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The purpose of this paper is to show the complexity in dealing with climate change adaptation at the local level, and to show how social and institutional factors in addition to the ecological challenges contribute to that complexity.

This paper examines four institutional climate change activities and reveals how institutions currently address climate change, and how the Sherpas are involved in the process. It draws on three sorts of material: the interviews and observations conducted during my field research in 2010 and 2011; my personal experiences as a Sherpa woman; my recent participation in Sherpa face-to-face and online communities.

Organizing institutional climate change activities to draw international attention alone are not sufficient to address climate change adaptation issues. Communities at the local level cannot be assumed to be homogeneous entities. Institutional climate change adaptation efforts cannot assume that by reaching out to a few individuals in the region they will benefit the whole. Institutional activities have increased receptivity to scientific climate change knowledge, but it has also increased fear of an impending doom, and anger over the continuous discussion of climate change without concrete actions.

Future research in the Everest region should include residents from all ethnic groups considering their historical contacts and interactions.

It is crucial that not only the Sherpa agency (or lack of agency) or understandings are examined but the institutional engagements and delivery are also assessed to practically, effectively, and sustainably address the challenges of climate change adaptation.

The paper aims to identify and assess quantitatively the influences of a few dimensions of climate awareness on people's preference for adaptation against sea level rise (SLR).

From the literature survey “familiarity with”, “perception about” and “intuitive knowledge about” climate change‐sea level rise (CC‐SLR) have been identified as dimensions of “climate awareness”. Empirical research was done through administering questionnaires among 285 respondents selected randomly from three coastal villages in Bangladesh. After principal component analysis, data sufficiency and colinearity test, a total of 18 variables were entered into a multinomial logistic regression model. The reference category “evacuation” was compared with other two choices, i.e. in situ adaptation with “same occupation” and “changed occupation”.

For the SLR scenario of 2050‐2075 occupational engagement, use of radio for climate information, exposure to rainfall, salinity and perception about CC‐SLR appeared as the most significant predictors of people's preference for evacuation or in situ adaptation (LR χ²=183.38, pseudo R²=0.54, p<.001). Similarly, for the SLR scenario of 2080‐2100, in addition to the factors cited above, some other factors such as educational attainment, exposure to flood, climate perception and familiarity appeared as the most significant predictor of respondent's preference (LR χ²=202.08, pseudo R²=0.60, p<0.001).

Two dimensions of climate awareness, i.e. familiarity with and perception about CC‐SLR may significantly influence the people's preference for adaptation choice. Launching a programme to enhance climate awareness without further delay may help people planning for anticipatory in situ adaptation against CC‐SLR.

Flexibility is one enabler of efficient use of resources and is therefore an antecedent to sustainability. The purpose of this article is to identify supplier flexibility variables in, and related to, the order-to-delivery (OTD) process and categorize them into a framework, followed by empirically exploring the framework.

A perception-based survey was sent to Swedish purchasing managers. 289 responses were received. After descriptive gap analysis, exploratory factor analysis was applied to structure the responses into factors. This formed the basis for hierarchical linear regression analysis, explaining supplier flexibility.

A conceptual framework, specifying supplier flexibility into volume, delivery and information exchange dimensions and relating these dimensions to the OTD process, was developed. Significant negative gaps between actual and demanded volume flexibility and delivery flexibility were identified, while positive gaps were found for information exchange flexibility. The factor analysis revealed three factors. The regression analysis verified that OTD-related information exchange flexibility and OTD-related volume and delivery flexibility explain the variation in OTD-specific flexibility and are important antecedents for supplier flexibility in the OTD process.

A contribution to research is the framework – with defined, related and empirically validated flexibility types.

The study proposes a perception-based way to capture supplier flexibility in the OTD process, which is of practical relevance when evaluating suppliers.

Identifying, conceptualizing and capturing types of supplier flexibility in the OTD process is new related to academic literature. Also the wide empirical study mapping supplier flexibility gaps is unique in its focus.

In today's internationalized world, value creation consists of knowledge and work integration involving workers from around the world. Members of these globally distributed work teams (GDWT) encounter organizational behavior issues (identity, cultural differences, and leadership) and organization design issues (dependencies, information processing, media use, and teamwork structures). While most research on GDWT focuses on the first set of issues, this chapter is among the few to systematically explore the second set. We propose and elaborate on strategies for either reducing the intensity of collaboration, or enabling teams to collaborate intensely on a global scale. Implications for research and practice are explored.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the drivers that influence subsidiaries of international companies in the automobile industry in Thailand and how automobile companies pursue localization in response to these drivers.

Using case research method, examined seven leading automobile manufacturers – Toyota Motor (Thailand); Hino Motors (Thailand); Honda Automobile (Thailand); Isuzu Motors (Thailand); BMW (Thailand); DaimlerChrysler (Thailand); and Auto Alliance (Thailand) – as well as 14 of their dealers and suppliers in Thailand. In total 120 Thai and expatriate managers were interviewed.

Extending the knowledge body from existing research, this study found that there are four drivers for automobile manufacturers to adopt localization strategies. Those are host country characteristics, industry characteristics, company characteristics, and market characteristics. The results show that automobile manufacturers react to drivers by localization of their decision making, building and exploiting knowledge pool of local suppliers and distributors, increasing numbers of Thais at the management level while decreasing the number of expatriates, increasing R&D activities locally, localizing products, increasing usage of local suppliers, adapting manufacturer processes, reinvesting at subsidiary, and localizing corporate image. However, these vary in degree from company to company. Localization strategies produce benefits that go beyond allowing automobile manufactures to compete within the local situation, also enabling them to overcome challenges and use their successes to transform the parent company and other subsidiaries and eventually contribute to the parent company's globalization strategy.

Managers in subsidiaries may first implement localization strategies to cope with driver factors to mitigate risks and uncertainty. By adopting localization, managers should not focus only on short term benefits to gain local advantages in host countries, but these advantages at the subsidiary should be transmitted to the parent company and other subsidiaries to build a competitive international strategy.

CEOs of subsidiaries in emerging markets can learn what drivers influence localization strategies and how to cope and create local advantages for global competitiveness by implementing wide range of localization strategies.

Recognition that not every climate adaptation policy is a good one has shifted attention to new tools and methods to measure the adequacy and effectiveness of adaptation policies. This study aims to propose and apply and applies an innovative adaptation policy assessment framework to identify the extent to which climate adaptation policies in Vietnam exhibit conditions that are likely to ensure a sufficient, credible and effective adaptation.

In total, 21 conditions, categorized under five normative principles and covering critical issue areas in adaptation domain, form the climate adaptation policy assessment framework. The principles were double-checked and tested in case studies through observations and analyses of policy documents to ensure that each condition should be distinct and not overlapping across principles. To see if the principles and attendant conditions were able to capture all relevant aspects of adaptation, the authors used structured expert judgment. In total, 39 policy documents pertaining to climate change adaptation were selected for qualitative document analysis. In-depth interviews with local officials and experts were conducted to address data gaps.

The study reveals major weaknesses constituting a reasonably worrisome picture of the adaptation policies in Vietnam since several critical conditions were underrepresented. These results shed new light on why some adaptation policies falter or are posing adverse impacts. The findings suggest that a sound policy assessment framework can provide evidence on what effective adaptation policy looks like and how it can be enabled. The framework for climate adaptation policy assessment in this study can be easily adjusted and used for different socio-environmental contexts in which new conditions for policy assessment might emerge.

The findings show underlying weaknesses constituting a reasonably worrisome picture of the adaptation regime in Vietnam. In the absence of mechanisms and measures for accountability and transparency in policy processes, adaptation in Vietnam appears more likely to be prone to maladaptation and corruption. While solving these problems will not be easy for Vietnam, the government needs to evaluate whether the short-term gains in sustaining the existing adaptation policies really make progress and serve its long-term climate-adaptive development goals.

Although interpretations of adaptation effectiveness may be very divergent in different normative views on adaptation outcomes, the authors argue that a common, agreed-upon effectiveness can be reached if it is clearly defined and measurable in adaptation policies. Thus, the climate adaptation policy assessment framework proposed in this study is critical for policymakers, practitioners, donors and stakeholders dealing with adaptation to better understand the weaknesses in policymaking processes, pinpoint priority areas of action and timely prevent or prepare for possible adverse impacts of policies.

Research has not yet captured nor synthesized the supply chain (SC) adaptations exercised by various base of the pyramid (BoP) initiators for successful BoP business. This is a crucial shortcoming that the study has taken a step to address, with the aim of advancing theory in BoP supply chain management (SCM). The paper aims to discuss this issue.

The authors draw on Carter et al.’s (2015) theory of the SC and use a multi-method approach combining systematic literature review and embedded case studies based on the secondary data.

The authors compare BoP SC adaptations of MNCs, local companies, NGOs, social enterprises and governments and develop propositions. The authors find that SC adaptations exercised by BoP initiators are influenced by their sense making of institutional and agency drivers at the BoP, and contingent on whether the poor are engaged as recipients or value co-creators.

The authors develop a multi-initiator understanding of SC adaptations for BoP business. This is useful for BoP initiators who struggle to leverage their BoP business as well as for those who are considering entering the BoP. The authors offer these entities insights for aligning strategy and developing capabilities for BoP markets.

The authors develop an original model of BoP initiator-based configurations of SC adaptations for BoP business. As such, the authors contribute toward advancing BoP SCM theory and practice by mapping substantive concepts and their relationships associated with BoP SC adaptations.

Ubiquitous web applications (UWA) are a new type of web applications which are accessed in various contexts, i.e. through different devices, by users with various interests, at anytime from anyplace around the globe. For such full‐fledged, complex software systems, a methodologically sound engineering approach in terms of model‐driven engineering (MDE) is crucial. Several modeling approaches have already been proposed that capture the ubiquitous nature of web applications, each of them having different origins, pursuing different goals and providing a pantheon of concepts. This paper aims to give an in‐depth comparison of seven modeling approaches supporting the development of UWAs.

This methodology is conducted by applying a detailed set of evaluation criteria and by demonstrating its applicability on basis of an exemplary tourism web application. In particular, five commonly found ubiquitous scenarios are investigated, thus providing initial insight into the modeling concepts of each approach as well as to facilitate their comparability.

The results gained indicate that many modeling approaches lack a proper MDE foundation in terms of meta‐models and tool support. The proposed modeling mechanisms for ubiquity are often limited, since they neither cover all relevant context factors in an explicit, self‐contained, and extensible way, nor allow for a wide spectrum of extensible adaptation operations. The provided modeling concepts frequently do not allow dealing with all different parts of a web application in terms of its content, hypertext, and presentation levels as well as their structural and behavioral features. Finally, current modeling approaches do not reflect the crosscutting nature of ubiquity but rather intermingle context and adaptation issues with the core parts of a web application, thus hampering maintainability and extensibility.

Different from other surveys in the area of modeling web applications, this paper specifically considers modeling concepts for their ubiquitous nature, together with an investigation of available support for MDD in a comprehensive way, using a well‐defined as well as fine‐grained catalogue of more than 30 evaluation criteria.

The purpose of this study is to examine empirically the relationship between psychic distance and adaptation of the retail offer across a range of countries.

Data were collected using a mail survey of randomly selected non‐food retailers that operated stores in at least three foreign countries.

Findings of this study suggest that a substantial proportion of retail offer adaptation is explained by psychic distance. In particular, differences in market structure, business practices and language between the home and foreign market significantly increase the extent to which retailers adapt their offer.

The research findings may be limited in terms of their generalisability across retail sectors, as the study focused on non‐food retailers only.

These results have implications for researchers and managers in suggesting that we need to go beyond consumer behaviour differences to explain fully the degree to which international firms standardise or adapt their strategies in foreign markets.

Much of the existing research into standardisation and adaptation is limited in terms of geographic scope and a focus on the marketing strategies of manufacturing and export firms. Thus, this paper addresses a substantial gap in existing research by empirically examining the relationship between psychic distance and adaptation in a retail context and across a range of countries.

The small-scale artisanal fishers in coastal Bangladesh are comparatively more vulnerable to climate risks than any other communities in Bangladesh. Based on practicality, this paper aims to explain the local level climate change perception, its impact and adaptation strategies of the fisher in southeast coastal villages in Bangladesh.

To achieve the above objective, this study used structural, semi-structured interviews and focus group discussion in two coastal communities, namely, at Salimpur in the Sitakund coast and Sarikait Sandwip Island, Bangladesh. It reviews and applies secondary data sources to compare and contrast the findings presented in this study.

Results show that the fishers perceived an increase in temperature, frequency of tropical cyclones and an increase in sea level. They also perceived a decrease in monsoon rainfall. Such changes impact the decreasing amount of fish in the Bay of Bengal and the fishers’ livelihood options. Analysing seasonal calendar of fishing, findings suggest that fishers’ well-being is highly associated with the amount of fish yield, rather than climatic stress, certain non-climatic factors (such as the governmental rules, less profit, bank erosion and commercial fishing) also affected their livelihood. The major adaptation strategies undertaken include, but are not limited to, installation of tube well or rainwater harvesting plant for safe drinking water, raising plinth of the house to cope with inundation and use of solar panel/biogas for electricity.

Despite experiencing social stress and extreme climatic events and disasters, the majority of the fishing community expressed that they would not change their profession in future. The research suggests implementing risk reduction strategies in the coastal region of Bangladesh that supports the small-scale fishers to sustain their livelihood despite climate change consequences.