Supply chain management as the key to a firm’s strategy in the global marketplace

Purpose: This research aims to analyze the intersection of two literature streams: that of strategy and supply chain management (SCM). This review should create a better understanding of “strategic SCM” by focusing on relevant theories in the strategic management field and their intersection with SCM to develop a joint research agenda. Design/Methodology/Approach: We conducted a correspondence analysis on the content of 3,402 articles from the top SCM journals. This analysis provides a map of the intellectual structure of content in this field to date. The key trends and changes were identified in strategic SCM research from 1990-2014 as well as the intersection with the key schools of strategic management. Findings: The results suggest that SCM is key to a successful deployment of strategy for competing in the global marketplace. The main theoretical foundations for research in this field were identified and discussed. Gaps were detected and combinations of theoretical foundations of strategic management and SCM suggest four poles for future research: agents and focal firm; distributions and logistics strategic models; SCM competitive requirements; SCM relational governance. Research limitations/implications: Scholars in both the strategy and the SCM fields continue to search for competitive advantages. Much recent research indicates that strategic SCM can be a critical source for that advantage. One of the limitations of our research is that the analysis does not include every journal that published an article mentioning SCM. However, the 34 journals selected are reputed to be the most influential on SCM and focused primarily on SCM. Practical implications: The map of the intellectual structure of research to strategic SCM highlights the need to combine different theoretical approaches to the complex phenomenon of SCM. Practitioners should consider the supply chain as an informal organization and should devote time and resources to build a shared advantage across the supply chain. They should also consider the inherent benefits and risks that sharing Originality/value: The paper demonstrates that strategic SCM needs a balanced and rigorous combination of theoretical approaches to deliver more theory-driven evidences. Our research combines both a qualitative analysis and a quantitative methodology that summarizes gaps and then outlines future research from a large sample of articles. This methodology is an original contribution to this field and offers some assistance for enlarging the sample of future literature reviews

A linked data-driven & service-oriented architecture for sharing educational resources

The two fundamental aims of managing educational resources are to enable resources to be reusable and interoperable and to enable Web-scale sharing of resources across learning communities. Currently, a variety of approaches have been proposed to expose and manage educational resources and their metadata on the Web. These are usually based on heterogeneous metadata standards and schemas, such as IEEE LOM or ADL SCORM, and diverse repository interfaces such as OAI-PMH or SQI. Also, there is still a lack of usage of controlled vocabularies and available data sets that could replace the widespread use of unstructured text for describing resources. On the other hand, the Linked Data approach has proven that it offers a set of successful principles that have the potential to alleviate the aforementioned issues. In this paper, we introduce an architecture and prototype which is fundamentally based on (a) Linked Data principles and (b) Service-orientation to resolve the integration issues for sharing educational resources

Developing Socially Just Teachers: The Interaction of Experiences Before, During, and After Teacher Preparation in Beginning Urban Teachers

This interpretive study investigated how 12 graduates from a justice-oriented teacher preparation program described their teaching goals, practices, and influences on those practices after their 1st year of teaching in an urban school. Relationships among these teachers’ orientations toward socially just teaching, self-reported socially just teaching practices, and self-reported preprogram, program, and postprogram influences were explored. Teachers who were individually and structurally oriented exhibited a sociocultural consciousness and described socially just teaching in various combinations of culturally responsive pedagogies, consciousness-raising, and advocacy; whereas individually oriented teachers focused primarily on “color-blind” caring relationships with their students. Factors that seemed to influence a more structural orientation to socially just teaching included (a) cross-cultural experiences before and during teacher preparation, (b) program course content and field experiences that challenged previous thinking, and (c) administrative and collegial support during the 1st year of teaching. Implications for teacher education practice and research are discussed

Market information acquisition: a prerequisite for successful strategic entrepreneurship

AbstractThis paper investigates on the types of information used by managers and entrepreneurs, so as to conduct market research and to evaluate market potential.The authors examine five major sets of variables to understand their impact on firms’ information market search effort. Empirical results based on a survey of Greek enterprises provide support for these factors in predicting firms’ market information acquisition. Findings on structural and administrative characteristics of the firms support the notion that companies engaged in greater market information search and evaluation of market potential tend to develop and implement complex penetration and development market strategies, in order to maximize their business performance in the examined market

Sensor-AssistedWeighted Average Ensemble Model for Detecting Major Depressive Disorder

The present methods of diagnosing depression are entirely dependent on self-report ratings or clinical interviews. Those traditional methods are subjective, where the individual may or may not be answering genuinely to questions. In this paper, the data has been collected using self-report ratings and also using electronic smartwatches. This study aims to develop a weighted average ensemble machine learning model to predict major depressive disorder (MDD) with superior accuracy. The data has been pre-processed and the essential features have been selected using a correlation-based feature selection method. With the selected features, machine learning approaches such as Logistic Regression, Random Forest, and the proposedWeighted Average Ensemble Model are applied. Further, for assessing the performance of the proposed model, the Area under the Receiver Optimization Characteristic Curves has been used. The results demonstrate that the proposed Weighted Average Ensemble model performs with better accuracy than the Logistic Regression and the Random Forest approaches

A European research agenda for lifelong learning

It is a generally accepted truth that without a proper educational system no country will prosper, nor will its inhabitants. With the arrival of the post-industrial society, in Europe and elsewhere, it has become increasingly clear that people should continue learning over their entire life-spans lest they or their society suffer the dire consequences. But what does this future lifelong learning society exactly look like? And how then should education prepare for it? What should people learn and how should they do so? How can we afford to pay for all this, what are the socio-economic constraints of the move towards a lifelong-learning society? And, of course, what role can and should the educational establishment of schools and universities play? This are questions that demand serious research efforts, which is what this paper argues for

"Talk" about male suicide? Learning from community programmes

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the contribution of public awareness campaigning in developing community capacity toward preventing male suicide and explores emerging considerations for suicide prevention programme development. Design/methodology/approach – The paper draws on campaign evaluation data, specifically qualitative discussion groups with the general public, to report results concerning campaign processes, and “interim” effectiveness in changing public awareness and attitudes, and then discusses how progress is to be lasting and transformational. Findings – The campaign raised the awareness of a substantial proportion of those targeted, and affected attitudes and behaviour of those who were highly aware. The community settings approach was effective in reaching younger men, but there were challenges targeting the public more selectively, and engaging communities in a sustained way. Practical implications – The paper discusses emerging considerations for suicide prevention, focusing on gender and approaches and materials for engaging with the public as “influencers”. There are challenges to target audiences more specifically, provide a clear call to action, and engage the public in a sustained way. Social implications – The paper discusses emerging considerations for suicide prevention, focusing on gender and approaches and materials for engaging with the public as “influencers”. There are challenges to target audiences more specifically, provide a clear call to action, and engage the public in a sustained way. Originality/value – The paper adds fresh evidence of gendered communication processes, including their effects on public awareness, attitudes and engagement. Application of a theory of change model leads to systems level findings for sustaining programme gains

Digital Ecosystems: Ecosystem-Oriented Architectures

We view Digital Ecosystems to be the digital counterparts of biological ecosystems. Here, we are concerned with the creation of these Digital Ecosystems, exploiting the self-organising properties of biological ecosystems to evolve high-level software applications. Therefore, we created the Digital Ecosystem, a novel optimisation technique inspired by biological ecosystems, where the optimisation works at two levels: a first optimisation, migration of agents which are distributed in a decentralised peer-to-peer network, operating continuously in time; this process feeds a second optimisation based on evolutionary computing that operates locally on single peers and is aimed at finding solutions to satisfy locally relevant constraints. The Digital Ecosystem was then measured experimentally through simulations, with measures originating from theoretical ecology, evaluating its likeness to biological ecosystems. This included its responsiveness to requests for applications from the user base, as a measure of the ecological succession (ecosystem maturity). Overall, we have advanced the understanding of Digital Ecosystems, creating Ecosystem-Oriented Architectures where the word ecosystem is more than just a metaphor.Comment: 39 pages, 26 figures, journa