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In accordance with Latour, this paper aims to respond to the call for a “down-to-earth” post-learning organization approach to sustainability, which is critical of Senge’s conception of learning organization (LO).

“Gaia storytelling” is used to define a LO that is “down-to-earth”.

Gaia is understood through the notion of a critical zone, which foregrounds the local and differentiated terrestrial conditions in which life on Earth is embedded.

Gaia storytelling implies perceiving LO as a network of storytelling practices enacted and told by unique creative citizens. Such an organization sustains and grows through several entangled storytelling cycles that allow Gaia to shape learning.

The article distinguishes five different storytelling cycles as a way to explore how the Gaia theater cycle connects to other cycles. The four other cycles are: Gaia thinking, explorative, creative and Gaia truth-telling.

A Gaian LO is a new beginning for LO.

The organization of events in public spaces in the cities of Oporto, Vila Nova de Gaia (both in Portugal), and Barcelona (Spain) led us to propose a classification of thematic cities. The conclusions are the result of social representations of organizers and sponsors in the three cities and, thus, it is a qualitative study carried out in research Ph.D. in Sociology at the Faculty of Letters of the University of Oporto. We propose the presentation of some events organized in three public spaces – Aliados Avenue in Oporto, Cais de Gaia’s waterfront in Vila Nova de Gaia, and Ramblas in Barcelona – to make its framing in terms of objectives, motivations, and public. We also appealed to the social representations of interviewees to evaluate the quality and structure of public spaces in the two cities in the metropolitan area of Oporto in comparison with the Catalan city. Finally, we propose the typification of the three cities according to the features presented throughout the chapter.

This chapter examines the benefits of being sustainable for a company’s business operations and its corporate brand. In the current business world, companies are required to act in a way that will not harm the environment in which they operate, both from a social and economic, as well as ecological, perspective. Being sustainable is, thus, an essential aspect for developing a positive brand image. The chapter overviews various theoretical stances on the issue of sustainability, as well as highlights the importance of applying sustainable thinking in a company’s business strategy and communicating sustainability-driven practices for development of a sustainable brand. By providing results from an interview with Gaia, the largest consultancy for sustainable business in Finland, the chapter offers several practical insights concerning the advantages of acting in a sustainable manner for both business operations, in general, and branding, in particular.

In spinning industries, selection of the most appropriate fibre for yarn manufacturing plays an important role for achieving an optimal mix of several yarn characteristics, like maximum tenacity, elasticity and spinning ability; and minimum unevenness and hairiness. Identification of the best suited cotton fibre from a set of available alternatives in presence of different conflicting physical properties is often treated as a multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) problem. The paper aims to discuss this issue.

In this paper, the preference ranking organisation method for enrichment of evaluations (PROMETHEE) and geometrical analysis for interactive aid (GAIA) methods are integrated to solve a cotton fibre selection problem. The PROMETHEE II method ranks the alternative cotton fibres based on their net outranking flows, whereas GAIA acts as a visual aid to strongly support the derived selection decision. The weight stability intervals for all the considered fibre properties (criteria) over which the position of the top-ranked cotton fibre remains unchanged are also determined.

The clusters of cotton fibres formed in the developed GAIA plane act as a yard stick for their appropriate grading to aid the blending process. The ranking of 17 cotton fibres as achieved applying the combined PROMETHEE-GAIA approach highly corroborates with the observations of the past researchers which proves its immense potentiality and applicability in solving fibre selection problems.

Two MCDM methods in the form of PROMETHEE II and GAIA are integrated to provide a holistic approach for cotton fibre grading and selection while taking into consideration all the available cotton fibre properties.

Most of the proposed decision aid methods provide the user only with a prescriptive approach (quantitative analysis) without any descriptive approach (qualitative analysis). It is therefore not possible to justify and recommend ways of improvement. The purpose of this paper is to introduce visualization techniques to complement prescriptive approaches.

Visual techniques have been developed for the FlowSort sorting method, namely the FS‐GAIA and stacked bar diagrams.

It is found that with visual techniques, fine details can be captured, e.g. detection of incomparability (with FS‐GAIA) and the composition of a score (with stacked bar diagrams).

In the future, it is expected that other multi‐criteria decision methods will be complemented by prescriptive approaches.

A real case study is introduced in order to illustrate the practicality of the visual techniques. In this paper, the innovation performances of small and medium enterprises from the French Lorraine region are assessed.

It is expected that the quality of the decisions taken are improved because of being better informed.

The paper, using a real case study, provides important new tools to enhance decision quality.

The purpose of this article is to present an alternative theory to why publicly‐traded physician practice management companies in the US were popular and successful for a limited number of years and then essentially self‐destructed.

The short history of publicly‐traded practice management companies suggests that they had limited value and utility in the US healthcare industry. It is the premise of the paper that the sudden appearance these for‐profit companies upset the natural order within the healthcare industry and created a disequilibria which ultimately resulted in their demise. While Gaia theory is most commonly applied to the natural sciences, it has been applied to a number of interdisciplinary issues.

Physicians gravitated to these for‐profit companies either out of fear of encroaching managed care or out a desire to sell their practice to the highest bidder. Physician practice management companies, on the other hand, saw a way to entice stockholders to invest in a growth industry. The paper suggests that the physician practice management companies added little new value to the health care industry and applies Gaia theory as a possible explanation for this phenomena. Gaia theory was first postulated in 1979 to address the evolution of the material environment and corresponding organisms as a tightly coupled system which attempt to manipulate the environment for the purpose of creating biologically favorable conditions.

The paper is one of the first to suggest that the laws of nature, as understood from the perspective of Gaia theory, may have applicability to the US health care industry.

A road network provides arterial arrangement to facilitate business, transport, social integration and economic progress of any nation. During the last seven decades after independence, road transport infrastructure in India has expanded manifold, both in terms of spread (total length and density of road) and capacity (number of on-road registered vehicles, and volume of passenger and freight traffic handled). But, with the enrichment of road transport network in India, the number of traffic accidents and total cost for maintaining the road infrastructure also keeps on increasing. It becomes necessary to evaluate state-wise performance of the Indian roads using some mathematical tools. The paper aims to discuss this issue.

In this paper, using preference ranking organization method for enrichment of evaluations (PROMETHEE) and geometrical analysis for interactive aid (GAIA) approaches, an attempt is made to appraise the state-wise performance of Indian roads based on 12 critically important criteria. A geographic information system method and a hue-saturation-value color coding scheme are also employed to identify the influence of individual criterion on the overall rank of 29 Indian states.

It is observed that amongst all the considered states, the road conditions in the states of Mizoram and Arunachal Pradesh are really satisfactory, whereas Bihar and Uttar Pradesh are the lagging states requiring governmental intervention and support to enhance their road network infrastructure.

This analysis would help the decision makers to identify the strengths and deficiencies of each Indian state with respect to its road conditions so that proper promotional and growth actions can be implemented.

From the review of the existing literature, it is quite evident that till date, no research work has been conducted in order to evaluate the performance of roads, and their conditions and characteristic features in the Indian context. In this paper, the state-wise performance of the Indian roads is appraised based on several identified parameters using a combined PROMETHEE-GAIA approach.

The purpose of this paper is thus to develop a hybrid decision-making model for optimal coal blending strategy. Coal is one of the major resources contributing to generation of electricity and anthropogenic carbon-dioxide emission. Being formed from dead plant matter, it undergoes a series of morphological changes from peat to lignite, and finally to anthracite. Because of non-uniform distribution of coal over the whole earth and continuous variation in its compositions, coals mined from different parts of the world have widely varying properties. Hence, it requires an ideal blending strategy such that the coking coal having the optimal combination of all of its properties can be used for maximum benefit to the steel making process.

In this paper, a multi-criteria decision-making approach is proposed while integrating preference ranking organization method for enrichment of evaluations (PROMETHEE II and V) and geometrical analysis for interactive aid (GAIA) method to aid in formulating an optimal coal blending strategy. The optimal decision is arrived at while taking into account some practical implications associated with blending of coal, such as coal price from different reserves.

Different grades of coal are ranked from the best to the worst to find out the composition of constituent coals in the final blending process. Coals from the mines of two different geographical regions are considered here so as to prove the applicability of the proposed model. Adoption of this hybrid decision-making model would subsequently improve the performance of coal after blending and help in addressing some sustainability issues, like less pollution.

As this model takes into account the purchase price of coals from different reserves, it is always expected to provide more realistic solutions. Thus, it would be beneficial to deploy this decision-making model to different blending optimization problems in other spheres of a manufacturing industry. This model can further accommodate some more realistic criteria, such as availability of coal in different reserves as a topic of future research work.

The purpose of this paper is to present the development of a multi‐agent system (MAS) used to simulate a crisis response organization.

Following an agent‐based approach, the model is developed using the GAIA methodology and implemented in the Java Agent Development framework.

The GAIA methodology can be combined with an additional GAIA2JADE process to bridge the gap between design and implementation. Keeping the MAS organization separate from the crisis scenario model enables testing different configurations of the crisis response organization in different scenarios.

The simulation model is provided as proof of concept along with preliminary experiments. Additional detailed experiments and validation are ongoing.

The model can be configured differently to deal with an emergency scenario developed separately, providing a test bed for simulating coordination in crisis response. Such simulation forms the basis for exploring different coordination mechanisms and can also be adapted and extended for training and decision support.

The characteristics of the response organization and the study of structured vs emergent coordination fit with the capabilities and nature of a MAS. The structure and process are useful for modelling similar ad hoc, multidisciplinary organizations.