Search results

We adopt a super slack-based measurement (SBM) data envelopment analysis (DEA) model to estimate the efficiency of five biggest freight rail operators in Russia, which are included in the top 30 freight rail operators in terms of two dimensions – financial and operational efficiency during 2013–2017. The result shows that the private companies characterized by high financial and operational efficiency, while the Rossiiskye Zheleznye Dorogi (RZD) subsidiaries characterized by sufficiently low financial and operational efficiency scores. And the result also presents that operational efficiency score of operators handling universal rolling stock is higher than financial efficiency scores. In contrast, financial efficiency scores of operators handling special rolling stock is higher than operational efficiency scores. rail freight operators in addition to a special rolling stock park should have a universal rolling stock park for higher profitability. State-owned companies and its subsidiary operate inefficiently in the midst of a market economy in Russia. Rail freight operators for a higher level of financial efficiency should be transferred to the private sector.

The aim of this paper is to show current position of domestic airports and provide an improvement scheme through the comparative analysis of efficiency and social efficiency. We used SBM (Slack Based Measure) for efficiency and undesirable output model that is extended from SBM for social efficiency. In addition, window analysis is used for analyzing the trend of the values. For the scope of this study, we analyzed fourteen airports in Korea from 2004 to 2009. In the models, we considered the length of runway, the number of employees and terminal area as input factors, and the number of passengers, the amount of cargo and the number of flights as desirable outputs and directly controllable CO2 emissions from airports as undesirable output. The results show that all of the efficiencies are higher than the social efficiencies and both of them are decreasing by years. To improve social efficiency in 2009, the average amounts of reduced CO2 emissions which account for 48.3% of the total emissions are required.

Previous literature on sustainable supply chain management has largely adopted an instrumental view of stakeholder management and has focused on understanding the effect of powerful stakeholders who have a more decisive influence on an organization's supply chain decisions. Social enterprises have emerged as organizations that often aim to create impact by integrating marginalized stakeholders into their operations and supply chains. This study examines the trade-offs that social enterprises experience due to their moral stance toward stakeholder engagement, evidenced in their commitment to serving marginalized stakeholders, as well as the responses adopted to these trade-offs.

The study follows a theory elaboration approach through a multiple case study design. The authors draw on insights from stakeholder theory and use the empirical insights to expand current constructs and relationships in a novel empirical context. Based on an in-depth analysis of primary and secondary qualitative data on ten social enterprises, the authors examine how these organizations integrate marginalized stakeholders into various roles in their operations.

When integrating marginalized customers, suppliers and employees, social enterprises face affordability, reliability and efficiency trade-offs. Each trade-off represents conflicts between the organization's needs and the needs of marginalized stakeholders. In response to these trade-offs, social enterprises choose to internalize the costs through slack creation or vertical integration or externalize the costs to stakeholders. The ability to externalize is contingent on the growth orientation of the organization and the presence of like-minded B2B (Business-to-Business) customers. These responses reflect whether organizations accept the trade-offs at the expense of one or more stakeholders or if they avoid the trade-offs and find mutually beneficial solutions.

Building on the empirical insights, the authors elaborate on stakeholder theory with a focus on the integration of marginalized stakeholders by emphasizing a moral justification for stakeholder engagement, identifying the nature of the underlying trade-offs which can arise when various stakeholder needs are in conflict and examining the contingencies affecting organizational responses to these trade-offs.

Diagnosing pain in neonates is difficult but critical. Although approximately thirty manual pain instruments have been developed for neonatal pain diagnosis, most are complex, multifactorial, and geared toward research. The goals of this work are twofold: 1) to develop a new video dataset for automatic neonatal pain detection called iCOPEvid (infant Classification Of Pain Expressions videos), and 2) to present a classification system that sets a challenging comparison performance on this dataset. The iCOPEvid dataset contains 234 videos of 49 neonates experiencing a set of noxious stimuli, a period of rest, and an acute pain stimulus. From these videos 20 s segments are extracted and grouped into two classes: pain (49) and nopain (185), with the nopain video segments handpicked to produce a highly challenging dataset. An ensemble of twelve global and local descriptors with a Bag-of-Features approach is utilized to improve the performance of some new descriptors based on Gaussian of Local Descriptors (GOLD). The basic classifier used in the ensembles is the Support Vector Machine, and decisions are combined by sum rule. These results are compared with standard methods, some deep learning approaches, and 185 human assessments. Our best machine learning methods are shown to outperform the human judges.

This paper inspects in detail the seasonality (deterministic) in container freight rates, and compares seasonality patterns in different freight rate indices. A deterministic seasonality unit root test is performed to achieve set objectives. This study concludes that all the indices (tested in this paper) exhibit significant deterministic seasonality. For January and August, there is no seasonal effect observed in all five series. At the same time, all the indices except Exports from Europe Rate Index (EEI) exhibit significant seasonal patterns in February, September, and December. All five indices exhibit significant seasonality during May, and the coefficient sign shows a drop in the freight rates. During March, October, and November; it is observed that only EEI exhibit significant seasonal patterns. The results could be beneficial for carriers and agents who are involved in the containerised freight transport business. Also, shippers could get a clear idea about the freight rates' nature across various trade routes.

This paper is an empirical attempt to verify the interplay between political change, fleet nationality, and the evolution of shipping networks. North Korea offers a good example of a socialist maritime country that has experienced much contrasting geopolitical contexts since 1990. A database of vessel movements between North Korean ports and other ports is analyzed. Main results show differences between North Korean and foreign fleets in terms of traffic (vessel size, age, berthing time) and geographical coverage. South Korean ports tend to play a new role in the reorganization of North Korean-related flows in Northeast Asia.

Toyota's internationally coordinated production system in Asia and its selection of supply bases in South America and South Africa highlights the significance of recognizing global network firms and the global hub-and-spoke logistics system that has been developed to meet their needs. This system underpins the expansion of container shipping, air freight and telecommunications. Recognition of Main Street, linking Europe, Asia and North America with cui-desacs in Africa, Australasia and Central and South America, provides a framework for examining the relative importance of the system's hubs and terminals across different modes and regions. This analysis provides the basis for identifying and ranking key regional logistics platforms in Northeast Asia and their attraction as headquarter sites for global network firms. Examining the logistical situation pertaining after the end of the Cold War in the early 1990s and a decade later is used to gauge progress towards regional economic integration in Northeast Asia.

The purpose of this paper is to ease the methodological application of critical realist multilevel research in business marketing. Although there has been plenty of theoretical contributions in this field, it is not always clear how critical realism can be best applied in business marketing settings. Accordingly, this paper addresses this gap in literature. Also, this paper addresses the calls for a multilevel conceptualization for resilience, based on the critical realist laminated systems.

This is a conceptual paper, which uses pre-existing literature to develop a critical realist methodological approach for the purposes of multilevel business marketing research. The contribution is based on literature by combining pre-existing ideas in a new way in the context of business marketing.

This paper makes a methodological contribution by introducing the critical realist “laminated systems” to business marketing as a multilevel research approach. Furthermore, the authors conceptualize a specific laminated model, the Laminated Interactional Model (LIM), that is designed for the purpose of business marketing research. The LIM is a methodological tool that conceptualizes business marketing based on six levels of analysis, easing the methodological application of critical realism in business marketing settings. In addition, to provide an example, the authors apply the LIM to the literature on resilience, providing a multilevel conceptualization. This is a timely contribution, as resilience has emerged as a central concept addressing interorganizational survival during the COVID-19 pandemic.

This paper makes three main contributions to business marketing. First, this paper provides a methodological contribution by introducing the critical realist notion of “laminated systems” to business marketing. Second, this paper conceptualizes a specific laminated model for business marketing, namely, the LIM. Third, as a response to the COVID-19 pandemic, this paper will apply critical realism and the LIM to the notion of resilience, addressing the calls for multilevel conceptualizations.

The growth of China’s economy during the 1990s has both shaped and reflected changes in the span and function of the country’s shipping connections both within Asia and with the rest of the world. Although sea-land developments within China have been studied, less attention has been paid to the wider global implications stemming from the transformation of the country’s maritime geography during a decade of further market reforms and greater integration into the world economy. Consequently, there is a need to comprehend how China’s state-owned shipping industry has been reorganized during the 1990s to meet the new requirements, with special reference to the country’s liner shipping connections between and within Asia respectively. More purposely, these topics are addressed by examining changes in the organization, approach and set of connections of the state-owned China Ocean Shipping (Group) Company (Cosco) and its post-1993 offshoot COSCO Container Lines Company Ltd (Coscon). This review provides a springboard for a detailed analysis of shifts in both extra- and intra-Asian shipping patterns between 1990 and 2000 and consideration of their strategic implications. Finally, short-sea shipping is defined and the phenomenon’s operational strengths and weaknesses discussed.