Developing Pharmacy Services: a Customer-driven Interaction and Counselling Approach

In recent years, many traditional businesses have been facing demands to extend their core product and incorporate a substantial service element. The transition from traditional business to service enterprise cannot be accomplished without considerable attention being given to ways of fulfilling cus- tomer needs. This study looks at the pharmacy business and asks what kind of pharmacy services different customer groups want, how these groups can be distinguished and what the implications are for pharmacy service development. It identifies four customer groups - the contented, phormacist- dependent customer, the independent customer, the infor- mation seeker and the discontented customer -and concludes that the future success of the pharmacies depends on how much they take the desires of these groups into consideration in developing their services.     

Local niche planning and its strategic implications for implementation of energy-efficient technology

It is widely recognised that the world is facing climate challenges that necessitate transitions towards more energy-efficient buildings. A key challenge is that visions of energy efficient buildings in policies often fail to become aligned with existing local practices. In order to overcome such a gap between policy visions and their implementation in practice specific forms of strategic work is needed, according to new transformative ideas in spatial planning. The aim of this paper is to characterize the transformative capacities of this kind of strategic work at the spatial scale of the town in order to assess how such activities engage with sustainable transitions. The theoretical contribution of the paper is to compare strategic work performed in transformative forms of spatial planning with the strategic work intended in strategic niche management, which represent a change-management process for enabling transitions. The study outlines the proactive spatial planning of a Danish local authority in order to illustrate how the strategic work performed in this kind of local development project represents a special form of niche management that is able to create room for innovation and challenge existing socio-technical regimes in the building sector, but still different to typical strategic niche management processes. Based on this empirical study, the paper challenges the narrow focus on niches around technology development processes in strategic niche management by pointing towards niche planning in local development projects as another relevant context for niche management. However, as discussed in the paper, this assumes a more strategic form of planning than is often practised today, where more emphasis is put on how planning can contribute to promoting sustainable transitions.     

Greening the Danes? Experience with consumption and environment policies

Consumer-oriented environmental policies came high on the political agenda during the 1990s. Internationally, consumers were assigned a key role in environmental policies; also in Denmark, political initiatives were taken to promote sustainable consumer behaviour. In this article, the results of Danish policies related to consumption and environment are assessed by considering first, the environmental impacts of the political measures, and second, whether the policies have succeeded in addressing the dynamics behind increasing consumption. The study combines a theoretical understanding of consumption as an inseparable part of daily practices with empirical analyses of three fields of consumption: housing, transportation, and information and communication technology. It is pointed out that policies to promote sustainable consumption are successful only when technological development, economic structures, and information are all in accordance with each other, and this is the case only when sustainable consumption does not conflict with economic growth. A more fundamental critique thus concerns the failure of Danish consumer-oriented environmental policies to address consumption growth and the rising standards for “normal consumption.”