The export of national varieties of capitalism: the cases of Wal-Mart and Ikea

Using the cases of Wal-Mart and IKEA, this paper takes a productive systems approach to examine ‘varieties of capitalism’ from the perspective of the ways by which production and market relations are structured and prioritised. It considers the nature of these relations and their interaction within the domestic economy and the ways that firms and national systems interact with each other in the global economy. It examines the processes by which trading standards are transported via supply chain relationships, which ultimately become embedded in products and recognized by consumers at various stages. In this analysis, the cases of Wal-Mart and IKEA provide insight into the ways by which national systems extend themselves globally, their contrasting effects on the business environments in host localities, and the impact of the resulting supply chain relations on organizational performance

Food security, risk management and climate change

This report identifies major constraints to the adaptive capacity of food organisations operating in Australia. This report is about food security, climate change and risk management. Australia has enjoyed an unprecedented level of food security for more than half a century, but there are new uncertainties emerging and it would be unrealistic – if not complacent – to assume the same level of food security will persist simply because of recent history. The project collected data from more than 36 case study organisations (both foreign and local) operating in the Australian food-supply chain, and found that for many businesses,  risk management practices require substantial improvement to cope with and exploit the uncertainties that lie ahead. Three risks were identified as major constraints to adaptive capacity of food organisations operating in Australia:  risk management practices; an uncertain regulatory environment – itself a result of gaps in risk management; climate change uncertainty and projections about climate change impacts, also related to risk management

Mixed Method Analysis of Apparel Corporations for Future Policy Development

This study focused on analyzing the gaps and inconsistencies in sustainability reporting by conducting a needs assessment on 14 apparel retailing corporations. An analysis for new public policies that would enhance the sustainable efforts by apparel retailing corporations were explored. Additionally, the efficiencies of current sustainable practices were analyzed and the current trends were reported. This study provided a comprehensive review of apparel retailing corporations’ interest towards governmental support in developing policies for efficient sustainability practices and for standardized reporting. A mixed methods approach was used with the primary focus being the evaluation of emission reduction, governmental influence, sustainability reporting, and climate change initiatives. Particularly, the concurrent nested/embedded research design was utilized in this research; whereby, one data collection phase incorporated the collection of both quantitative and qualitative data at the same time. This project utilized a quantitative method embedded within a predominately qualitative research design. The external changes related to sustainability policy were explained by the Punctuated Equilibrium Model. Some of the sustainability issues that corporations are currently focused on with legislators are the reduction of carbon emissions, energy efficiency, environmental protection, and clean energy. These are all forces that are punctuating a system to drive change in environmental policy. Policy makers have been made aware of the consequences of disastrous events that could disrupt the environment by interest groups, consumer advocacy groups, stake- holders and corporations. The on-going push for change by the aforementioned groups will drive policy makers into examining the consequences and creating new sustainability policy. Based on the study, the corporations analyzed indicated that there is a need for consistent and clear standards in sustainability reporting. The United States (US) government could devise a simple and straightforward program/policy that capitalizes on the main environmental concerns of corporations to be reported within their sustainability initiatives. In this regard, government support could be a motivation for participation by all apparel retailing corporations

Sustainability in Store

Retailers across Western Europe are faced with the challenge to integrate the idea of sustainable consumption and production (SCP) into their operations. The difficulty hierin lies in the the lack of any clear understanding or agreement for what the term implies for retailers and how to implement it in retailers’ daily operations. Instead, retailers need to handle a number of different – at times competing – understandings of SCP among their stakeholders and combine these into a strategy that fits their business interests. In this thesis, I study the interaction between retailers, their stakeholders and market demand to understand how the complexity of the sustainability discourse is translated into concrete action on the shop floor. My results show retailers to be highly flexible in their work with SCP, however also quite unstrategic. Much of retailers’ efforts to integrate SCP into their operations is based on a trial-and-error process with frequent mistakes and change of direction. To approach SCP more strategically more attention must be paid to the sensemaking process of SCP among stakeholders and how it connects to market demand. My research found that rather than focusing on the overall sustainability of products and services, retailers ought to comparmentalize SCP to match specific stakeholder groups in a meaningful way. Retail brands have emerged as particularly useful tool in this respect. Due to the property rights assigned to such brands, they offer the retailer the ability to actively enage with SCP and adapt its meaning to stakeholder expectations. However, sensemaking of SCP is also to a great extent a local process, removed from the national discourse. While brands are well-suited to engage with the macro-discourse, they are not sufficiently able to adapt to the micro-level discourse. My research points to the important role individual stores have in the adaptation process of SCP to the micro-level discourse. Several examples of successful micro-adaptation to local sensemaking of SCP at the store level could be observed in my research. Successful integration of SCP into a retailer’s operation therefore seems to depend on a functioning multi-layer process within the organisation, where both headquarters and stores contribute their strengthes to a functioning internal translation procees of SCP, from global discourse to local enaction. These results have particular relevance for centralized retail organisations. They imply more responsibility for stores in the sensemaking and operationalisation of SCP as a way to achieve a more contextually meaningful approach to SCP

Science, Standards, and Power: New Food Safety Governance in California

In 2006, an outbreak of E. coli O157:H7 associated with California spinach resulted in widespread illness across the United States. The magnitude of the outbreak and the resulting media attention demanded a change in the governance of leafy green produce. Drawing from more than 130 personal interviews, this paper critically examines how powerful players in the produce industry organized a strategic approach to governing leafy greens production in California. Networks are used to explore the evolution of new industry-led food safety standards and how they directly conflicted with and overpowered environmental agendas. This paper highlights serious concerns regarding participation and transparency in the creation of food safety standards, identifying patterns of winners and losers and suggesting ways in which we might foster more democratic approaches to food governance

Information Disclosure Strategies for Green Industries

Environmental information disclosure strategies, which involve corporate attempts to increase the availability of information on pollution and emissions, can become a basis for a new wave of environmental protection policy that follows and has the potential to complement traditional command and control and market-based approaches. Although a growing body of literature and operational programs suggest that publicly disclosing the information can motivate improved corporate environmental performance, this phenomenon remains poorly understood. This paper reviews the economic and legitimacy theory behind information disclosure and analyses the current practice and programs adopted in industrialized and industrializing countries.environmental information disclosure; toxic release inventory; government disclosure programs; materials accounting; sector facility indexing; pollution and emissions; environmental performance

Large UK retailers' initiatives to reduce consumers' emissions: a systematic assessment

In the interest of climate change mitigation, policy makers, businesses and non-governmental organisations have devised initiatives designed to reduce in-use emissions whilst, at the same time, the number of energy-consuming products in homes, and household energy consumption, is increasing. Retailers are important because they are at the interface between manufacturers of products and consumers and they supply the vast majority of consumer goods in developed countries like the UK, including energy using products. Large retailers have a consistent history of corporate responsibility reporting and have included plans and actions to influence consumer emissions within them. This paper adapts two frameworks to use them for systematically assessing large retailers’ initiatives aimed at reducing consumers’ carbon emissions. The Framework for Strategic Sustainable Development (FSSD) is adapted and used to analyse the strategic scope and coherence of these initiatives in relation to the businesses’ sustainability strategies. The ISM ‘Individual Social Material’ framework is adapted and used to analyse how consumer behaviour change mechanisms are framed by retailers. These frameworks are used to analyse eighteen initiatives designed to reduce consumer emissions from eight of the largest UK retail businesses, identified from publicly available data. The results of the eighteen initiatives analysed show that the vast majority were not well planned nor were they strategically coherent. Secondly, most of these specific initiatives relied solely on providing information to consumers and thus deployed a rather narrow range of consumer behaviour change mechanisms. The research concludes that leaders of retail businesses and policy makers could use the FSSD to ensure processes, and measurements are comprehensive and integrated, in order to increase the materiality and impact of their initiatives to reduce consumer emissions in use. Furthermore, retailers could benefit from exploring different models of behaviour change from the ISM framework in order to access a wider set of tools for transformative system change