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Prior literature has widely established that the design of storage locations impacts order picking task performance. The purpose of this study is to investigate the performance impact of unit loads, e.g. pallets or rolling cages, utilized by pickers to pack products after picking them from storage locations.

An empirical analysis of archival data on a manual order picking system for deep-freeze products was performed in cooperation with a German brick-and-mortar retailer. The dataset comprises N = 343,259 storage location visits from 17 order pickers. The analysis was also supported by the development and the results of a batch assignment model that takes unit load selection into account.

The analysis reveals that unit load selection affects order picking task performance. Standardized rolling cages can decrease processing time by up to 8.42% compared to standardized isolated rolling boxes used in cold retail supply chains. Potential cost savings originating from optimal batch assignment range from 1.03% to 39.29%, depending on batch characteristics.

This study contributes to the literature on factors impacting order picking task performance, considering the characteristics of unit loads where products are packed on after they have been picked from the storage locations. In addition, it provides potential task performance improvements in cold retail supply chains.

Our prior work has identified a trade-off that new entrants face in obtaining favorable market reception, whereby initial entrants suffer from a deficit of legitimacy whereas later entrants suffer from a deficit of authenticity. This research has also proposed that a single mechanism is responsible for this trade-off: the tendency for customers and other stakeholders to assess the entrant's claim to originality based on the visible work that it has done to legitimate the new product or organizational form. This chapter extends and deepens our understanding of such “legitimation work” by showing how it can illuminate cases that seem in the first instance to defy this trade-off. In particular, we focus on two “off-diagonal” cases: (a) when, as in the case of “patent trolls” and fraudulent innovators, early entrants are viewed as inauthentic despite having a credible claim to originality; (b) when late entrants, as in the case of Dell Computers, mechanical watches and baseball ballparks, are viewed as authentic despite obviously not being the originators. We clarify how each off-diagonal case represents an ‘exception that proves the rule’ whereby audiences attribute authenticity on the basis of legitimation work rather than on the order of entry per se. The last case also leads to an opportunity to clarify why “cultural appropriation” can sometimes project authenticity and sometimes inauthenticity, why audiences bother to make inferences about a producer's authenticity on the basis of visible legitimation work, and why legitimacy is a universal goal of early movers whereas authenticity varies in its importance.

This study is the first that aims to investigate international transmission channels of sovereign risk among G20 and explore its influential factors by applying the multidimensional SAR model.

Multiple spatial weight matrices can capture the contiguity of spatial units from various dimensions, which could be exploited to improve the precision of inference as well as prediction accuracy. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to investigate international transmission channels of sovereign risk among G20 and explore its influential factors by applying the multidimensional SAR model.

With network structure analysis, this study finds that they contain different information content from the perspective of graphical display, node strength and correlation. Developed and emerging countries all play major roles in trade connection, while only developed countries play major roles in financial linkage. Second, by applying the multidimensional SAR model, only the spatial autocorrelation coefficients for trade and financial linkages are significant during the full sample period, which is in sharp contrast to published studies using the SAR model with a single matrix. Third, the spillover channels that play major roles in various periods are different. Only trade channel plays a role during crisis periods and it is the most important. Fourth, the spatial correlation among countries greatly amplifies the shock’s impacts on one market. And spatial effect for developed countries is larger than those for emerging countries, while the mean spatial effect of a unit shock in the USA on emerging countries is slightly greater than that on developed countries.

Multiple spatial weight matrices can capture the contiguity of spatial units from various dimensions, which could be exploited to improve the precision of inference as well as prediction accuracy. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to investigate international transmission channels of sovereign risk among G20 and explore its influential factors by applying the multidimensional SAR model.

The ongoing anthropological transformation urges the rethinking of education, underlining the inadequacy of our schools and universities in dealing with hypercomplexity, that is, with the global extension of all political, social, and cultural processes and with their indeterminacy, interdependence, and interconnection. The idea that educational processes are questions of a purely technical/technological nature, solely a problem of skills and know-how, is the “great mistake” of the hypertechnological society, based on the illusion of being able to measure and quantify everything, to eliminate error and unpredictability, and to achieve total control and rationality. It is necessary to rethink education radically because the extraordinary scientific discoveries and the dynamics of the new technologies have completely overturned the complex interaction between biological and cultural evolution, doing away with the borders between the natural and the artificial. Emergence and emergency themselves are structural features of complex systems (living, social, and human systems), rendered hypercomplex through today’s acceleration and virality, regarding not only education and socialization but also the representations and perceptions of all systemic processes. The merging of fields of knowledge and an epistemology of error become essential for the analysis and interpretation of this hypercomplexity and the unpredictability that distinguishes it.

Waste generated from electrical and electronic equipment, collectively known as E-waste, remains a persistent environmental, economic and social problem. Sustainable E-waste management (EWM) has numerous benefits, such as preventing electronic waste from entering landfills, reducing the need for virgin materials by recovering valuable materials from recycling and lowering greenhouse gas emissions. Circular economy (CE) practices are considered the initial steps toward sustainable EWM, but some hurdles have been reported in the adoption of these practices. Therefore, the current study aims to identify the common CE practices, sustainability of the EWM process and the challenges in EWM, and to develop a conceptual framework for effective EWM.

Very few studies have proposed frameworks that acknowledge the challenges and CE practices of EWM. To fill this gap, a systematic literature review (SLR) was performed, and 169 research articles were explored.

A total of seven challenges in the adoption of effective EWM were identified: rules and policy, infrastructure, consumer behaviour, informal sectors, community culture, technology and economy. Eight common CE practices were also found for effective EWM: reuse, recycle, remanufacturing, refurbishment, repair, reduce, recover and repurpose.

A conceptual framework guiding sustainable EWM was proposed, which includes solutions for the identified challenges, and CE practices with sustainable benefits.

The aim of this chapter is to investigate the immigrant women entrepreneurship phenomenon in Italy by focusing on the Polish experience. Stemming from the most current data on immigration in Italy and on immigrant women entrepreneurs and women-led firms, by analysing the regions in which these firms are grounded and the economic sectors in which they are mostly involved, this chapter presents the research programme the two authors of this book have been involved in over the last year and the first preliminary results. Specifically, the two authors engaged to compare the experiences, difficulties and opportunities of immigrant women entrepreneurs of different ethnicities/communities located in Italy. The final goal is to analyse if and how the socio-cultural background of these women counts, if and how it affects their way of doing business and what is the influence of the socio-cultural Italian context. The first group of immigrant women entrepreneurs that the authors decided to analyse are the Polish. Accordingly, this chapter presents data on Polish women entrepreneurs based in Italy and the results of an interview with an expert on this community.

The authors’ goal is to investigate variations in the writing style of book reviews published on different social reading platforms and referring to books of different genres, which enables acquiring insights into communication strategies adopted by readers to share their reading experiences.

The authors propose a corpus-based study focused on the analysis of A Good Review, a novel corpus of online book reviews written in Italian, posted on Amazon and Goodreads, and covering six literary fiction genres. The authors rely on stylometric analysis to explore the linguistic properties and lexicon of reviews and the authors conducted automatic classification experiments using multiple approaches and feature configurations to predict either the review's platform or the literary genre.

The analysis of user-generated reviews demonstrates that language is a quite variable dimension across reading platforms, but not as much across book genres. The classification experiments revealed that features modelling the syntactic structure of the sentence are reliable proxies for discerning Amazon and Goodreads reviews, whereas lexical information showed a higher predictive role for automatically discriminating the genre.

The high availability of cultural products makes information services necessary to help users navigate these resources and acquire information from unstructured data. This study contributes to a better understanding of the linguistic characteristics of user-generated book reviews, which can support the development of linguistically-informed recommendation services. Additionally, the authors release a novel corpus of online book reviews meant to support the reproducibility and advancements of the research.

This study aims to analyze the short-, medium- and long-term impacts of natural-resources-seeking foreign direct investment (FDI) in the form of foreign multinational enterprise (MNE) land acquisitions on agricultural labor productivity in developing countries. The authors analyze if these land acquisitions disrupt fair and decent rural labor productivity or if the investments provide opportunities for improvement and growth. The influence of different country characteristics, such as economic development levels and governmental protection for the rural population, are acknowledged.

The study analyzes 570 land acquisitions across 90 countries between 2000 and 2015 via a generalized least squares regression. It distinguishes short- and long-term implications and the moderating role of a country’s economic development level and government effectiveness in implementing government protection.

The results suggest that natural resource-seeking FDI harms agricultural labor productivity in the short term. However, this impact turns positive in the long term as labor markets adjust to the initial disruptions that result from land acquisitions. A country’s economic development level mitigates the negative short-term impacts, indicating the possibility of finding alternative job opportunities in economically stronger countries. Government effectiveness does have no influence, presumably as the rural population in which the investment is partaking is in many developing countries, not the focus of governmental protectionism.

The findings provide interesting insights into the impact of MNEs on developing countries and particularly their rural areas that are heavily dependent on natural resources. The authors identify implications on employment opportunities in the agricultural sector in these countries, which are negative in the short term but turn positive in the long term.

Moreover, the findings also have utility for policymakers. The sale of land to foreign MNEs is not a passive process – indeed, developing country governments have an active hand in constructing purchase contracts. Local governments could organize multistakeholder partnerships between MNEs, domestic businesses and communities to promote cooperation for access to technology and innovation and capacity-building to support employment opportunities.

The authors urge MNE managers to establish new partnerships to ease transitions and mitigate the negative impacts of land acquisitions on agricultural employment opportunities in the short term. These partnerships could emphasize worker retraining and skills upgrading for MNE-owned land, developing new financing schemes and sharing of technology and market opportunities for surrounding small-holder farmers (World Bank, 2018). MNE managers could also adopt wildlife-friendly farming and agroecological intensification practices to mitigate the negative impacts on local ecosystems and biodiversity (Tscharntke et al., 2012).

The authors contribute to the debate on the positive and negative impact of FDI on developing countries, particularly considering temporality and the rural environment in which the FDI is partaking.