Principles of Ecology and Management

Author(s):  
Alan Sitkin

or more than a decade now, business gurus have been advising managers to embark upon the kinds of environmental processes that will allow their companies to survive and thrive in the face of a mounting ecological imperative. The big question for students of business is therefore not why companies should go green, but rather why so little progress has been achieved so far. Hence the unique focus of this book, which turns the table on the cheerleading attitudes customarily associated with many green business texts to highlight instead the factors impeding the much desired transition towards greater corporate environmentalism. By gaining a more realistic understanding of these obstacles, readers will be able to develop a fuller sense of how they might be overcome.

Author(s):  
Geoffrey Jones

This chapter reviews the history of green entrepreneurship, arguing that green entrepreneurship was shaped by four different temporal contexts between the mid-nineteenth century and the present day. Although there were significant achievements over the entire period, it was only in the most recent era that green business achieved legitimacy and scale. Green entrepreneurs often had religious and ideological motivations, but they were shaped by their institutional and temporal context. They created new markets and categories through selling their ideas and products, and by imagining the meaning of sustainability. They faced hard challenges, which encouraged clustering which provided proximity advantages and higher trust levels. Combining profits and sustainability has always been difficult, and the spread of corporate environmentalism in recent decades has not helped. Although commercial success often eluded pioneers, by a willingness to think outside of traditional boxes, they have opened up new ways of thinking about sustainability.


Author(s):  
Geoffrey Jones

This chapter examines the greening of large conventional firms since 1980, the acquisition of many green entrepreneurial firms, and the rise of “greenwashing.” While noting that this development appeared to signal the success of green business, and the scaling needed for sustainability to make a real impact, there were also major problems. In particular, there were frequent and large gaps between corporate rhetoric and reality, threatening consumer disillusion and making it harder for more genuinely green firms to make their distinctive case. Corporate environmentalism was also constrained by the huge pressure on firms to meet quarterly returns, making it hard for large corporations to pursue truly radical sustainability strategies.


Author(s):  
MOHD RAFI YAACOB

A business pertaining to the environment has three basic issues. First, in order to produce products it takes too much from the environment and does so in a harmful way; second, the product it makes require excessive amounts of energy, toxins, and pollutants; and finally, the method of manufacture and the products themselves produce extraordinary waste and cause harm to present and future generations of all species including humans. The only way out of the unsustainability of business practices is through re-engineering business activities inline with the principle of ecology. Hence, it is crucial for businesses to take a fresh look at the damages that they have done to the natural environment and their far-reaching impacts to human survival. Businesses will not do so, unless there is an increasing pressure from the stakeholders including the public and the government alike to improve their corporate environmentalism. In order to exert an influence on the industry, the media needs to be more proactive in reporting and investigating environmental issues pertaining to business activities. This paper tries to unfold the efficacy and the role of the media in Malaysia as a pressure group towards corporate environmentalism in the Malaysian businesses. This report involves a qualitative study of four major newspaper agencies in the country – two vernacular daily newspapers, one daily English newspaper and a bi-monthly newspaper. Four senior reporters involved in the face-to-face interviews. The conversations were audio-taped and then were analysed using the NVivo Version 7 software programme. This report highlights amongst other things the media challenges pertaining to environmental issues, and the media approaches to exert pressure on businesses. It also investigates the efficacy of the media to exert influence on the Malaysian industries to be more environmentally responsible and forward ways to improve media pressure against unscrupulous business activities.  


2018 ◽  
Vol 41 ◽  
Author(s):  
Samuel G. B. Johnson

AbstractZero-sum thinking and aversion to trade pervade our society, yet fly in the face of everyday experience and the consensus of economists. Boyer & Petersen's (B&P's) evolutionary model invokes coalitional psychology to explain these puzzling intuitions. I raise several empirical challenges to this explanation, proposing two alternative mechanisms – intuitive mercantilism (assigning value to money rather than goods) and errors in perspective-taking.


1997 ◽  
Vol 161 ◽  
pp. 203-218 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tobias C. Owen

AbstractThe clear evidence of water erosion on the surface of Mars suggests an early climate much more clement than the present one. Using a model for the origin of inner planet atmospheres by icy planetesimal impact, it is possible to reconstruct the original volatile inventory on Mars, starting from the thin atmosphere we observe today. Evidence for cometary impact can be found in the present abundances and isotope ratios of gases in the atmosphere and in SNC meteorites. If we invoke impact erosion to account for the present excess of129Xe, we predict an early inventory equivalent to at least 7.5 bars of CO2. This reservoir of volatiles is adequate to produce a substantial greenhouse effect, provided there is some small addition of SO2(volcanoes) or reduced gases (cometary impact). Thus it seems likely that conditions on early Mars were suitable for the origin of life – biogenic elements and liquid water were present at favorable conditions of pressure and temperature. Whether life began on Mars remains an open question, receiving hints of a positive answer from recent work on one of the Martian meteorites. The implications for habitable zones around other stars include the need to have rocky planets with sufficient mass to preserve atmospheres in the face of intensive early bombardment.


Author(s):  
G.J.C. Carpenter

In zirconium-hydrogen alloys, rapid cooling from an elevated temperature causes precipitation of the face-centred tetragonal (fct) phase, γZrH, in the form of needles, parallel to the close-packed <1120>zr directions (1). With low hydrogen concentrations, the hydride solvus is sufficiently low that zirconium atom diffusion cannot occur. For example, with 6 μg/g hydrogen, the solvus temperature is approximately 370 K (2), at which only the hydrogen diffuses readily. Shears are therefore necessary to produce the crystallographic transformation from hexagonal close-packed (hep) zirconium to fct hydride.The simplest mechanism for the transformation is the passage of Shockley partial dislocations having Burgers vectors (b) of the type 1/3<0110> on every second (0001)Zr plane. If the partial dislocations are in the form of loops with the same b, the crosssection of a hydride precipitate will be as shown in fig.1. A consequence of this type of transformation is that a cumulative shear, S, is produced that leads to a strain field in the surrounding zirconium matrix, as illustrated in fig.2a.


Author(s):  
F. Monchoux ◽  
A. Rocher ◽  
J.L. Martin

Interphase sliding is an important phenomenon of high temperature plasticity. In order to study the microstructural changes associated with it, as well as its influence on the strain rate dependence on stress and temperature, plane boundaries were obtained by welding together two polycrystals of Cu-Zn alloys having the face centered cubic and body centered cubic structures respectively following the procedure described in (1). These specimens were then deformed in shear along the interface on a creep machine (2) at the same temperature as that of the diffusion treatment so as to avoid any precipitation. The present paper reports observations by conventional and high voltage electron microscopy of the microstructure of both phases, in the vicinity of the phase boundary, after different creep tests corresponding to various deformation conditions.Foils were cut by spark machining out of the bulk samples, 0.2 mm thick. They were then electropolished down to 0.1 mm, after which a hole with thin edges was made in an area including the boundary


2002 ◽  
Vol 69 ◽  
pp. 117-134 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stuart M. Haslam ◽  
David Gems ◽  
Howard R. Morris ◽  
Anne Dell

There is no doubt that the immense amount of information that is being generated by the initial sequencing and secondary interrogation of various genomes will change the face of glycobiological research. However, a major area of concern is that detailed structural knowledge of the ultimate products of genes that are identified as being involved in glycoconjugate biosynthesis is still limited. This is illustrated clearly by the nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans, which was the first multicellular organism to have its entire genome sequenced. To date, only limited structural data on the glycosylated molecules of this organism have been reported. Our laboratory is addressing this problem by performing detailed MS structural characterization of the N-linked glycans of C. elegans; high-mannose structures dominate, with only minor amounts of complex-type structures. Novel, highly fucosylated truncated structures are also present which are difucosylated on the proximal N-acetylglucosamine of the chitobiose core as well as containing unusual Fucα1–2Gal1–2Man as peripheral structures. The implications of these results in terms of the identification of ligands for genomically predicted lectins and potential glycosyltransferases are discussed in this chapter. Current knowledge on the glycomes of other model organisms such as Dictyostelium discoideum, Saccharomyces cerevisiae and Drosophila melanogaster is also discussed briefly.


2014 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 132-139 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lauren Zubow ◽  
Richard Hurtig

Children with Rett Syndrome (RS) are reported to use multiple modalities to communicate although their intentionality is often questioned (Bartolotta, Zipp, Simpkins, & Glazewski, 2011; Hetzroni & Rubin, 2006; Sigafoos et al., 2000; Sigafoos, Woodyatt, Tuckeer, Roberts-Pennell, & Pittendreigh, 2000). This paper will present results of a study analyzing the unconventional vocalizations of a child with RS. The primary research question addresses the ability of familiar and unfamiliar listeners to interpret unconventional vocalizations as “yes” or “no” responses. This paper will also address the acoustic analysis and perceptual judgments of these vocalizations. Pre-recorded isolated vocalizations of “yes” and “no” were presented to 5 listeners (mother, father, 1 unfamiliar, and 2 familiar clinicians) and the listeners were asked to rate the vocalizations as either “yes” or “no.” The ratings were compared to the original identification made by the child's mother during the face-to-face interaction from which the samples were drawn. Findings of this study suggest, in this case, the child's vocalizations were intentional and could be interpreted by familiar and unfamiliar listeners as either “yes” or “no” without contextual or visual cues. The results suggest that communication partners should be trained to attend to eye-gaze and vocalizations to ensure the child's intended choice is accurately understood.


1971 ◽  
Vol 104 (3) ◽  
pp. 330-330
Author(s):  
R. Lester
Keyword(s):  

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document