Siet Sijtsema, Gé Backus, Anita Linnemann and Wim Jongen
The aim of this paper is to link the denotation of healthy and health‐related consumer terms of traditional Dutch meal components to characteristics, ingredients and affective…
Abstract
Purpose
The aim of this paper is to link the denotation of healthy and health‐related consumer terms of traditional Dutch meal components to characteristics, ingredients and affective aspects of food products.
Design/methodology/approach
A total of 344 respondents completed a questionnaire with propositions about product perception and health opinions. Distinct meal components of a traditional Dutch meal were chosen to make the research results applicable in product development.
Findings
A total of four clusters of consumers emerged: with an unconventional definition of health; with no interest in health; feeling healthy; and having health problems, with sample percentages of 21, 10, 50 and 18, respectively.
Originality/value
The study provides insight in the transformation (selection and formulation) of consumers' terminology related to health into attributes, ingredients and affective aspects of products for groups of consumers with a different definition of health.
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Lusine Aramyan, Paul Ingenbleek, Gé Backus, Kees de Roest and Richard Tranter
The purpose of this paper is to analyse the likelihood of adoption of a recently designed Welfare Assessment System in agri‐food supply chains and the factors affecting the…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to analyse the likelihood of adoption of a recently designed Welfare Assessment System in agri‐food supply chains and the factors affecting the adoption decision. The application is carried out for pig and poultry chains.
Design/methodology/approach
This research consisted of two main components: interviews with retailers in pig and poultry supply chains in eight different EU countries to explore their perceptions towards the adoption possibilities of the welfare assessment system; and a conjoint analysis designed to evaluate the perceived adoption likelihood of the assessment system by different Standards Formulating Organisations (SFOs).
Findings
Stakeholders were found to be especially concerned about the costs of implementation of the system and how it could, or should, be merged with existing assurance schemes. Another conclusion of the study is that the presence of a strong third independent party supporting the implementation of the welfare assessment system would be the most important influence on the decision whether, or not, to adopt it.
Originality/value
This research evaluates the adoption possibilities of a novel Welfare Assessment System and presents the views of different supply chain stakeholders on an adoption of such a system. The main factors affecting the adoption decision are identified and analysed. Contrary to expectations, the costs of adoption of a new welfare assessment system were not considered to be the most important factor affecting the decision of supply chain stakeholders about the adoption of this new welfare system.
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Siet Sijtsema, Anita Linnemann, Gé Backus, Wim Jongen, Ton van Gaasbeek and Hans Dagevos
This paper seeks to explore the design, organisation and application of group discussions in which projective techniques (expressive and associative) are used to unravel health…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper seeks to explore the design, organisation and application of group discussions in which projective techniques (expressive and associative) are used to unravel health perception of consumers in cognitive and affective terms.
Design/methodology/approach
A trained moderator led four group discussions in which 24 Dutch women, divided into two groups of six women aged between 50 and 65, and two groups of women with young children (0‐7 years old) participated. By means of expressive and associative techniques participants discuss health and food based on non‐verbal expressions, namely, drawings and abstract paintings made by themselves. The participants selected and discussed relevant terms related to food and health based on their interpretations and associations of images.
Findings
Participants related healthy to feeling free and happy (affective) and implied a balance between being active and passive. “Health” and “food” are associated with terms of nature (e.g. season, water and sun), specific products (vegetables and fruits), ingredients (vitamins, fibres, minerals) and no additives (cognitive).
Originality/value
The expressive and associative group discussions proved to be a promising, fascinating and participant‐friendly approach to gain an insight into the affective and the cognitive aspects that consumers relate to health‐promoting product characteristics.
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This chapter investigates the behavior of Reddit’s news subreddit users and the relationship between their sentiment on exchange rates. Using graphical models and natural language…
Abstract
This chapter investigates the behavior of Reddit’s news subreddit users and the relationship between their sentiment on exchange rates. Using graphical models and natural language processing, hidden online communities among Reddit users are discovered. The data set used in this project is a mixture of text and categorical data from Reddit’s news subreddit. These data include the titles of the news pages, as well as a few user characteristics, in addition to users’ comments. This data set is an excellent resource to study user reaction to news since their comments are directly linked to the webpage contents. The model considered in this chapter is a hierarchical mixture model which is a generative model that detects overlapping networks using the sentiment from the user generated content. The advantage of this model is that the communities (or groups) are assumed to follow a Chinese restaurant process, and therefore it can automatically detect and cluster the communities. The hidden variables and the hyperparameters for this model are obtained using Gibbs sampling.
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John H Drake, Matthew Hyde, Khaled Ibrahim and Ender Ozcan
Hyper-heuristics are a class of high-level search techniques which operate on a search space of heuristics rather than directly on a search space of solutions. The purpose of this…
Abstract
Purpose
Hyper-heuristics are a class of high-level search techniques which operate on a search space of heuristics rather than directly on a search space of solutions. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the suitability of using genetic programming as a hyper-heuristic methodology to generate constructive heuristics to solve the multidimensional 0-1 knapsack problem
Design/methodology/approach
Early hyper-heuristics focused on selecting and applying a low-level heuristic at each stage of a search. Recent trends in hyper-heuristic research have led to a number of approaches being developed to automatically generate new heuristics from a set of heuristic components. A population of heuristics to rank knapsack items are trained on a subset of test problems and then applied to unseen instances.
Findings
The results over a set of standard benchmarks show that genetic programming can be used to generate constructive heuristics which yield human-competitive results.
Originality/value
In this work the authors show that genetic programming is suitable as a method to generate reusable constructive heuristics for the multidimensional 0-1 knapsack problem. This is classified as a hyper-heuristic approach as it operates on a search space of heuristics rather than a search space of solutions. To our knowledge, this is the first time in the literature a GP hyper-heuristic has been used to solve the multidimensional 0-1 knapsack problem. The results suggest that using GP to evolve ranking mechanisms merits further future research effort.
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Gregory A. Kuhlemeyer, M. Cary Collins and Harold A. Black
Refers to previous research on the effects of poor external audits on agency costs to shareholders and takes the 1991 disciplinary action by the US Securities and Exchange…
Abstract
Refers to previous research on the effects of poor external audits on agency costs to shareholders and takes the 1991 disciplinary action by the US Securities and Exchange Commission against Ernst and Young (re the Republic Bank) as an example to examine the effect on its other audit clients and on financial institutions. Uses event study methods to show that there were no statistically abnormal returns for financial institutions or for Ernst and Young’s audit clients; but significant negative returns for firms audited by non‐big six auditors.
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Morteza Yazdani, Ernesto D.R.S. Gonzalez and Prasenjit Chatterjee
The implementation of circular economy strategies is one of the central objectives of several governments seeking a transition toward a sustainable development. Circular economy…
Abstract
Purpose
The implementation of circular economy strategies is one of the central objectives of several governments seeking a transition toward a sustainable development. Circular economy in agriculture deals with the production of agricultural commodities making an efficient use of resources and avoiding unnecessary waste and carbon emission generation. Disruptions in the production and supply of critical agricultural products can have serious negative repercussions for firms and consumers of the food supply chain. In recent decades, disruptions generated by natural disasters such as hurricanes, thunderstorms and floods have greatly impacted social communities and industrial sectors. Supply chain risks approaches are seen to contribute key elements to address the impacts of natural disaster toward the implementation of circular economy in agriculture, helping to prevent collapses in the production and supply of food. The purpose of this paper is to study and identify flood risk drivers and their effects on the sustainability of an agriculture supply chain in connection with a circular economy strategy. By using an extended Step-wise Weight Assessment Ratio Analysis method combined with a multi-criteria decision analysis, the most essential flood drivers with a degree of importance are reported here. Then, the authors propose an Evaluation of Data based on average ASsessment method, to rank different agricultural projects that pretend to mitigate the flood risks and its impacts on crop areas. The application of this research lies within the framework of a real agricultural project founded by the European Commission Scientific Section, called RUC-APS.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors use management science-based tools to address circular economy in agriculture. The authors propose a multi-criteria-based methodology to assess the risks of flooding in crops areas. To validate the proposed methodology, a case example from Spain is discussed to rank different agricultural projects that pretend to mitigate the flood risks and its impacts on crop areas.
Findings
The proposed multi-criteria methodology confirmed a successful application to rank different agricultural projects that pretend to mitigate the flood risks and its impacts on crop areas. Organizations and firms in the agricultural business can use the methodology to identify risks drivers and to detect the best projects to mitigate the highest impacts of flooding risks in crops areas.
Originality/value
The authors use supply chain risks approaches to address the impacts of natural disaster on the implementation of circular economy in agriculture. The authors propose a robust multi-criteria-based methodology to assess the risks of flooding in crops areas and we used to determine the best mitigating projects to face flooding risks on crop areas.
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Yan Liang, Yingying Wei, Panjie Li, Liangliang Li and Zhenghao Zhao
For coastal bridges, the ability to recover traffic functions after the earthquake has crucial implications for post-disaster reconstruction, which makes resilience become a…
Abstract
Purpose
For coastal bridges, the ability to recover traffic functions after the earthquake has crucial implications for post-disaster reconstruction, which makes resilience become a significant index to evaluate the seismic behavior. However, the deterioration of the material is particularly prominent in coastal bridge, which causes the degradation of the seismic behavior. As far, the research studies on resilience of coastal bridges considering multiple degradation factors and different disaster prevention capability are scarce. For further evaluating the seismic behavior of coastal bridge in the long-term context, the seismic resilience is conducted in this paper with considering multiple durability damage.
Design/methodology/approach
The fuzzy theory and time-varying fragility analysis are combined in this paper to obtain the life-cycle resilience of coastal bridges.
Findings
The results show that durability damage has a remarkable impact on the resilience. After 100 years of service, the seismic resilience of bridge with poor disaster-prevention capability has greatest reduction, about 18%. In addition, the improvement of the disaster prevention capability can stabilize the resilience of the bridge at a higher level.
Originality/value
In this paper, the time-varying fragility analysis of case bridge are evaluated with considering chloride ion erosion and concrete carbonization, firstly. Then, combining fuzzy theory and fragility analysis, the triangular fuzzy values of resilience parameters under different service period are obtained. Finally, the life-cycle resilience of bridge in different disaster prevention capability is analyzed.
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Man Mohan Siddh, Gunjan Soni, Rakesh Jain and Milind Kumar Sharma
The purpose of this paper is to examine the concept of perishable food supply chain quality (PFSCQ) and to suggest a structural model that counts the influence of PFSCQ practices…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to examine the concept of perishable food supply chain quality (PFSCQ) and to suggest a structural model that counts the influence of PFSCQ practices on organizational sustainable performance.
Design/methodology/approach
On the basis of comprehensive literature review, PFSCQ highly significant practices were examined and designated. These practices were classified into four dimensions: upstream quality (supplier quality), downstream quality (customer focus), internal quality (process and logistics quality) and support practices (top management leadership and commitment to quality, quality of human resource, quality of information and supply chain integration). The measurement instrument of organizational sustainable performance was also build on, containing three aspects: economic, environmental and social performance.
Findings
An inventive conceptual model that specifies a comprehensive image cover up core dimensions of PFSCQ and various aspects of organizational sustainable performance was suggested. This conceptual model can be used as “a directive” for theory developing and measurement instrument development of PFSCQ practices and organizational sustainable performance. More prominently, on the road to achieving additional insight, an extensive structural model that makes out direct and indirect relationships between PFSCQ practices and organizational sustainable performance was also developed. Practitioners can apply this model as “a path plan” for implementing PFSCQ practices to improve organizational sustainable performance.
Originality/value
The integration of quality and supply chain even now remains inadequate in the literature. Consequently, it is required to have a more focused approach in assessing quality issues inside the upstream, internal and downstream of the supply chain. This study concentrates on the practices which make better quality aspects of the supply chain, known as PFSCQ practices. Suggested research models in this paper contribute to conceptual frameworks for theory building in PFSCQ and sustainable organizational performance. It is also expected that this research can suggest a useful direction for determining and implementing PFSCQ practices as well as make possible further studies in this arena.
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Man Mohan Siddh, Gunjan Soni, Rakesh Jain, Milind Kumar Sharma and Vinod Yadav
The purpose of this paper is to deliver a structured literature review of existing literature on agri-fresh food supply chain quality (AFSCQ) over a period of 23 years (1994 to…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to deliver a structured literature review of existing literature on agri-fresh food supply chain quality (AFSCQ) over a period of 23 years (1994 to mid-2016) and provide a platform for practitioners and researchers trying to identify the existing state of work, gaps in current research, and future directions in the field of AFSCQ.
Design/methodology/approach
The existing literature is classified on the basis of several classes like number of publications per year, journal-wise publications, studies across various countries, growth of empirical research, data analysis methods or tool used, issues related to supply chain quality as well as performance measurement (with respect to entity of analysis, level of analysis and element of exchange).
Findings
Most of the research publications discuss issues in developed countries, while relatively lesser publications are available on issues in developing countries. Hence, larger opportunities in the field of AFSCQ are available in developing countries. Empirical research is also growing in the field of AFSCQ. Largely research publications make use of “case study” research approach and “statistical analysis” as a quantitative tool of research. The literature is also categorized under the various issues of supply chain quality such as sustainability management, information management, logistic management, collaboration and coordination management, strategic management, demand management, inventory management, food safety, performance management, supply chain integration, supplier management, quality management, etc. It was found that in the majority of articles, information management, sustainability management, and logistics management are very critical issues as far as AFSCQ is concerned. Performance measurement of agri-fresh food supply chain is also on a growing stage. It is also an integral part of AFSCQ.
Originality/value
Most of the prior reviews are concentrated on a particular issue as production and distribution planning for agri-foods, temperature monitoring, corporate and consumer social responsibility, traceability system and ignore the wider perception. There exists a necessity of having a detailed review to cover up all the issues in AFSCQ. This review fills this gap in the extant AFSCQ literature.