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Megaprojects in the Middle East are typically large public infrastructure improvements that require fast-paced design and implementation. Successful multinational bidders primarily focus on achieving acceptable quality at the lowest costs. Inevitably, this focus drives those businesses to hire less expensive but skilled foreign labor to accomplish project objectives. A resulting major drawback is that job opportunities are not readily available to the local workforce, reducing social benefit in terms of economic growth. Since the Middle East is highly affected by this negative aspect of megaprojects, governments have adopted a policy referred to as "nationalization initiative," where firms are required to hire a certain percentage of local labor. This paper recommends an approach to satisfy the government's requirements on labor hiring while meeting project cost and schedule commitment.First, the paper investigates the benefits of megaprojects to multinational companies and their impacts on local labor market. Second, the paper discusses the reasons for the historical underutilization of local workforce.Finally, the paper assesses how the nationalization initiative affects multinational businesses, local labor market, and economy of the hosting nation. The results will serve as the cornerstone in the recommendation of necessary and suitable practices to optimize benefits to all project stakeholders. (Abstract)

This paper first presents a protocol study and its software realization for visualizing cognitive chunks as they form in real time during freehand sketching of design concepts, and then illustrates a method and metrics for measuring the information content of freehand sketches based on those chunks. A manual protocol for detecting cognitive chunks during sketching was reported earlier. In this research, the said protocol was automated into a software program and validated in a new protocol study, using new participants. The chunks detected by the program, by definitions in cognitive science literature, serve as entities or units of information conceived at once by the designer. The relations between these entities, esp. spatial relations, are then computed using a new method, which represents the sketch as an entity-relation (ER) model. An established protocol for measuring information of ER models is then applied to compute the information content of the sketches.