Innovativa företags utformning av hållbarhetsarbete och dess inverkan på legitimiteten

Unga innovativa företag står inför en utmaning avseende att skapa och erhålla trovärdighet och legitimitet för sin verksamhet. Detta då de ännu inte byggt upp ett förtroende hos sina intressenter. Därmed behöver dessa företag hitta sätt för att uppnå legitimitet. Ett sätt kan vara att arbeta med hållbarhet, varför denna studie undersöker hur unga företag kan arbeta med hållbarhet för att erhålla legitimitet hos sina intressenter. Även vilka utmaningar unga företag möter i sitt arbete med att erhålla legitimitet samt hur dessa övervinns, undersöks i studien. I studien har författarna fokuserat på ett fallstudieföretag inom bygg- och fastighetsbranschen, K2A, där företagets hållbarhetsarbete studerats genom deras hållbarhetsredovisning. Hållbarhetsredovisning är ett sätt för organisationer att visa sina intressenter vilken påverkan företaget har på samhället avseende social, ekonomisk och miljömässig hållbarhet. Det har även genomförts en semistrukturerad intervju med fallstudieföretagets hållbarhetschef Karina Antin, för att samla in ytterligare empiri. Fallstudieföretaget K2A är ett fastighetsbolag som startades år 2013 och räknas därför som ett ungt fastighetsbolag. Bolaget både bygger och förvaltar hyresbostäder. Grundidén var och är fortfarande att bygga långsiktigt hållbara bostäder i trä. Detta då trä är det enda förnyelsebara byggmaterialet vilket gör det hållbarare än exempelvis betong. För att besvara studiens frågeställningar har ett teoretiskt ramverk utformats där intressentteorin, legitimitetsteorin och triple bottom line är de teorier som tillsammans skapar det teoretiska ramverket. Teorierna används för att beskriva och skapa förståelse för relationen mellan företaget och dess intressenter, för att i förlängningen upptäcka om legitimitet skapas genom hållbarhetsarbetet. Empirin som samlats in genom hållbarhetsredovisningen och intervjun visar att företaget har ett omfattande hållbarhetsarbete. I studiens diskussion och slutsats fastställs att fallstudieföretaget genom sitt hållbarhetsfokus skapar legitimitet hos sina intressenter. Det fastställs även att många av företagets intressenter söker sig till dem just med anledning av deras hållbarhetsprofil. Men empirin visar också att företaget möter en rad utmaningar i sitt arbete med att erhålla legitimitet, men att de genom strategisk planering till viss del lyckas övervinna dessa utmaningar.Young innovative companies face a challenge in creating and gaining credibility and legitimacy for their business. This is because they have not yet built up trust with their stakeholders. Thus, these companies need to identify how to achieve legitimacy. One way may be to work with sustainability, which is why this study looks into how young companies can work with sustainability to gain legitimacy from their stakeholders. The challenges that young companies face in their work to obtain legitimacy and how these are overcome are also explored in the study. In the study, the authors have focused on a case study company in the construction and real estate industry, K2A, where the company's sustainability work has been studied through their sustainability report. Sustainability reporting is a way for organizations to show their stakeholders what impact the company has on society in terms of social, economic and environmental sustainability. A semi-structured interview has also been conducted with the case study company's sustainability manager Karina Antin, to gather further empirical evidence. The case study company K2A is a real estate company that was started in 2013 and is therefore considered a young real estate company. The company both builds and manages rental housing. The basic idea was and still is to build long-term sustainable homes in wood. This is because wood is the only renewable building material, which makes it more durable than, for example, concrete. To answer the study's questions, a theoretical framework has been designed where the stakeholder theory, the legitimacy theory and the triple bottom line are the theories that together create the theoretical framework. The theories are used to describe and create an understanding of the relationship between the company and its stakeholders, in order to discover in the long run whether legitimacy is created through sustainability work. The empirical data collected through the sustainability report and the interview shows that the company has extensive sustainability work. In the study's discussion and conclusion, it is established that the case study company, through its focus on sustainability, creates legitimacy among its stakeholders. It is also determined that their sustainability profile attracts many stakeholders. The empirical evidence also shows that the company faces a number of challenges in its work to obtain legitimacy, but that through strategic planning they succeed in overcoming these challenges to some extent

Prenatal early food and multiple micronutrient supplementation trial reduced infant mortality in Bangladesh, but did not influence morbidity.

AIM: A previous maternal and infant nutrition intervention in rural Matlab, Bangladesh, showed that prenatal nutrient supplements improved child survival, but had no effect on size at birth. This secondary analysis examined whether prenatal multiple micronutrient supplements (MMS), on their own or combined with an early invitation to receive prenatal food supplements, affected child morbidity. METHODS: This randomised trial enrolled 4436 pregnant women from November 2001 to October 2003 and allocated them to early or standard invitations to food supplements, in the ninth and 20th weeks of pregnancy, respectively, and supplements of either the standard 60 mg iron with 400 μg folic acid, 30 mg iron with 400 μg folic acid or MMS. Quasi-Poisson regression was used to analyse morbidity. RESULTS: There were 3560 single live births and 3516 had morbidity data. The incidence rates of fever, diarrhoea and acute lower respiratory tract infection were 15.3, 3.6 and 2.3 episodes per person-year, respectively. The separate or combined interventions had no effect on morbidity up to 24 months. CONCLUSION: Early invitations to prenatal food supplements or prenatal MMS had no effect on common infections in rural Bangladesh, suggesting that earlier findings on improved child survival were not mediated by an effect on child morbidity

Effects of prenatal micronutrient and early food supplementation on metabolic status of the offspring at 4.5 years of age. The MINIMat randomized trial in rural Bangladesh.

BACKGROUND: Fetal nutritional insults may alter the later metabolic phenotype. We hypothesized that early timing of prenatal food supplementation and multiple micronutrient supplementation (MMS) would favourably influence childhood metabolic phenotype. METHODS: Pregnant women recruited 1 January to 31 December 2002 in Matlab, Bangladesh, were randomized into supplementation with capsules of either 30 mg of iron and 400 μg of folic acid, 60 mg of iron and 400 μg of folic acid, or MMS containing a daily allowance of 15 micronutrients, and randomized to food supplementation (608 kcal) either with early invitation (9 weeks' gestation) or usual invitation (at 20 weeks). Their children (n = 1667) were followed up at 4.5 years with assessment of biomarkers of lipid and glucose metabolism, inflammation and oxidative stress. RESULTS: Children in the group with early timing of food supplementation had lower cholesterol (difference -0.079 mmol/l, 95% confidence interval (CI) -0.156; -0.003), low-density lipoprotein (LDL) (difference -0.068 mmol/l, 95% CI -0.126; -0.011) and ApoB levels (difference -0.017 g/l, 95% CL -0.033; -0.001). MMS supplementation resulted in lower high-density lipoprotein (HDL) (difference -0.028 mmol/l, 95% CL -0.053; -0.002), lower glucose (difference -0.099 mmol/l, 95% CL -0.179; -0.019) and lower insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF-1) (difference on log scale -0.141 µg/l, 95% CL -0.254; -0.028) than 60 mg iron and 400 μg folic acid. There were no effects on markers of inflammation or oxidative stress. CONCLUSIONS: Findings suggest that in a population where malnutrition is prevalent, nutrition interventions during pregnancy may modify the metabolic phenotype in the young child that could have consequences for later chronic disease risks

Seeing red? The Effect of Colour on Intelligence Test Performance

A series of recent studies reported that seeing red was associated with poor intelligence test performance in university students. Here we test for the first time the effect of colour on intelligence test scores in an adult sample and across a large battery of ability tests. Overall 200 British adults completed Raven’s matrices without colour manipulation (i.e. baseline assessment); afterwards, they then either viewed red or green before completing six additional ability tests (i.e. word fluency, logical reasoning, vocabulary, syllogisms, verbal reasoning, and knowledge) and rating their self-perceived performance for each measure. We found no evidence for an association between colour and intelligence test scores or self-perceived performance, before and after adjusting for intelligence at baseline. The discrepancy with previous findings is likely to be due to testing adult rather than student samples, which in turn has implications for the recruitment and selection of study samples in future intelligence research

Seeing red? The Effect of Colour on Intelligence Test Performance

A series of recent studies reported that seeing red was associated with poor intelligence test performance in university students. Here we test for the first time the effect of colour on intelligence test scores in an adult sample and across a large battery of ability tests. Overall 200 British adults completed Raven’s matrices without colour manipulation (i.e. baseline assessment); afterwards, they then either viewed red or green before completing six additional ability tests (i.e. word fluency, logical reasoning, vocabulary, syllogisms, verbal reasoning, and knowledge) and rating their self-perceived performance for each measure. We found no evidence for an association between colour and intelligence test scores or self-perceived performance, before and after adjusting for intelligence at baseline. The discrepancy with previous findings is likely to be due to testing adult rather than student samples, which in turn has implications for the recruitment and selection of study samples in future intelligence research

The luminosities of cool supergiants in the Magellanic Clouds, and the Humphreys-Davidson limit revisited

The empirical upper luminosity boundary Lmax of cool supergiants (SGs), often referred to as the Humphreys-Davidson limit, is thought to encode information on the general mass-loss behaviour of massive stars. Further, it delineates the boundary at which single stars will end their lives stripped of their hydrogen-rich envelope, which in turn is a key factor in the relative rates of Type-II to Type-Ibc supernovae from single star channels. In this paper we have revisited the issue of Lmax by studying the luminosity distributions of cool SGs in the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds (LMC/SMC). We assemble samples of cool SGs in each galaxy which are highly complete above logL/L⊙= 5.0, and determine their spectral energy distributions from the optical to the mid-infrared using modern multiwavelength survey data. We show that in both cases Lmax appears to be lower than previously quoted, and is in the region of log L/L⊙ = 5.5. There is no evidence for Lmax being higher in the SMC than in the LMC, as would be expected if metallicity-dependent winds were the dominant factor in the stripping of stellar envelopes. We also show that Lmax aligns with the lowest luminosity of single nitrogen-rich Wolf-Rayet stars, indicating of a change in evolutionary sequence for stars above a critical mass. From population synthesis analysis we show that the Geneva evolutionary models greatly overpredict the numbers of cool SGs in the SMC. We also argue that the trend of earlier average spectral types of cool SGs in lower metallicity environments represents a genuine shift to hotter temperatures. Finally, we use our new bolometric luminosity measurements to provide updated bolometric corrections for cool SGs

Adaptation of pineal expressed teleost exo-rod opsin to non-image forming photoreception through enhanced Meta II decay

Photoreception by vertebrates enables both image-forming vision and non-image-forming responses such as circadian photoentrainment. Over the recent years, distinct non-rod non-cone photopigments have been found to support circadian photoreception in diverse species. By allowing specialization to this sensory task a selective advantage is implied, but the nature of that specialization remains elusive. We have used the presence of distinct rod opsin genes specialized to either image-forming (retinal rod opsin) or non-image-forming (pineal exo-rod opsin) photoreception in ray-finned fish (Actinopterygii) to gain a unique insight into this problem. A comparison of biochemical features for these paralogous opsins in two model teleosts, Fugu pufferfish (Takifugu rubripes) and zebrafish (Danio rerio), reveals striking differences. While spectral sensitivity is largely unaltered by specialization to the pineal environment, in other aspects exo-rod opsins exhibit a behavior that is quite distinct from the cardinal features of the rod opsin family. While they display a similar thermal stability, they show a greater than tenfold reduction in the lifetime of the signaling active Meta II photoproduct. We show that these features reflect structural changes in retinal association domains of helices 3 and 5 but, interestingly, not at either of the two residues known to define these characteristics in cone opsins. Our findings suggest that the requirements of non-image-forming photoreception have lead exo-rod opsin to adopt a characteristic that seemingly favors efficient bleach recovery but not at the expense of absolute sensitivity