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With rising public concern over animal welfare, food safety and GM crops, Europe’s farmers, breeders and food processors are caught in the eye of a storm. While some are “returning to the soil” with traditional organic methods, others are breeding crops and animals using biotechnology, for markets as diverse as power generation and pharmaceuticals. For Europe’s policymakers social and ecological sustainability are paramount, but public information is also a prerequisite for meaningful debate.

The purpose of this paper is to shed light on the role of and relationships between human, structural and relational capital assets for strategic management in a farm business. In particular, it analyzes the interaction between human capital’s creativity skills and the introduction of climate-smart technologies for the competitiveness of the firm.

An explorative case study was conducted on one of the largest Italian farm businesses to gain an understanding of the drivers of intellectual capital (IC) and of their implications for strategic management. Full-time employees’ perception of the skills required to achieve strategic goals and their perception of whether they possessed these abilities were investigated to determine if an alignment was present. The skills were subsequently classified using the framework of Amabile (1988) into domain-relevant and creativity-relevant skills. Then, two linear regression models were used to investigate the effects of training on the acquisition of these two sets of skills.

The analysis confirmed the strategic role of interactions among human capital assets to effectively exploit the structural capital of the company. When investigating employees’ perceptions, a gap emerged about informatics capabilities and knowledge of soils. As the company’s investments in innovation are oriented to ICT technologies, the company could strengthen informatics training to enable its employees to implement effective innovation.

The paper contributes to the literature on IC by highlighting the role of interconnections of assets to align organizations with their strategic goals. Therefore, the provision of IC accounting contributes to the strategic management of human capital.

This chapter is focussed on the macro context of higher education and describes the historical developments in higher education and how these developments affect academic jobs and academic work. When we sketch the development of higher education with a few broad strokes of the pen, we see (1) a development from a small-scale elite institution to broad training (and research) institutes; (2) a struggle over control of higher education; and (3) a movement in which higher education is professionalized and increasingly assigned a societal task, with a series of consequences for education, research and impact. These developments contribute to a field of tension in which old traditions of academic behaviour must be reconciled with demands that are placed on higher education by society. This makes talent management, both on an individual and collective level, no easy task.

In February this year the sequence of the human genome was published, opening a new chapter in medicine. Soon genetic testing will be at the heart of diagnosis, epidemiology, drug development and even regenerative medicine. Before we are born there will be new opportunities to remedy genetic defects, and afterwards to make almost lifelong prognoses. The debate will intensify on the use of human embryos in medical research, while the prospect of human cloning will fascinate some scientists and horrify others. Europe needs to be in the vanguard of this new industrial revolution, but a host of ethical concerns must first be addressed – because genomics is as much about privacy as Petri dishes.

A review of recent foresight exercises reveals some important drivers of research in Europe. In this editorial, we introduce five main areas where science and technology will be required to deliver tangible gains for society and the economy in the coming years. It is no longer enough for research agendas to be dictated by the supply of expertise from the science base. Increasingly, they must respond to social values like access and sustainability, and humanize the interface between technology and people.

The paper's aim is to develop a diagnosis of the environment of the agrifood supply chain based on members' perceptions of environmental uncertainty.

Environmental uncertainty is defined as the lack of information about the external environment and is obtained by integrating the perceived dynamism and complexity of the environmental variables. The measurements that are used are the result of applying the Rasch methodology to the information obtained by means of a questionnaire completed by the deciders of firms in the Canary Islands (Spain). Those measures permit the complexity and dynamism perceived by the groups of firms in the supply chain together with the levels of perceived dynamism and complexity of the environmental variables to be jointly positioned on a map.

According to the perceptions of the members of the agrifood supply chain (agriculture, agrifood industry and distribution), the main sources of environmental uncertainty are demand and competitors. The agricultural sector perceives somewhat more uncertainty than agrifood industry sector, while the distribution sector perceives a stable environment.

The paper presents a useful tool for the business population and public institutions to identify which variables are perceived as the most dynamic and complex and how those variables are perceived by each member of the agrifood supply chain.

The paper operationalises the proposal of Duncan by means of a new application of the Rasch methodology. The results reflect the thinking of the members of all sectors of a supply chain. It is one of the first to study the environmental uncertainty perceived in the agrifood supply chain from a strategic perspective as a fundamental antecedent of the promotion of vertical collaboration in the agrifood supply chain.

This chapter reviews the recent polarisation of debates in agrofood and rural studies, in particular the opposition between network (social relations, actor-network) and political economy analyses. It explores the contributions of different network approaches and draws on the French convention and regulation traditions, which provide alternative guidelines for confronting micro–macro tensions. Networks have similarly assumed analytical centrality in the new institutional economics and subsequent elaborations of the Williamsonian transaction costs paradigm have involved an approximation to some of the central tenets of social network analysis. Alternative traditions of political economy analysis (Global Value Chains (GVC), Global Production Networks) are now making an important contribution to agrofood studies. A distinctive feature of these analysts is their overture to social networks, actor-network, transaction costs and convention theory in the effort to capture the multiple dimensions of economic power and coordination. The possibilities for a fruitful convergence between these apparently conflicting approaches are best captured in the emergence of the concept of the “netchain”. At the same time, the intractability of values to absorption within economic transactions suggests the need to move forward to a focus on the tensions between netchains and social movements and a different type of network, the global policy network.

Following Philip Selznick’s lead in using pragmatist social science to understand issues of public concern we conducted a study of failed innovation in the commercial construction industry (CCI). We find that social heuristics – collectively constructed and maintained interpretive decision-making frames – significantly shape economic and non-economic decision-making practices. Social heuristics are the outcome of industry-based “institutionalization processes” and are widely held and commonly relied on in CCI to reduce uncertainty endemic to decision-making; they provide actors with both a priori and ex post facto justifications for economic decisions that appear socially rational to industry co-participants. In the CCI – a project-centered production network – social heuristics as shared institutions sustain network-based social order but in so doing discourage novel technologies and impede innovation. Social heuristics are actor-level constructs that reflect macro-level institutional arrangements and networked production relations. The concept of social heuristics offers the promise of developing a genuinely social theory of individual economic choice and action that is historically informed, contextually situated, and neither psychologically nor structurally reductionist.

Aim of the present monograph is the economic analysis of the role of MNEs regarding globalisation and digital economy and in parallel there is a reference and examination of some legal aspects concerning MNEs, cyberspace and e‐commerce as the means of expression of the digital economy. The whole effort of the author is focused on the examination of various aspects of MNEs and their impact upon globalisation and vice versa and how and if we are moving towards a global digital economy.

This chapter studies the technical efficiencies of Chinese airports by using a meta-frontier production function model which accounts for airports in different regions accessing different technologies. Our empirical results show that the technical efficiency scores of airports and provincial output in the coastal region are higher than their counterparts in the inland region. However, the technical efficiency scores of airports and provincial output in inland region are steadily increasing while the counterparts of airports and provincial output in coastal region are slowly declining. In addition, our analysis of provincial efficiency changes shows that airport productivity has a positive and statistically significant effect on the technical changes of provincial output. Our results partially confirm the success of the government policy of promoting airport construction and development in the western inland region.