Search results

Supply chain governance constitutes the rules, structures and institutions that guide supply chains toward various objectives, including environmental sustainability. Previous studies have provided insight into the relationship between governance and sustainability but have overlooked two crucial dimensions: power dynamics and the influence of outside actors. This paper aims to address these two gaps by measuring differential power (i.e. power asymmetries) among actors across the supply chain, including external actors.

This paper quantifies power dynamics across the entire chain through a structured survey in which supply chain participants rank their peer’s ability to affect environmental and social outcomes. This paper tests this approach by surveying 200 industry professionals (e.g. feedlot owners, retailers) and external actors (e.g. NGOs) in the US beef sector.

Respondents ranked the most powerful actors as follows: feedlot owners; processing plant owners; and regulatory agencies. Results also revealed that trade associations, retailers and cow–calf producers and ranchers perceive a sense of powerlessness. This study reveals multiple power nodes and confirms a shift in the power structure depending on which indicator respondents considered (e.g. environmental impacts vs employee safety). This study concludes that the buyer–producer dichotomy often used to assess supply chain governance fails to capture the complex dynamics among actors within supply chains.

This study demonstrates a novel approach to measure perceptions of power in supply chains. This method enables researchers to map networks of power across entire supply chains, including internal and external actors, to advance understanding of supply chain governance dynamics. Previous studies have misidentified who governs environmental outcomes in supply chains, and NGOs have overestimated the power of consumers and retailers to influence producers.

To provide a new semi-analytical solution for the nonlinear Benjamin–Bona–Mahony (BBM) equation in the form of a convergent series. The results obtained through HPTM for BBM are compared with those obtained using the Sine-Gordon Expansion Method (SGEM) and the exact solution. We consider the initial condition as uncertain, represented in terms of an interval then investigate the solution of the interval Benjamin–Bona–Mahony (iBBM).

We employ the Homotopy Perturbation Transform Method (HPTM) to derive the series solution for the BBM equation. Furthermore, the iBBM equation is solved using HPTM to the initial condition has been considered as an interval number as the coefficient of it depends on several parameters and provides lower and upper interval solutions for iBBM.

The obtained numerical results provide accurate solutions, as demonstrated in the figures. The numerical results are evaluated to the precise solutions and found to be in good agreement. Further, the initial condition has been considered as an interval number as the coefficient of it depends on several parameters. To enhance the clarity, we depict our solutions using 3D graphics and interval solution plots generated using MATLAB.

A new semi-analytical convergent series-type solution has been found for nonlinear BBM and interval BBM equations with the help of the semi-analytical technique HPTM.

Immigrant and second generation youth face distinct challenges adapting to school environments in the host society. Young people’s popularity is often influenced by style-based subcultures. This research investigates how students from diverse ethnic and linguistic backgrounds in Israel, a multi-ethnic society with a large proportion of immigrant youth, adopt subcultural identities, and the effects this has on popularity attainment.

This study makes use of a nationally representative quantitative survey of Hebrew instructed high schools. Results are analyzed through Structural Equations Modeling.

Results highlight how youth who have less tenure in the country and preserve indigenous languages are increasingly drawn toward delinquent subcultures as a means toward gaining popularity in school. Differences based on ethnic belonging are also discussed.

In order to create a more conducive environment for immigrant children to make friends with locals, educators require knowledge about the causes of social conflict. Immigrant youth are often drawn toward delinquent subcultures as a means for attaining social acceptance, which can lead to perpetual inequalities.

Subcultures are widely recognized as playing an important role in one’s choice of friends, but hitherto little research examined the mediating role that subcultures play for immigrant youth, especially in the Israeli context.

Political risk is a complex phenomenon. This complexity has incentivized scholars to take a piecemeal approach to understanding it. Nearly all scholarship has targeted a single type of political risk (expropriation) and, within this risk, a single type of firm (MNCs) and a single type of strategic mechanism through which that risk may be mitigated (entry mode). Yet “political risk” is actually a collection of multiple distinct risks that affect the full spectrum of foreign firms, and these firms vary widely in their capabilities for resisting and evading these risks. We offer a unified theoretical model that can simultaneously analyze: the three main types of political risk (war, expropriation, and transfer restrictions); the universe of private foreign investors (direct investors, portfolio equity investors, portfolio debt investors, and commercial banks); heterogeneity in government constraints; and the three most relevant strategic capabilities (information, exit, and resistance). We leverage the variance among foreign investors to identify effective firm strategies to manage political risk. By employing a simultaneous and unified model of political risk, we also find counterintuitive insights on the way governments trade off between risks and how investors use other investors as risk shields.

The purpose of this paper is to empirically investigate the antecedents and impacts of a largely overlooked concept, employee development, within the challenging area of returns management.

The proposed relationships are validated through structural equation modeling analysis with survey data collected in India.

Combining the ability–motivation–opportunity model in human resource management and the theoretical tenets associated with dynamic capabilities, the authors confirmed that supply chain learning, returns management orientation and information support are important antecedents of returns management employee development. In turn, the findings suggest that, as a dynamic capability, returns management employee development positively impacts a firm’s returns management and market performance.

To successfully tackle the challenges related to handling returns, companies must focus their resources not only on new technologies and related processes, but also on employee training and development as well.

Although recruiting and retaining talent in supply chain management has long been recognized as a serious global challenge, no previous research has empirically studied employee development practices in the returns management context.

Critical Theory was, more than anything else, a determined effort to keep alive the notion that there were alternatives to the existing cognitive order, one that seemed to find necessity in the contingent (and irrational) order of mature capitalism. Herbert Marcuse famously paid tribute to the power of the Imagination to destroy the illusion of the absence of alternatives to the existent, developing both an esthetic social theory and a social theory of esthetics. Yet the founder of Critical Theory, Max Horkheimer, was always suspicious of the Imagination, seeing it as predominantly a reproductive and not productive faculty – something that strengthened the hold of the existent on us, not the reverse. I argue that some of Horkheimer's interpretation of the role of the Imagination is rooted in his early work on Kant's Third Critique, which was conducted under the imprimatur of Gestalt psychologist Hans Cornelius. Thus suggests that there may be more connection between Horkheimer's early Gestalt-influenced thinking and his later work, and may even suggest possible directions for a post-Freudian critical theory.

The authors theorize the role that identity, and especially collective identity, plays in the creation of new institutions. The authors begin by reviewing the literature on social movements, focusing on identity movements; from this, the authors extract and explore the role of identity in collective action and institutional formation. The authors propose that identity and lifestyle movements create institutions that furnish the necessary cultural tools to support and enact a given identity. As an example of this process, the authors examine Martha Stewart’s cultivation of a lifestyle-driven brand. The authors discuss the implications of their work on social movement theory and institutional theory.