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Socially responsible investing (SRI) funds depart from mainstream finance by incorporating environmental, social, and governance considerations, but their success varies across regions. By using a historical comparative case design, we identify an empirically puzzling phenomenon in China: despite an initially favorable resource environment and the presence of socially skilled institutional entrepreneurs, SRI wanes over time in Hong Kong but survives in Mainland China where initial resource endowments and actors’ social skills were inferior. By comparing four periods of SRI development, we reveal how state sustainable development policies, a change in the institutional context, led unintentionally to a shared orientation and a public pool of resources, which sustained the SRI niche. Our paper contributes to research on market emergence, institutional change, and cultural entrepreneurship.

Recent empirical and theoretical developments related to the microprocesses of institutional logics have helped to cultivate a powerful theory of agency. We build on these developments to show how the institutional logics perspective can shed light on important questions related to frame construction and how institutions matter. In particular, we show how the emergence of an economic democracy frame in post-war Sweden generated different efforts to define that frame with concrete ideas and practices linked to different logics – socialism and neoliberalism. We show how socialists tried to define economic democracy as requiring a radical transformation in the nature of ownership and control embedded in the innovative financial practice of wage earner’s funds. In contradistinction, conservatives drew on neoliberal ideas and extant mutual fund practices to construct alternative meanings and practices related to economic democracy that enrolled citizens in Capitalism without challenging extant Capitalist ownership structures. While mutual funds and wage earner’s funds initially existed in a state of parabiosis – existing side by side without much interrelationship – struggles over the meaning of economic democracy led these practices to become competing solutions in a framing contest. Implications for the study of institutional logics, frames and the social organization of society are discussed.

The purpose of this study is to develop a robotic hand–arm system for on-orbit servicing missions at the Tiangong-2 (TG-2) Space Laboratory.

The hand–arm system is mainly composed of a lightweight arm, a dexterous hand, an electrical cabinet, a global camera, a hand–eye camera and some human–machine interfaces. The 6-DOF lightweight arm and the 15-DOF dexterous hand adopt the modular design philosophy that greatly reduces the design cycle and cost. To reduce the computational burden on the central controller and simplify system maintenance, an electrical system which has a hierarchical structure is introduced.

The prototypical operating experiments completed in TG-2 space laboratory demonstrate the performance of the hand–arm system and lay foundations for the future applications of space manipulators.

The main contributions of this paper are as follows a robotic hand–arm system which can perform on-orbit servicing missions such as grasping the electric drill, screwing the bolt, unscrewing J599 electrical connector has been developed; a variable time step motion plan method is proposed to adjust the trajectories of the lightweight arm to reduce or eliminate the collision force; and a dexterous hand uses the coordinated grasp control based on the object Cartesian stiffness to realize stable grasp. To solve the kinematic mapping from the cyber glove commands to the dexterous hand, a fingertip-position-based method is proposed to acquire precise solutions.

The purpose of this paper to present a practical and systematic approach to estimate the availability of a process plant using generalized stochastic Petri nets (GSPNs). The actual live problem at a fluid catalytic cracking unit (FCCU) of a refinery is used to demonstrate this approach.

A majority of models used for estimation of availability of a complex system are based on the assumptions that the failure of the system is associated with only a few states, and the system does not face different operating conditions, repair actions and common-cause failures. In reality, this is often not the case. Therefore, it is necessary to construct more sophisticated models without such assumptions. In this paper, an attempt has been made to model interaction of component failures, partial failures of components and common-cause failures.

The superiority of this approach over other modeling approaches such as fault tree and Markov analysis is demonstrated. The proposed GSPN is a promising tool that can be conveniently used to model and analyze any complex systems.

GSPN was used to model the reactor-regenerator section of FCCU, which is quite a large system, which shows the strength of modeling capability. The use of Petri nets (PNs) for modeling complex systems for the purpose of availability assessment is demonstrated in this paper. Sensitivity analysis was also carried out for various subsystem/components.

No similar work has been conducted for FCCU using GSPN as per literature incorporating different operating conditions and common-cause failures. The understanding and usage of PNs require a steep learning curve for the practitioners, and this paper provides an approach to estimate availability measures for the complex system.