3,407 research outputs found

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

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    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

    Resilience and food security in a food systems context

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    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

    Systemic Circular Economy Solutions for Fiber Reinforced Composites

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    This open access book provides an overview of the work undertaken within the FiberEUse project, which developed solutions enhancing the profitability of composite recycling and reuse in value-added products, with a cross-sectorial approach. Glass and carbon fiber reinforced polymers, or composites, are increasingly used as structural materials in many manufacturing sectors like transport, constructions and energy due to their better lightweight and corrosion resistance compared to metals. However, composite recycling is still a challenge since no significant added value in the recycling and reprocessing of composites is demonstrated. FiberEUse developed innovative solutions and business models towards sustainable Circular Economy solutions for post-use composite-made products. Three strategies are presented, namely mechanical recycling of short fibers, thermal recycling of long fibers and modular car parts design for sustainable disassembly and remanufacturing. The validation of the FiberEUse approach within eight industrial demonstrators shows the potentials towards new Circular Economy value-chains for composite materials

    Tradition and Innovation in Construction Project Management

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    This book is a reprint of the Special Issue 'Tradition and Innovation in Construction Project Management' that was published in the journal Buildings

    Weather or not? The role of international sanctions and climate on food prices in Iran

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    IntroductionThe scarcity of resources have affected food production, which has challenged the ability of Iran to provide adequate food for the population. Iterative and mounting sanctions on Iran by the international community have seriously eroded Iran's access to agricultural technology and resources to support a growing population. Limited moisture availability also affects Iran's agricultural production. The aim of this study was to analyze the influence of inflation, international sanctions, weather disturbances, and domestic crop production on the price of rice, wheat and lentils from 2010 to 2021 in Iran.MethodData were obtained from the statistical yearbooks of the Ministry of Agriculture in Iran, Statistical Center of Iran, and the Central Bank of Iran. We analyzed econometric measures of food prices, including CPI, food inflation, subsidy reform plan and sanctions to estimate economic relationships. After deflating the food prices through CPI and detrending the time series to resolve the non-linear issue, we used monthly Climate Hazards group Infrared Precipitation with Stations (CHIRPS) precipitation data to analyze the influence of weather disturbances on food prices.Results and discussionThe price of goods not only provides an important indicator of the balance between agricultural production and market demand, but also has strong impacts on food affordability and food security. This novel study used a combination of economic and climate factors to analyze the food prices in Iran. Our statistical modeling framework found that the monthly precipitation on domestic food prices, and ultimately food access, in the country is much less important than the international sanctions, lowering Iran's productive capability and negatively impacting its food security

    Causal effects of green infrastructure on stormwater hydrology and water quality

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    Applications of green infrastructure to stormwater management continue to increase in urban landscapes. There are numerous studies of individual stormwater management sites, but few meta-analyses that synthesize and explore design variables for stormwater control structures within a robust statistical framework. The lack of a standardized framework is due to the complexity of stormwater infrastructure designs. Locally customized designs fit to meet diverse site conditions create datasets that become messy, non-uniform, and difficult to analyze across multiple sites. In this dissertation, I first examine how hydrologic processes govern the function of various stormwater infrastructure technologies using water budget data from published literature. The hydrologic observations are displayed on a Water Budget Triangle---a ternary plot tool developed to visualize simplified water budgets---to enable direct functional comparisons of green and grey approaches to stormwater management. The findings are used to generate a suite of observable site characteristics, which are then mapped to a set of stormwater control and treatment sites reported in the International Stormwater Best Management Practice (BMP) database. These mapped site characteristics provide site context for the runoff and water quality observations present in the database. Drawing from these contextual observations of design variables, I next examine the functional design of different stormwater management technologies by quantifying the differences among varied structural features, and comparing their causal effects on hydrologic and water quality performance. This stormwater toolbox provides a framework for comparison of the overall performance of different system types to understand causal implications of stormwater design

    Catchment based analysis of macronutrients (nitrogen and phosphorus) and organic carbon dynamics: new modelling and participatory tools

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    Ecosystem services (ESs) are increasingly being considered in decision-making with respect to mitigating future climate impacts. To capture complex variation in spatial and temporal dynamics, ecosystem models require spatially explicit data that are often difficult to obtain for model development and validation. Citizen science allows for the participation of trained citizen volunteers in research or regulatory activities, resulting in increased data collection and increased participation of the general public in resource management. Despite the increasing experience in citizen science, these approaches have seldom been used in the modelling of provisioning ecosystem services. The development of new approaches for the analysis of long-term changes in riverine carbon, hydrological and nutrient cycles is important to identify potential alteration on the biogeochemical cycles and potential impacts on the ecosystem services provided to the local population. The Basin scale approach is useful to evaluate the pressures on river ecosystems that may be distant from the receiving watercourse, including the effects of soil or water management activities that propagate or amplify downstream. However, the lack of process-based and basin-scale models for carbon transport has limited effective basin management of organic carbon fluxes from soils, through river networks and to receiving marine waters. In the present study, were examined the temporal and spatial drivers in macronutrient (nitrogen and phosphorus) and sediment delivery, carbon storage and sequestration and water yield in a major Italian river catchment and under different NBS scenarios. Information on climate, land use, soil and river conditions, as well as future climate scenarios, were used to explore future (2050) benefits of NBS on local and basin scales, followed the national and European directives related to water quality (Directive 2000/60/EC) and habitat (Directive 92/43/EEC). It was developed and validate a spatially semi-distributed mass balance modelling approach to estimate organic carbon delivery at a sub-basin scale and which allows exploration of alternative river basin management scenarios and their impact on DOC and POC dynamics. The model is built as an open-source plugin for QGIS and can be easily integrated with other basin scale decision support models on nutrient and sediment export. Furthermore, was performed an estimation of the benefits of individual and combined NBS approaches related to river restoration and catchment reforestation. To complete the ESs overall evaluation and prioritization was developed a new method in order to attributing a weight to the best NBS scenarios based on the natural stoichiometric ratio between the elements carbon, silicon, nitrogen, phosphorus (C:Si:N:P

    Improvement of construction process by adopting lean construction principles: a construction model development

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    Lessons learned from the construction industry have shown that adopting lean principles within construction processes can significantly enhance the overall success of a construction project. However, currently the potential benefits of such an approach are still not being fully realised in a uniform way. The application of lean principles in construction projects has an underlying aim to increase the value of projects and to eliminate construction waste, in order to achieve project targets of time, cost, and quality while reducing damage to the environment consistent with the underlying principles of sustainable development. This research project presents a newly developed framework that contains a set of lean methods and techniques to support the application of lean principles to construction project practice. In so doing the method helps those within the construction industry to more consistently achieve the full benefits that lean construction approaches can offer. The aim of this research project is to investigate the lean construction techniques currently used in the industry and the principles of lean construction applications, particularly, the problems and challenges, and develop a new construction process model in which lean methods/tools can be integrated. This will provide an effective and efficient way for managing construction projects in the construction industry. A parallel aim is to improve the construction process to better manage construction waste, time and cost and to improve the levels of quality and sustainability achieved. The adaptation of lean principles with identified enablers has been assessed where a combination of different lean principles and techniques were considered as the main enablers to develop a framework for the construction process. The RIBA Plan of Work was used to integrate and incorporate several lean construction principles and techniques to develop a standardised model where both the construction stages and the associated activities of the construction process in projects can be described. The underlying philosophy of the developed framework is to increase the efficiency of transformation activities (known as value-adding activities – processing). The innovative construction process models presented in this research are developed based on the core enablers that can be used to identify and eliminate waste in the construction process. These include set-based concurrent engineering (SBCE) integrated with the Last Planner® System (LPS) and lean thinking (LT) within traditional construction process activities. A number of measurement and control methods and guidelines for implementation of the framework are presented. In addition, case study materials have been collected from the industry in order to test and validate the framework. The results provide useful information and guidance to the construction industry as a whole. The novelty and contribution to knowledge of the research includes: improvement of construction process and performance through the development and implementation of an integrated lean-enabled pull flow construction process framework (i.e. pull flow control embedded within lean construction management) integrated with measurement and control methods within the RIBA Plan of Works. The research concludes by suggesting that the most effective way to implement lean methods and techniques in construction activities is to use the framework proposed and developed in this research which is integrated with the RIBA Plan of Work

    The Distribution and Fate of Microplastic Pollution in Polar Environments

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    The distribution of microplastics in polar regions is relatively unknown, but it is key to understanding the fate and potential impact of this pervasive and complex pollutant in these remote and threatened environments. This thesis focuses on the most accessible and arguably vital matrix in which microplastics may exist in the Arctic and Antarctic; the near-surface environments such as seawater and snow. Although likely to be transient, microplastics in these matrices present a direct interface between humans (the polluter) and the environment (the polluted). Determining distribution at the surface is vital to understanding the impact of an increasing human presence in these regions and an increasing human footprint via long-range transport. Three distinct environments have been explored in this thesis to provide data on the characteristics and concentrations of microplastics and facilitate the development of methods that enable perceived “pristine” environments to be effectively and rigorously investigated. In both the Canadian Arctic and the Southern Ocean, this thesis shows that microplastic concentrations are low compared with global concentrations. In the Arctic, it is shown that a 300 µm mesh, which has typically been used in marine microplastic research, retains only 6% of the particulate, which can be potentially captured on a 50 µm mesh, therefore significantly underestimating microplastic abundance and overlooking the characterisation of the most bioavailable size fraction to polar ecosystems. In the Southern Ocean, although concentrations are low, it is demonstrated that these are significantly high enough for microplastics to be encountered and therefore potentially ingested by pelagic amphipods. With little known about the subsidiary impacts of microplastics on the biogeochemistry of other pollutants in the Southern Ocean, an experiment exploring the impact of microplastics on mercury uptake by Antarctic krill has been carried out. Results from this ship-based laboratory experiment indicate that virgin microplastics, compared to particulate organic matter, play an insignificant role in mercury uptake by Antarctic krill. As methods developed, the final environmental dataset collected in Antarctic snow was analysed using automated analysis, revealing remarkably high concentrations of the smallest microplastics, heterogeneously distributed in continental Antarctica. These findings provide valuable insight into the distribution and potential fate of microplastics in polar environments whilst also providing vital information on the methods of carrying out polar plastics research. In combination, this is key to providing an evidence base for needs and ways to monitor and understand the impact of microplastics in remote polar regions
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