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The purpose of this paper is to show the benefits of bridging the gap between supply chain management (SCM) and political philosophy to challenge the underlying assumptions about SCM concepts and open doors to novel theory building.

A thought experiment is conducted to illustrate how the two philosophers Niccolò Machiavelli and Jürgen Habermas would tackle sustainability issues in coffee supply chains from a research perspective. The thought experiment is carried out using data from 30 semi-structured interviews with actors from the coffee industry. Supplementing the thought experiment with empirical insights allows for a deeper understanding of supply chain dynamics and how these are impacted by the application of the philosophical viewpoints.

The research stresses the importance of SCM scholars being aware of the underlying assumptions of their research, as these have a remarkable impact on theory building. A combination of empirical insights and philosophical understandings makes it possible to reflect on the underlying concepts of SCM, providing suggestions for reimagining SCM.

The contribution of the research is twofold. First, the paper presents an original view on SCM, as the thought experiment is introduced as an approach to better understand SCM concepts. By challenging the underlying assumptions with political philosophy, researchers will be better equipped to address grand challenges in the twenty-first century. Second, this is exemplified by the case study of the coffee supply chain, which provides the reader with insight into the dynamics of supply chains with prevalent power differences.

Industrial experiments have shown an unprecedented success for improving the product and process quality in many manufacturing organisations. This paper provides some useful and practical tips to industrial engineers with limited knowledge in experimental design (ED) for making industrial experiments successful in their own organisations. ED is a powerful tool which can be used to achieve breakthrough improvements in product quality and process effectiveness. The purpose of the paper is to stimulate the engineering community to start applying ED for tackling quality control problems in key processes they are dealing with everyday.

Prison populations in the United States have increased in every year since 1973 – during depressions and in times of economic growth, with rising and falling crime rates, and in times of war and peace. Accomplishing this historically unprecedented penal pattern has required a serious policy agenda that has remained focused on punishment as a goal for more than a generation. This paper seeks to understand that policy orientation from the framework of a social experiment. It explores the following questions: how does the penal experiment – which we have called the Punishment Imperative – compare to other “grand” social experiments? What were its assumptions? What forms did the experiment take? What lessons can be learned from it? What is the future of the grand social experiment in mass incarceration?

This paper examines binding multi-round commitments (MRCs) to the group account in a repeated voluntary contributions mechanism (VCM) game. Before each five-round interval, subjects in a four-person group are given the option to commit a portion of their endowments to the group account for each of the next five rounds. Decision rounds proceed, with each subject's commitment acting as the binding minimum of his group-account allocation for each round. The opportunity to make MRCs does not increase mean allocations to the group account relative to a control treatment. However, commitments do have implications for reciprocal behavior within groups, leading to higher outcome variances across groups in the MRCs treatment.

This chapter suggests that welfare management is becoming a matter of being able to use the open space in between formal roles, silos and organisations to actualise a not yet possible, qualitatively better welfare here and now. The discourse about the open-ended and futuristic space in between is challenging practices of welfare education. A growing field of studies is criticising the centres of education, learning and research for being a McDonald’s culture, with an overly linear approach, unable to connect passion, sensitivity and intuition with knowledge. This chapter goes further than criticising existing practices. Building on notions of affective studies, the aim is to experiment on how to shift the focus from thinking about open spaces to intensifying thinking-spaces, able to generate the processual relations increasing the opportunity for a qualitative better welfare to occur here and now.

The object of the chapter is an experiment entitled The Future Public Leadership Education Now. It is based on non-representational studies and designed to operate on the affective registers.

The chapter offers a theoretical and pragmatic wandering as wondering. It continues and expands the experiment as an ongoing thinking-spaces moving between the known and the unknown. It aims at gently opening the opportunity for a qualitatively better welfare to occur.

Researchers become welfare artists intensifying affective co-motions as ongoing and form-shifting processes.

The results of standard lab experiments have long been questioned because of the convenience samples of subjects they typically employ and the abstract nature of the lab settings. These two characteristics of experimental economics, it is argued, are the key factors that endanger the external validity of experiments.

Researchers have tried to address these issues by bringing the lab to non-traditional subjects including participants in remote locations, and/or by moving the setting of experiments closer to reality by using real goods and/or settings that are not stripped of context.

While field experiments might help experimental economists to increase the external validity of their investigations, these potential benefits might come at costs that can be considerable. Specifically, going into the field can dramatically increase the demands on, and challenges to, experimental control. This is particularly true for experiments in small-scale societies in remote locations on which I focus in this article.

A review of the first year physics laboratory program in 1991 at the University of Technology, Sydney (UTS) revealed that student laboratory experiences did not: resemble the practice of physicists; give a realistic picture of the contribution of physics to everyday life, or; enhance students’ capabilities of broad value, such as their communication skills. Physics academics at UTS committed themselves to reforming students’ laboratory experiences with inquiry-oriented learning as a center-piece of the reform. This chapter explores the drivers that led to the reconceptualization of the role of the laboratory in the undergraduate curriculum and the strategies and processes we adopted over more than 20 years to embed inquiry-oriented activities into first year physics laboratory programs.

If we are to examine the role of “controls” in different experimental settings, it is appropriate that the word be defined carefully. The Oxford English Dictionary (Second Edition) defines the verb “control” in the following manner: “To exercise restraint or direction upon the free action of; to hold sway over, exercise power or authority over; to dominate, command.” So the word means something more active and interventionist than is suggested by it’s colloquial clinical usage. Control can include such mundane things as ensuring sterile equipment in a chemistry lab, to restrain the free flow of germs and unwanted particles that might contaminate some test.

This chapter examines the external validity of lab experiments on corruption by evaluating the extent to which experimental results are robust to the degree of field context included in the experimental design. To do so, we follow Harrison and List (2004) and partition corruption experiments into four classes depending on their field context. A comparison of the results obtained within each class reveals that similar treatment effects tend to emerge. Although a definitive answer to the external validity question has yet to be provided, these preliminary results provide some support to the external validity of lab experiments on corruption.

Purpose – What role did economic experiments play in creating value in the commercial market for wireless Internet access? Rosenberg (1992, p. 181) defines such experiments broadly, “to include experimentation with new forms of economic organization as well as the better-known historical experiments that have been responsible for new products and new manufacturing technologies.”

Design/methodology/approach – The chapter provides an overview of the experience of a number of firms, focusing on the period between the late 1990s and early part of the 21st century, when the technology first blossomed in commercial markets. The chapter uses the experience of Lucent and Intel as primary illustrations of key concepts, and the chapter discusses how the framework generalizes beyond the experience of these two firms.

Findings – The distinction between directed and undirected experiments helps understand events in the evolution of Wi-Fi's value. They also bring new perspective to an extensive debate in communications policy about the best way to assign and allocate spectrum, focusing on the importance of the regulatory decision to provide space in which experiments can take place.

Originality/value – This framework has value for business history of the commercial Internet. This lens stresses the importance of preserving discretion to move business away from applications with low value, namely, away from allocations that used a conceptualization of the technology founded on a poor-use case, which later lessons showed had lower value than alternatives.