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In late 2015, the El Nĩno phenomenon induced Vietnam’s worst drought in 60 years, which lasted until mid-2016 and intensified the most expansive saline intrusion in 90 years. The combination of the two hazards resulted in a large-scale disaster, which has led 18 provinces of Vietnam, most of them from the Mekong Delta, to water shortage, insanitation, human and animal diseases, food emergency need and a considerable disruption in local communities’ livelihoods. These devastating effects raise the question of what makes local households vulnerable to drought and saline intrusion. The chapter argues that vulnerability to the natural disaster is not something resulted from external threats, but rather, is derived from the interplay between social structures residing deeply inside the socio-economic systems and agency’s conditions presenting at the household level. Social structures are rules and procedures that constrain and/or enable human actions in agricultural production, risk taking and adaptation. Agency refers to the capacities of disaster-affected households in the Vietnamese Mekong Delta who cultivated third rice crop and suffered heavily from the 2015–2016 disaster. In addition to households’ lack of planning and coping capacities, the constitution of vulnerability to drought and saline intrusion can be attributed to the interaction between farmers’ choice of extra rice crops and the state’s policies and directions in agricultural and irrigation development since 1990s to date.

Salinity is one of the major problems in the coastal region of Bangladesh that contributes to 20% of the total land area. About 53% of the coastal region is affected by different degrees of salinity. Salinity intrusion in this area is mainly derived through climate change as well as anthropogenic factors that make this region more vulnerable. Hence, salinity intrusion has adverse effects on water, soils, agriculture, fisheries, ecosystem, and livelihoods of this region. To ensure the availability of food as well as drinking water, this chapter highlights how individual and community people have endeavored several adaptation measures to minimize salinity effects. Moreover, it further discloses governmental and other development organizations’ actions toward salinity to reduce its impacts.

Assuming that organizations are open and have increasingly permeable boundaries, one risks overlooking the strategies employed by organizations to defend their own logics and routines, as illustrated by the example of the implementation of active labor market policies. It is often assumed that only open, networked organizations can fulfill the demand of offering individualized employment and social services to citizens. On the basis of an in-depth case study, we show how a jobcenter organization dealt with these challenges by developing its own decision-making criteria on a procedural, structural, and personal dimension. This implies not only cognitive openness but also operational closure and increased internal “requisite variety,” in the language of systems theory.

Organizational studies fail to examine organizations in terms of the several environments in which they operate, both internally and externally. That is, studies tend to focus on climate, or time, or trust, or leadership. This chapter builds on academic research that discusses organizational environments in ways that show all of these environments are important for organizational understanding, especially for organizational leadership. In particular, this chapter offers a paradigm of understanding organizational leadership realities through multi-level understanding of the organizational environments of climate, knowledge, ethnos, and time.

The chapter first discusses five enviroscapes – climate, knowledge, ethos, time, and leadership. Each of these enviroscapes has two phenotypes – business and commerce. Each of these enviroscapes, with its concomitant phenotypes, is used differently at multiple levels of management and leadership by senior managers, middle managers, and entry-level managers. The scope of organizational reach, in terms of global, regional, and local levels of analysis, provides additional context for the use of enviroscapes. After a review of the theoretical bases for each enviroscape, the chapter applies appropriate theory and models to an extended time case study of land purchase in Indonesia.

In Japan, since an outbreak of mass food poisoning in 2000, consumer interest in food safety and security has increased, focusing on activities such as Chisan-Chishō (Local Production, Local Consumption), Slow Food, and LOHAS. Activities related to food safety and security in Japan have a strong local character, are moving toward industrialization, are not bound by tradition, and can be said to be activities in pursuit of alternative forms of consumption and development. In Japan, most supporters of Slow Food, LOHAS, and Chisan-Chishō have been women. In societies where production is important, consumption has been entrusted to women. Therefore, activities related to food safety and security are tied to social reform with women in central roles. Receiving social recognition, these activities develop business opportunities, move toward globalized industrialization, and, in a gendered society centered on men, become activities with men in central positions. Gender in the area of food does not allow women to take part in production and distribution and is moving to exclude women. To secure women's position in food, it is necessary to industrialize according to women's ways such as maintaining the viewpoint of living nature, mutual support, collective leadership, and networking.

The contamination of groundwater by natural arsenic is currently a worldwide epidemic. Arsenic-contaminated groundwater has been reported in Argentina, Chile, Mexico, China, Hungary, West Bengal in India, Bangladesh, and Vietnam. Of these regions, Bangladesh and West Bengal are the most seriously affected in terms of the size of the population at risk and magnitude of health problems. Hence, chronic exposure to arsenic >50′′μg/L in drinking water can result in serious health problems. Common symptoms of arsenic-related ailments are skin, cardiovascular, renal, hematological, and respiratory disorders. Therefore, this chapter focuses on nature, origin, and extent of groundwater arsenic contamination, probable causes, and its impacts on food, drinking water, and social coverage. It further discloses mitigation approaches proposed and practiced by the different research groups to combat this problem and finally concludes.

This research attempts to examine the co-creation process involving Chiayi City International Band Festival (CIBF). It deploys a questionnaire survey which assesses the level of activity involvement, preference to local products, and place attachment. The questionnaire is pretested, which utilizes college students as the samples to screen the clarity of wordings covered in the questionnaire and the reliability of the study scales. Subsequently, 342 festivity attendees, who are not local residents, are invited to participate in the survey. Structural equational modeling is used to test the study hypotheses. The results show a mediating effect of co-creation between activity involvement and place attachment.

Many people as well as the government in Bangladesh perceive floods and cyclones as recurrent environmental hazards in the country. They also view that these two hazards are the main contributors to crop loss in the country. But, in reality, droughts afflict the country at least as frequently as do major floods and cyclones, averaging about once in 2.5 years (Adnan, 1993, p. 1; Erickson, 1993, p. 5; Hossain 1990, p. 33). In some years, droughts not only cause a greater damage to crops than floods or cyclones, but they also generally affect more farmers across a wider area (Paul, 1995). If not institutionally and economically tackled, the consequences tend to have a far-reaching effect on the given society, and the socioeconomic problems would assume a chronic pattern.

We examine the construction of “empty categories” – that is, categories created prior to the existence of producers and consumers – and their implications for industry emergence. Drawing on the case of the ji-biru category among Japanese microbreweries, we exemplify how external actors – including governments, the media, consultants, and other entities – frequently create empty categories that are “legitimate yet not legitimated” (Vergne & Wry, 2014). We show how such empty categories generate lower entry barriers, resulting in higher founding rates and significant innovation. We highlight how empty categories impede evolutionary forces by inhibiting shared understandings of what constitutes a legitimate category member.

The fact that the world is becoming increasingly urbanized is recognized by the United Nations (UNFPA, 2007) in the State of the World Population Report as the “The Urban Millennium.” In year 1950, 30% of the world's population lived in cities and as of recently, the population has reached up to 50%, making year 2007 a turning point in the history of urban population growth (Bigio, 2003; Kreimer, Arnold, & Caitlin, 2003; UN-HABITAT, 2007). By year 2030, the United Nations expects more than 60% of population to be living in cities (Munich Re, 2005). And as shown by Surjan and Shaw (2009), by year 2050, the world's urban population is expected to grow by 3 billion people. Most of this growth will take place in developing countries, with the urban population in cities and towns doubling. As it has been summarized, from 1991 to 2005, more than 3.5 billion people were affected by disasters; more than 950,000 people have taken their lives unwillingly and damages have reached nearly 1,193 billion US dollars. Developing countries will suffer the most from climate change, since they are disproportionally affected and have intrinsic vulnerabilities to hazards and so far have struggled in increasing the capacity for risk reduction measures (Wahlström, 2009). Nevertheless, by contrast, even in the largest and wealthiest countries, which have diversified economies and risk transfer mechanisms, the loss has topped an amount of billions of US dollars, as was the case with Hurricane Katrina in USA in 2005. It has been confirmed with facts over the last two decades (1988–2007) that 76% of all disaster events were hydrological, meteorological, or climatological in nature, whether it occurred in urban or in rural areas.