Sustainable Textile Marketing

We know that sustainability has become an important topic in every aspect of life. The textile, fashion, and material industries must also be sustainable, which could be imparted in their development, production, or even marketing. The textile industry has a huge market, as clothing is arguably the most important human need after food. Recently, this industry has been labeled as a polluting industry, a label that could be overcome by the proper development of textile goods and careful marketing strategies. There are specific roles that government, entrepreneurs, and even universities can play in properly educating people to make the textile industry cleaner and greener. Several journals focus only on one of the aspects of this key problem, i.e., the production of sustainable materials, textile education, or textile marketing. However, herein, we strive to bring different areas together on one platform to cover different aspects, i.e., production, policy, education, and marketing related to textile fashion and textile materials

Collaborative driving mode of sustainable marketing and supply chain management supported by metaverse technology

In this article, we aim to explore the relationship between sustainable marketing and supply chain management (SCM) under the background of metaverse technology to realize the sustainable development of enterprises. First, this study deeply studies the influence of metaverse technology on sustainable marketing strategy from the theoretical level. Second, it deeply discusses the integration of digital transformation and sustainable development in SCM. Finally, this study implements a collaborative driving model of sustainable marketing and SCM supported by metaverse. By designing and analyzing the questionnaire on the sustainable performance of enterprises, it is found that SCM, cooperation with customers, investment recovery, sustainable marketing, R&D and design, production, and manufacturing have a significant positive influence on the sustainable performance of enterprises (p<0.01). In addition, the distribution and retail in sustainable marketing negatively impact the sustainable performance of enterprises, and the standardization coefficient is −0.225 (p<0.05). These research results emphasize the importance of sustainable marketing and SCM, which jointly promote enterprises to achieve sustainable performance, and ultimately provide valuable practical guidance for building a sustainable digital economy and contribute to collaborative optimization in enterprise engineering

Emerging business models

Magretta (2002) suggests, using the example of American Express in the nineteenth century, that: " a successful business model represents a better way than the existing alternatives. It may offer more value to a discrete group of customers. Or it may completely replace the old way of doing things and become the standard for the next generation of entrepreneurs to beat". Adding substance with: "… all new business models are variations on the generic value chain underlying all businesses. Broadly speaking, this chain has two parts. Part one includes all the activities associated with making something: designing it purchasing raw materials, manufacturing and so on. Part two includes all the activities associated with selling something: finding and reaching customers, transacting a sale, distributing the product or delivering the service. A new business model's plot may turn on designing a new product for an unmet need … Or it may turn on a process innovation, a better way of making or selling or distributing an already.

BOUNDED IMAGINATION: REVISITING WORK IDENTITY, SPATIAL-TEMPORAL MATERIALITY, AND DEVELOPMENT DISCOURSES IN CHINESE APPAREL MANUFACTURING

The global apparel manufacturing industry has long been characterized by abusive employment practices, including low pay, poor work conditions, and prolonged work hours. In light of enduring and emerging work predicaments in the apparel manufacturing industry, this dissertation investigates work identities among Chinese apparel manufacturing practitioners with a focus on their imagination. Adopting a communicative lens, I develop the concept “bounded imagination.” Bounded imagination describes how practitioners’ future-oriented desires are shaped by spatial-temporal configurations and local and macro discourses. My study primarily draws on semi-structured, in-depth interviews with current and former practitioners in Chinese apparel factories. Qualitative data collection helped me gather rich accounts from practitioners, and iterative analysis facilitated my theory building. My findings explicate two manifestations of bounded imagination: “constrained imagination” and “upgrading idealism.” Constrained imagination refers to production workers’ constrained career aspirations and limited ideas about the possibilities of industrial transformation. Key constraints relate to the spatial-temporal materiality in factory settings and the domestic employment context, including the rural/urban divide, the hukou policy, and ineffective labor organizing. By contrast, upgrading idealism focuses on owners and managers’ imagination about the future of apparel manufacturing and involves three basic elements represented by the acronym 3“Ds”: depreciation of cut and sew, desires for upgrading, and development following Western countries. Upgrading idealism draws attention to long-existing development discourses and uneven development on the international scale. This research demonstrates that imagination is an important site to explore workplace control and resistance. Addressing production workers’ constrained imagination adds new perspectives on workers’ voices and discursive practices to craft positive work identities. The findings about spatial-temporal materiality enrich the conception of materiality and offer important lessons on the role of materiality in organizing. Furthermore, my study indicates that upgrading idealism constitutes a recent iteration of “development idealism” (DI) in China. Owners and managers’ articulations of upgrading involved constructions of work’s value and regional and national hierarchies. Altogether, my focus on practitioners’ imagination contributes novel insights into work identity, spatial-temporal materiality, and development discourses.Doctor of Philosoph

GLOBAL PRODUCTION NETWORKS, STRATEGIC COUPLING AND THE DYNAMICS OF INDUSTRIAL UPGRADING IN PEARL RIVER DELTA, CHINA

Ph.DDOCTOR OF PHILOSOPH

Managing enterprise resource planning and multi-organisational enterprise governance:a new contingency framework for the enterprisation of operations

This research has been undertaken to determine how successful multi-organisational enterprise strategy is reliant on the correct type of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) information systems being used. However there appears to be a dearth of research as regards strategic alignment between ERP systems development and multi-organisational enterprise governance as guidelines and frameworks to assist practitioners in making decision for multi-organisational collaboration supported by different types of ERP systems are still missing from theoretical and empirical perspectives. This calls for this research which investigates ERP systems development and emerging practices in the management of multi-organisational enterprises (i.e. parts of companies working with parts of other companies to deliver complex product-service systems) and identify how different ERP systems fit into different multi-organisational enterprise structures, in order to achieve sustainable competitive success. An empirical inductive study was conducted using the Grounded Theory-based methodological approach based on successful manufacturing and service companies in the UK and China. This involved an initial pre-study literature review, data collection via 48 semi-structured interviews with 8 companies delivering complex products and services across organisational boundaries whilst adopting ERP systems to support their collaborative business strategies – 4 cases cover printing, semiconductor manufacturing, and parcel distribution industries in the UK and 4 cases cover crane manufacturing, concrete production, and banking industries in China in order to form a set of 29 tentative propositions that have been validated via a questionnaire receiving 116 responses from 16 companies. The research has resulted in the consolidation of the validated propositions into a novel concept referred to as the ‘Dynamic Enterprise Reference Grid for ERP’ (DERG-ERP) which draws from multiple theoretical perspectives. The core of the DERG-ERP concept is a contingency management framework which indicates that different multi-organisational enterprise paradigms and the supporting ERP information systems are not the result of different strategies, but are best considered part of a strategic continuum with the same overall business purpose of multi-organisational cooperation. At different times and circumstances in a partnership lifecycle firms may prefer particular multi-organisational enterprise structures and the use of different types of ERP systems to satisfy business requirements. Thus the DERG-ERP concept helps decision makers in selecting, managing and co-developing the most appropriate multi-organistional enterprise strategy and its corresponding ERP systems by drawing on core competence, expected competitiveness, and information systems strategic capabilities as the main contingency factors. Specifically, this research suggests that traditional ERP(I) systems are associated with Vertically Integrated Enterprise (VIE); whilst ERPIIsystems can be correlated to Extended Enterprise (EE) requirements and ERPIII systems can best support the operations of Virtual Enterprise (VE). The contribution of this thesis is threefold. Firstly, this work contributes to a gap in the extant literature about the best fit between ERP system types and multi-organisational enterprise structure types; and proposes a new contingency framework – the DERG-ERP, which can be used to explain how and why enterprise managers need to change and adapt their ERP information systems in response to changing business and operational requirements. Secondly, with respect to a priori theoretical models, the new DERG-ERP has furthered multi-organisational enterprise management thinking by incorporating information system strategy, rather than purely focusing on strategy, structural, and operational aspects of enterprise design and management. Simultaneously, the DERG-ERP makes theoretical contributions to the current IS Strategy Formulation Model which does not explicitly address multi-organisational enterprise governance. Thirdly, this research clarifies and emphasises the new concept and ideas of future ERP systems (referred to as ERPIII) that are inadequately covered in the extant literature. The novel DERG-ERP concept and its elements have also been applied to 8 empirical cases to serve as a practical guide for ERP vendors, information systems management, and operations managers hoping to grow and sustain their competitive advantage with respect to effective enterprise strategy, enterprise structures, and ERP systems use; referred to in this thesis as the “enterprisation of operations”