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Warehouses are under pressure to operate as efficiently as possible. In pursuit of attaining high efficiency in the order picking process, the warehouse manager must take several planning decisions, typically supported by a central planning system. However, highly centralised work erodes the autonomy of warehouse workers, interfering with worker well-being and productivity. This study holistically explores the impact of a work system with more decision autonomy for order pickers.

We conduct a unique field experiment in a real-world warehouse and use a within-subjects design to compare two work systems, one with worker autonomy and one without. 18 permanent employees participate in our study, in which we measure both psychosocial and physical well-being as well as productivity. Post-experimental interviews are conducted to delve deeper into the observed effects.

Our study illustrates that involving order pickers in operational decisions can benefit their job satisfaction and motivation without compromising productivity. Although we fail to find significance at the conventional level (α = 0.05), we do find marginally significant effects of our treatment on physical well-being aspects. Furthermore, our intervention invoked a highly positive user experience.

We show that slightly loosening tight process control results in organisational and individual benefits without endangering smooth operational flows. The warehouse in this paper acknowledged this and decided to permanently work according to this philosophy.

This study is the first to holistically explore the effects of a participatory work setting in a real-world warehouse.

This research investigates how to optimize storage location assignment to decrease the order picking time and the waiting time of orders in the staging area of low-temperature logistics centers, with the goal of reducing food loss caused by temperature abuse.

The authors applied ABC clustering to the products in a simulated database of historical orders modeled after the actual order pattern of a large cold logistics company; then, the authors mined the association rules and calculated the sales volume correlation indices of the ordered products. Finally, the authors generated three different simulated order databases to compare order picking time and waiting time of orders in the staging area under eight different storage location assignment strategies.

All the eight proposed storage location assignment strategies significantly improve the order picking time (by up to 8%) and the waiting time of orders in the staging area (by up to 22%) compared with random placement.

The results of this research are based on a case study and simulated data, which implies that, if the best performing strategies are applied to different environments, the extent of the improvements may vary. Additionally, the authors only considered specific settings in terms of order picker routing, zoning and batching: other settings may lead to different results.

A storage location assignment strategy that adopts dispersion and takes into consideration ABC clustering and shipping frequency provides the best performance in minimizing order picker's travel distance, order picking time, and waiting time of orders in the staging area. Other strategies may be a better fit if the company's objectives differ.

Previous research on optimal storage location assignment rarely considered item association rules based on sales volume correlation. This study combines such rules with several storage planning strategies, ABC clustering, and two warehouse layouts; then, it evaluates their performance compared to the random placement, to find which one minimizes the order picking time and the order waiting time in the staging area, with a 30-min time limit to preserve the integrity of the cold chain. Order picking under these conditions was rarely studied before, because they may be irrelevant when dealing with temperature-insensitive items but become critical in cold warehouses to prevent temperature abuse.

After completion of this case study, students will be able to understand about characteristics of urban poor in the city of Mumbai which will aid in understanding about other emerging markets as well, to apply Health Belief Model to help students analyse behaviour change model, to apply social marketing strategies to popularize a social marketing cause, to learn about non-traditional intermediaries and apply to promote a social marketing cause, to apply Ansoff matrix and evaluate various strategies for growth and to analyse various challenges faced by social entrepreneurs and enable learners to arrive at solutions (applicable for social entrepreneurs and marketing executives).

This case study looked at a Mumbai-based organization, Medow Brite Enterprises, which sold sanitary napkins under the brand FeelOn to women particularly from urban poor background. The protagonist Mrs Ameeta Neel Ramesh was at the helm of the organization and was stuck with a dilemma – whether to enter rural markets or focus on selling incinerators and aid in disposing used sanitary napkins which was adding to the volume of non-biodegradable waste in the city. In 2019, Neel Ramesh made her first investment in Medow Brite. The organization had seen turbulent times during COVID-19 outbreak. However, Neel Ramesh with her astute strategy, helped the company get back on its feet. Medow Brite instead of manufacturing started procuring quality sanitary napkins from specific vendors. In contrast to many other sanitary napkins available in the market, FeelOn had cotton sanitary napkin variant without presence of plastic in the pads. Neel Ramesh had taken a different route for sale of her sanitary napkin, she conducted awareness sessions with the help of non-governmental organizations in various locations of Mumbai as well as Maharashtra. Post these sessions she sold her sanitary napkins among the attendees of the awareness sessions.

The case study can be included in marketing management course, consumer behaviour as well as social marketing courses in both undergraduate level and postgraduate level. In addition, the case study is also suitable for social entrepreneurs and marketing executives to discuss about non-traditional sales and marketing approaches, identifying unique segments and understanding behaviour change theories.

Teaching notes are available for educators only.

CSS 8: Marketing.

The circular economy (CE) is a sustainable economic model that has the potential to create new opportunities, reduce environmental impact and enhance social well-being. Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC), the largest city in Vietnam, has experienced rapid economic growth in recent years, but at the cost of the environment and public health. The city could reduce waste, conserve resources and promote sustainable production and consumption by adopting CE principles. Employing qualitative research, including content analysis, we construct a SWOT analysis to assess HCMC's strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats in the CE context. The city possesses several strengths, such as a vast potential for a CE and a robust economic foundation. However, it also faces multiple weaknesses, including insufficient infrastructure, inadequate citizen and business awareness and participation, ineffective policy enforcement and a deficiency of standards for recycled products. This chapter will conclude that the CE presents an opportunity for HCMC to reduce its dependence on imported raw materials, increase local value creation and create new jobs in the CE sector.

The purpose of this study is to provide a highly efficient method to obtain the kinetics of the hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) on metal electrodes in an alkaline solution and to analyze the effect of thiourea addition on HER under the same cathodic overpotential.

A novel method based on hydrogen permeation tests, potentiodynamic polarization tests and electrochemical impedance spectroscopy was put forward to characterize the HER kinetics on metal electrode.

The study found that adding thiourea accelerated the Volmer, Heyrovsky and Tafel reactions associated with HER. In addition, it reduced the hydrogen surface coverage and increased the hydrogen permeation steady-state current density. As a result, thiourea facilitated HER, promoted the diffusion of hydrogen atoms into iron and reduced the number of hydrogen atoms in the adsorbed state.

This work provides novel insights into the influence of thiourea on HER kinetics, demonstrating that thiourea addition can significantly enhance HER efficiency by altering reaction dynamics and promoting hydrogen atom diffusion into iron. This has implications for hydrogen energy applications, cathodic protection and understanding hydrogen embrittlement mechanisms.

Female smallholder farmers in low-income countries face barriers to accessing capital and commodity markets. While agricultural cooperatives provide services that contribute to the income and productivity of small-scale producers, evidence of cooperatives' social and economic empowerment of female smallholders remains limited. We apply Sen's capability approach to female entrepreneurs' socioeconomic empowerment to examine whether women's participation in a coffee and microfinance cooperative from rural western Uganda benefits their social and economic position within their household. First, we study the relationship between women's cooperative participation and their household coffee sales and savings. Second, we investigate the link between women's cooperative participation and their intra-household decision-making and whether the inclusion of the husband in his wife's cooperative strengthens or lowers women's decision-making power.

We carry out a case study of a hybrid coffee and microfinance cooperative that promotes social innovation through the integration and empowerment of female smallholders in rural Uganda. Using a cross-sectional survey of 411 married female cooperative members from 26 randomly selected self-help groups of Bukonzo Joint Cooperative and 196 female non-members from the identical area, employing propensity score matching, this paper investigates the benefits of women's participation in a coffee and microfinance cooperative in the Rwenzori Mountains of western Uganda. We present and discuss the results of our case study within an extensive literature on the role of institutions in collective action for women's empowerment.

Our findings provide new empirical evidence on female smallholders' participation in mixed cooperatives. Our results indicate that women's participation in microfinance-producer cooperatives appears to be a conditional blessing: even though membership is linked to increased women's intra-household decision-making and raised household savings and income from coffee sales, a wife with a husband in the same cooperative self-help group is associated with diminished women's household decision-making power.

The focus of this study is on female coffee smallholders in an agricultural cooperative in rural western Uganda. In particular, we focus on a case study of one major coffee cooperative. Our cross-sectional survey does not allow us to infer causal interpretations. Also, the survey does not include variables that allow us to measure other dimensions of women's empowerment beyond decision-making over household expenditures and women's financial performance related to savings and income from coffee cultivation.

Our empirical results indicate that female smallholders' cooperative membership is associated with higher incomes and coffee sales. However, husband co-participation in their wives' cooperative group diminishes wives' decision-making, which suggests that including husbands and other family members in the same cooperative group may not be perceived as an attractive route to empowerment for female smallholders. For these reasons, an intervention that encourages the cooperation of both spouses and that is sensitive to context-specific gender inequalities, may be more successful at stimulating social change toward household gender equality than interventions that focus on women's autonomous spheres only.

While the literature thus far has focused on microfinance's potential for women's empowerment, evidence on agricultural cooperatives' affecting women's social and economic position is limited. First, our findings provide novel empirical evidence on the empowering effects of women's participation in a self-help group-based coffee cooperative in rural Uganda. Second, our data allows us to explore the role of husbands' participation in their wives' cooperative and SGH. We embed our hypotheses and empirical results in a rich discussion of female entrepreneurship, microfinance and cooperative literature.

The primary objective of this study was to evaluate the influence of greenery on residential mobility within purpose-built student housing facilities in Northern Ghana.

This research employed a structured questionnaire and utilized an experimental block design, encompassing 124 comparative greened and non-greened student housing facilities, with a total of 995 resident participants. The impact of greenery on residential mobility was analyzed using a repeated sales model and t-test analysis.

Results revealed that residential mobility was significantly higher in non-greened student housing facilities than their greened counterparts. The study further indicated that the presence of greenery had a substantial effect on residential mobility, attributed to residents' preferences for the ecological, social and economic benefits associated with greenery, rather than merely infrastructure considerations.

Enhancing the aesthetic appeal, economic viability, safety, security and health benefits of greened student housing facilities while managing the influence of greenery on infrastructure was found to affect residential mobility. The findings suggest that improving occupancy rates in these facilities through the incorporation of greenery could yield higher rental income and better cash flows for investors involved in student housing operations.

This study highlights the ecological, social and economic advantages of greenery for residents. While the benefits of greenery in residential contexts are increasingly recognized, the specific impact of greenery on residential mobility within the Sub-Saharan African context represents a novel contribution. The application of neighborhood effects theory to the examination of greenery benefits and residential mobility in this region adds a new dimension to existing research.

Artificial intelligence (AI) technologies have led to significant transformations across industries and society, including the field of education. The integration of AI in educational settings has the potential to improve students' learning experience and support their individual competencies when paired with non-AI methods. Despite the growing importance of AI in modern education, there remains a noticeable research gap regarding its use in entrepreneurship education and the effects of Chatbots on students' entrepreneurial competencies. To address this gap, an exploratory study was conducted on undergraduate students who were tasked with using ChatGPT to improve their business model canvas.

The chosen methodology aligned with the research purpose, aiming to explore the relationship between Generative AI and competencies. Due to the novel nature of the research problem, an exploratory study was conducted using a mixed methods approach. A survey with open- and closed-ended questions was designed, and statistical and text analyses were performed to interpret data and test identified propositions.

The findings of this study indicate that ChatGPT can enhance the types of students' entrepreneurial competencies considered in this study: spotting opportunities, creativity, vision, valuing ideas and ethical and sustainable thinking. The results show that ChatGPT can be particularly helpful to improve the ability of students of valuing ideas.

Overall, this study highlights the potential of adopting ChatGPT in experiential learning methodologies for enhancing students' entrepreneurial competencies and improving their learning outcomes.

This paper aims to explore the accelerations and constraints libraries, archives, museums and heritage organisations (“collections-holding organisations”) face in their role as collection data providers for digital infrastructures. To date, digital infrastructures operate within the cultural heritage domain typically as data aggregation platforms, such as Europeana or Art UK.

Semi-structured interviews with 18 individuals in 8 UK collections-holding organisations and 2 international aggregators.

Discussions about digital infrastructure development often lay great emphasis on questions and problems that are technical and legal in nature. As important as technical and legal matters are, more latent, yet potent challenges exist too. Though less discussed in the literature, collections-holding organisations' capacity to participate in digital infrastructures is dependent on a complex interplay of funding allocation across the sector, divergent traditions of collection description and disciplinaries’ idiosyncrasies. Accordingly, we call for better social-cultural and trans-sectoral (collections-holding organisations, universities and technological providers) understandings of collection data infrastructure development.

The authors recommend developing more understanding of the social-cultural aspects (e.g. disciplinary conventions) and their impact on collection data dissemination. More studies on the impact and opportunities of unified collections for different audiences and collections-holding organisations themselves are required too.

Sustainable financial investment across the heritage sector is required to address the discrepancies between different organisation types in their capacity to deliver collection data. Smaller organisations play a vital role in diversifying the (digital) historical canon, but they often struggle to digitise collections and bring catalogues online in the first place. In addition, investment in existing infrastructures for collection data dissemination and unification is necessary, instead of creating new platforms, with various levels of uptake and longevity. Ongoing investments in collections curation and high-quality cataloguing are prerequisites for a sustainable heritage sector and collection data infrastructures. Investments in the sustainability of infrastructures are not a replacement for research and vice versa.

The authors recommend establishing networks where collections-holding organisations, technology providers and users can communicate their experiences and needs in an ongoing way and influence policy.

To date, the research focus on developing collection data infrastructures has tended to be on the drive to adopt specific technological solutions and copyright licensing practices. This paper offers a critical and holistic analysis of the dispersed experience of collections-holding organisations in their role as data providers for digital infrastructures. The paper contributes to the emerging understanding of the latent factors that make infrastructural endeavours in the heritage sector complex undertakings.

Online grocery service (OGS) has significantly grown in recent years, particularly during the Covid-19 pandemic. This surge has attracted significant scholarly attention and resulted in many scientific articles in the last five years. Adopting a bibliometric review approach, this study attempts to comprehensively and systematically analyse the academic literature on OGS.

A Scopus search using pertinent keywords followed by PRISMA screening identified 384 relevant articles. Articles were analysed using VOSviewer and Biblioshiny, which employed citation and thematic analysis.

The study identifies the significantly impactful authors, articles, and journals. While the analysis reveals the evolution across four time-frames, it also highlights the clusters representing the literature strands. Six major themes are identified in the literature, and potential future research enquiries are suggested.

As the first study to include over 350 articles, it comprehensively represents the current state of the OGS literature, utilising performance and thematic analysis techniques. The article contributes significantly to the academic discourse surrounding OGS by synthesising and presenting diverse themes. Further, the future research questions provide a foundation for advancing the literature and guiding future scholarly work in the OGS domain.