Search results

The purpose of this study is therefore to detail an additive manufacturing process for printing TiD parts for implant applications. Titanium–diamond (TiD) is a new composite that provides biocompatible three-dimensional multimaterial structures. Thus, the authors report a powder-deposition and print optimization strategy to overcome the dual-functionality gap by printing bulk TiD parts. However, despite favorable customization outcomes, relatively few additive manufacturing (AM) feedstock powders offer the biocompatibility required for medical implant and device technologies.

AM offers a platform to fabricate customized patient-specific parts. Developing feedstock that can be 3D printed into specific 3D structures while providing a favorable interface with the human tissue remains a challenge. Using laser metal deposition, feedstock powder comprising diamond and titanium was co-printed into TiD parts for mechanical testing to determine optimal manufacturing parameters.

TiD parts were fabricated comprising 30% and 50% diamond. The composite powder had a Hausner ratio of 1.13 and 1.21 for 30% and 50% TiD, respectively. The flow analysis (Carney flow) for TiD 30% and 50% was 7.53 and 5.15 g/s. The authors report that the printing-specific conditions significantly affect the integrity of the printed part and thus provide the optimal manufacturing parameters for structural integrity as determined by micro-computed tomography, nanoindentation and biocompatibility of TiD parts. The hardness, ultimate tensile strength and yield strength for TiD are 4–6 GPa (depending on build position), 426 MPa and 375 MPa, respectively. Furthermore, the authors show that increasing diamond composition to 30% results in higher osteoblast viability and lower bacteria count than titanium.

In this study, the authors provide a clear strategy to manufacture TiD parts with high integrity, performance and biocompatibility, expanding the material feedstock library and paving the way to customized diamond implants. Diamond is showing strong potential as a biomedical material; however, upscale is limited by conventional techniques. By optimizing AM as the avenue to make complex shapes, the authors open up the possibility of patient-specific diamond implant solutions.

This paper presents an historical reconstruction of the radicalisation of Alan Fox, the industrial sociologist and a detailed analysis of his early historical and sociological writing in the classical pluralist phase.

An intellectual history, including detailed discussion of key Fox texts, supported by interviews with Fox and other Biographical sources.

Fox’s radicalisation was incomplete, as he carried over from his industrial relations (IR) pluralist mentors, Allan Flanders and Hugh Clegg, a suspicion of political Marxism, a sense of historical contingency and an awareness of the fragmented nature of industrial conflict.

Recent academic attention has centred on Fox’s later radical pluralism with its “structural” approach to the employment relationship. This paper revisits his early, neglected classical pluralist writing. It also illuminates his transition from institutional IR to a broader sociology of work, influenced by AH Halsey, John Goldthorpe and others and the complex nature of his radicalisation.

Industrial heritage works within a world of contradictions, contentions and scalar liminality. Archaeologists and historians focus upon oral histories and discourses of tangible and intangible memory and heritage while planners and economists see industrial World Heritage, in particular, as a marketing ploy to redevelop deindustrialized spaces. Within this liminality, we explore the potential for geographical perspectives to solder such contradictions into transdisciplinary heritage assessments and tourism contexts. How might the spatial tools of landscape and scalar analyses expose alternative and sustainable futures within broader patterns of industrial heritage management and consumption?

Using three comparative cases, interview and landscape methods and conducting discourse analysis within a spatial and scalar framework, we explore the increasing presence of industrial World Heritage.

We present both an institutional reflection upon the complexities of heritage discourse across complex spatial configurations and the intersectional historical, cultural, political, environmental and economic geographies that guide and emerge out of World Heritage Designations. Framed scalarly and spatially, we highlight common interpretation, tourism and heritage management styles and concerns found across industrial World Heritage. We point out trans-scalar considerations for future municipalities and regions looking to utilize their industrial landscapes and narratives.

We believe that more theoretical groundings in space and scale may lead to both the flexibility and the applicability needed to assess and, in turn, manage trans-scalar and trans-spatial complex heritage sites. These perspectives may be uniquely poised to assess the complex geographies of industrial, particularly mining, World Heritage Sites.

The retail investment landscape in the UK has drastically changed. Understanding owners’ responses to this structural change is critical to gain insight into protecting investment performance. This paper identifies and evaluates the tactics and strategies being adopted.

This paper employs a mixed methods research approach, using data collected from semi-structured interviews with professionals involved in the retail investment process. This is supplemented by secondary market data analysis.

The paper assesses the practical responses made by retail property owners/managers, structured around emerging sub-themes. Actions include mitigating short-term risks through greater use of temporary tenants/licensees and independent retailers, preparing generic “white box” retail space to capture remaining tenant demand, exploiting the tenant mix to provide “the retail experience,” and applying new technologies and processes in a sector where systematic risk remains high. A new framework for retail asset management has been developed.

This study contributes to the retail asset management literature and understanding of the way the contemporary retail landscape is shaping investment management behaviour.

The developed framework provides guidance to real estate managers developing a retail real estate management strategy and will help them recognise tactics to better support the evolving retailing market.

The new framework adds new insights to understanding the process for managing retail assets and the actions necessary for asset managers to address economic/functional obsolescence and sustain asset investment values.

While operational performance is important for a company's competitiveness and profitability, this study claims that procurement may be required to drive operational performance. This study aims to focus on how procurement practices is related to operational performance among selected manufacturing firms.

The model was tested on a sample of 329 manufacturing firms in clothing and textiles, chemicals and plastics, food and beverages processing, wood processing, metal processing and pharmaceutical manufacturing industries in a developing economy.

The results indicate that firms with higher and optimal level of procurement practices achieve higher levels of operational performance. Regardless of the H1 rationale, this study suggests that increasing procurement techniques has a limit in terms of improving operational performance. This study establishes that extreme level of procurement practices is associated with decreasing operational performance.

This study calls attention to how managers can guide organizations in refining their procurement strategies and practices; there is the need to strive to strike a balance between diversification and efficiency in procurement.

Manufacturing firms are often integral parts of local communities. The decisions they make regarding procurement practices can impact the economic health of these communities. Striking a balance between diversification and efficiency can contribute to sustainable business practices that benefit both the company and the local community.

As the main contribution, this study brings the additional perspective that extreme level of procurement practices is associated with decreasing operational performance.

This paper reviews recent research on the expected economic effects of developing artificial intelligence (AI) through a survey of the latest publications, in particular papers and reports issued by academics, consulting companies and think tanks.

Our paper represents a point of view on AI and its impact on the global economy. It represents a descriptive analysis of the AI phenomenon.

AI represents a driver of productivity and economic growth. It can increase efficiency and significantly improve the decision-making process by analyzing large amounts of data, yet at the same time it creates equally serious risks of job market polarization, rising inequality, structural unemployment and the emergence of new undesirable industrial structures.

This paper presents itself as a building block for further research by introducing the two main factors in the production function (Cobb-Douglas): labor and capital. Indeed, Zeira (1998) and Aghion, Jones and Jones (2017) suggested that AI can stimulate growth by replacing labor, which is a limited resource, with capital, an unlimited resource, both for the production of goods, services and ideas.

Our study contributes to the previous literature and presents a descriptive analysis of the impact of AI on technological development, economic growth and employment.

Tabletop ‘pen and paper’ role-play games (TTRPGs) can function as spaces of creative experimentation with gender identity through shared storytelling. The last decade has seen an explosion of Actual Play (AP) shows that broadcast recorded gameplay of TTRPGs to online audiences. Neverafter is the 15th season of well-known AP show Dimension 20 and is a horror-themed re-imagining of classic fairy tales through the rules of Dungeons and Dragons. Four of the six player characters are male, based individually on the fairy tales of Pinocchio, Puss in Boots, the Frog Prince, and a (gender-swapped) Mother Goose, adventuring together in a story-world called ‘The Neverafter’. Not only are these versions of the fairy tale characters shaped by the players' own explorations of identity, but as an AP show, this is also layered with the expectations produced by the show's wide fan base. Their diverse gender explorations and their subversion of fairy tale conventions are enabled by the fluency of the players and audience in freely flowing between the framing perspectives of player and character. This chapter will focus on non-binary player Ally Beardsley's creation and performance of Mother Timothy Goose as a gay, elderly, human man as a particularly meaningful case study. This analysis considers how heroic masculinity is reconceptualised in Neverafter through the horror-themed embodiment of fairy tale men in the context of contemporary gender issues.

This paper compares how the two interacting themes of “Whistleblowing” or “Speaking Up” and the duty of candour (DoC), which are both concerned with safety and quality improvement in health care, got onto the agenda of the British National Health Service (NHS).

It uses the approach of multiple streams and the methodology of interpretive content analysis in a deductive approach that focusses on both manifest and latent content. It examines official documents that discuss the DoC or whistleblowing or cognate terms in connection with the British NHS from 1999 to 2019.

The main conceptual finding, which mirrors many previous studies, is that it seems difficult to operationalise many of the sub-components of the multiple streams approach. The main empirical finding points to the “focusing event” of the Francis Report into the Mid Staffordshire Trust of 2013 and the importance of its Chair, Sir Robert Francis, as a policy entrepreneur.

This is one of the first studies to focus on both issues of whistleblowing and the DoC and the first to compare them through the lens of the multiple streams approach. It has two main conceptual advantages over most previous studies in the field: it compares whistleblowing and the duty of candour rather than the dominant approach of a single case study and explores the different outcomes of failed as well as successful couplings of the streams.

This research paper aimed to investigate the affordances of using virtual reality (VR) in teaching culture among in-service teachers of teaching Persian to speakers of other languages (TPSOL) in Iran.

This qualitative case study, conducted at two Iranian universities, used purposeful sampling to select 34 eligible in-service Persian teachers from a pool of 73. Data collection used an open-ended questionnaire and interviews.

Before the TPSOL in-service training workshop, teachers expressed their reservations regarding the use of VR to teach culture in TPSOL courses. The emerged themes were “skepticism toward effectiveness,” “practicality concerns,” “limited awareness of VR applications,” “technological apprehension” and “prevalence of traditional teaching paradigms.” During the post-workshop interview, it was discovered that the teachers’ perceptions of VR in teaching culture had undergone a positive shift. The workshop generated emergent themes that reflected positive perceptions and affordances for using VR to teach culture in TPSOL, including “enhanced cultural immersion,” “increased student engagement,” “simulation of authentic cultural experiences,” and “facilitation of interactive learning environments.”

One primary limitation is the lack of prior experience with VR for teaching practices in real-world classrooms among the participants. While the study aimed to explore the potential of VR in enhancing pedagogical approaches, the absence of participants with prior exposure to VR in educational contexts may impact the generalizability of the findings to a broader population. Additionally, the study faced practical constraints, such as the unavailability of sufficient facilities in the workshop. As a result, the instructor had to project the VR cont7ent on a monitor, potentially diverging from the immersive nature of true VR experiences. These limitations offer opportunities for future research to refine methodologies and gain a more comprehensive understanding of the implications of integrating VR into teaching practices.

Extensive research has been conducted on the effectiveness of VR in language education. However, there is a significant gap in research on TPSOL, which is considered a less commonly taught language. This study aims to address this gap by exploring the use of VR in the TPSOL through the lenses of in-service teachers. As part of a larger investigation, this qualitative inquiry focuses on the perceptions of in-service teachers about VR, with a particular emphasis on the cultural understanding of the Persian language.

This chapter critically evaluates whether football can attain recognition as a national sport in China. Article No. 11, released by the Chinese government in 2015, aimed to develop a new national strategy centralised on the sport of football to foster consumption and enhance national soft power. Consequently, this also means encouraging Chinese football fans to support the national football team. Comparing the significance of local football clubs and the national football team to Chinese football fans is deemed meaningless and unable to generate useful information to comprehend Chinese people's attitudes towards local and national communities. Through literature comparisons with established Chinese national sports such as Chinese martial arts, badminton and table tennis, the discussion reveals that football currently falls short of meeting the general criteria of invention and popularity to be considered a Chinese national sport. In the specific Chinese context, it also proves that football fails to meet the criterion of politics, hindering its identification as a national sport. Consequently, the chapter rebuts the assumption and advocates for the validity of comparing how fans assess their fandom for local and national football teams.