Workplace Injury and the Failing Academic Body: A Testimony of Pain

Journal of Business Ethics - In its three decades of development, many constructs of cause-related marketing have been tested from different perspectives and in varied contexts. However, there has...     

Changes in food provision in Russian households experiencing perestroika

The purpose of this article is to describe how households in Novgorod the Great, Russia, deal with food provision in everyday life. The study focuses on changes experienced in food provision and consumption in Russian society, in order to illustrate how households respond to the transformation towards a market economy. The study reflects women's perspective on food provision. Students from Novgorod the Great visited 105 households and asked the women in the household to answer a questionnaire. Results from the study show that in order to cope with changes in society related to economic reforms, Russian households had changed both their food consumption and food production patterns. There was no big difference between urban and rural households. Nearly all of the households were self‐sufficient in the provision of vegetables and potatoes. Many households had a ‘dacha’ (plot), where they produced most of what they needed. Among the changes experienced during recent years (i.e. during the end of the 1990s), a decade after perestroika was initiated, households mentioned the rise in food prices and the decrease of income. Households reported that they consumed less fruit and/or meat. Some households also mentioned that the quality of nourishment had decreased, thereby indicating lower general quality, lower nutrition value, or less healthy foodstuffs.     

Valley floor landscape change following almost 100 years of flood embankment abandonment on a wandering gravel‐bed river

Critical to restoring the nature conservation value of many river corridors is an understanding of how alluvial landscapes will respond to cessation of river management and land use practices that have previously degraded the environment. This paper analyses changes in valley floor landforms and vegetation patch dynamics, in relation to fluvial disturbance, over a period of almost 100 years following flood embankment abandonment on a wandering gravel‐bed river, namely the River Tummel, Scotland. Such rivers were once typical of many draining upland areas of northern maritime Europe. Prior to abandonment the valley floor landscape was agriculturally dominated and the river for the most part was single thread confined between flood embankments. The pattern of landform change and vegetation patch development over time following a decision in 1903 not to maintain embankments was tracked by geomorphic and land cover mapping utilizing successive sets of aerial photography for the period 1946 to 1994. A historical context for these changes was also feasible because the channel planform in 1900 and earlier channel planform changes dating back to 1753 were known due to the availability of old maps and earlier geomorphic studies. The land cover mapping was validated by comparison of results produced from the interpretation work on the 1994 aerial photographs with the field‐based UK National Vegetation Classification protocol. The findings of the study illustrate that bordering the River Tummel fluvial landforms and vegetation patch mosaics, presumably resembling those that occurred before valley floor land use intensification, evolved in less than 50 years after flood embankment abandonment with a resultant increase in habitat diversity. The change relates primarily to flood‐induced channel planform change and moderate levels of fluvial disturbance. The general significance of this change to plant species diversity on the valley floor of the River Tummel and elsewhere is discussed as is possible implications of the upstream impoundment and scenarios for climatically induced changes in flood frequency and magnitude. The overall outcome is the strong possibility that simple changes in river management and land use practices could result in re‐establishment of the nature conservation value of similar river corridors in Europe over the medium term without active restoration efforts. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Exchange Rate Pass‐through and Currency Invoicing: Implications for Monetary Integration in East Asia

Exporter's price‐setting behaviour and currency invoicing play a key role in the literature on the new open‐economy macroeconomics. This paper estimates exchange rate pass‐through coefficients for the exports of four ASEAN countries: Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and Thailand. In addition, previous estimates of pass‐through as well as invoicing behaviour in East Asia are discussed in the context of regional integration. The new pass‐through coefficients are estimated under two alternate specifications for up to 34 goods for each of the four ASEAN countries destined for up to 13 major markets. The results suggest: (a) little pass‐through is occurring in Southeast Asia and (b) this lack of pass‐through is more likely attributable to the fact that they are small countries in a relatively integrated market, rather than evidence of pricing to market. The implications for regional monetary integration of this apparently low degree of pass‐through are detailed.     

Approaches to child labour in the supply chain

This paper examines the difficulties of dealing with child labour in the supply chain. It begins by identifying a number of the factors which make global supply chains so difficult to manage. It goes on to outline a framework of different approaches that can be taken to managing the supply chain with relation to child labour, moving from national and international regulation, through to the role of NGOs and the companies themselves. Focusing on an 'engagement' strategy for dealing with child labour, the paper traces a case study of Adidas-Salomon and its attempts to implement their 'standards of engagement' in this area with relation to one of their supplier factories in Vietnam. The research draws on the direct involvement of one of the authors who visited the site and was able to interview staff and observe the operation in practice. Her findings are supported by wider work on the implementation of corporate approaches to human rights at a range of companies interviewed by another of the authors. The paper aims to highlight the issues needing to be addressed for companies considering the 'involvement' approach to child labour. It also aims to develop theory on our understanding of different approaches to corporate rights.     

The risk-return trade-off in human capital investment

In this paper, we analyze investments in human capital in a way which is standard for financial assets, but not (yet) for human capital assets. We study mean-variance plots of human capital assets. We compare the properties of human capital returns using a performance measure and by using tests for mean-variance spanning. Fields differ strongly not only in common rates of return, but also in return per unit of risk. We identify a range of educations that are efficient in terms of investment goods, and a range of educations that may be chosen for consumption purposes.     

Bed morphology, flow structure, and sediment transport at the outlet of Lake Huron and in the upper St. Clair River

An integrated multibeam echo sounder and acoustic Doppler current profiler field survey was conducted in July 2008 to investigate the morphodynamics of the St. Clair River at the outlet of Lake Huron. The principal morphological features of the upper St. Clair River included flow-transverse bedforms that appear weakly mobile, erosive bedforms in cohesive muds, thin non-cohesive veneers of weakly mobile sediment that cover an underlying cohesive (till or glacio-lacustrine) surface, and vegetation that covers the bed. The flow was characterized by acceleration as the banks constrict from Lake Huron into the St. Clair River, an approximately 1500-m long region of flow separation downstream from the Blue Water Bridge, and secondary flow connected to: i) channel curvature; ii) forcing of the flow by local bed topography, and iii) flow wakes in the lee side of ship wrecks. Nearshore, sand-sized, sediment from Lake Huron was capable of being transported into, and principally along, the banks of the upper St. Clair River by the measured flow. A comparison of bathymetric surveys conducted in 2007 and 2008 identifies that the gravel bed does undergo slow downstream movement, but that this movement does not appear to be generated by the mean flow, and could possibly be caused by ship-propeller-induced turbulence. The study results suggest that the measured mean flow and dredging within the channel have not produced major scour of the upper St. Clair River and that the recent fall in the level of Lake Huron is unlikely to have been caused by these mechanisms.     

Energy Production in Water Distribution Networks: A PAT Design Strategy

Pump operating as turbine (PAT) is an effective source of reducing the equipment cost in small hydropower plants. However, the manufacturers provide poor information on the PAT performance thus representing a limit for its wider diffusion. Additional implementation difficulties arise under variable operating conditions, characteristic of water distribution networks (WDNs). WDNs allow to obtain widespread and globally significant amount of produced energy by exploiting the head drop due to the network pressure control strategy for leak reductions. Thus a design procedure is proposed that couples a parallel hydraulic circuit with an overall plant efficiency criteria for the market pump selection within a WDN. The proposed design method allows to identify the performance curves of the PAT that maximizes the produced energy for an assigned flow and pressure-head distribution pattern. Finally, computational fluid dynamics (CFD) is shown as a suitable alternative for performance curve assessment covering the limited number of experimental data.     

Does Managerial Behavior Determine Farm Technical Efficiency? A Case of Grape Production in an Economy in Transition

This study explores how farmers' managerial behavior in their production planning processes influences the economic performance of their farms, measured through input‐oriented and output‐oriented technical efficiency. A conceptual framework in which differences in managerial behavior were assumed to be due to bounded rationality was developed. The 3‐year means (2006–2008) from a panel data set on grape‐producing family farms in FYR Macedonia were analyzed. Technical efficiency was estimated with the nonparametric data envelopment analysis approach. The impact of farmers' managerial behavior was assessed in a second‐stage regression. The results suggest that bounded rationality in farmers' production planning decisions causes inefficiency. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.