Seafood festivals for local development in Italy and Sweden

PurposeThe paper focusses on festivals taking place in coastal regions whose central element is seafood. The purpose is to analyse the role of seafood festivals as potential tourist attractions for local development. The decision to focus on coastal areas is based on a perceived knowledge gap regarding the interactions between different sectors of the sea economy.Design/methodology/approachQualitative exploratory case studies of seafood festivals in Italy and Sweden have been performed using an analytical model. The participatory observation methodology contributed to a better understanding of the phenomenon.FindingsThe analysis shows the close relationship between seafood and tourism, and although it takes variable forms, food is a fundamental lever for maritime and coastal tourism and local development. Findings suggest that local food events can help strengthening gastronomic identities, despite there is a different articulation between tradition and marketing in the two countries.Research limitations/implicationsSince this paper represents an exploratory study of five seafood festivals, research needs to be extended and replicated before any findings can be generalized. However, the model is flexible enough to be tested in different food events.Practical implicationsFood events represent a key instrument for the integration of territorial policies in which tourism and food products might be used as strategic instruments for the development of coastal areas.Originality/valueThis paper is a first attempt to analyse and compare seafood events, contributing to filling the gap in event literature referring to coastal areas. The model introduced can be used to determine the articulation of tradition-marketing in different food events.

Enabling Food Safety Entrepreneurship: Exploratory Case Studies From Nepal, Senegal, and Ethiopia

Today, formal and informal enterprises are increasingly contributing to the safety and nutritional ramifications of their food business activities. Enabling entrepreneurship in a sustainable manner means making profits, striving to prevent ingress of harmful substances, and increasing the efficiency of using local natural resources and thus mitigating food hazardous footprints. Using examples from Nepal, Senegal and Ethiopia, this review provides information on microbial and chemical contamination and food adulteration that lead to having unsafe food in the market and on factors that are limiting growing food businesses. Four examples for how to accelerate food safety entrepreneurship are presented that include safely diversifying markets with animal sourced foods, sustainably using neglected and underutilized animal sources, expanding, and integrating innovative technologies with traditional practice and using digital technology to improving monitoring and safety along the food supply chain.

Crises conducting stakeholder salience: shifts in the evolution of private universities’ governance in Latin America

Purpose This study aims to build on embedded approaches to stakeholder management and examines how organizational decision-makers consider social responsibility toward proximal stakeholders in crises that encompass an entire system of stakeholder relationships. Design/methodology/approach Within a criterion-based sample of eight Latin American private universities, this paper develops in-depth exploratory case studies to examine the prioritization of stakeholders in higher education institutions’ decision-making during the outbreak of the COVID-19 crisis. Findings Contrary to the notion that during crises organizations prioritize stakeholders that provide resources that are critical to survival, this study finds that in contextual crises stakeholder management is informed by social responsibility. In addition, the findings suggest that crises may be tipping points for changes toward mission-driven approaches to governance. Practical implications Acknowledging the roles of social responsibility and proximity in stakeholder management during contextual crises allows for more informed governance of organizations that face disruptions in their system of stakeholder relations. Originality/value This study contributes unique insights into the decision-maker’s prioritization of stakeholders during the COVID-19 crisis. The uncertainty associated with the emerging “new normal” allowed for an extreme test of socially embedded versus resource-oriented approaches to stakeholder management.

The Effect of Preference of Music on Reaction Time

A series of 4 collective, exploratory case studies were conducted in order to determine the effect of different genres on reaction time. The Brain Gauge System was used to measure raw reaction time via a tactile reaction time test, testing three different conditions: no music, preferred genre, classical music. The subjects listened to 10 minute increments of music on noise-cancelling headphones and took the tactile reaction time test once before listening and twice (2 minute and 8 minute mark) while the music was playing. Results indicated that there was a general trend of increased reaction time (i.e., decreased performance) with music playing in the background. An ANOVA test was performed, with a resulting p-value of 0.411. While statistical analysis proved the results to be insignificant, the trends found in the case studies indicate that listening to music worsens your reaction time. Furthermore, preferred types of music do not have a significant effect on reaction time. Consistent with literature, this indicates that music in general is a form of distraction, regardless of preference and genre. Further in-depth studies need to be conducted with a larger sample size in order to expand upon these preliminary findings.

Student Performance Prediction Based on a Framework of Teacher’s Features

Teachers teaching skills are essential to motivate students’ engagement in online educational environments, where students and teachers interact with each other, generating a large amount of educational data. However, to the best of our knowledge, there is no previous study that takes advantage of the huge quantity of teachers’ behavioral data to predict students’ performance. To fill this research gap, we elaborated a theoretically based framework of teacher’s characteristics, that guided an automatic data collection of teachers’ behaviors to predict students’ performance. The implementation of a computational prediction system applied the Random Forest classifying algorithm, which achieved better performance, according to AUC metric, when compared to other algorithms. Two exploratory case studies were conducted to investigate the efficiency and efficacy of the framework of teacher’s features in Goiás Judicial School EJUG teachers in Brazil. The results from the case studies shown that the framework is effective to predict students’ performance. This work contributes to distant education, enabling monitoring teachers’ actions aiming students’ academic best achievements.

Facing Societal Challenges in Living Labs: Towards a Conceptual Framework to Facilitate Transdisciplinary Collaborations

Living labs are an extremely attractive open innovation landscape for collaborative research and development activities targeting the complexity of today’s societal challenges. However, although there is plenty of support for collaboration, we still lack clear guidelines to direct transdisciplinary stakeholder networks of academics and practitioners through collaboration processes in the living lab ecosystem. In other words, we lack answers to the question of “how to collaborate?” In the present paper we propose a conceptual framework defining relevant stages to initiate and facilitate transdisciplinary collaboration processes. We base our framework on collaboration challenges described in the literature, specifically the need for stakeholder alignment, as well as challenges experienced in practice, which we report through exploratory case studies. In the proposed conceptual framework, we advocate the application of co-creation methods, both at the level of the living lab (macro) and in projects (meso) within the living lab, in order to define, with all involved parties and stakeholders, the scope and strategy of the living lab and to facilitate stakeholder alignment. Additionally, we integrate an iterative approach and a feedback loop in order to account for the dynamic nature of the collaboration process and to enable reflection and evaluation.

When Sustainability Becomes an Order Winner: Linking Supply Uncertainty and Sustainable Supply Chain Strategies

This study investigates how to implement a sustainable supply chain strategy by choosing a set of sustainable practices while considering the strategic priority assigned to sustainability within a company’s competitive strategy (i.e., an order winner (OW), market qualifier (MQ) or desirable attribute (DA)). Therefore, two research questions arise: RQ1. What are the sustainable supply chain management (SSCM) practices adopted by companies under the different levels of priority assigned to sustainability (i.e., OW, MQ and DA)? and RQ2. How does supply uncertainty influence the choices regarding the SSCM practices to adopt or vice versa? We addressed these questions through a two-step methodology that includes 10 exploratory case studies in different industries and four explanatory cases in the furniture industry. Six research propositions are developed, and we show how some sustainable practices are common to all companies in the sample, while others are only applicable when sustainability is an MQ or an OW. Moreover, in contrast to the suggestion in the literature, we observed that companies with sustainability as an OW implement sustainability practices despite increasing exposure to supply uncertainty. However, when sustainability is a DA or an MQ, companies might implement sustainable practices with the aim of reducing supply uncertainty rather than for sustainability goals. The cases show that investment in these practices can trigger a transition towards a situation in which sustainability is an OW.

Implementasi Total Branding dalam Perspektif Semiotika Pemasaran

The integrated marketing communication process creates positive relationships with consumers, stakeholders, suppliers, and distributors bringing profit through the delivery of carefully planned messages or strategies with integrated marketing objectives. This study aims to describe the implementation of total branding in the application of integrated marketing communication in a food brand, which is seen from many aspects such as brand identity, brand elements, suppliers, distributors, competitors, packaging, and others. The analysis offered by Laura R. Oswald in the semiotic marketing, where the signs, strategies and brand values ​​are interrelated with one another is implemented. The research method is exploratory case studies elaborated with marketing semiotics resting on a constructivism paradigm that thoroughly examines signs and the way they work and can convey meaning to all aspects of marketing activities carried out by Kecap Bango. The results of this study are Kecap Bango’s plan and carry out a through total branding that is in line with the target of the intended marketing.

Fostering Trust as a Catalyst for Sustainable Village-Owned State Enterprise

While the obligatory mandate to establish Village-Owned State Enterprise (VOE) is final, the fact that there are still many villages do not have VOE yet, lead us to investigate what hamper its establishment. Using an exploratory case studies to several villages in Banyumas district, Central Java, we found that trust and reliance hold as key roles for the success of the establishment as well as the sustainability of VOE. We argue that by fostering trust and reliance among village government officials, rural communities and village-owned enterprise managers would give positive outcomes. Further, this study also shed light on ways to foster trust. The practical implication of our finding shows that for a village leader who wants to have a successful village owned enterprise needs to be able to trust and rely on VillageOwned State Enterprise managers.