Current Practices of Green Marketing and Consumers’ Attitude towards Green Consumption: A Case Study of Some Selected Plastic-Bottled Soft Drinks Producing Firms

In today’s global economy, organizations are increasingly called upon to demonstrate sound management of economic, social and environmental issues. A focus on these issues results in advantages in financing, insurance, marketing, regulatory treatment, and other areas. Business today is not just about selling a product or service to a customer around the corner. In the rapid evolution to a global market-place, having a set of common rules is critical to facilitating trade. Increasingly in this single world market, an organization needs to be able to demonstrate sound business management that includes concern for the environment. This would obviously results in advantages in financing, insurance, marketing, regulatory, and other areas of operations. An Environmental Management System (EMS) provides a solid framework for meeting environmental challenges and realizing the benefits. EMS is a structured approach to addressing the environmental bottom line. Development and implementation of EMS requires careful concentration, otherwise it would be an overwhelming task. Major global firms and international industry associations have historically been leaders in the areas of corporate environmental performance and voluntary initiatives for global environmental management. On the other hand, Bangladeshi firms are seriously lagging behind. Multinational companies as well as larger associations must come forward to help their smaller counterparts in development and implementation of a successful EMS for the betterment of the business sector and the environment as a whole. Keywords: China insurance industry, Foreign fund, Challeng

Electronic Payment Systems Development in a Developing Country: The Role of Institutional Arrangements

This paper examines the institutional arrangements in the development of Nigeria’s electronic payment system (EPS) using a new institutional economics (NIE) perspective. A case study of Nigeria’s EPS was carried out using semi structured interviews to collect data from 18 participating stakeholders; a thematic method was used for the data analysis. The study suggests that a well-functioning set of arrangements, which is lacking in the institutional setup in Nigeria may be required to build necessary institutional capacity suitable for development of safe and efficient electronic payment systems. Although the technological payment infrastructure in Nigeria is modern and of comparable standard, the failure to put in place reliable and relevant market and collaborative agreements has not enabled full exploitation of the available infrastructure. Current governance structures show elements of power struggle and distrust between stakeholders (players and regulators), hampering the creation of an environment that would sustain free market economic activities and effective development of payment systems

The complexities of electronic services implementation and institutionalisation in the public sector

This is the post-print version of the final paper published in Information & Management. The published article is available from the link below. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. Copyright @ 2013 Elsevier B.V.Electronic service implementation (ESI) in the public sector attempts to improve efficiency, effectiveness, and transparency of governmental departments. Despite having provided the necessary infrastructure and investment, many governments have struggled to realise such aims due to the various forces that challenge implementation and institutionalisation. Using institutional theory as a lens, we explored the forces influencing the implementation and institutionalisation of ESI in the public sector. While our results reinforced previous research in IT implementation and organisational transformation, they showed that the dynamic nature of technology poses unanticipated pressures, and that these can impede the implementation and institutionalisation process

Experimentation in securities market structure and regulation in China: from state to market

A key feature of the socialist market economy in China is the development of securities markets so as to facilitate entrepreneurship. With the national securities market now well established attention has shifted to the development of lower tier markets that may be able to meet the financing needs of smaller scale enterprises. In this article we examine how the concept of experimentation has been applied to the process of developing such markets and the regulatory framework in which they operate. We begin with a survey and critique of the policy and regulatory framework within which lower-tier markets have evolved. We argue that experimentation has been important in China but that it operates in a unique way as a result of the institutional structure in which securities markets are located. We then focus more specifically on the regulatory framework for lower tier markets and present two case studies focused on the establishment and operation of two local equity exchanges in a single province (LiaoNing). While this evidence supports our view on the significance of experimentation it also highlights the problems associated with developing lower-tier securities markets within the current policy framework

A Framework for Agile Development of Component-Based Applications

Agile development processes and component-based software architectures are two software engineering approaches that contribute to enable the rapid building and evolution of applications. Nevertheless, few approaches have proposed a framework to combine agile and component-based development, allowing an application to be tested throughout the entire development cycle. To address this problematic, we have built CALICO, a model-based framework that allows applications to be safely developed in an iterative and incremental manner. The CALICO approach relies on the synchronization of a model view, which specifies the application properties, and a runtime view, which contains the application in its execution context. Tests on the application specifications that require values only known at runtime, are automatically integrated by CALICO into the running application, and the captured needed values are reified at execution time to resume the tests and inform the architect of potential problems. Any modification at the model level that does not introduce new errors is automatically propagated to the running system, allowing the safe evolution of the application. In this paper, we illustrate the CALICO development process with a concrete example and provide information on the current implementation of our framework

Civil Society Actors as Catalysts for Transnational Social Learning

This article explores the roles of transnational civil society organizations and networks in transnational social learning. It begins with an investigation into social learning within problem domains and into the ways in which such domain learning builds perspectives and capacities for effective action among domain organizations and institutions. It suggests that domain learning involves problem definition, direction setting, implementation of collective action, and performance monitoring. Transnational civil society actors appear to take five roles in domain learning: (1) identifying issues, (2) facilitating voice of marginalized stakeholders, (3) amplifying the importance of issues, (4) building bridges among diverse stakeholders, and (5) monitoring and assessing solutions. The paper then explores the circumstances in which transnational civil society actors can be expected to make special contributions in important problem domains in the future.This publication is Hauser Center Working Paper No. 28. The Hauser Center Working Paper Series was launched during the summer of 2000. The Series enables the Hauser Center to share with a broad audience important works-in-progress written by Hauser Center scholars and researchers