8,172 research outputs found

    An empirical investigation of the relationship between integration, dynamic capabilities and performance in supply chains

    Get PDF
    This research aimed to develop an empirical understanding of the relationships between integration, dynamic capabilities and performance in the supply chain domain, based on which, two conceptual frameworks were constructed to advance the field. The core motivation for the research was that, at the stage of writing the thesis, the combined relationship between the three concepts had not yet been examined, although their interrelationships have been studied individually. To achieve this aim, deductive and inductive reasoning logics were utilised to guide the qualitative study, which was undertaken via multiple case studies to investigate lines of enquiry that would address the research questions formulated. This is consistent with the author’s philosophical adoption of the ontology of relativism and the epistemology of constructionism, which was considered appropriate to address the research questions. Empirical data and evidence were collected, and various triangulation techniques were employed to ensure their credibility. Some key features of grounded theory coding techniques were drawn upon for data coding and analysis, generating two levels of findings. These revealed that whilst integration and dynamic capabilities were crucial in improving performance, the performance also informed the former. This reflects a cyclical and iterative approach rather than one purely based on linearity. Adopting a holistic approach towards the relationship was key in producing complementary strategies that can deliver sustainable supply chain performance. The research makes theoretical, methodological and practical contributions to the field of supply chain management. The theoretical contribution includes the development of two emerging conceptual frameworks at the micro and macro levels. The former provides greater specificity, as it allows meta-analytic evaluation of the three concepts and their dimensions, providing a detailed insight into their correlations. The latter gives a holistic view of their relationships and how they are connected, reflecting a middle-range theory that bridges theory and practice. The methodological contribution lies in presenting models that address gaps associated with the inconsistent use of terminologies in philosophical assumptions, and lack of rigor in deploying case study research methods. In terms of its practical contribution, this research offers insights that practitioners could adopt to enhance their performance. They can do so without necessarily having to forgo certain desired outcomes using targeted integrative strategies and drawing on their dynamic capabilities

    Financial and Economic Review 22.

    Get PDF

    Resilience and food security in a food systems context

    Get PDF
    This open access book compiles a series of chapters written by internationally recognized experts known for their in-depth but critical views on questions of resilience and food security. The book assesses rigorously and critically the contribution of the concept of resilience in advancing our understanding and ability to design and implement development interventions in relation to food security and humanitarian crises. For this, the book departs from the narrow beaten tracks of agriculture and trade, which have influenced the mainstream debate on food security for nearly 60 years, and adopts instead a wider, more holistic perspective, framed around food systems. The foundation for this new approach is the recognition that in the current post-globalization era, the food and nutritional security of the world’s population no longer depends just on the performance of agriculture and policies on trade, but rather on the capacity of the entire (food) system to produce, process, transport and distribute safe, affordable and nutritious food for all, in ways that remain environmentally sustainable. In that context, adopting a food system perspective provides a more appropriate frame as it incites to broaden the conventional thinking and to acknowledge the systemic nature of the different processes and actors involved. This book is written for a large audience, from academics to policymakers, students to practitioners

    Post-Growth Geographies: Spatial Relations of Diverse and Alternative Economies

    Get PDF
    Post-Growth Geographies examines the spatial relations of diverse and alternative economies between growth-oriented institutions and multiple socio-ecological crises. The book brings together conceptual and empirical contributions from geography and its neighbouring disciplines and offers different perspectives on the possibilities, demands and critiques of post-growth transformation. Through case studies and interviews, the contributions combine voices from activism, civil society, planning and politics with current theoretical debates on socio-ecological transformation

    Interdisciplinarity as a political instrument of governance and its consequences for doctoral training

    Get PDF
    UK educational policies exploit interdisciplinarity as a marketing tool in a competitive educational world by building images of prosperous futures for society, the economy, and universities. Following this narrative, interdisciplinary science is promoted as superior to disciplinary forms of research and requires the training of future researchers accordingly, with interdisciplinary doctoral education becoming more established in universities. This emphasis on the growth of interdisciplinary science polarises scholars’ views on the role of academic research between the production of knowledge on the one hand and knowledge as an economic resource at the other end of the spectrum. This research asks: what is the rationale behind the perceived value of interdisciplinary research and training, and how does it affect graduate students’ experiences of their PhD? Based on a practice theory perspective for its suitability in generating insights into how university’s social life is organised, reproduced and transformed, the doctorate is conceptualised as sets of interconnected practices that are observable as they happen. This current study, therefore, comprised two stages of data collection and analysis; the examination of documents to elucidate educational policy practices and an educational ethnography of an interdisciplinary doctoral programme. This study found interdisciplinary doctoral training is hindered by the lack of role models and positive social relationships, which are crucial to the way interdisciplinary students learn. Furthermore, it is argued that interdisciplinarity is sometimes applied to research as a label to fit with funders’ requirements. Specifically, in this case, medical optical imaging is best seen as an interdiscipline as it does not exhibit true interdisciplinary integration. Further insights show that while interdisciplinarity is promoted in policy around promises and expectations for a better future, it is in tension with how it is organisationally embedded in higher education. These insights form the basis for a list of practical recommendations for institutions. Overall, interdisciplinary doctoral training was observed to present students with difficulties and to leave policy concerns unaddressed

    Producing performance collectively in austere times (UK 2008-2018)

    Get PDF
    This thesis examines collective and artist-run performance producing practices in the UK in the period of austerity from 2008-2018. This thesis examines collective practices in opposition to the rhetoric, logic, and impacts of neoliberal austerity, while examining how they are, at one and the same time, caught up within them, and frequently complicit with them. I argue that collectives can temporarily reverse and rework the negative material and affective impacts of austerity through gathering artists and producers with similar practices and concerns together in the same space, producing social and affective spaces that feel and operate differently to the rest of the artistic infrastructure, and sharing material and immaterial resources. As I go on to establish, austerity works by making people feel precarious, uncared for, alone, indebted, hopeless, and disentitled. At their best, collectives work by making people feel the opposite. In gathering together in their own space, these artists and producers feel and imagine the possibility of a different way of doing things. These spaces exist to present the performance of others, to support the organisers’ individual practices and administrative work, to run festivals and performance events, and to organise around particular issues. An analysis of these functions of collective practice structure the main body of this thesis, which begins by examining collective and artist-run models of performance venues, then studios, then festivals, and finally, networks. In each chapter I examine a specific negative affect of austerity which these groups seek to resist. These are: insecurity or precarity, neglect or a lack of care, isolation or disconnectedness, and hopelessness or a lack of access to futurity. I show, using Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of field, Henri Lefebvre’s production of space, and Sara Ahmed’s work on affect, how the practices of each structural model of collective and artist-run organisation responds to and reworks these conditions by producing affective spaces of security, care, communitas, and hope. These spaces, and the practices that create them, are embedded within the wider context of neoliberalism and austerity which they oppose, and are thus temporary and susceptible to reproducing exploitative and exclusive practices. The task of this thesis is to reveal the immediate positive affective and material impacts of these collectives in opposition to austerity, as well as the complexity of the problems that arise as these groups interact with a wider context over which they have no control. Despite the limitations of collective practice, this thesis argues that through providing relief from the negative affective impacts of austerity, it can provide vital support to artists, practices, and communities during difficult economic conditions, and allow them to survive, to organise, and to imagine and enact better and more liveable futures in the field of performance

    Reframing Construction Labour Productivity in a Colonisation Context: The West Bank as an Example

    Get PDF
    This thesis explores the under-researched topic of defining construction labour productivity and the factors impacting it in the context of a small, volatile and dependent economy of the West Bank. The aim is to identify the impact of particular social, economic and political constraints on structural and agency factors affecting the construction sector's productivity using case studies from the West Bank. Labour productivity is studied from a broad perspective, adding political and economic conditions to reframe and evaluate the term and its determinants in the context of high uncertainty, political instability and complex geography. 'Labour productivity' comes to represent the production interplay between agency and structural factors, and construction labour is treated as complementary to the machine rather than as an extension of it. The theoretical framework is developed based on Giddens' Structuration Theory, mainly the reconciliation of the multi-layers structure and agency determinants impacting construction labour productivity in the context of colonisation. The study's philosophy validates the use of mixed methods methodology, merging positivism and constructivism under the canopy of pragmatism. Quantitative and qualitative data have been collected, with the quantitative part consisting primarily of comprehensive survey data from the PCBS and the qualitative of purposive semi-structured interviews with decision makers at macro and meso levels plus analysis of multiple case studies. The results reveal that the controversy about using hourly wage as an indication of construction productivity is resolved by including labour characteristics and context-specific variables in the model. The construction sector in Israel depends on skilled blue-collar employees from the West Bank rather than unskilled ones, with a higher rate of labour mobility for those from rural areas to Israeli construction markets than from other locations, leading to skill shortages in the West Bank. The construction labour process in the West Bank also rests on low levels of vocational education and training and a high risk of accidents due to meagre experience, lack of training and improper application of health and safety regulations. Finally, Israeli control of movement within the West Bank and the outlets to international markets impacts on labour productivity by imposing restrictions on importing and transporting construction materials and the internal mobility of workers. The research contributes to knowledge through its originality and generalisation by mapping the complexity of social factors and providing a definition of construction productivity appropriate to colonisation

    Residualisation as an explanatory theory of educational inequalities: an exploratory analysis of schools in the Glasgow region

    Get PDF
    This thesis focuses on an understanding of the State and its implications for social equalities promised through the education system. Studies of educational inequalities tend to focus on either social class inequalities and their effects on education or inequalities generated within the education system itself. Whilst there are a few studies on the historical genesis of the modern state education system (e.g. Green, 1990; Archer, 2013), the State itself is an invisible backdrop: there are no studies of educational inequalities which look at the State in state education. The main contribution of the thesis then is in developing an account of the State in the education system, which explains educational inequalities in a way that is neither reducible to class inequalities alone nor to inequalities generated within the education system itself. The reason for developing such an account relates to an impasse of sorts in sociological and educational theory. Namely, in explaining why, given the widespread consensus on the importance of education in generating social equalities, such little progress has been made. The sociologist Diane Reay (2010: 396) expresses the paradoxical nature of this: So we are confronted with a conundrum. How is schooling to be understood in relation to social class? The contribution of the thesis to explore why this is not the right question to ask and why the relations between schooling and social class in themselves are necessary but not sufficient to explain educational inequalities. The answer to what these other relations are is itself an answer to a gap in educational theory, therefore. And the answer is provided by the addition of the State. Methodologically, the approach is a Critical Realist one. This means an ontological focus on structures and their causal powers which generate actual events. And since this ontological level cannot be accessed directly, it means – at the epistemological level - developing a theoretical model based on the relevant structures and causal powers involved in the research object. This is then applied to a concrete empirical case, enabling the explanatory model to be validated or, in most instances, modified and augmented to a greater or lesser degree. This methodological sequence of retroduction-retrodiction-retroduction (or Real-Empirical-Real) shapes the structure of the thesis as follows: • Retroduction: In Chapters 2-4, the building of a theoretical model of systemically linked inequalities, expanding the concept of residualisation in the housing literature. • Retrodiction: Working out the specifics of applying this theoretical model in terms of a Critical Realist research design (Chapter 5) to a specific empirical case, using the secondary schools of Glasgow Region (Chapters 6-10). • Retroduction: Returning to that initial theoretical model enables an integration of the empirical findings and, at the same time, the refinement and augmentation of it into a final, causal model (Chapter 11), which explains the persistence of educational inequalities in terms of structures and their causal powers. Theoretically, no one approach is applied as one of the contributions is to build a new approach. The is done through retaining David Lockwood’s (1964) account of the conflict model of strategic-functionalism found in Karl Marx and developing it. It is developed by adding in the State as the key relation missing. In doing so, Lockwood’s model is elaborated in two ways. Firstly, his account of a core institutional order is developed through an account of institutional compatibilities in the Varieties of Capitalism (VOC) literature (Hall and Soskice, 2001). Secondly, his account of contradiction is developed through Claus Offe’s (1984) structural Marxist approach to the crisis management of the State. The latter supplies the critical relation missing in both Lockwood and the VOC literature: the State. Thirdly, the structural relations of a Liberal Market Economy (LME) in the VOC literature combined with Offe’s structural analysis of the post-Keynesian state means the final elaboration: the LME State. It is argued that this is what produced the phenomenon of residualisation analysed in the housing studies literature In the early 1980s (for example, Forrest and Murie, 1983), and is just one specific instance of the residualisation produced in residual, LME States more generally, a process which is cumulative in its linked poverty traps. It is this then that is used to explain educational inequalities. Empirically, the main finding is that there is a quasi-privatisation of the state secondary system in Glasgow Region, despite the distinctiveness of Scottish Education and its commitment to the welfare state. The key implications of this and the thesis overall are: • Theoretically, an alternative approach to educational inequalities. It also points to a way beyond the theoretical impasse in the sociology of education and a route past the overreliance on Bourdieu, as well as a move past the functionalist issues in the simplified Marxist Base-Superstructure model. In addition, addressing the omission of the State in the skills literature and the VOC literature means a contribution to these other two literatures. • Methodologically, better theoretical conceptualisation of this problem based on structures of System Integration and the State would enable approaches that are necessarily multidisciplinary, taking into account the cumulative nature of inequalities, which cannot be explained by a focus on schooling or social class alone. This requires developing a better understanding of how inequalities work in modern states and a move away from education alone being able to solve them. • Empirically, this opens up a potential programme of research which enables further testing of the theoretical model of residualisation within Scotland and the UK. Further, extending this from countries in the UK to a more comparative international approach, such as in those regimes identified in the Varieties of Capitalism literature, would develop the theory of systemic poverty traps in Liberal Market Economic States. It would also help to develop a better understanding of the relation of the State to education and develop a better understanding of state education more generally. Finally, in terms of the ‘story’ of the thesis, the conundrum of how schooling is to be understood in relation to social class is instead replaced with how education is to be understood in relation to the state
    • …
    corecore