Lean in Swedish agriculture: strategic and operational perspectives

The purpose of this article is to present and test a framework for lean implementation in the agricultural sector, addressing challenges from an operational and strategical perspective. The article builds on the previous literature on the use of Lean and reports empirical data from a lean implementation project in the south-western Sweden, including interviews, observations, diaries and questionnaires. A framework is developed to examine strategic and operational perspectives on Lean Thinking. Using this framework, a number of challenges encountered in Lean implementation are presented. This article is limited to the study of Lean among a group of Swedish farms although its findings may have implications for the wider agricultural sectors. Many societal challenges are linked with agricultural sustainability, stressing the need for productive, resource-efficient, resilient and less wasteful food production. This article is the first to develop and test a Lean implementation framework in the agriculture sector.     

Populism: a major threat to democracy?

ABSTRACT

Unsurprisingly, given the surge in support for “populist” movements across the globe, there has been a resurgence of academic interest in the subject. Our aim in this volume is to explore some of the key issues in these contemporary debates. In this introduction, we focus upon five of the main questions raised in this literature: What is populism? What variants of it are there? How serious a problem is the rise of populism? Why has there been a rise in populism? And how can populism be addressed?     

Integration of Critical Infrastructure and Societal Consequence Models: Impact on Swedish Power System Mitigation Decisions

Critical infrastructures provide society with services essential to its functioning, and extensive disruptions give rise to large societal consequences. Risk and vulnerability analyses of critical infrastructures generally focus narrowly on the infrastructure of interest and describe the consequences as nonsupplied commodities or the cost of unsupplied commodities; they rarely holistically consider the larger impact with respect to higher‐order consequences for the society. From a societal perspective, this narrow focus may lead to severe underestimation of the negative effects of infrastructure disruptions. To explore this theory, an integrated modeling approach, combining models of critical infrastructures and economic input–output models, is proposed and applied in a case study. In the case study, a representative model of the Swedish power transmission system and a regionalized economic input–output model are utilized. This enables exploration of how a narrow infrastructure or a more holistic societal consequence perspective affects vulnerability‐related mitigation decisions regarding critical infrastructures. Two decision contexts related to prioritization of different vulnerability‐reducing measures are considered—identifying critical components and adding system components to increase robustness. It is concluded that higher‐order societal consequences due to power supply disruptions can be up to twice as large as first‐order consequences, which in turn has a significant effect on the identification of which critical components are to be protected or strengthened and a smaller effect on the ranking of improvement measures in terms of adding system components to increase system redundancy.     

Malaysian researchers talk about the influence of culture on research misconduct in higher learning institutions

Based on a previous survey by the Office of Research Integrity (ORI) in the USA, a considerable number of foreign research scientists have been found guilty of research misconduct. However, it remains unclear as to whether or not cultural factors really contribute to research misconduct. This study is based on a series of interviews with Malaysian researchers from the local universities regarding their own professional experiences involving working with researchers or research students from different countries or of different nationalities. Most of the researchers interviewed agreed that cultures do shape individual character, which influences the way that such individuals conduct research, their decision-making, and their style of academic writing. Our findings also showed that working culture within the institution also influences research practices, as well as faculty mentorship of the younger generation of researchers. Given the fact such misconduct might be due to a lack of understanding of research or working cultures or practices within the institution, the impact on the scientific community and on society could be destructive. Therefore, it is suggested that the institution has an important role to play in orienting foreign researchers through training, mentoring, and discussion with regard to the “does” and “don’ts” related to research, and to provide them with an awareness of the importance of ethics when it comes to conducting research.     

Valuing mortality risk reductions from environmental, transport, and health policies: a global meta-analysis of stated preference studies

We conduct, to our knowledge, the first global meta-analysis (MA) of stated preference (SP) surveys of mortality risk valuation. The surveys ask adults their willingness to pay (WTP) for small reductions in mortality risks, deriving estimates of the sample mean value of statistical life (VSL) for environmental, health, and transport policies. We explain the variation in VSL estimates by differences in the characteristics of the SP methodologies applied, the population affected, and the characteristics of the mortality risks valued, including the magnitude of the risk change. The mean (median) VSL in our full data set of VSL sample means was found to be around $7.4 million (2.4 million) (2005 U.S. dollars). The most important variables explaining the variation in VSL are gross domestic product (GDP) per capita and the magnitude of the risk change valued. According to theory, however, VSL should be independent of the risk change. We discuss and test a range of quality screening criteria in order to investigate the effect of limiting the MA to high-quality studies. When limiting the MA to studies that find statistically significant differences in WTP using external or internal scope tests (without requiring strict proportionality), we find that mean VSL from studies that pass both tests tend to be less sensitive to the magnitude of the risk change. Mean VSL also tends to decrease when stricter screening criteria are applied. For many of our screened models, we find a VSL income elasticity of 0.7-0.9, which is reduced to 0.3-0.4 for some subsets of the data that satisfy scope tests or use the same high-quality survey.     

A Local Dimension of Integration Policies? A Comparative Study of Berlin,Malmö, and Rotterdam

This study examines three theses on local integration policies by a qualitative comparative case study of integration policies in three cities in three different countries (Berlin, Malmö, and Rotterdam). We found little evidence of a congruent local dimension of integration policies. Local policies resemble their national policy frameworks fairly well in terms of policy approaches and domains. Our multi‐level perspective shows that this is not the result of top‐down hierarchical governance, but rather of a multilevel dynamic of two‐way interaction. Local policy legacies and local politics matter and national policies are also influenced by local approaches of integration.     

Caregiving, ethical and informal: emerging challenges in the sociology of health and illness

The concept of care, integral to medical sociology and to the sociology of health and illness, suggests new challenges in two key areas of this field: 1) within professional socialization, an examination of socialization to ethical thinking, behavior, and identity among professional caregivers, building on the substantial literature already accumulated; 2) in the arena of hidden or informal care providers, an analysis of male and female informal providers and the productive work, other than care, done by these individuals. In both analyses, as well as in all medical sociology and sociology of health and illness, gender, race, and class require more attention. Both analytic endeavors influence the substance and the contours of the field.     

Book reviews

Distributed Cognitions: Psychological and Educational Considerations. Gavriel Salomon (Ed.), Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993. 275 pages, $49.95.

The Computer as Medium. Peter Bøgh Andersen, Berit Holmqvist, & Jens F. Jensen (Eds.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 495 pages. $54.95.     

Local linear regression with adaptive orthogonal fitting for the wind power application

Short-term forecasting of wind generation requires a model of the function for the conversion of meteorological variables (mainly wind speed) to power production. Such a power curve is nonlinear and bounded, in addition to being nonstationary. Local linear regression is an appealing nonparametric approach for power curve estimation, for which the model coefficients can be tracked with recursive Least Squares (LS) methods. This may lead to an inaccurate estimate of the true power curve, owing to the assumption that a noise component is present on the response variable axis only. Therefore, this assumption is relaxed here, by describing a local linear regression with orthogonal fit. Local linear coefficients are defined as those which minimize a weighted Total Least Squares (TLS) criterion. An adaptive estimation method is introduced in order to accommodate nonstationarity. This has the additional benefit of lowering the computational costs of updating local coefficients every time new observations become available. The estimation method is based on tracking the left-most eigenvector of the augmented covariance matrix. A robustification of the estimation method is also proposed. Simulations on semi-artificial datasets (for which the true power curve is available) underline the properties of the proposed regression and related estimation methods. An important result is the significantly higher ability of local polynomial regression with orthogonal fit to accurately approximate the target regression, even though it may hardly be visible when calculating error criteria against corrupted data.     

The Uses and Misuses of Globalization in the Study of Social Movements

On a general level this article seeks to improve our understanding of the relationship between the concepts of globalization and transnational mobilization; a question that is surprisingly rarely addressed in an explicit manner in the already extensive (and still growing) body of literature on these issues. The article proceeds from the assumption that globalization does not necessarily lead to transnational mobilization. The missing link between globalization and transnational mobilization is a process of social construction that seeks to link the local, the national and the global. Globalization, in this perspective, is both an objective process involving certain structural transformations and a subjective process intimately related to the way social actors interpret these changes and give them meaning. Proceeding from a critique of mono-causal and political economic approaches to transnational mobilization the main objective of this article is to outline an analytical framework able to encompass both of these dimensions; a task achieved by combining insights from the globalization literature and the social constructionist framing approach to social movements. This integration is captured in the concept of transnational framing.