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This paper aims to explore how regional organizations manage its affairs, peace-building and economic development focussing on a crucial analytical dimension: the link between global order, regional integration and multi-culturally diverse stakeholders.

This conceptual paper focusses on the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) by grounding the arguments based on the conceptualization of regional integration and “stakeholder management”. It offers an exploration of concepts of the “new global order”, “multilateralism”, “institutions”, effective stakeholder collaboration and cross-cultural management.

Defined in terms of EU-style institutionalization’ ECOWAS is one of the modes of regionalism classified as failed. The organization has struggled with the member-states internal crisis, inter-state border crisis, a growing army of unemployed youths, high political-instability, militant terrorism, cybersecurity and farmers-herders conflict. Also, it has a poor implementation of treaties and poor cultural communications.

Besides contributing to the emerging interest in the understanding of how regional organizations improve organizational efficiency, this study develops an interest in stakeholder management from the perspective of political, economic and peace-building organizations with different national, cultural and political experiences.

The learning outcomes are as follows: to describe the possible problems in cross hierarchical and cross-functional coordination; to illustrate the month/year-end closing operations related issues at logistics and warehousing end; to analyze the importance of supply chain resilience/ contingency plan; and to compare the role of the tradeoff in decision-making: ethics (policies) vs operations.

Mr Azhar Ali working as a regional distribution manager was waiting for the finalization of sales orders, it was the last working day of the financial year. He had to fulfill all the orders to achieve his personal and organizational goals. He was excited as he was supposed to be promoted and transferred to Head Office on a national role, after a successful annual closing. It was not too late when his excitement turned into anxiety when he received a never expected direct call from Director Sales. Around 7:00 p.m., he was informed of some new orders for an important institutional customer, which was out of his own region. The orders were placed in Ali’s region because of stocks’ availability. Ali had no time to plan this huge order and there were no dispatch trucks available at that time. Should Ali take risk of organizational goals and his promotion and cancel those orders? Should Ali generate sales invoices to record sales and dispatch the stocks on next day compromising the organizational core values and policies?

BBA.

Teaching Notes are available for educators only.

CSS 9: Operations and logistics.

This chapter does three things. First, it estimates regional gross domestic product (GDP) for three different geographical levels in Switzerland (97 micro regions, 16 labor market basins, and 3 large regions). Second, it analyzes the evolution of regional inequality relying on a heuristic model inspired by Williamson (1965), which features an initial growth impulse in one or several core regions and subsequent diffusion. Third, it uses index number theory to decompose regional inequality into three different effects: sectoral structure, productivity, and comparative advantage.

The results can be summarized as follows: As a consequence of the existence of multiple core regions, Swiss regional inequality has been comparatively low at higher geographical levels. Spatial diffusion of economic growth occurred across different parts of the country and within different labor market regions. This resulted in a bell-shaped evolution of regional inequality at the micro regional level and convergence at higher geographical levels. In early and in late stages of the development process, productivity differentials were the main drivers of inequality, whereas economic structure was determinant between 1888 and 1941. The poorest regions suffered from comparative disadvantage, that is, they were specialized in the vary sector (agriculture), where their relative productivity was comparatively lowest.

The purpose of this paper is to develop a new building typology for: the estimation of heat demand of urban agglomerations; and the assessment of the environmental impact linked to urban re-development policies.

In order to: capture regional differences of urban areas; and describe individual building components of neighbourhoods, the author proposes the construction of a new building typology based upon a regional material catalog (Klauß et al. 2009a).

The main findings of this analysis are primarily on method. The author presents a method to estimate the building shell from available information on the digital cadastre and the first attempt to link material databases with a ranking algorithm. The analysis application presented in this paper shows that the embodied energy on insulation materials and the corresponding energetic payback time depends on the “real” building shell, making it important to accurately compute this value.

Results from this analysis present an heat demand urban model able to capture: regional differences, thanks to the use of the regional material catalog, local characteristics of the building stock, thanks to the detailed information of the digital cadastre, and ability to link building stock models with rich Live Cycle Inventory (LCI) databases for the explicit consideration of the embodied energy of retrofit measures. Further applications of the developed method could be used to assess new urban development plans of the city as well as financial incentives packages for building retrofits.

This analysis shows the first step towards the development of a new building typology constructed upon a regional material catalog. This innovation allows taking regional differences into account. Because the author uses a detailed catalog of building components, an accounting of embodied energy by linking data of a LCI database is possible. In this paper the author presents an application of the enriched data set, the presented example shows the needed embodied energy by adding an extra layer to the predefined building components of selected buildings of the digital cadastre.

The purpose of this paper is to identify regional foods and analyze its use on school menus of a Brazilian city, as well as the respect to symbolic and cultural aspects related to it.

The study was conducted in two stages. In the first stage, regional foods were identified through interviews with key school meal and city agents. In the second stage, the inclusion of these foods in school menus from 2009 to 2013 was assessed.

In total, 142 regional foods were identified and classified into four groups. This classification resulted in a decision tree model to identify regional foods. Approximately 45 percent of regional preparations and 82.5 percent of regional foods were offered totaling 455 preparations and 977 foods analyzed. However, 31 percent of the regional foods identified in Stage 1 were not offered in the menus analyzed. Various regional preparations lost their authenticity, possibly not being recognized because of a lack of traditional ingredients or because they contained non-regional foods that changed their character.

The results mainly point to symbolic aspects of the production and consumption of regional foods and preparations that are important to promoting healthy diets. In addition, they can support public policies that promote the use of these foods in the school environment.

This study analyzes the inclusion of regional foods in school meals--a topic rarely explored in the scientific literature – and proposes a decision tree model to identify regional foods with methodological rigor. This model can assist school food managers in including regional foods and developing studies related to this topic.

This paper examines the issue of core competency from the perspective of economic regionalization. It utilizes the concept of strategic geography and the studies focusing on regional integration in order to interlink with the concept of corporate regiocentric orientation. It is within this framework that the concept of core competency is discussed. Of particular concern is the question as to how the regional element creates opportunities and imposes challenges on the ability to extend, renew and customize core competencies.

Aims to provide new practical viewpoints regarding the knowledge management and leadership theory of project management through an in‐depth case study

Argues that community leaders can develop a concept of a business community comprised of diverse types of business and processes to achieve business innovation. Studies a regional initiative in Japan towards electronic networking that illustrates the use of information and multimedia technologies as an instance of the latest business case of strategic community management.

Community leaders serve an important function in creating networked strategic communities. The case study shows how community leaders have created networked strategic communities in which the central government, regional governments, universities, hospitals, private businesses and non‐profit organizations take part in the advancement of regional electronic networking.

Provides new practical viewpoints regarding the knowledge management and leadership theory of project management.

Against the backdrop of recent developments in multimedia and information technology (IT), video‐based information networks being constructed on a platform chiefly composed of the two core technologies of video terminals and ISDN are gaining worldwide recognition through the deployment of videophones, videoconferencing systems, and digital network ISDN technology. New forms of virtual community based on interactive, virtual communication continue to be fashioned, particularly in relation to the promotion of IT in regions of Japan. This paper points out that in the future, video‐based information networks will be an important platform for creating new regional‐level virtual communities to further regional invigoration.

Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) is a much discussed topic, but remains widely misunderstood. In this article David Palmer clarifies the current significance and future direction of EDI.