Japan’s civic environmentalism combines a tradition of local protest and activism with a national environmental movement that is limited in size and policy influence. A strong…
Abstract
Japan’s civic environmentalism combines a tradition of local protest and activism with a national environmental movement that is limited in size and policy influence. A strong legislative and administrative response to the country’s severe pollution crisis of the 1960s and 1970s helped tamp down that era’s wave of protests and keep the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) in power. While the state has generally supported local organizations engaged in environmental improvement activities, it has erected barriers that limit the scope of non-governmental organization (NGO) activities and inhibit the development of an influential national environmental movement. The 1990s reforms, inspired in part by the citizen response to the 1995 Great Hanshin Earthquake, made it easier for NGOs to attain legal status and raise funds. Yet Japan’s civic environmentalism – by most measures – still lags well behind that of peer industrialized countries. The 2011 tsunami and nuclear crisis brought another opportunity for major reforms to the nation’s civic environmental culture – but the evidence to date indicates that the much anticipated transformation is turning out to be of a lesser magnitude than many had initially expected.
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PETER OWEN and J.C. MASON
A linear programming method has been used to design antenna array patterns that suppress interference from certain directions. The method is particularly useful since any degree…
Abstract
A linear programming method has been used to design antenna array patterns that suppress interference from certain directions. The method is particularly useful since any degree of suppression can be specified. It is not necessary to impose exact nulls onto the pattern, although this can be done if desired. Moreover, by constraining real excitations to lie in the interval [‐1, 1], a pattern is obtained in which the majority of excitations remain at the quiescent value of unity. The method can be modified in principle to incorporate any other appropriate linear equality or inequality constraints on the pattern or the excitations. A detailed description of the method is given and several illustrative examples are included.
Carlos A. Diaz Ruiz, Jonathan J. Baker, Katy Mason and Kieran Tierney
This paper aims to investigate two seminal market-scanning frameworks – the five-forces analysis and PESTEL environmental scanning tool – to assess their readiness for…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to investigate two seminal market-scanning frameworks – the five-forces analysis and PESTEL environmental scanning tool – to assess their readiness for anticipating market-shaping acts.
Design/methodology/approach
Drawing on the market-shaping literature that conceptualizes markets as complex adaptive systems, this conceptual paper interrogates the underlying assumptions and “blind spots” in two seminal market-scanning frameworks. The paper showcases three illustrative vignettes in which non-industry actors catalyzed market change in ways that these market-scanning frameworks would not be able to anticipate.
Findings
Marketing strategists can be “blindsided” as seminal market-scanning frameworks have either too narrow an interpretation of market change or are too broad to anticipate specific types of market-shaping acts. The assumptions about markets that underpin these market-scanning frameworks contribute to incumbents being slow to realize market-shaping acts are taking place.
Research limitations/implications
The authors extend market-scanning to include a type of managerial myopia that fails to register the socially embedded, systemic nature of complex contemporary markets. Furthermore, the paper provides an “actors-agendas-outcomes” scanning framework that offers awareness of market-shaping acts.
Originality/value
This paper is the first to consider market-scanning frameworks from a market-shaping perspective.
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The chapter explores an overlooked theme across the literature: capturing the experience of childhood family disruption and transitional flux between foster family homes and the…
Abstract
The chapter explores an overlooked theme across the literature: capturing the experience of childhood family disruption and transitional flux between foster family homes and the independent sensemaking into the present of young care-experienced parents. The chapter draws upon research that constructed 20 biographical life story accounts of a diverse sample of foster care-experienced young people. The chapter aims to reflect upon the findings garnered from six of these accounts through extracting the narratives of a selection of participants who were to become or had become parents. This chapter makes sociological connections between past family disruption, demarcating present families of choice, and reconciliation of the past through experiencing parenting into the future within constructed ‘family displays’ (Finch, 2007). The chapter illustrates this phenomenon through narrative accounts offering a family history of parents who have experienced a variance of transitions between family units and who were negotiating, or had negotiated, their post-care independence through the role of becoming a parent themselves. The chapter highlights the symbolic value of parenting to the lives of young people who have experienced care in recalibrating their past familial experiences, as demonstrated through their family displays. Through the family displays of care-experienced parents, the importance of the relational context to youth transition ultimately reveals itself, as does the development of relational agency, and ultimately the role of parenting in developing a young person’s independent ‘post-care’ identity.
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V. Kumar, Nita Umashankar and Insu Park
Retail marketing is in the midst of an evolution. The paradigm is shifting from a product-centric to a consumer-centric focus, with a particular emphasis on understanding how…
Abstract
Retail marketing is in the midst of an evolution. The paradigm is shifting from a product-centric to a consumer-centric focus, with a particular emphasis on understanding how consumers transition from harboring an interest in a product to actually purchasing that product. In response, shopper marketing, and in-store marketing (ISM) in particular, have emerged as important mechanisms to influence shopper behavior in brick & mortar and online retail environments. The academic literature is replete with work on what factors of ISM influence shopper behavior. In this chapter, we categorize prominent streams of findings on ISM into firm, customer, competitor and product characteristics of ISM and examine how the notion of a “store” is evolving from bricks to clicks – namely from physical formats to online shopping experiences. Insights from this chapter will help retailers and store managers identify what their customers respond to within a physical store, how technology is changing the way they can capture information on customers, and how shopper behavior is evolving in response to brick & mortar and online retail environments.
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States retain (socio-political) tools to govern the lives of their population and beyond. Such governing takes place in various offices, where frontline staff need to implement…
Abstract
States retain (socio-political) tools to govern the lives of their population and beyond. Such governing takes place in various offices, where frontline staff need to implement policies that are created at higher levels of the administrative and political hierarchy. This chapter proposes an in-depth view on work that is being done in Swiss resident registration offices, through an ethnographic lens. Following caseworkers in their daily work routines over an extended period allowed me to trace their practices and (in)formal approaches to their work. This chapter delves into longer field note extracts that allow for deeper contextuality. Two key themes that will be engaged with, hustling and shuffling, explore the presence of informality and the consequences that such informal practices have for institutional functioning. First, insights show that a high workload combined with a lack of resources, creates an air of hustling that pushes frontline staff to make up for shortcomings in resources by inventing new and more efficient ways to implement their work. Hustling goes beyond individual coping mechanisms; often embedded in collective routines and practices that are, however, not codified. Second, given the high amount of information, policies and laws frontline workers need to be familiar with, they shuffle around with knowledge and devise productive ways to communicate with each other while remaining able to process cases. As such, informality is neither the opposite to formality nor simply uncodified but can range from spontaneous solutions to established sets of practice that blur the boundary between formal and informal.