted the walking comfort of pedestrians during the pandemic. © 2023 by the authors.
ABSTRACT
Crises trigger both learning and unlearning at both intra-organizational and inter-organizational levels. This article stresses the need to facilitate unlearning for effective crisis management and shows how we could use mindfulness practice to enhance unlearning and transformative learning in a crisis. This study proposes the conceptualization of mindful unlearning in crisis with different mechanisms to foster unlearning in three stages of crisis (pre-crisis, during-crisis, and post-crisis). These mechanisms include mindful awareness of impermanence and sensual processing (pre-crisis stage), mindful awareness of interdependence and right intention (crisis management stage), and mindful awareness of transiency and past experiences (post-crisis stage).
ABSTRACT
Purpose: The purpose of this study is to explore audit procedure disclosures related to key audit risks, during the prior year and the initial year of the COVID-19 outbreak, by reporting on matters published in over 3,000 Australian statutory audit reports during 2019 and 2020. Design/methodology/approach: This study partially uses latent semantic analysis methods to apply textual and readability analyses to external audit reports in Australia. The authors measure the tone of the audit reports using the Loughran and McDonald (2011) approach. Findings: The authors find that 3% of audit procedures undertaken during 2020 were designed to address audit risks associated with the COVID-19 pandemic. As a percentage of total audit procedures undertaken during 2020, the authors find that smaller practitioners reported much less audit procedures related to COVID-19 audit risks than most larger audit firms. Finally, the textual analysis further found differences in the sentiment or tone of words used by different auditors in 2020, but differences in sentiment or tone were not found when 2020 was compared to the prior year 2019. Originality/value: This study provides early evidence on whether auditors designed audit procedures to deal specifically with audit risks that arose due to the COVID-19 pandemic and on the extent and nature of those audit procedures. The study will help policymakers to better understand whether Key Audit Matters provided informational value to investors during a time of global crisis. © 2022, Emerald Publishing Limited.