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Ensuring Access to Safe and Nutritious Food for All Through the Transformation of Food Systems
A Design Science Research Approach to Smart and Collaborative Urban Supply Networks
Urban supply networks are facing increasing demands and challenges and thus constitute a relevant field for research and practical development. Supply chain management holds enormous potential and relevance for society and everyday life as the flow of goods and information are important economic functions. Being a heterogeneous field, the literature base of supply chain management research is difficult to manage and navigate. Disruptive digital technologies and the implementation of cross-network information analysis and sharing drive the need for new organisational and technological approaches. Practical issues are manifold and include mega trends such as digital transformation, urbanisation, and environmental awareness.
A promising approach to solving these problems is the realisation of smart and collaborative supply networks. The growth of artificial intelligence applications in recent years has led to a wide range of applications in a variety of domains. However, the potential of artificial intelligence utilisation in supply chain management has not yet been fully exploited. Similarly, value creation increasingly takes place in networked value creation cycles that have become continuously more collaborative, complex, and dynamic as interactions in business processes involving information technologies have become more intense.
Following a design science research approach this cumulative thesis comprises the development and discussion of four artefacts for the analysis and advancement of smart and collaborative urban supply networks. This thesis aims to highlight the potential of artificial intelligence-based supply networks, to advance data-driven inter-organisational collaboration, and to improve last mile supply network sustainability. Based on thorough machine learning and systematic literature reviews, reference and system dynamics modelling, simulation, and qualitative empirical research, the artefacts provide a valuable contribution to research and practice
B/order work: recomposing relations in the seamful carescapes of health and social care integration in Scotland
As people, ageing and living with disabilities, struggle with how care is enacted through their lives, integrated care has gained policy purchase in many places, especially in the United Kingdom. Accordingly, there have been various (re)forms of care configurations instigated, in particular, promoting partnership and service redesign. Despite integrations apparent popularity, its contribution to improved service delivery and outcomes for people has been questioned, exposing ongoing uncertainties about what it entails and its associated benefits. Nonetheless, over decades, a remarkably consistent approach to integrated care has advanced collaboration as a solution. Equally, any (re)configurations emerge through wider infrastructures of care, in what might be regarded as dis-integrated care, as complex carescapes attempt to hold and aporias remain.
In 2014, the Scottish Public Bodies (Joint Working) (Scotland) Act mandated Health and Social Care Integration (HSCI), as a means to mend fraying carescapes; a flagship policy epitomising public service reform in Scotland, in which normative aspirations of collaboration are central. What then are the accomplishments of this ambitious legislation? From the vantage point of 2021, HSCI has been assessed as slow and insubstantial, but this is not the complete picture. Narratives about failing to meet expectations obscure more complicated histories of cooperation and discord, successes and failures, and unintended consequences. Yet given collaborative ubiquity, if partnerships are contested how then are they practiced?
To answer this question, I embarked on an interorganisational ethnography of the enactment of a Health and Social Care Partnership (HSCP), which went ‘live’ on April 1st, 2016; in a place I call ‘Kintra’. I interrogate what happened when several managers (from the NHS and Council) endeavoured to implement HSCI according to the precepts of the Act; working to both (re)configure and hold things together behind care frontiers; away from the bodywork of direct care, immersed in everyday arrangements in the spaces of governance and operations. I chart their efforts to comply with regulations, plan, and build governance apparatuses through documents. I explore through coalescent objects how distributed forms of governance, entwined in policy implementation, were subsequently both sustained, and challenged. I observed for seven months actors struggling to (re)configure care services embedded in a collaborative approach, as well as establish the legitimacy of the HSCP; exemplified through the fabrication of what was understood as a 'must-do' commissioning plan.
In tracing documents, I show the ways in which HSCI was simultaneously materialised and constituted through documentation. I reveal how, in the mundane mattering of document manufacturing, possibilities for (re)forming the carescape emerged. By delving into inconspicuous, ‘seamful’ b/order work that both sustained distinctions between the NHS and Council and enabled b/order crossings, I expose how actors were knotted, and how this shaped efforts to recompose the contours of the carescape.
While ‘Kintra’s story might be familiar, situated in concerns that may resonate across Scotland; I reveal how collaboration-as-practice is tangled in differing organisational practices, emerging from quotidian intra-actions in meeting rooms, offices, car parks and kitchenettes. I deploy a posthuman practice stance to show not only the way in which public administration ‘does’ care, but it’s world-making through a sociomaterial politics of anticipation.
I was told legislation was the only way to make HSCI in ‘Kintra’ happen, nevertheless, there was resistance to limit the breadth and depth of integrating. Consequently, I show how the (re)organising of b/orders was an always-ongoing act of maintenance and repair of a (dis)integrating carescape; as I learnt at the end of my fieldwork, ‘it’s ‘Kintra, ‘it’s aye been!
Knowledge Transfer for and through the Replication of Organisational Routines in Franchise Systems
Routines are dispositions to behave according to established sets of rules that are also repositories of the organisational memory about “how things get done”. Franchise systems are organisational forms which expand through the replication of routines by new units owned by franchisees. Drawing on insights from the literatures on organisational learning, organisational evolution (under generalised Darwinism), and cognitive psychology, this thesis identifies the building blocks for a conceptual explanation of routine replication in franchise systems. It then proposes an original case study of Yázigi, a large Brazilian franchise system of language schools, which is used to develop a novel process model that captures how knowledge is transferred for and through the replication of routines within an expanding franchise system. Four principal lessons are derived. First, when direct knowledge transfer is not available, artefacts, most notably template representations of routines, are essential. Second, intermediaries, as agents of routine compilation who direct participants to template representations, are crucial to the process of routine replication. Third, just as routines are analogues of habits, routine compilation seems to reproduce habit compilation. Finally, existing learning-related habits of thought may work in favour of or against the adoption of new habits in the replication process. This thesis outlines the prescriptive implications of these lessons for franchise practitioners and details opportunities for future research
To GDP or not to GDP? Identifying the factors promoting and inhibiting the use and impact of well-being metrics in Scotland and Italy
Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is frequently used as a proxy for well-being. Such use of GDP is problematic for many reasons, for GDP excludes activities that contribute to well-being and includes others that have a negative impact instead. A vast array of metrics has therefore been developed that aim to complement or replace it and put well-being at the heart of policymaking. Nonetheless, previous research has shown that their use and impact has been limited to date.
This thesis examines the use and impact of well-being metrics and the factors affecting them in the crucial cases of Scotland and Italy. Despite being at the forefront of the well-being debate, both countries have never been studied before in the context in question. This thesis fills this gap, collating views from 120 stakeholders on different facets of the well-being debate gathered through interviews that were conducted between 2018 and 2020. Of uttermost importance was the study of informants’ awareness of problems and solutions and the extent to which these were regarded as such, problem and solution awareness and recognition being the founding pillars of a theory of policy change that I developed drawing on Kingdon’s Multiple Stream Approach. Furthermore, this thesis provides an extended analysis of the use of well-being metrics in parliamentary debates and media reporting in both countries before and during the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, the first of its kind to be undertaken. The research was conducted using the archives made available by TheyWorkForYou and the Italian Parliament as far as the study of parliamentary debates is concerned, and Factiva and TVEyes as far as newspaper and radio and TV coverage are concerned, employing advanced search strings and a robust methodology aimed to reduce the number of duplicates and potentially irrelevant hits returned.
Findings reveal low awareness of well-being metrics and of GDP’s limitations, especially among policymakers and journalists; a prevailing view of economic growth as a prerequisite for well-being which translates into the preference for GDP to be integrated with other metrics rather than replaced altogether and which results in economic crises generating punctuations that strengthen the status quo and hinder attempts to bring about change; and an almost unanimous scepticism of subjective indicators. Most importantly, findings reveal very limited use and impact of well-being metrics, particularly of official national frameworks, in line with what the theory of policy change that I developed would predict.
Ten recommendations are made to increase the use and impact of well-being metrics in both countries, among which is the need to put more effort into promoting the well-being agenda when the economy is expanding as opposed to periods in which economic growth is lacking and to divert resources to awareness campaigns that enhance the use and impact of already existing metrics rather than to the development of new metrics altogether
The Evolution of Smart Buildings: An Industrial Perspective of the Development of Smart Buildings in the 2010s
Over the course of the 2010s, specialist research bodies have failed to provide a holistic view of the changes in the prominent reason (as driven by industry) for creating a smart building. Over the 2010s, research tended to focus on remaining deeply involved in only single issues or value drivers.
Through an analysis of the author’s peer reviewed and published works (book chapters, articles, essays and podcasts), supplemented with additional contextual academic literature, a model for how the key drivers for creating a smart building have evolved in industry during the 2010s is presented. The critical research commentary within this thesis, tracks the incremental advances of technology and their application to the built environment via academic movements, industrial shifts, or the author’s personal contributions.
This thesis has found that it is demonstrable, through the chronology and publication dates of the included research papers, that as the financial cost and complexity of sensors and cloud computing reduced, smart buildings became
increasingly prevalent. Initially, sustainability was the primary focus with the use of HVAC analytics and advanced metering in the early 2010s. The middle of the decade saw an economic transformation of the commercial office sector and the driver for creating a smart building was concerned with delivering flexible yet quantifiably used space. Driven by society’s emphasis on health, wellbeing and productivity, smart buildings pivoted their focus towards the end of the 2010s. Smart building technologies were required to demonstrate the impacts of architecture on the human. This research has evidenced that smart buildings use data to improve performance in sustainability, in space usage or for humancentric outcomes
Moving with Stories of "Me too.": Towards a Theory and Praxis of Intersectional Entanglements
This dissertation offers a critical-theoretical intervention into how we approach the study of mediated phenomena. Using the example of the #MeToo Movement, I bring together intersectional feminism, posthumanism, and new materialism to delineate "intersectional entanglements" in order to develop the praxes of virtual dwelling, vibrant ethos, and vital structuring and to analyze the ways that stories from the "me too." Movement flow throughout individual, collective, and structural domains of power. I argue that we need to envision spaces and relationalities through the lens of intersectional entanglements to better attune to power imbalances and abuses and to more holistically attend to the motions of the "me too." Movement's stories. As such, I follow #MeToo and its digitally-born artifacts as they travel within and between various spaces to trace links, histories, and possible futures, looking towards individual posts, hashtags, comments, images, media stories, the sociopolitical and technocultural contexts from which data emerge, and the relationships between these pieces of data. Within the current technologically motivated big data moment of hashtag research, I take a specifically situated feminist perspective to this work, turning to the ways that the "me too." Movement circulates between different domains of power and various mediated spheres to focus on smaller curated sets of data that may be lost within larger abstracted aggregates. Reflecting the ethos of the #MeToo movement, this dissertation hinges upon personal stories, including some of my own interactions with these stories, and I follow hashtagged posts on my own social media feeds as they travel within and outside social media platforms. Throughout, this dissertation suggests that as stories from the "me too." Movement travel between various temporally and spatially mediated spheres and between domains of power, they reveal new opportunities for critiquing and intervening into white supremacist heteropatriarchal systems. Ultimately, as I develop the approaches of virtual dwelling at the individual level of power, vibrant ethos at the collective level, and vital structuring at the structural level for analyzing #MeToo's intersectional entanglements, I argue that following digital phenomena throughout culturally and digitally mediated spaces provides crucial insights of intersectional protest and resistance beyond the hashtag
Cosmovisions and Realities - the each one's philosophy
Cosmovision is a term that should mean a set of foundations from which emerges a systemic understanding of the Universe, its components as life, the world we live in, nature, the human phenomenon, and their relationships. It is, therefore, a field of analytical philosophy fed by the sciences, whose objective is this aggregated and epistemologically sustainable knowledge about everything that we are and contain, that surrounds us, and that relates to us in any way. It is something as old as human thought and, in addition to using elements of scientific cosmology, it encompasses everything in philosophy and science that refers to the universe and life.
A cosmovision is not a set of ideas, hypotheses, and assumptions but a system based on observation, analysis, evidence, and demonstration. No cosmovision intends to define, establish, propose but only understand, analyze and interpret. Each of us builds and transports his cosmovision throughout life, without establishing forms, as a background for our thinking and behavior.
Linguistically, the term “cosmovision” would derive from the German, equivalent to the concept of “ Weltanschauung,” as used by several philosophers. However, this linguistic relationship is not applicable because it contradicts what we propose as a cosmovision. This German word refers to a pre-logical or proto- experimental vision of reality, with an intuitive context and far from critical knowledge still non-existent at the time of its formulation. Undoubtedly, cosmovisions, in the sense in which we understand them, house and use these proto-experimental or pre-logical elements that include history, the collective unconscious, and all the archetypes we carry. However, in the concept that we apply here, the cosmovision goes far beyond this content, firstly by constantly submitting it to present critical thinking, and finally by making the analytic experience ( and not the thought itself or intuition) its actual universe.
António Lopes expose the breadth of this content:
"Cosmovisions are not the product of thought. They do not spring from the simple desire to know. The apprehension of reality is an important moment in its configuration, but, nevertheless, it is only one. It comes from the vital conduct, from the experience of life's evaluation, from the structure of our psychic totality. The elevation of life to consciousness in the knowledge of reality, in the valuation, and in the volitional reality is the slow and arduous work that humanity has done in the development of the conceptions of life. (W. Dilthey, 1992 [1911]: 120)”(1)
In this work, we seek to outline a cosmovision based on the realities that science offers today. We do not propose, at any time, to do science; or theorize philosophy, but we will always seek to be supported by them or, at least, protected by them from the cognitive distortions that we usually carry.
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(1) Lopes , Antonio – “ Weltanschauung (Cosmovision)” (2009 ) in Carlos Ceia's E-Dictionary of Literary Terms
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