Discerning Rejection of Technology

Technology is innate to modern society and primarily embodies human intellect. It greatly influences development, societal functioning, and sociotechnical transitions. Rapid technological advancements, made possible with advancement in science, human ingenuity, and competitive markets, provide human society with affordable and unlimited choice. A society can be viewed, with an individual as the fundamental unit, or as a community, or state/nation. In one view, sustainability can be viewed through a matrix of societal, economic, and environmental configurations associated with the three societal levels. Technological advancement and complexity can either remain simple and amenable to the user or, as emerging in recent years, may daunt the user to keep away. While the phenomenon of technology adoption (acceptance) in society has been well appreciated, the increasingly characteristic phenomenon of technology rejection is yet to be understood and studied. Technology rejection is not merely a negation of its acceptance, and hence requires to be discerned carefully. Rejection also does not imply in its totality, but varies in terms of its kind and/or intensiveness. While rejection is discernable at all these three levels of society, this study remains focused at the level of the user (individual). It attempts to discern rejection of technology and discusses its distinctness from technology acceptance through an exhaustive literature study. The article initially discusses the technology–society nexus and provides a preliminary technology–user interface model leading to a detailed discussion into the determinants of technology rejection

Springer Handbook of Additive Manufacturing

Additive manufacturing has grown from an initial prototyping application into a core production technology. The increasing applicability of additive manufacturing in sectors such as aviation and health care has created an attractive market for emergent and established firms alike. One can also identify a plurality of business models among these equipment suppliers. A business model articulates the customer value proposition, how value is created, the means of value capture and the partners in the value network – the four Vs. The business models of these equipment supplier firms include equipment sales, equipment as a service, the sale of supplies and platform-based integrated solutions, among others. The emergent firms presented here are Stratasys and 3D Systems; similarly, the established firms considered here are Hewlett-Packard and General Electric. The chapter employs the four Vs framework to analyse how their business models have evolved. It provides an overview of additive manufacturing businesses, compares the business models in the four firms, discusses the different business models in four other nascent firms, and discusses implications for managers.Chander Velu would like to acknowledge funding from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EP/R024367/1, EP/K039598/1, EP/T024429/1 and EP/V062123/1) and the Economic and Social Research Council – The Productivity Institute (ES/V002740/1). Jiashun Huang would like to thank funding from Science & Technology Innovation Strategy and Soft Science Research Fund of Anhui (202006f01050001)

Elastic Manufacturing: Provisioning and deprovisioning production capacity to vary product volume and mix

Responsive manufacturing has been supporting firms over the last few decades. However, manufacturers now operate in a context of continuous uncertainty. This research explores a mechanism where firms can ‘elastically’ provision and deprovision their production capacity, to enable them to cope with repeated disruptions. Such a mechanism is facilitated by the imitability and substitutability of production resources. An inductive study was conducted using Gioia methodology for this theory generation research. Respondents from twenty UK manufacturing firms across multiple industrial sectors reflected on their experience through COVID-19. Resource-Based View and Resource Dependence Theory were employed to analyse the manufacturers’ use of internal and external production resources. The study identifies elastic responses at four operational levels: production-line, factory, firm, and supply chain. Elastic responses that imposed variable-costs were particularly well-suited for coping with unforeseen disruptions. Further, the imitability and substitutability of manufacturers helped others produce alternate goods during the crisis. While uniqueness of production capability helps manufacturers sustain competitive advantage against competitors during stable operations, imitability and substitutability are beneficial during a crisis. Successful manufacturing firms need to combine these two approaches to respond effectively to repeated disruptions in a context of ongoing uncertainties. The theoretical contribution is in characterising responsive manufacturing in terms of resource heterogeneity and resource homogeneity, with elastic resourcing as the underlying mechanism

Transverse momentum spectra of charged particles in proton–proton collisions at √s=900 GeV with ALICE at the LHC

The inclusive charged particle transverse momentum distribution is measured in proton–proton collisions at s=900 GeV at the LHC using the ALICE detector. The measurement is performed in the central pseudorapidity region (|η|<0.8) over the transverse momentum range 0.15<pT<10 GeV/c. The correlation between transverse momentum and particle multiplicity is also studied. Results are presented for inelastic (INEL) and non-single-diffractive (NSD) events. The average transverse momentum for |η|<0.8 is 〈pT〉INEL=0.483±0.001 (stat.)±0.007 (syst.) GeV/c and 〈pT〉NSD=0.489±0.001 (stat.)±0.007 (syst.) GeV/c, respectively. The data exhibit a slightly larger 〈pT〉 than measurements in wider pseudorapidity intervals. The results are compared to simulations with the Monte Carlo event generators PYTHIA and PHOJET