Search results

Purpose
This paper aims to reflect education for sustainable development (ESD) principles and their manifestation in higher education (HE) in Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries which share a similar policy situation owing to post-socialist transition processes.


Design/methodology/approach
Observations from comprehensive mapping of ESD in professional development of university educators in CEE within the University Educators for Sustainable Development project provided the initial input for this research. To justify the findings, a questionnaire was distributed among informed respondents and assessed qualitatively. ESD success factors were identified to support the interpretation of the results within the overall HE policy context.


Findings
Opportunities for educators' competence development are lower and less diverse in the CEE region than in other parts of Europe. Historical reasons and the policy context may contribute to this situation; the most important factor being the underfinanced HE sector which is currently undergoing profound structural transformation.


Research limitations/implications
The sample of respondents is not representative; they are informed experts in ESD. The results are of an illustrative nature; different sources of information are combined to draw a broad picture.


Social implications
University educators in CEE have considerable know-how and experience in ESD and thus represent significant potential for the development of this field under more favourable conditions.


Originality/value
This research is based on more than two years of cooperation within a broad partnership of European universities; it represents a contribution to the debate from a specific regional perspective. It shows opportunities for critical, creative and participatory approaches in HE, analyses current trends in historical and policy contexts and provides impulses for theoretically and practically oriented efforts.

Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to study the decline of the Tuareg, and explore the emergence of traditional elements of Tuareg culture to circumvent formal barriers to trade.


Design/methodology/approach
This paper examines the history of the Tuareg through the lens of the New Development Economics.


Findings
This paper examines three elements of past Tuareg wealth: the caravan trade as spontaneous order; the unintended consequences of forced modernization policies under colonization and post-colonial states; and contemporary problems from hindered freedom of trade. The bad news is that the Tuareg are facing impediments from failed states with low economic and political freedom. The good news is that traditional elements in the Tuareg's entrepreneurial culture are re-emerging to circumvent formal barriers.


Research limitations/implications
The literature on the Tuareg is largely pessimistic, as the Tuareg's traditions have largely been quashed by post-colonial boundaries and failed states. The New Development Economics offers a new perspective, with two implications. First, there is hope for the Tuareg, and a possible win-win, if the local states adopt a policy of laissez faire and international trade, rather than assimilation or repression. Second, this theoretical lens can be used in other cases throughout Africa (and the world) involving post-colonial borders.


Originality/value
There already exists a rich literature on the Tuareg. This paper uses the New Development Economics to examine the history of the Tuareg's decline – and to find hope in traditional elements of Tuareg entrepreneurship emerging to circumvent local failed (and predatory) states.

Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to investigate the large case of enterprise resource planning (ERP) system implementation in Latin America, performed between 2011 and 2015 in a Brazilian, multinational, publicly traded company. Using the organizational change literature as background, this research analyzes the barriers and factors of success by comparing the perspectives of ERP implementers and end-users, identifying success factors and barriers of this project. A conceptual framework is developed.


Design/methodology/approach
The case study method was used to conduct an in-depth analysis of the interviews that captured the complexity of this process. The change management project team had exactly 11 implementers, of whom ten were interviewed, and 45 end-users, of whom 20 were interviewed.


Findings
The results suggest that end-users and implementers have opposite perceptions regarding the role of previous experience, organizational processes, capacity for change, leadership behavior, and the interaction of business units. In general, implementers presented a more critical perception of the change processes. Conversely, implementers and end-users agreed that business needs and cultural values facilitated the ERP implementation, whereas organizational structure and geographic dispersion constrain it.


Research limitations/implications
This research could have analyzed the results by region or by production line.


Originality/value
The major contribution of this research is to offer a conceptual framework to analyze different views about the same project. This study deepens the understanding of ERP implementations by adding studies from other countries and different cultures. For practitioners, this case study aims to offer the experiences and perceptions that implementers and end-users had about the largest ERP implementation system in Latin America.

Purpose
Innovation projects are often risky and costly. But not all innovation projects lead to commercialisation; some are abandoned, and these abandoned innovation projects can be classified as a waste of resources. Therefore, this paper studies the influence of different external sources and a firm's decision to abandon an innovation project. The purpose of this paper is to provide a broader understanding of abandoned projects.


Design/methodology/approach
The data applied are quantitative data and the empirical background is the Danish Innovation Survey 2009. The sample consists of Danish manufacturing firms with ten employees or more (n=840). The results are based on logistic regression analysis.


Findings
Results reveal that firms should consider that the involvement of customers can lead them to abandon innovation projects. However, if firms combine customers with universities, it will decrease the likelihood of innovation projects being abandoned. A more in-depth analysis shows that the involvement of customers from "Europe" (countries in Europe excluding Denmark) and the "US" leads to innovation projects being abandoned while customers from "other countries" (the rest of the world, including China and India) have the opposite effect.


Originality/value
The contribution is to the limited literature on abandoned innovation projects by suggesting that the type of external sources is a significant factor in firms' decisions to abandon innovation projects. The paper identifies that the involvement of certain external sources leads firms to decide to abandon innovation projects, and that the country of origin of the external sources is an important criterion to consider in relation to a firm's decision to abandon innovation projects.

Purpose
In today's dynamic environment with shortened product life cycles, phase-outs because of product elimination are becoming increasingly frequent. Research on the phase-out process is still scarce. The lack of formalization of the process, especially from the labor perspective, leads to disturbances in phase-out execution. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to analyze how phase-out is organized in industry to derive a generic labor phase-out process.


Design/methodology/approach
This research identifies manufacturing firms that have eliminated products in the past as an adequate sample. Data collection relies on exploratory cross-industry after-the-fact interviews of entirely finished replacement and closure phase-outs.


Findings
The labor phase-out process consists of four stages and each stage of several activities. There are two types of activities: rational and emotional, which should be combined to support companies in implementing a successful phase-out.


Research limitations/implications
Phase-out is a sensitive process, and many experts from industry do not like to discuss phase-outs, in particular closure phase-outs. Although cross-industry coverage could be achieved, companies that intend to apply the developed process should individually adapt it to their own requirements and their own context.


Practical implications
The presented labor process supports companies in formalizing phase-out, while identifying best practices.


Originality/value
This research sheds light on a phase of the production cycle – the phase-out – that has been neglected so far in the extant literature and generates insights for manufacturing companies how they can formalize this process and how they can deal with it more systematically.

Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to investigate the roles that employee-initiated Lean improvement projects play in health care. Lean ideas are introduced to improve flow in health care. Although variability is detrimental to flow performance, it is unclear whether Lean initiatives set out to reduce this variability and the associated buffers.


Design/methodology/approach
Longitudinal field research is combined with an exploratory field-quasi-experiment. First, a large set of Lean interventions were explored and their focus classified. Semi-structured interviews with practitioners supported the initial findings regarding the focus. Second, this study investigated whether a knowledge deficiency could explain the identified focus through a quasi-experiment in which the authors' stimulated knowledge on the roles of variability and buffers and then classified subsequent interventions.


Findings
The results reflected a narrow application of Lean, with most interventions directed at reducing direct waste. A quasi-experiment demonstrated that a small investment in knowledge enables the focus to shift toward buffers and variability issues – i.e. toward a more complete Lean approach.


Research limitations/implications
This research supports the commonly held view that there is a tendency to focus on waste. Furthermore, a lengthy experience of Lean does not guarantee interventions will focus on buffers and variability, issues with arguably a higher complexity compared to obvious waste. However, small investments in knowledge can broaden the focus of practitioners' interventions.


Originality/value
This study is one of the first to research the focus of Lean interventions through a data set spanning several years. The results are based on a unique data set covering a large number of documented Lean interventions.

Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to analyze a contract-based relationship for value co-creation and gain-sharing between two companies for the purpose of industrial maintenance services. After five years of good results for both parties, the relationship was terminated, thus raising questions regarding on the actual gains shared by both partners from joint actions.


Design/methodology/approach
The research method is the longitudinal case study. The research question is: why would a contractual relationship of co-creation of value be terminated given the fact that it yielded good financial results for both parts over the course of five years? The main research techniques were structured interviews with relevant actors and documental analysis from both parts involved in the contract.


Findings
Even valuable contracts can be terminated if the external scenario changes significantly: it matters very little the good job done together if the result became poor due to external reasons, as buyer's sales drop in the period. In the inner scenario, mistruth can arise if the buyer maintains parallel structures for performing similar tasks to those of the service provider, showing some kind of independence from the supplier.


Research limitations/implications
The main limitation is that inherent to case studies: the lack of generalization.


Practical implications
When companies decide to contract regular long-term maintenance services, preventions to revenue reductions of the main activity the must be present, for the continuity of the contract.


Originality/value
To the date of this research, no similar study was found, regarding the influence of the external results in the internal relationships in co-creation value contracts.

Purposee-Business (e-B) organization is an integrated synergy of internet and supply chain. It is an organizational environment which consists of associations among suppliers, customers, work force and information technology. An important issue for an e-B organization is the comprehension of the critical factors that affect its success, in order to realize its full advantages and how it results in efficiency improvements of the organizations. The purpose of this paper is twofold: first to identify the critical success factors (CSFs) that determine the successful implementation of e-B and second to develop an integrated e-B model based on the CSFs.Design/methodology/approachBy following a quantitative approach, primary data were collected through a structured questionnaire from 174 Greek e-B firms. An initial exploratory factor analysis was conducted, followed by confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) and structural equation modeling (SEM).FindingsFindings have shown that there was a direct association of the Resource Based View (RBV) on the supply chain view (SCV) of a firm, which in turn influenced the performance/results of an e-B organization. It is concluded that e-B performance results and value creation are linked to customers' and partners' orientation (SCV) and human resources and information technology (RBV).Originality/valueThe proposed framework contributes to the understanding of the successful implementation of e-B, by proposing a fifthfold framework. The proposed framework portrayed a very fundamental result, that the resourced based view and the SCV of the organization are the critical priorities and have a direct and positive affect on the performance and efficiency of the successful implementation of e-B.

Research Framework : Over the thirty years before World War I, expansion of the world economy occasioned new opportunities and new constraints for children and adolescents as well as adults; but experiences and responses of minors are understated in print sources.Objectives : To discover what societal changes young people noticed and talked about, we examined the « children's page » of a weekly newspaper available for a rural setting in the South Island of New Zealand. The perspective of youth is essential to interpret trajectories inferred from the more conventional sources available in a North American urban setting (Montreal, Quebec).Methodology : From the internet archive PapersPast we collected 12,000 letters of young people aged six through nineteen years, 1886-1909, and extracted their comments on two popular topics : the work they reported (paid or unpaid) and their accounts of toothache.Results : The letters inform us about tasks of young people by age, gender, season, daily routine and household structure. Changes in work assignments at ages 12 to 14, coincident with a spurt of growth and, for most, the end of formal schooling, evoked discussion among them about gender roles and, among girls, protest of the scheduling of their growing up.Conclusion : The seasonality of tasks assigned to children still in school indicates an unrecognized contribution to the elasticity of the rural economy on a global frontier of the industrial food supply. Reallocation of the labour of young people was an ongoing process, subject to negotiation.Contribution : The wealth of information and opinion accessed in the letters invites further experiment with newspaper content analysis for recognizing the participation of segments of the population whose contributions to economic growth have been underestimated.

Research Framework: Long conducted in parallel,
studies on life stages and gender have converged more in recent years, but still
leave large areas uncovered. Some analyzes still treat sex as a simple variable that
does not require problematization. Others lose sight of the fact that growing up and
aging generate categories and trajectories that are the result of interactions of
sex and age. The link between gender and age thus still needs to be tightened.
Objectives: The introductory article of the
issue " Life Stages, Gender and Temporalities" proposes to explore the interactions
between age and gender relations by examining the gendered constructions of ages and
the life trajectories structured by gender.
Methodology: This article lists studies by
sociologists and historians exploring gender/age links.
Results: The articles presented help to show to
what extent gender and age relationships overlap and interact in the development of
social inequalities throughout the life of individuals. They also participate in
questioning the social hierarchy which is "mechanically" based on gender and certain
age-related markers.
Conclusions: The joint analysis of gender and
age relations is progressing, but slowly, and still remains in the blind spot of
intersectional perspectives. While current research now recognizes gender and age as
constantly interacting systems, it too seldom addresses the power relations and the
cumulative inequalities they generate.
Contribution: This introductory article opens
up new research perspectives, both with regard to the gendered processes favouring
the development of sexual physical characteristics and to the dominant social codes
that shape heteronormative experiences and temporalities.

Anthracological studies aim at the reconstruction of the paleoenvironment through the analysis and interpretation of macroremains of carbonized woods found in soils and archaeological sites that are related to previous human activities. The objective of this study was to compare the anthrocological and taphonomic data of the Archaeological Sites RS-T-101 and RS-T-114, located in the municipality of Marques de Souza, associated with pre-colonial occupancies of Guarani origin (archaeological sites RS-T-114 and RS-T-101, respectively, in 1,410-431 BP years and 1,411 -295 years BP, to build the environmental history of the Forqueta River basin based on taphonomic comparisons between these two sites. The traces analyzed were collected following methodology scaling and blasting, being conducted by the Archeology Section of the team's Museum of Natural Sciences of the UNIVATES University Center. In this work, the images of carbon obtained under SEM were analyzed from both sites, which were the object of previous anthrachological studies, being used to perform the taphonomic comparisons. From the images, it can be inferred that the recovered charcoals in the sites had their anatomical characteristics well preserved, being possible to observe homogenization of the cellular walls, as well as the thickness of the walls demonstrates fires with temperatures that did not exceed 340ºC. Moreover, with this study it was possible to infer that the fragments found in these sites may have been originated by fires of anthropogenic origin because they are dispersed in the sedimentary matrix as well as in places with the presence of vestiges of fires.

Purpose
The identification of key criteria that influence citizens' preferences for using m-government services, prioritization of these criteria and making them consistent with the development of m-government services can improve the relationship of the government with citizens and vice versa. The purpose of this study is to investigate and prioritize the criteria that influence the usage of m-government services in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), using the technology acceptance model (TAM) and diffusion of innovation (DOI) theory, along with external variables of perceived security and perceived privacy.


Design/methodology/approach
A quantitative approach has been applied using a questionnaire with a nine-point scale for collecting data. The analytic hierarchy process (AHP) approach has been deployed to structure and prioritize citizens' preferences and select users of the Ministry of Interior (MOI) application.


Findings
The results of the data analysis showed that the first criteria, which refer to the intention to use m-government services, were ease of use and perceived security and were given the highest priority, and the criterion of observability was given the lowest priority.


Originality/value
This study integrates the DOI and TAM theories with other external variables such as perceived security and perceived privacy to develop a conceptual framework. AHP has been used to structure and prioritize the main criteria and sub-criteria of m-government services. The results can assist the m-government decision-makers and software developers in focusing on the criteria that should be considered for the development of m-government services.

PurposePromoting sustainable consumption among young consumers has become a key priority on the research agenda in such different fields as education for sustainable development, environmental psychology and consumer policy. Progress in this field has been hampered by a lack of sophisticated research instruments capable of measuring consumption behaviors that are relevant both in terms of their sustainability impacts and their suitability for teenagers. This study aims to address this research gap and presents a scale for young consumers' sustainable consumption behaviors (YCSCB) in the areas of food and clothing.Design/methodology/approachThe scale was developed in a two-step, mixed-methods approach. In an initial qualitative interview study, the actual behaviors of theoretically selected young consumers (n= 8) were identified with regard to acquiring, using and disposing of consumer goods in the areas of food and clothing. The YCSCB scale was constructed using the findings of this qualitative study and then validated in a subsequent quantitative study (n= 155).FindingsThe YCSCB scale is a valid and reliable scale to measure young consumers' sustainable consumption behavior in the areas of food (n= 14 items) and clothing (n= 13 items).Originality/valueThe findings of this research provide a twofold contribution to advancing research on YCSCB. Firstly, it presents a consolidated scale that is explicitly constructed for teenagers and their consumption contexts. Secondly, it proposes a heuristic for developing more sophisticated measurements of SCB among young consumers that would allow a comparison between studies, is focused on behaviors (instead of confounding behaviors with intentions, attitudes or values) and is impact-oriented in terms of sustainability relevance.

Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to outline the duties and powers of the Adult Support and Protection (Scotland) Act (ASPSA) 2007 and place them in the wider Scottish adult protection legislative framework. It considers the potential value of a standalone adult safeguarding statute.


Design/methodology/approach
The authors draw upon their research and practice expertise to consider the merits of the ASPSA 2007. They take a case study approach to explore its implementation in one particular Scottish local authority, drawing on the qualitative and quantitative data contained in its annual reports.


Findings
Skilled, knowledgeable and well-supported practitioners are key to effective screening, investigations and intervention. Protection orders are being used as intended for a very small number of cases.


Research limitations/implications
The lack of national statistical reports means that there is limited scope for comparison between the local and national data.


Practical implications
Adult support and protection requires ongoing investment of time and leadership in councils and other local agencies to instigate and maintain good practice. Aspects that require further attention are self-neglect; capacity and consent and residents in care homes who pose potential risks to other residents and staff.


Social implications
ASPSA 2007 has helped to raise awareness of adults at risk of harm within the local communities and as social issue more generally.


Originality/value
The authors provide a critical appraisal of the implementation of Scottish adult safeguarding legislation over the last six years. They consider similar developments in England and Wales and argue for comparative research to test these out. Finally, they signpost future directions for bridging separate policy streams.

Purpose
Bats provide many ecosystem services and have intrinsic value. They also act as host reservoirs for some viruses. Several studies have linked zoonotic diseases to bats, raising questions about the risks bats pose, especially to people living close to bat roosts. Through a series of case studies undertaken in three communities, the purpose of this paper is to explore the various ways in which framings and perceptions of bats can influence a potential spillover of bat-borne viruses to humans in Ghana. It assesses the social, cultural and economic factors that drive human-bat interactions and posits that understanding the socio-economic contexts in which human-bat interactions occur is key to the success of future communication strategies.


Design/methodology/approach
Primary data collection methods included participatory landscape mappings, transect walks, focus group discussions and questionnaire surveys.


Findings
Perceptions of bats vary and are influenced by personal beliefs, the perceived economic benefits derived from bats and the location of bat roosts. Activities that put people at risk include bat hunting, butchering and consumption of poorly prepared bat meat. Those who live and work close to bat roosts, and bat hunters, for example, are more at risk of bat-borne zoonotic disease spillover. Disease risk perceptions were generally low, with high levels of uncertainty, indicating the need for clearer information about personal protective practices.


Originality/value
The results of the study may well inform future risk communication strategies as well as help in developing effective responses to zoonotic disease risk, disease outbreaks and the conservation of bats in communities.