Stakeholder engagement: Defining strategic advantage for sustainable construction

This is the accepted version of the following article: Rodriguez-Melo, A. and Mansouri, S. A. (2011), Stakeholder Engagement: Defining Strategic Advantage for Sustainable Construction. Bus. Strat. Env., 20: 539–552, which has been published in final form at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/bse.715/abstract.Although sustainable development is increasingly becoming a part of business plans, it is unclear what makes the economic, social and environmental dynamics strategically compatible. This research examines which of the following in sustainable development – government policy, managerial attitude and stakeholder engagement – is the most influential on the profitability of companies in the UK construction sector. Quantitative and qualitative analyses were rendered through a survey and semi-structured interviews. Patterns of ambiguity in legislation were discovered as an obstacle for changing the sector's mind-set. Stakeholder engagement was identified as the defining factor increasing managers' awareness, helping legislation to be effectively implemented and making sustainability highly appealing to clients. These findings indicate that to gain competitive advantage, companies should embark on long-term strategic alliances which adopt the proposals of environmental non-governmental organisations and closely follow public opinion. This, strengthens brand equity, allows for premium pricing, increases market share and maximizes profit

Extending spin ice concepts to another geometry: the artificial triangular spin ice

In this work we propose and study a realization of an artificial spin ice-like system, not based on any real material, in a triangular geometry. At each vertex of the lattice, the "ice-like rule" dictates that three spins must point inward while the other three must point outward. We have studied the system's ground-state and the lowest energy excitations as well as the thermodynamic properties of the system. Our results show that, despite fundamental differences in the vertices topologies as compared to the artificial square spin ice, in the triangular array the lowest energy excitations also behave as a kind of Nambu monopoles (two opposite monopoles connected by an energetic string). Indeed, our results suggest that the monopoles charge value may have a universal value while the string tension could be tuned by changing the system's geometry, probably allowing the design of systems with different string tensions. Our Monte Carlo results suggest a phase transition in the Ising universality class where the mean distance between monopoles and anti-monopoles increases considerably at the critical temperature. The differences on the vertices topologies seem to facilitate the experimental achievement of the system's ground-state, thereby allowing a more detailed experimental study of the system's properties.Comment: This new version of the paper includes all changes described in the erratum published at PRB 86, 219902(E) (2012) (http://dx.doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevB.86.219902

Magnetization reversals in a disk-shaped small magnet with an interface

We consider a nanodisk possessing two coupled materials with different ferromagnetic exchange constant. The common border line of the two media passes at the disk center dividing the system exactly in two similar half-disks. The vortex core motion crossing the interface is investigated with a simple description based on a two-dimensional model which mimics a very thin real material with such a line defect. The main result of this study is that, depending on the magnetic coupling which connects the media, the vortex core can be dramatically and repeatedly flipped from up to down and vice versa by the interface. This phenomenon produces burst-like emission of spin waves each time the switching process takes place.Comment: 11 pages, 10 figure