Optimal replenishment policy for a deteriorating green product: Life cycle costing analysis

In the last few decades, enterprises are trying to recycle the used products to reduce the negative impact on environment. This results in the need for reverse supply chain model especially for deteriorating items. The proposed model considers vendor managed inventory strategy and conducts a life cycle cost and benefit analysis for green electronic products. The mathematical analytical approach is used to solve the proposed model. The results show that selling price, deteriorating rate, holding cost, product return rate, and remanufactured quality have a significant effect on the model. This study can provide managerial insights into improving the design of a green-supply chain.     

Technology in the rear-view mirror: how to better incorporate the history of technology into technology education

The history of technology can play an important role in illuminating the fundamentals of technological change, but it is important that technology teachers, teacher educators, curriculum developers and researchers can be provided with good analytical tools for this purpose. In this article, we propose a model of techno-historical interplay, as a help in deciding what historical artefacts and systems should be included in technology curricula and teaching as well as in analyzing and conveying to students the fundamental issues of technological change. We want to emphasize particularly three points of importance in employing the model as a tool of analysis. First of all, it is crucial to decide what one wants the technologically literate student to know about technology and technological change. This should include an awareness of the historical and geographical contingency of any technology. Second, on the basis of this decision one should adapt the model as a tool for selecting relevant technologies. Third, the model should be applied as an instrument of analysis of the history of the selected technological artefacts or systems as well as theories of technological development.     

Material Cultures of Tourism

Abstract

Despite the fact that tourists constantly interact corporeally with things and physical places, tourist studies have failed to understand the significance of materiality and objects in modern tourism. Like much theory and research influenced by the ‘cultural turn’, tourist (and leisure) studies have melted everything solid into signs. This article is inspired by current calls for a renewed engagement with the ‘material’ in social and cultural geography and sociology. It introduces questions of materiality and material culture into cultural accounts of contemporary leisure and tourism, in particular in relation to space and ‘human’ performances. In doing so it stresses the inescapable hybridity of human and ‘nonhuman’ worlds. It is shown that leisure and tourist practices are much more tied up with material objects and physical sensations than traditionally assumed and that emblematic tourist performances involve, and are made possible and pleasurable by, objects, machines and technologies. Thus we suggest that further engagement with the ‘material’ would be the constructive path to follow for future leisure and tourist studies.     

The Dortmund Case — On the Enactment of an Urban Economic Imaginary

Launched in the year 2000, the so‐called Dortmund Project was a 10‐year local development initiative aimed at creating 70,000 new jobs and redeveloping the old industrial sites in Dortmund, a city in the Ruhr area of Germany. The project's proclaimed vision of a ‘new Dortmund’ is seen as a part of a new imaginary. This article uses a praxeological perspective to work out the enactment practices in this imaginary, viewing them as various nexuses of doings and sayings. In doing so, it stresses the relevance of the production and influence of different reports in this process and seeks to offer an insight into the complexity of the setting in which this imaginary was enacted.     

Discrimination in Services: How Service Recovery Efforts Change with Customer Accent

Journal of Business Ethics - Discrimination represents an important moral problem in the field of business ethics, and is often directed against minority groups. While most of the extant literature...     

„Medical Savings Accounts“ — Eine internationale Bestandsaufnahme des Konzeptes der Gesundheitssparkonten und seine Implikationen für Deutschland

Medical Savings Accounts have gained rapid popularity in the international discussion as a means for financing health care over the last years. In Germany a similar idea has been discussed for the German Pension System known as the so called ?Riester Rente“. Countries like Singapore, South Africa, China and the USA have already introduced Medical Savings Accounts or are conducting pilot studies. This article summarizes the experience with Medical Savings Accounts in these countries and tries to evaluate first results, which are primarily positive so far. Finally it is suggested to introduce the concept of Medical Savings Accounts in the German Public Health Insurance in order to tackle its financing problems.     

Care of the other: knowledge-creation through care in professional teams

This paper presents a study in a major pharmaceutical company of how team-based, knowledge-intensive work is positively affected by what we refer to as care. Organization theory directs much effort toward understanding how values, norms and cultures are shared, how they construct meaning and make sense within an organization. In addition, the ability to share experiences and know-how is a crucial activity in organizations. This paper presents a framework for knowledge-creation in a relational, sensemaking perspective where the notion of care, the ability to establish interpersonal, sensemaking mechanisms, is the underlying key factor behind knowledge-creation in team-based organizations.     

A count data model with endogenous household specific censoring: the number of nights to stay

In this paper a count data regression model accounting for endogenous censoring with household specific censoring thresholds is presented. The presented modelling approach is utilized in an analysis of household choice of total number of nights to spend on monthly recreational trips. The empirical study reveals that the suggested approach is feasible and that accounting for endogenous censoring gives a better fit to the data. For helpful comments on an earlier version of the paper we thank two anonymous referees.     

Students’ attitudes toward technology: exploring the relationship among affective,cognitive and behavioral components of the attitude construct

International Journal of Technology and Design Education - When studying attitudes toward technology education, the affective attitudinal component has primarily been the focus. This study focuses...     

Signs of dependence and heavy tails in non-life insurance data

In this paper, we study data from the yearly reports the four major Swedish non-life insurers have sent to the Swedish Financial Supervisory Authority (FSA). We aim at finding marginal distributions of, and dependence between, losses on the five largest lines of business (LoBs) in order to create models for solvency capital requirement (SCR) calculation. We try to use data in an optimal way by sensibly defining an accounting year loss in terms of actuarial liability predictions and by pooling observations from several companies when possible to decrease the uncertainty about the underlying distributions and their parameters. We find that dependence between LoBs is weaker in our data than what is assumed in the Solvency II standard formula. We also find dependence between companies that may affect financial stability and must be taken into account when estimating loss distribution parameters. Moreover, we discuss under what circumstances an insurer is better (or worse) off using an internal model for SCR calculation, instead of the standard formula.