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The purpose of this paper is to identify and rank supply chain disruption causes for Western buying firms in the Chinese market; to identify supplier-relationship-specific mitigation strategies to avoid and resist such disruptions; and to develop and propose a framework of relational supply chain disruption management with Chinese suppliers.

Two group exercises with 42 representatives from Western manufacturing buying firms and nine in-depth interviews were conducted. The group exercises applied the nominal group technique.

The authors identified and ranked 22 disruption causes in China for Western buying firms. Evaluating the five most urgent causes, 43 mitigation strategies could be identified that build on implementing strategic relationships with Chinese suppliers. A framework of relational supply chain disruption management for Western buying firms was developed with six propositions on primary constructs, mediators, and moderators, highlighting guanxi as a fundamental construct of relations within the Chinese culture.

The findings contribute to theory development at the intersection of risk management and culture. Quantitative testing of the proposed relationships in the framework is needed to derive more reliable conclusions.

The study depicts how cultural differences between Chinese suppliers and Western buyers influence relational supply chain disruption management strategies. Using the study findings, managers of Western buying firms are informed regarding the most pressing disruption causes in the Chinese market and the value and strategic use of Chinese-supplier relationships.

The study provides a valuable contribution to the scant body of literature on disruption management in supply chains with Chinese suppliers. It contributes to our understanding of a successful risk management in the presence of cultural differences.

The purpose of this paper is to provide groundwork for an emerging theory of supply chain robustness – which has been conceptualized as a dimension of supply chain resilience – through reviewing and synthesizing related yet disconnected studies. The paper develops a formal definition of supply chain robustness to build a framework that captures the dimensions, antecedents and moderators of the construct as discussed in the literature.

The authors apply a systematic literature review approach. In order to reduce researcher bias, they involve a team of academics, librarians and managers.

The paper first, provides a formal definition of supply chain robustness; second, builds a theoretical framework of supply chain robustness that augments both causal and descriptive knowledge; third,shows how findings in this review support practice; and fourth,reveals methodological insights on the use of journal rankings in reviews.

At this stage, managers may benefit from seeing these relationships as clues derived from the literature. The paper is fundamentally a call for researchers to conduct quantitative testing of such relationships to derive more reliable understanding and practical applications.

Rather than presenting empirical findings, this paper reveals to managers that visibility, risk management orientation and reduced network complexity have been the main predictive antecedents of supply chain robustness (as discussed in the academic literature). This provides a potentially important signal as to where to invest resources.

The study is the first to develop a formal definition of supply chain robustness and to establish a comprehensive theoretical framework for understanding the construct.

If any single statement during the recent Lancaster House conference was generally accepted it was that Britain's productivity is far from satisfactory. The two things which decide a country's productivity are how much of its gross national product it invests and how much it makes that investment earn.

Although first rank symptoms focus on positive symptoms of psychosis they are shared by a number of psychiatric conditions. The difficulty in differentiating bipolar disorder from schizophrenia with affective features has led to a third category of patients often loosely labeled as schizoaffective. Research in schizophrenia has attempted to render the presence or absence of negative symptoms and their relation to etiology and prognosis more explicit. A dichotomous population is a recurring theme in experimental paradigms. Thus, schizophrenia is defined as process or reactive, deficit or non-deficit and by the presence or absence of affective symptoms. Laboratory tests confirm the clinical impression showing conflicting responses to dexamethasone suppression and clearly defined differences in autonomic responsiveness, but their patho-physiological significance eludes mainstream theory. Added to this is the difficulty in agreeing to what exactly constitutes useful clinical features differentiating, for example, negative symptoms of a true deficit syndrome from features of depression. Two recent papers proposed that the general and specific cognitive features of schizophrenia and major depression result from a monoamine-cholinergic imbalance, the former due to a relative muscarinic receptor hypofunction and the latter, in contrast, to a muscarinic hypersensitivity exacerbated by monoamine depletion. Further development of these ideas will provide pharmacological principles for what is currently an incomplete and largely, descriptive nosology of psychosis. It will propose a dimensional view of affective and negative symptoms based on relative muscarinic integrity and is supported by several exciting intracellular signaling and gene expression studies. Bipolar disorder manifests both muscarinic and dopaminergic hypersensitivity. The greater the imbalance between these two receptor signaling systems, the more the clinical picture will resemble schizophrenia with bizarre, incongruent delusions and increasingly disorganized thought. The capacity for affective expression, by definition a non-deficit syndrome, will remain contingent on the degree of preservation of muscarinic signaling, which itself may be unstable and vary between trait and state examinations. At the extreme end of muscarinic impairment, a deficit schizophrenia subpopulation is proposed with a primary and fixed muscarinic receptor hypofunction.

The genomic profile of bipolar disorder and schizophrenia overlap and both have a common dopaminergic intracellular signaling which is hypersensitive to various stressors. It is proposed that the concomitant muscarinic receptor upregulation differentiates the syndromes, being marked in bipolar disorder and rather less so in schizophrenia. From a behavioral point of view non-deficit syndromes and bipolar disorder appear most proximate and could be reclassified as a spectrum of affective psychosis or schizoaffective disorders. Because of a profound malfunction of the muscarinic receptor, the deficit subgroup cannot express a comparable stress response. None -theless, a convergent principle of psychotic features across psychiatric disorders is a relative monoaminergic-muscarinic imbalance in signal transduction.

This paper aims to systematically review the constructive effects of digital transformation (DT) on social sustainability, examining its impact across democracy and governance, social cohesion, quality of life, equality and diversity. It emphasizes the need for appropriate frameworks that incorporate DT strategies in organizational practices to improve social sustainability.

A systematic literature review was carried out through Web of Science and Scopus databases to identify the distinctive papers that explored the impact of DT on social sustainability. It analyzes how various digital technologies, like Internet of Things, cloud computing and mobile computing, can be strategically embedded in organizational practices to optimize social sustainability outcomes.

This study reveals that although DT significantly enhances operational capabilities and consumer experiences, its integration into social sustainability practices is often overlooked. It proposes a novel framework that aligns digital capabilities with sustainability goals, aiming to enrich organizational performance and societal welfare. This paper identifies dynamic capabilities as crucial for sustaining competitive advantage in a digitally transformed business landscape.

The primary limitation is the reliance on secondary data, which may not fully capture the rapid advancements in DT. Future research should focus on empirical studies to validate the proposed framework and explore the dynamic capabilities required for integrating DT in social sustainability practices.

This study extends the discourse on DT by linking it explicitly with social sustainability, presenting a structured analysis that highlights the need for strategic integration of digital technologies within organizational sustainability practices. It fills a gap in the literature by proposing a comprehensive framework for organizations to follow, thereby contributing to the theoretical and practical understanding of DT’s role in enhancing social sustainability.

Ceramic materials and glasses have become important in modern industry as well as in the consumer environment. Heat resistant ceramics are used in the metal forming processes or as welding and brazing fixtures, etc. Ceramic materials are frequently used in industries where a wear and chemical resistance are required criteria (seals, liners, grinding wheels, machining tools, etc.). Electrical, magnetic and optical properties of ceramic materials are important in electrical and electronic industries where these materials are used as sensors and actuators, integrated circuits, piezoelectric transducers, ultrasonic devices, microwave devices, magnetic tapes, and in other applications. A significant amount of literature is available on the finite element modelling (FEM) of ceramics and glass. This paper gives a listing of these published papers and is a continuation of the author's bibliography entitled “Finite element modelling of ceramics and glass” and published in Engineering Computations, Vol. 16, 1999, pp. 510‐71 for the period 1977‐1998.

The form of the paper is a bibliography. Listed references have been retrieved from the author's database, MAKEBASE. Also Compendex has been checked. The period is 1998‐2004.

Provides a listing of 1,432 references. The following topics are included: ceramics – material and mechanical properties in general, ceramic coatings and joining problems, ceramic composites, piezoceramics, ceramic tools and machining, material processing simulations, fracture mechanics and damage, applications of ceramic/composites in engineering; glass – material and mechanical properties in general, glass fiber composites, material processing simulations, fracture mechanics and damage, and applications of glasses in engineering.

This paper makes it easy for professionals working with the numerical methods with applications to ceramics and glasses to be up‐to‐date in an effective way.