1,721,003 research outputs found
Market organizing in the European Union's biofuels market: Organizing for favouring, acceptability, and future preferences
No full textMarket creation as such is a relevant policy instrument in sustainability transformations that merits further examination. The regulatory creation of the European Union (EU) biofuels market has been a highly contested policy instrument, largely because of its atypical nature, as biofuels became one of the most controversial renewable energies. This paper combines the literature of market organization and meta-organizations as conceptual lenses to analyse the dynamics and challenges of market creation through policy-making with sustainability goals. A longitudinal qualitative analysis of the EU biofuels market in 2003–2015 is conducted to examine contested policy-making and heterogeneous implementation as two key elements shaping the dynamics and outcomes of market organization. The analysis shows that market organization developed as three organizing schemes—favouring a product group, specifying acceptability for the product group, and establishing preferences within the product group—that redefined market boundaries and signalled innovation incentives but potentially undermined the policy goals of market growth. The findings show that this reorganization produced intertemporal discrepancies and tensions between conflicting policy aims, which partly explain the previously observed inconsistencies within transnational market-creation policies. Accordingly, the market organization and meta-organization literature are proposed as useful conceptual tools to analyse sustainability-driven market creation policies.Peer reviewe
Kestävän liiketoiminnan startup-pohjaisen innovaatiomallin kehittäminen
Get PDFTässä raportissa tarkastellaan DemosHelsinki Peloton Clubin piirissä syntynyttä startup-yritystoimintaa ja sen roolia kestävän kehityksen yritystoiminnan kentässä ja kasvuyrityskentässä. Hankkeessa etsittiin vastauksia kysymyksiin 1) Miten ja miksi uusia kasvuyrityksiä syntyy ympäristöliiketoiminnan kenttään ja 2) miten Peloton Club -toiminta tukee uusien yritysten syntyä ja kehitystä. Hanke toteutettiin Aalto-yliopiston ja DemosHelsingin yhteistyönä Liikesivistysrahaston tuella
The approaches of strategic environmental management used by mining companies in Finland
No full textGlobal megatrends such as scarcity of natural resources and urbanization have been the drivers for a mining sector upswing. Therefore, the mining sector in Finland, with attractive ore geology, has recently experienced rapid growth and new mines have been opened. At the same time, society's expectations have increased, resulting in a public debate on mining companies' environmental and social responsibility. Companies have the same positioning choices relative to their competitors, but environmental issues are a new area of interest in order to stand out strategically. In this study of companies with mining operations in Finland, strategic environmental management practices are examined based on companies' own public information. This article takes a closer look at whether their public reporting projects an image of strategic environmental management. The results show that environmental and social considerations are essential elements in companies' commitments and strengthen their business strategy. This study also shows a gap between strategic commitments and their implementation, based on the company reports. (C) 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.Peer reviewe
Do forest biorefineries fit with working principles of a circular bioeconomy? A case of Finnish and Swedish initiatives
No full textPursuit of the Bioeconomy (BE) and the Circular Economy (CE) is high on the political agendas of many countries. Application of the concepts is intended to ameliorate a number of sustainability challenges, such as raw material constraint concerns and global warming. The concepts of BE and CE are increasingly combined to describe a ‘circular bioeconomy’ (CBE), which emphasises value retention for renewable resources and increased circularity in material cycles. Embedding these CE principes is anticipated to ameliorate sustainability weaknesses associated with the BE. Biorefineries, the focal point for this discussion, are perceived as essential infrastructure items within such concepts. The work focuses on the forest industries, a leading bioeconomy sector. This study draws upon a review of extant literature on the BE, CE and biorefinery concepts to summarise a set of working principles aligned with high levels of socio-economic and environmental performance. These are deemed to operationalize these concepts as parts of the concept of the circular bioeconomy. Analysis is then performed to compare a set of 22 forest biorefinery initiatives in Finland and Sweden to the working principles, and assess how the expectations are met in practice. Overall, the study finds that expectations of increased value added of the products and increased sustainability through closing the material loops are rarely met. That is, very few characteristics compliant with visions for the circular bioeconomy were found. We conclude that while a CBE framing offers insights that can help a bioeconomy sector such as forestry become more sustainable, there is a lack of consistency and coherence in the manner in which CE and BE concepts are communicated and applied. Further, it is suggested that biorefinery proponents may benefit from clearer framing and promotion of their endeavours. While scholarly works suggest this may have potential to defray trust and undermine perceptions of reliability among potential supporters or partners, we deem that further work is needed to assess whether, or how this is so. Areas of relevance for research include assessment of the actual function, and likely impacts of inconsistent use of the concepts upon the societal, industrial, and political support
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
Sustainable supply chain management policies and practices
No full textManaging sustainability in global supply chains has become one of the most challenging sustainability issues for companies. This challenge has also sparked research in the field of Sustainable Supply Chain Management (SSCM). Despite the great body of research, there is still little understanding of what kind of SSCM policies and practices are used in Finland. Also, there is little research done on the SSCM policies and practices used in the forest and grocery trade industry.
The purpose of this thesis is to find out which pressures drive the aforementioned industries to adopt SSCM policies and how they practice SSCM on an operative level. This study also seeks to highlight the industry- specific as well as common challenges. The study is conducted by taking a qualitative, multiple case study approach. More specifically, eight employees are interviewed in total from four companies. This way, a holistic picture of the SSCM policies and practices can be drawn and any biases related to one company or informant can be minimized.
The study provides three main findings. Firstly, though the SSCM policies and practices could be identified in both industries, the extent of how well they have been embedded in the company depends on the industry. More specifically, there were three practices where the two industries differed the most from each other. These were reward system linked to sustainability, technological integration and innovation. The second finding shows that for the most part, the two industries share the same challenges which were: proactive stakeholder management, enhanced communication with domestic competitors, assessment and auditing, and multi-tier SSCM. Finally, this study identifies situations where the policies and practices can become decoupled. For example, though external stakeholders demand the grocery retailers to make sure that environmental sustainability is assured in their sourcing, the majority of the SSCM practices that the grocery trade industry has, are limited to social sustainability.
This study contributes to the SSCM literature by providing a ‘management processes’ perspective that integrates the concept of decoupling which seems to be lacking from the current SSCM literature. This thesis also serves managers and institutional investors by providing implications on which SSCM policies and practices to focus on if the goal is to improve the sustainability in the supply chains
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