3,870 research outputs found

    Organizing sustainable development

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    The role and meaning of sustainable development have been recognized in the scientific literature for decades. However, there has recently been a dynamic increase in interest in the subject, which results in numerous, in-depth scientific research and publications with an interdisciplinary dimension. This edited volume is a compendium of theoretical knowledge on sustainable development. The context analysed in the publication includes a multi-level and multi-aspect analysis starting from the historical and legal conditions, through elements of the macro level and the micro level, inside the organization. Organizing Sustainable Development offers a systematic and comprehensive theoretical analysis of sustainable development supplemented with practical examples, which will allow obtaining comprehensive knowledge about the meaning and its multi-context application in practice. It shows the latest state of knowledge on the topic and will be of interest to students at an advanced level, academics and reflective practitioners in the fields of sustainable development, management studies, organizational studies and corporate social responsibility

    Digitalization and Development

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    This book examines the diffusion of digitalization and Industry 4.0 technologies in Malaysia by focusing on the ecosystem critical for its expansion. The chapters examine the digital proliferation in major sectors of agriculture, manufacturing, e-commerce and services, as well as the intermediary organizations essential for the orderly performance of socioeconomic agents. The book incisively reviews policy instruments critical for the effective and orderly development of the embedding organizations, and the regulatory framework needed to quicken the appropriation of socioeconomic synergies from digitalization and Industry 4.0 technologies. It highlights the importance of collaboration between government, academic and industry partners, as well as makes key recommendations on how to encourage adoption of IR4.0 technologies in the short- and long-term. This book bridges the concepts and applications of digitalization and Industry 4.0 and will be a must-read for policy makers seeking to quicken the adoption of its technologies

    Natural and Technological Hazards in Urban Areas

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    Natural hazard events and technological accidents are separate causes of environmental impacts. Natural hazards are physical phenomena active in geological times, whereas technological hazards result from actions or facilities created by humans. In our time, combined natural and man-made hazards have been induced. Overpopulation and urban development in areas prone to natural hazards increase the impact of natural disasters worldwide. Additionally, urban areas are frequently characterized by intense industrial activity and rapid, poorly planned growth that threatens the environment and degrades the quality of life. Therefore, proper urban planning is crucial to minimize fatalities and reduce the environmental and economic impacts that accompany both natural and technological hazardous events

    Digital Innovations for a Circular Plastic Economy in Africa

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    Plastic pollution is one of the biggest challenges of the twenty-first century that requires innovative and varied solutions. Focusing on sub-Saharan Africa, this book brings together interdisciplinary, multi-sectoral and multi-stakeholder perspectives exploring challenges and opportunities for utilising digital innovations to manage and accelerate the transition to a circular plastic economy (CPE). This book is organised into three sections bringing together discussion of environmental conditions, operational dimensions and country case studies of digital transformation towards the circular plastic economy. It explores the environment for digitisation in the circular economy, bringing together perspectives from practitioners in academia, innovation, policy, civil society and government agencies. The book also highlights specific country case studies in relation to the development and implementation of different innovative ideas to drive the circular plastic economy across the three sub-Saharan African regions. Finally, the book interrogates the policy dimensions and practitioner perspectives towards a digitally enabled circular plastic economy. Written for a wide range of readers across academia, policy and practice, including researchers, students, small and medium enterprises (SMEs), digital entrepreneurs, non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and multilateral agencies, policymakers and public officials, this book offers unique insights into complex, multilayered issues relating to the production and management of plastic waste and highlights how digital innovations can drive the transition to the circular plastic economy in Africa. The Open Access version of this book, available at https://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license

    Fictocritical Cyberfeminism: A Paralogical Model for Post-Internet Communication

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    This dissertation positions the understudied and experimental writing practice of fictocriticism as an analog for the convergent and indeterminate nature of “post-Internet” communication as well a cyberfeminist technology for interfering and in-tervening in metanarratives of technoscience and technocapitalism that structure contemporary media. Significant theoretical valences are established between twen-tieth century literary works of fictocriticism and the hybrid and ephemeral modes of writing endemic to emergent, twenty-first century forms of networked communica-tion such as social media. Through a critical theoretical understanding of paralogy, or that countercultural logic of deploying language outside legitimate discourses, in-volving various tactics of multivocity, mimesis and metagraphy, fictocriticism is ex-plored as a self-referencing linguistic machine which exists intentionally to occupy those liminal territories “somewhere in among/between criticism, autobiography and fiction” (Hunter qtd. in Kerr 1996). Additionally, as a writing practice that orig-inated in Canada and yet remains marginal to national and international literary scholarship, this dissertation elevates the origins and ongoing relevance of fictocriti-cism by mapping its shared aims and concerns onto proximal discourses of post-structuralism, cyberfeminism, network ecology, media art, the avant-garde, glitch feminism, and radical self-authorship in online environments. Theorized in such a matrix, I argue that fictocriticism represents a capacious framework for writing and reading media that embodies the self-reflexive politics of second-order cybernetic theory while disrupting the rhetoric of technoscientific and neoliberal economic forc-es with speech acts of calculated incoherence. Additionally, through the inclusion of my own fictocritical writing as works of research-creation that interpolate the more traditional chapters and subchapters, I theorize and demonstrate praxis of this dis-tinctively indeterminate form of criticism to empirically and meaningfully juxtapose different modes of knowing and speaking about entangled matters of language, bod-ies, and technologies. In its conclusion, this dissertation contends that the “creative paranoia” engendered by fictocritical cyberfeminism in both print and digital media environments offers a pathway towards a more paralogical media literacy that can transform the terms and expectations of our future media ecology

    Auditable and performant Byzantine consensus for permissioned ledgers

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    Permissioned ledgers allow users to execute transactions against a data store, and retain proof of their execution in a replicated ledger. Each replica verifies the transactions’ execution and ensures that, in perpetuity, a committed transaction cannot be removed from the ledger. Unfortunately, this is not guaranteed by today’s permissioned ledgers, which can be re-written if an arbitrary number of replicas collude. In addition, the transaction throughput of permissioned ledgers is low, hampering real-world deployments, by not taking advantage of multi-core CPUs and hardware accelerators. This thesis explores how permissioned ledgers and their consensus protocols can be made auditable in perpetuity; even when all replicas collude and re-write the ledger. It also addresses how Byzantine consensus protocols can be changed to increase the execution throughput of complex transactions. This thesis makes the following contributions: 1. Always auditable Byzantine consensus protocols. We present a permissioned ledger system that can assign blame to individual replicas regardless of how many of them misbehave. This is achieved by signing and storing consensus protocol messages in the ledger and providing clients with signed, universally-verifiable receipts. 2. Performant transaction execution with hardware accelerators. Next, we describe a cloud-based ML inference service that provides strong integrity guarantees, while staying compatible with current inference APIs. We change the Byzantine consensus protocol to execute machine learning (ML) inference computation on GPUs to optimize throughput and latency of ML inference computation. 3. Parallel transactions execution on multi-core CPUs. Finally, we introduce a permissioned ledger that executes transactions, in parallel, on multi-core CPUs. We separate the execution of transactions between the primary and secondary replicas. The primary replica executes transactions on multiple CPU cores and creates a dependency graph of the transactions that the backup replicas utilize to execute transactions in parallel.Open Acces

    Sociotechnical Imaginaries, the Future and the Third Offset Strategy

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    “So what if ChatGPT wrote it?” Multidisciplinary perspectives on opportunities, challenges and implications of generative conversational AI for research, practice and policy

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    Transformative artificially intelligent tools, such as ChatGPT, designed to generate sophisticated text indistinguishable from that produced by a human, are applicable across a wide range of contexts. The technology presents opportunities as well as, often ethical and legal, challenges, and has the potential for both positive and negative impacts for organisations, society, and individuals. Offering multi-disciplinary insight into some of these, this article brings together 43 contributions from experts in fields such as computer science, marketing, information systems, education, policy, hospitality and tourism, management, publishing, and nursing. The contributors acknowledge ChatGPT’s capabilities to enhance productivity and suggest that it is likely to offer significant gains in the banking, hospitality and tourism, and information technology industries, and enhance business activities, such as management and marketing. Nevertheless, they also consider its limitations, disruptions to practices, threats to privacy and security, and consequences of biases, misuse, and misinformation. However, opinion is split on whether ChatGPT’s use should be restricted or legislated. Drawing on these contributions, the article identifies questions requiring further research across three thematic areas: knowledge, transparency, and ethics; digital transformation of organisations and societies; and teaching, learning, and scholarly research. The avenues for further research include: identifying skills, resources, and capabilities needed to handle generative AI; examining biases of generative AI attributable to training datasets and processes; exploring business and societal contexts best suited for generative AI implementation; determining optimal combinations of human and generative AI for various tasks; identifying ways to assess accuracy of text produced by generative AI; and uncovering the ethical and legal issues in using generative AI across different contexts
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