Importance of context in measuring the effectiveness of strategic environmental assessment

By focusing on three contextual areas—social/political, environmental/economic and legal/administrative—this article considers how a greater understanding of context may help in measuring the effectiveness of strategic environmental assessment (SEA). Based on a review of literature, some of the environmental assessment studies and a recent case study in Canada, the importance of context is considered generally and contextual criteria developed. A positive approach is necessary if the challenge of moving SEA effectiveness studies forward is to be met.     

Intelligent automation implementation and corporate sustainability performance: The enabling role of corporate social responsibility strategy

Although Intelligent Automation (IA) represents the future of business automation, the organizational implementation and sustainability performance of this emerging technological innovation is vastly understudied. Understanding the implications of IA for sustainability is critical since leveraging these technologies shapes operations and policies that can promote sustainable digitalization and automation practices. We study how firms' technological, organizational, environmental, and human resource contexts impact IA implementation. The study further explains how IA may associate with the firm's triple bottom line while accounting for the moderating role of corporate social responsibility strategy. The study surveyed 207 multinational firms in 2022 and used partial least square-structural equation modeling to test the hypothesized relationships. Results showed that IA implementation is mainly determined by the characteristics of the firm's internal environment, such as absorptive capacity, employee socio-behavioral concerns, and social capital competency. IA may offer valuable opportunities for boosting the firm's economic and environmental sustainability performance. Nonetheless, IA is a double-edged sword for social sustainability, harming social values in implementing firms with informal corporate social sustainability strategies. Conversely, firms with formal corporate social sustainability strategy have a significantly higher opportunity to transform the value of IA into social sustainability performance. Findings are expected to assist managers and decision-makers with streamlining an impartial and sustainable transition of organizations toward automation.     

The ecology of organizational demography: managerial tenure distributions and organizational competition

This paper argues that turnover processes in top managementteams create inter-organizational interdependencies. I arguethat managerial capabilities are shaped by their experiencesin a given competitive context; differences in managerial tenuretherefore lead to differences in managerial capabilities. Acomparison of the tenure distribution of a top management teamwith those of its competitors therefore captures the extentto which a firm relies on managerial capabilities similar tothose of its competitors. Overlap in managerial capabilitieswill lead to greater competition for resources, since managersshape a firm's pattern of resource utilization. I hypothesizethat organizational growth rates will decline to the extentthat competitors are crowded around a firm's location in thetenure distribution. Analyses of growth in viewership amongcommercial television stations support this claim.     

R&D and the overseas earnings of Indian firms

This article examines the impact of undertaking R&D, a measure of the enhancement of dynamic capabilities, on firms' overseas earnings patterns, for a panel of several thousand Indian firms, for the period from 1991–92 to 2005–06. The results show that undertaking R&D spending is associated with a significant rise in firms' average overseas earnings levels. These results point to the need for materially enhancing the very low levels of R&D undertaken by firms in India.     

Sustainability priorities across the strategic and operational level in packaging development

Sustainability is well‐established in many companies' strategic postures. However, executing sustainability‐related goals often lags at the operational level. This study analyses how decision‐making processes in packaging development at different hierarchical levels are characterized in achieving a sustainability consensus. This research focuses on the alignment of the strategic and operational levels of packaging development in relation to the integration of sustainability considerations. This materializes in a stakeholder perspective on packaging development and an analysis of targets aiming for the integration of sustainability considerations in such development processes. The involvement and decision making by internal stakeholders, the involvement of external stakeholders and sustainability target setting are considered as conditions causing the outcome of interest: levels of sustainability implementation on both the strategic and the operational levels of packaging development. By using a set‐theoretic method, we address that different compositions of stakeholder involvement and target setting might cause the same level of sustainability priority at the strategic and operational levels. For data analysis, we use a fuzzy‐set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) with empirical data derived from survey responses by packaging experts. This approach is motivated by its ability to address the complexity of the interplay of case characteristics within development processes. The research findings provide several indications of a limited alignment of a company's strategic sustainability ambition with the operational activities of multidisciplinary packaging development teams. The insights on the sustainability‐related configurations of stakeholders and target setting provide guidance for managing projects across the strategic and operational levels in improving sustainable packaging development.     

The Embeddedness of Selfish Routines: How Routines are Replicated in Business Networks

The notion of routines as a powerful metaphor for explaining organizational capabilities and the evolution of organizations has been widely accepted as a central issue in evolutionary economics. The configuration and management of routines across organizational, and ownership, boundaries involves a range of specific managerial and strategic issues which are not addressed in the current literature on routines. However, as new less-hierarchical and more fluent organizational forms evolve, where boundaries between the organization and the environment are increasingly arbitrary, the role of routines beyond the organizational perimeter becomes increasingly relevant. It is argued here that social networks sustain interpersonal routines, which not only transgress organizational boundaries but on occasion also incubate new organizations in order to ensure their continued existence. This paper presents an overview of the routine concept and an argument for applying it in a network embeddedness context. Two case studies are presented, covering examples from the Danish dairy and the Danish machinery industry.     

Measuring organizational capabilities for technological innovation through a fuzzy inference system

As a result of the strategic and operational management of research in higher education institutions (HEIs), the organizational Technological Innovation Capabilities (TICs) contribute to reaching strategic objectives of transfer of results in research and development (R & D) to society and industry, for this reason, it is necessary to take measurements to identify the index creation and consolidation of organizational capabilities. Despite the importance, theoretically given to the TICs, a great gap is found in the scientific literature regarding the measurements of these capabilities in the higher education sector.In this paper, the results of the implementation of a fuzzy inference diagnostic system for organizational capabilities for innovation in a university institution (UI) in the city of Medellin, Colombia are presented. The system consists of the application of a structured diagnostic instrument - type interviewed-to the management and teaching staff of the institution. The data is adapted to the requirements of a fuzzy inference system, in which previously defined variables are related, their values are standardized and entered in an inference system. The values were implemented and processed in the Fuzzy Logic Toolbox - MATLAB. As inference system output, concrete numerical values, and surfaces of fuzzy inference were obtained to formulate organizational strategies aimed at improving the technological innovation capabilities of the institution.     

Understanding the drivers and implications of remote work from the local perspective: An exploratory study into the dis/reembedding dynamics

Transformations in the institutional environment and advances in technological infrastructures have led to a rise in remote work with implications for local environments. While there is significant literature on the social and spatial effects of telecommuting, the growth of remote work warrants a holistic analysis of its specific implications for local economic and community life. Drawing on interviews with representatives of 22 firms in one state, this exploratory study examines how locational factors drive firms' remote work utilization. Together with an analysis of interviews with 12 remote employees, it also examines how remote work arrangements are modifying firms' and employees’ connections to the local environment. The firm interviews indicate that remote work is increasingly utilized as a strategy to overcome regional talent acquisition challenges. The analysis reveals that remote work utilization can rework or attenuate the local economic and social linkages of remote-utilizing firms and remote employees. These findings suggest that the dynamics of remote work in local environments entail processes of disembedding and reeembedding, moderated by organizational and contextual factors. By situating questions and findings in relation to local contexts, this study details how firm dynamics and work-life patterns associated with remote work introduce opportunities and challenges for community and economic development efforts.     

Considering Context: A Study of First‐Year Engineering Students

High‐quality engineering design requires an understanding of how the resulting engineered artifact interacts with society, the natural environment, and other aspects of context. This study examines how first‐year engineering undergraduates approached two engineering design tasks. We focused on how much students considered contextual factors during problem‐scoping, a critical part of the design process. As part of a larger, longitudinal study, we collected data from 160 students at four U.S. institutions. Students varied in their consideration of each design task's context, and women's responses were more likely to be context‐oriented than men's. Overall, context‐orientation was positively correlated between the two design tasks, despite differences in data collection and analysis. Having found that beginning engineering students, particularly women, are sensitive to important contextual factors, we suggest that efforts to broaden participation in engineering should consider legitimizing and fostering context‐oriented approaches to engineering earlier in the curriculum.     

Strategic alliance formation and the effects on the performance of manufacturing enterprises from supply chain perspective

This study examines the antecedents of strategic alliance formation in manufacturing firms in China, the alliance effect on innovation capability and dyadic quality performance, and how these two organisational capabilities are related to the supply chain performance of Chinese manufacturing enterprises in Shanghai. We perform a series of statistical techniques including logistic regression analysis, multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) and multiple regression analysis for assessing the hypothesised relationships. Our findings indicate that relational stability and effective communication are significant antecedent factors influencing strategic alliance formation among Chinese manufacturing enterprises. Such alliance formation is found to benefit innovation capability and dyadic quality performance, which are significant contributors to the supply chain performance of Chinese manufacturers. We provide important theoretical and practical implications on these antecedents and consequences of strategic alliance formation leading to supply chain performance in the Chinese manufacturing context.     

The principles of pedestrian route choice

Pedestrian route choice, the process by which individuals decide on their walking path between two locations, is a fundamental problem across disciplines. Because this behaviour is investigated from different conceptual and methodological angles, and because it strongly depends on the environmental context, it is challenging to establish a systematic framework for research. Here, by reviewing previous work, we identify four principles for pedestrian route choice that are relevant across disciplines. First, ‘information perception’ deals with how pedestrians can perceive information selectively and purposely, given the limited available information. Second, ‘information integration’ considers how pedestrians subjectively integrate environmental spatial information into mental representations. Third, ‘responding to information’ is concerned with how pedestrians tend to be attracted and repelled by specific attributes individually and how this can lead to positive or negative feedback loops across many individuals. Fourth ‘decision-making mechanisms'' describe how pedestrians trade off the evidence provided by different attributes. How pedestrians perceive, integrate, respond to, and act upon information is not fixed but varies with the context. We give examples for each principle and explain how these principles shape pedestrian choice behaviours. We hope this contribution provides a systematic overview of the field and helps to spark inspiration among specialists.     

Capacity planning through queueing analysis and simulation-based statistical methods: a case study for semiconductor wafer fabs

This paper presents a comprehensive framework for the strategic capacity expansion of production equipment in semiconductor manufacturing, and the proposed approach is applied to a model of an actual wafer fabrication facility. It is the intention of this work to show that, once intelligently integrated, an analytical queueing model and a numeric computer simulation model can be used synergistically and can lead to a better alternative method than methods restricted to only one of them. The outcome of our methods is a number of good system configurations, each of which is characterised by its cycle time (CT)–throughput (TH) profile. Such profiles fully describe the system's comprehensive performance over a wide range of demand scenarios (involving varying product mix), and hence can be used to thoroughly evaluate alternative configurations in capacity expansion decisions.     

Innovative Output,Productivity and Profitability. A Test Comparing USPTO and EPO Data

The aim of this paper is to test whether patent‐based indicators are still reliable measures of innovativeness in light of organizational changes in the field of Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) protection and the regulatory reforms already occurred and under way, respectively, at the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) and the European Patent Office (EPO). For most high‐tech industries, patents represent an outcome of the production process and their number can be taken as a proxy for a firm's ability to improve its productivity growth and profitability. The case study reported here concerns the biotechnology industry in Italy, whose firms, by definition, have Intellectual Property (IP) activities in their portfolios. For this purpose, we use a unique dataset which collects balance sheet items and patent information from EPO and USPTO. After linking firms' financial and production data with the patent information, we estimate a modified knowledge production function in which the dependent variable is alternatively (labor) productivity growth and profitability. Although based on a quite small sample, our findings provide some indication of a statistically significant relationship between patents with the EPO and both productivity growth and, in particular, profitability. This suggests that firms might pursue different strategies when patenting with the USPTO and the EPO.     

What Characterizes Firms' Academic Patents? Academic Involvement in Industrial Inventions in Sweden

This paper investigates the characteristics and importance of academic involvement in industrial invention processes by comparing firms' academic and non-academic patents. In contrast to previous research, this paper analyses firm-owned patents, which provides insight into the characteristics and relative importance of inventions resulting from university–industry collaboration. The empirical analysis in this paper is based on a database of Swedish academic patents. Our results indicate that academic involvement mainly takes place in inventions highly related to firms' technology bases. The findings moreover show that firms' academic patents, as compared to their non-academic patents, have lower importance in firms' core technological fields but higher importance in their marginal fields. We provide an interpretation of these results, suggesting that firm-owned academic patents largely result from “demand pull” rather than “science push” and that firms involve academics mainly for problem-solving activities in their core technological fields.     

Modelling an industrial strategy for inventory management in supply chains: The 'Consignment Stock' case

Stock control in Supply Chain management is of concern here, particularly an industrial practice observed in the automotive manufacturing context and defined as 'Consignment Stock' (CS). To understand the potentiality of CS policy, an analytical modelling is offered that refers to the problem of a single-vendor and single-buyer productive situation. A comparison with the optimal solution available in the literature is also shown. The conclusion proposes a method that is useful in identifying those productive situations where CS might be implemented successfully. Results show how CS policy might be a strategic and profitable approach to stock management in uncertain environments, i.e. where delivery lead times or market demand vary over time.     

Cumulative manufacturing capabilities: an extended model and new empirical evidence

There has been intense debate in the manufacturing strategy literature on the way in which firms work on different manufacturing capabilities, with two opposing approaches considered – the trade-off model and the sand cone model. Analysis of these models has essentially been based on study of the links amongst four classic manufacturing capabilities (quality, delivery, flexibility, and cost efficiency) and has obviated the need to consider environmental protection as an important manufacturing capability. This study analyses the theoretical arguments and the prior empirical evidence on the two models, and proposes and tests an extended sand cone model which includes the environmental protection objective alongside the four traditional ones. The research uses structural equation modelling and data from a sample of 274 manufacturers to contribute additional empirical evidence on the existence of cumulative effects amongst manufacturing capabilities. It is observed that the predominant strategic model in these firms is one of multiple, non-incompatible capabilities with cumulative effects according to the following sequence: quality, delivery, flexibility, environmental protection, and cost efficiency.     

On the environment-destructive probabilistic trends: A perceptual and behavioral study on video game players

Currently, gaming is the world's favorite form of entertainment. Various studies have shown how games impact players' perceptions and behaviors, prompting opportunities for purposes beyond entertainment. This study uses Animal Crossing: New Horizons (ACNH)—a real-time life-simulation game—as a unique case study of how video games can affect humans' environmental perceptions. A dataset of 584 observations from a survey of ACNH players and the Hamiltonian MCMC technique have enabled us to explore the relationship between in-game behaviors and perceptions. Here we show a probabilistic trend towards exploiting the in-game environment despite players' perceptions, suggesting that the simplification of commercial game design may overlook opportunities to engage and educate players in pro-environmental activities.     

A multi-objective modular design method for creating highly distinct independent modules

With the current rise in environmental concerns, customers want products that reduce environmental impacts. As a result, new multi-objective modular design methods are needed that can consider multiple design objectives, related to both the customers’ and the companies’ functional, environmental, and economical constraints and objectives. Most previous multi-objective modular design methods create module configurations, in which each module meets all of the design objectives. However, highly distinct independent modules are important for current product replacement processes. This paper presents an innovative multi-objective green modular design method that uses atomic theory and fuzzy clustering to create module configurations, in which each module meets one distinct design objective. This paper also presents case studies that demonstrate the capabilities of the new multi-objective green modular design method.     

Articulate Virtual Labs in Thermodynamics Education: A Multiple Case Study*

This paper describes the use of CyclePad—an articulate virtual laboratory for creating and analyzing thermodynamics cycles—at three different types of educational institutions: a research university, an engineering technology program in a large state university, and a military academy. Case studies of each site were created based on classroom observations, student surveys, and interviews with faculty. In comparing these three institutions, we found that the context of the school and the ways in which professors chose to implement CyclePad led to different student experiences. Depending on the types of problems that students worked on, they found the software more or less helpful in increasing their understanding of thermodynamics. Students in the class that had the most constraints on its curriculum, where little change was possible, were less able to take full advantage of the software's capabilities.