Search results

Presents a hyperbranched polymer, a hydroxyl functional aliphatic polyester which consists of a polyalcohol core from which branches extend, forming a core‐shell structure with a large number of hydroxyl groups at its peripheral surface. It is polydisperse and consists, apart from the main core/shell fraction, of a minor fraction with tree‐like branches. Hyperbranched polyesters of this type have been found to contribute to improved physical, as well as chemical and mechanical, properties. Due to the unique molecular architecture, it is possible to design the hyper‐branched polyester in numerous ways to acquire the desired properties in different applications. Focuses on and illuminates how molecular design might affect properties in not only one, but many applications. Illustrates this by way of examples in the field of alkyds, where presented hyperbranched polymer contributes to low viscosities combined with excellent drying; in amine cured epoxies, where a hyperbranched epoxy demonstrates dramatically increased toughening; and in polyurethanes and radcure, where rapid curing can be obtained by proper molecular design.

The aim of this paper is to investigate the development of the quality movement in Sweden since the mid-20th century. The authors are convinced that a summary of the Swedish quality journey so far will offer important lessons for further quality improvements in Sweden and elsewhere.

The authors study how the quality movement has been included in the industrial agenda and how it has been adopted in student curricula and in research. The authors have a focus on how business leaders have learnt, adopted, adapted and innovated with respect to quality development. often in collaboration with academia.

Although the quality movement has fit well with the Swedish culture and that successful corporate leaders have successfully used the specific cultural characteristics there is still a lot to be learnt with respect to the public sector, where the ideas from the quality movement have problem to overcome institutional barriers.

The study is limited to the Swedish context.

There is a serious need to revitalize the public sector by getting leaders and politicians to understand the need for systematic quality improvement.

If future Swedish achievements with respect to healthcare and other social welfare elements are to once again become world-class, the public sector needs to be open-minded and collaborate with the industrial sector and academia to find cost-effective strategies for making quality improvements. However, the private sector must also be alert not to be overtaken by some highly active Asian countries.

Swedish large companies have been very successful in applying quality leadership – however, in the public sector, this has not been the case. Suggestions for improvement are made.

This paper aims to investigate the strategies used by Swedish citizens to adapt to changing climate variability and extremes. There is an increasing consensus that individual adaptive capacities are critical to successfully adapt to climate change and achieve sustainable development. However, little is known about individual adaptive practices, particularly in developed countries.

The study covered a variety of geographical areas and included single-case studies of specific locations, cross-case studies and country-wide studies. Data were collected through literature review, interviews with at-risk people, observation and group discussions with municipal staff.

The paper provides an overview of Swedish citizens’ adaptive practices and highlights how institutional development efforts affect individuals and their activities, including the equitable distribution of adaptation needs and resources. The paper concludes that individual adaptive capacities do not necessarily translate into adaptation.

The results show that planned interventions are required. They emphasise the importance of more people-oriented adaptation planning that fosters the sustainable transformation of cities, together with the role that South-North knowledge transfer can play in this context.

The paper offers critical insights into the positive and negative effects of citizens’ adaptation strategies (based on criteria such as effectiveness, sustainability and equity), and it discusses their relevance in the formulation of development policies and programmes.

This paper aims to explore how gender is “done” on farms in Sweden in the context of increased tourism and hospitality activities. The authors seek to investigate how gender is done vis-à-vis women’s farm tourism entrepreneurship. They seek to answer the questions: What has motivated the farm women to become tourism entrepreneurs? How are the gendered divisions of labor changed through women starting businesses? How does the gendered associated symbolism, as well as the identities, change?

Research has indicated that introducing tourism entrepreneurship at farms may challenge established gender relations, as many of these entrepreneurs are women. The empirical material consists of in-depth interviews with 15 women farm tourism entrepreneurs in central Sweden.

The analysis suggests that the gendered divisions of labor are not changed through the interviewed women starting tourism businesses. The authors conclude that the women build their entrepreneurship and develop some of their products on an image of rural domesticity, including a representation of themselves as traditional farm women. At the same time they are changing how gender is done through identifying as entrepreneurs and changing the use of the farms.

The authors seek to fill the research gap concerning women’s farm tourism entrepreneurship and the potential associated gendered changes. Their theoretical contribution is applying the perspective of “doing gender” and entrepreneurship, for delineating potential changes in gendered relations.

While the literature contains plenty of theoretical models for cultural competence training of health care staff, the personnel and clinicians have seldom been asked for their views on transcultural competence. Focus group interviews that we carried out in this study showed that the main concern of the participants (interprofessional teams in Swedish psychiatry) is to understand the culturally diverse in psychiatry, rather than being culturally competent. Three major themes of the process of understanding emerged in our analyses: (1) diversity reflection (sub‐themes: reflecting on co‐existent cultural differences and similarities, moving from a one‐dimensional to a multi‐dimensional approach to cultural diversity and self‐reflection), (2) cultural knowledge and skill acquisition (generic and specific) and (3) communication (sources, discrimination). Listening to staff's learning needs may motivate greater sensitivity to the needs of their culturally diverse patients.

The purpose of this study is to find out what knowledge and experience of occupational therapists, personal assistants and public health nurses/nurses in Sweden can contribute concerning the vulnerability of residents to injury in different residential care-settings.

This study is based on an online survey. A total of 832 individuals responded to the survey. The data were analyzed from a mixed-method approach, using descriptive statistics, correlations and textual-analysis.

More than one in four representatives of these professions had witnessed accidents. The results show that bedrooms and bathrooms are the rooms in which accidents are most likely to occur in homes.

One limitation of the study is that the impact of educational initiatives on the different professions was not investigated, so it is not possible to ascertain what effect this may have had on risk identification and accident prevention measures in residential care-settings.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, no prior study of these issues has been conducted. This study is deemed to have significant social benefit because of the steadily increasing need for care in residential settings. No other study has addressed the importance of the physical environment in this context. Collaborations involving researchers from various disciplines, professional organizations and public and private sector employers involved in personal assistance have contributed specific knowledge.

The use of “special events” as an attractor for destinations in the smart tourism paradigm has been suggested as one element of an effective destination strategy. This study aims to create new understandings of this potentiality by exploring an event from a participant perspective in smart tourism contexts by creating a model integrating factors impacting the smart event experience.

The authors conducted five online focus groups by using Facebook secret groups to engage spectators of an international sports event. Discussions focussed on the digital event experience with particular reference to the event app. A subsequent interpretative phenomenological analysis facilitated the examination of how people make sense of this digital phenomenon and the impact on the overall event experience.

The findings demonstrate an increasing demand for real-time event integrative information, with more immersive and augmented experiences often sought by users. This has significant implications for the management of the digital event experience for all event stakeholders.

This study is limited in its analysis of the smart event experience because of the use of a purposive sample from the International NW200 Event in Northern Ireland, which may limit the generalisability of research findings.

The study therefore, meets a critical gap in existent literature by providing the first event experience model in a smart tourism context and presenting the interlocking elements through the 4P’s (people, processes, personalisation and places) and 7R’s (rituals, realms, realities, renewal, review, relational and resourcing) of digital event experience.

This paper investigates the motivations and challenges of women entrepreneurs in Ireland, assessing the role of policies and Enterprise Ireland (EI) support for women-led companies and high potential start-ups (HPSUs). It employs the gendered theory of entrepreneurship and opportunity recognition theory to analyse the enablers and obstacles to women’s entrepreneurship, particularly in the context of EI’s support, aiming to suggest improvements.

Grounded in a feminist epistemology and employing a mixed-methods approach, a targeted survey explores motivations, barriers and supports the needs of female entrepreneurs in Ireland, offering a comprehensive gender perspective evaluation for policy enhancement.

Findings note a shift in Irish women’s entrepreneurship motivations and outlines major hurdles like limited funding and work–life balance issues. It recommends policy enhancements in data collection, website usability, financial guidance and childcare support.

This paper aims to highlight the impact of gender-specific factors on entrepreneurship, the study highlights the importance of ongoing data collection and gender comparative analyses. It advocates for women mentoring networks and improved financial support to build a more inclusive entrepreneurial environment in Ireland, with potential global implications.

This study is unique for its in-depth exploration into Irish female entrepreneurship challenges, this study proposes actionable strategies with local and global relevance. Advocating for caregiving support integration and women’s increased involvement in tech, it offers a blueprint for fostering female entrepreneurship. It contributes to global discussions on creating supportive, equitable entrepreneurial ecosystems, serving as a valuable resource for advancing gender inclusivity and equity in entrepreneurship worldwide. It identifies scope for integration of a feminist epistemology in policy development.

Smart cities show a “booming” trend both in the academia and the industry in recent years. Scholars across the world have been investigating how new technologies are applied to develop new services to the inhabitants and cities all over the world also address the “smart cities” challenges by promoting policymaking and governance. This paper aims to conduct in-depth research on smart cities by combining the study of governance policy study and information technology study.

This paper empirically mapped the trends of smart city development, outstanding scholars and hot topics about smart cities by analyzing important references using CiteSpace. The authors visualized references and topics to analyze smart city research, based on empirical data from Web of Science. Furthermore, two most important research branches – topics from smart city governance research and those from information systems (IS) research were studied, respectively.

First, the authors mapped the development of research and divided the development into three different stages. Second, the authors explored important, influential and instructive publications and publications’ attributes including authors, institutions, journals and topics. Third, the authors found there are different characteristics between the IS group and the governance group in publication situations, influential institutions, journals and authors, although the research points of the two branches are overlapping and fragmented. Finally, the authors proposed important topics, which include “internet of things (IoT)”, “big data”, “smart city systems” and “smart city management” and the authors predicted that “IoT” and “smart city challenge” would be future trends in recent years.

This study is an innovative research of its category because it visualized the development of smart city research, analyzed both governance and technology branches of smart city research synthetically using CiteSpace and forecasted future trends of smart city research by topics analysis and visualization of evolution.

A new cutting tool is always well-defined and sharp at the onset of the metal cutting process and gradually losses these properties as the machining process advances. Similarly, at the beginning of the machining process, amplitude of tool vibrations is considerably low and it increases gradually and peaks at the end of the service period of the cutting tool while machining. It is significant to provide a corresponding real-time varying damping to control this chatter, which directly influences accuracy and quality of productivity. This paper aims to review the literature related to the application of smart fluid to control vibration in metal cutting and also focused on the challenges involved in the implementation of active control system during machining process.

Smart dampers, which are used as semi-active and active dampers in metal cutting, were reviewed and the research studies carried out in the field of the magnetorheological (MR) damper were concentrated. In smart materials, MR fluids possess some disadvantages because of their sedimentation of iron particles, leakage and slow response time. To overcome these drawbacks, new MR materials such as MR foam, MR elastomers, MR gels and MR plastomers have been recommended and suggested. This review intents to throw light into available literature which exclusively deals with controlling chatter in metal cutting with the help of MR damping methods.

Using an MR damper popularly known for its semi-active damping characteristics is very adaptable and flexible in controlling chatter by providing damping to real-time amplitudes of tool vibration. In the past, many researchers have attempted to implement MR damper in metal cutting to control vibration and were successful. Various methods with the help of MR fluid are illustrated.

A new cutting tool is always well-defined and sharp at the onset of metal cutting process and gradually losses these properties as the machining process advances. Similarly, at the beginning of the machining process, amplitude of tool vibrations is considerably low and it increases gradually and peaks at the end of service period of cutting tool while machining. Application of MR damper along with the working methodology in metal cutting is presented, challenges met are analyzed and a scope for development is reviewed.

This study provides corresponding real-time varying damping to control tool vibration which directly influences accuracy and quality of productivity. Using an MR damper popularly known for its semi-active damping characteristics is very adaptable and flexible in controlling chatter by providing damping to real-time amplitudes of tool vibration.

This study attempts to implement smart damper in metal cutting to control vibrations.

It is significant to provide corresponding real-time varying damping to control tool vibration which directly influences accuracy and quality of productivity.