1,720,974 research outputs found
Exploring the role of company context for informing Design for Sustainability implementation
Get PDFBackground: Sustainability issues on both social and environmental fronts are continuing to be a big challenge in academic and industrial circles alike. Impact of products on both the society and the environment is a research area that is being studied in this context. Researchers are increasingly focusing on mitigating sustainability challenges in the design, use and disposal phases of products, while industries are actively pursuing and adopting steps to implement sustainability initiatives in practice. Termed as Design for Sustainability (DfS), researchers acknowledge that the level of implementation of DfS in companies is not yet up to the desirable level in most industries. One of the major reasons accorded to this low/insuficient uptake of sustainability initiatives in product development stages is the lack of sufficient research focus on the human side and non-technical aspects in DfS implementation. This PhD thesis contributes to the ongoing academic discourse on addressing these in DfS implementation in companies.
Aim: This study aims at addressing the contextual factors existing within and surrounding a company that influence its DfS implementation process. The overall research question is:
How can sustainability researchers and design practitioners be assisted in understanding the context of a company better in-order to arrive at a more tailored solution to overcome DfS implementation challenges in different industries?
This overarching research question is further broken down to the following three research questions:
RQ1: What adjacent fields of research can positively contribute to the ongoing academic discussion on contextual challenges in DfS implementation?
RQ2: How do the external and internal environments of a company's organisational setting influence its internal sustainability practices and perceptions?
RQ3: How can the niche characteristics of the company be explored and understood better to arrive at customised solutions for organisational challenges in DfS implementation?
Method: The five research perspectives presented in this thesis are based on review of extant literature, research reports and empirical data. The data set consists of interviews with seven Norwegian and Danish companies operating Fast Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG), Biotechnology, Renewable energy and Construction industries, in addition to interviews with experts in the field of sustainability implementation.
Contributions: The major contributions of this study are:
1. The potential of learning and adapting insights from alternate research fields to improve DfS implementation processes in companies is scientifically presented. Five different well established research fields are explored and their relevance established backed by empirical data and extant literature.
2. The importance of understanding company context in DfS implementation scenarios is studied and presented within the ambit of established design methodologies and management frameworks.
3. Solutions to help sustainability researchers, practitioners and consultants to better understand the company context and thereby take a customised approach suitable for each company involved in DfS projects.
4. Empirically rich and qualitatively in-depth data on companies which are often found lacking in current literature.
Further to this, the scientific dissemination done as part of this PhD thesis consists of 3 journal papers, 4 conference papers and 4 posters (one best poster award).
Conclusion: Companies are evidently different from each other in perception, preparedness and accommodating change in their daily routines. These factors are influenced by its context which has been to a large extent ignored by the mainstream research on DfS topics. The insights presented from five different perspectives covered in this thesis help in establishing the importance of company context and potential ways to factor in the context in a DfS implementation scenario. It is increasingly important for designers, academicians and consultants to be aware of these existing company characteristics and to respond to it with due importance. DfS tools (such as LCA, Checklists, Guidelines, tools to evaluate environmental impacts of raw material used) are necessarily a strong aid in this process but certainly not suffcient enough to meet the sustainability goals of the company as long as the tools do not consider the human side aspects of the company.
Research on sustainability topics will have at the least a sustained and increasing focus even in the near future. With increased awareness and greatly accepted initiatives such as the UN Sustainable Development Goals (UNSDG) creating more ground for discussion and application of research, this thesis contributes to furthering the overall steps taken by academia on DfS topics. The research perspectives of this study primarily help in opening up the research window to hitherto less explored research fields such as user personas and management theories
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Get PDFWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
koamabayili/VECTRON-author-checklist: VECTRON author checklist
No full textWe have done our best to complete the author checklist relating to the use of animals in the hut study. Note that the objective for the hut study was to evaluate the IRS treatment applications for residual efficacy against Anopheles mosquitoes, including the local An. coluzzii mosquito population. Cows were only used to attract mosquitoes into the huts and no tests were carried out directly on the cows. The author checklist is intended for use with studies where experiments are carried out on animals, which is why we have had such difficulty in completing this for the hut study, as many of the questions do not relate to how the cows were used
Author-wise bibliometric analysis based on entropy.
No full textAuthor-wise bibliometric analysis based on entropy.</p
Author Under Sail The Imagination of Jack London, 1893-1902
No full textIn Author Under Sail, Jay Williams offers the first complete literary biography of Jack London as a professional writer engaged in the labor of writing. It examines the authorial imagination in London's work, the use of imagination in both his fiction and nonfiction, and the ways he defined imagination in the creative process in his business dealings with his publishers, editors, and agents. In this first volume of a two-volume biography, Williams traverses the years 1893 to 1902, from London's "Story of a Typhoon" to The People of the Abyss. The Jack London who emerges in the pages of Author Under Sail is a writer whose partnership with publishers, most notably his productive alliance with George Brett of Macmillan, was one of the most formative in American literary history. London pioneered many author models during the heyday of realism and naturalism, blurring the boundaries of these popular genres by focusing on absorption and theatricality and the representation of the seen and unseen. London created an impassioned, sincere, and extremely personal realism unlike that of other American writers of the time. Author Under Sail is a literary tour de force that reveals the full range of London as writer, creative citizen, and entrepreneur at the same time it sheds light on the maverick side of machine-age literature.Intro -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Dedication -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- 1. Spirit Truth -- 2. From Absorption to Theatricality and Back Again -- 3. "I Will Build a New Present" -- 4. Sons as Authors -- 5. Fathers as Publishers -- 6. The Daughter as Author -- 7. Lovers as Authors -- 8. At Sea with the Family -- 9. Yellow News, Yellow Stories -- 10. The Return Home -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index -- About Jay WilliamsIn Author Under Sail, Jay Williams offers the first complete literary biography of Jack London as a professional writer engaged in the labor of writing. It examines the authorial imagination in London's work, the use of imagination in both his fiction and nonfiction, and the ways he defined imagination in the creative process in his business dealings with his publishers, editors, and agents. In this first volume of a two-volume biography, Williams traverses the years 1893 to 1902, from London's "Story of a Typhoon" to The People of the Abyss. The Jack London who emerges in the pages of Author Under Sail is a writer whose partnership with publishers, most notably his productive alliance with George Brett of Macmillan, was one of the most formative in American literary history. London pioneered many author models during the heyday of realism and naturalism, blurring the boundaries of these popular genres by focusing on absorption and theatricality and the representation of the seen and unseen. London created an impassioned, sincere, and extremely personal realism unlike that of other American writers of the time. Author Under Sail is a literary tour de force that reveals the full range of London as writer, creative citizen, and entrepreneur at the same time it sheds light on the maverick side of machine-age literature.Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, Michigan : ProQuest Ebook Central, YYYY. Available via World Wide Web. Access may be limited to ProQuest Ebook Central affiliated libraries
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