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A deteriorating security situation and an increased need for defence equipment calls for new forms of collaboration between Armed Forces and the defence industry. This paper aims to investigate the ways in which the accelerating demand for increased security of supply of equipment and supplies to the Armed Forces requires adaptability in the procurement process that is governed by laws on public procurement (PP).

This paper is based on a review of current literature as well as empirical data obtained through interviews with representatives from the Swedish Defence Materiel Administration and the Swedish defence industry.

Collaboration with the globalized defence industry requires new approaches, where the PP rules make procurement of a safe supply of defence equipment difficult.

The study's empirical data and findings are based on the Swedish context. In order to draw more general conclusions in a defence context, the study should be expanded to cover more nations.

The findings will enable the defence industry and the procurement authorizations to better understand the requirements of Armed Forces, and how to cooperate under applicable legal and regulatory requirements.

The paper extends the extant body of academic knowledge of the security of supply into the defence sector. It serves as a first step towards articulating a call for new approaches to collaboration in defence supply chains.

The Agriculture Improvement Act of 2018 directed the US Secretary of Agriculture to report on the profitability and viability of beginning farmers and ranchers. Many beginning operations use local food markets as they provide more control, or a premium over commodity prices, and beginning operations cannot yet take advantage of economies of scale and subsequently have higher costs of production. Little research assesses the relationship between beginning farmer profitability and sales through local food markets. In this paper, the profitability implications of sales through local food markets for beginning farmers and ranchers are explored.

The authors utilize 2013–2016 USDA agricultural resource management survey data to assess the financial performance of US beginning farmers and ranchers who generate sales through local food markets.

The results point to four important takeaways to support beginning operations. (1) Local food channels can be viable marketing opportunities for beginning operations. (2) There are differences when using short- and long-term financial performance indicators, which may indicate that there is benefit to promoting lean management strategies to support beginning operations. (3) Beginning operations with intermediated local food sales, on average, perform better than those operations with direct-to-consumer sales. (4) Diversification across local food market channel types does not appear to be an indicator of improved financial performance.

This article is the first to focus on the relationship beginning local food sales and beginning farmer financial performance. It incorporates short-term and long-term measures of financial performance and differentiates sales by four local food market type classifications: direct-to-consumer sales at farmers markets, other direct-to-consumer sales, direct-to-retail sales and direct-to-regional distributor or institution sales.

More and more workers in Western economies are operating as freelancers in the so-called “gig economy”, moving from one project – or gig – to the next. A lively debate revolves around the question as to whether this new employment relationship is actually good for innovation in the 21 st century economy. Proponents argue that in this gig process valuable knowledge is created and transferred from one organization to the next via freelancers through their sequence of temporary gigs or projects. Antagonists reason that freelancers are only hired as one-trick ponies on a transactional basis, where knowledge is neither created nor shared. In this study, we focus on the characteristics of gigs. Which project characteristics lead to increased engagement of freelancers, and hence to knowledge-sharing behavior? Our study suggests that the gig economy can indeed lead to increased knowledge sharing by and engagement of freelance workers, provided that organizations and freelancers structure and shape gigs in such a way that they: (1) not only suit the task requirements at hand and (2) fit with the acquired skills of the freelancer, but that these gigs also (3) leave ample of room for the freelancer’s individual growth and development of new skills. This suggests that innovative organizations will need to shape gigs in such a way that freelancers are not only hired for their expertise, but rather that gigs also provide a learning opportunity for freelancers.

The Arab world is made up of 22 countries in the Middle East and North Africa. These countries are subjected to many social, economic, political and geographical vulnerabilities contributing to increased risks or ineffective emergency and disaster management. This paper examines these vulnerabilities, how they may impact the country's ability to face disasters, and how they can improve disasters' overall management.

The author selected Qatar, Oman to represent the Arab oil-rich countries, while Jordan, Egypt and Morocco to represent non-oil rich countries. The research was conducted in a qualitative, inductive systematic literature review based on a well-established systematic literature review methodology. Selected literature was based on its recency and the countries in question.

The review reveals population gaps that could threaten the social system in the event of a disaster in countries like Qatar and Oman. The majority of the countries lack community engagement and pre-planning for emergency preparedness due to social and cultural barriers. Other nations like Jordan, Egypt and Morocco are prone to long-lasting economic challenges due to lack of resources, mismanagement or corruption. The paper also highlights the need to raise the educational attainment among citizens to understand disaster risk reduction.

This study utilized the research method developed by Williams et al. (2017) to present a comprehensive systematic and comparative review of disaster management in the Arab world. Considering that disaster and emergency management has remained disproportionately unexplored in the Arab world, this paper reviewed several vulnerabilities and how those vulnerabilities may affect disaster and emergency management efforts in the Arab countries.

This paper aims to explore to what extent can the Saudi–US alliance endure, given the several challenges it has faced over the past decade. Using a conceptual framework from the alliance theory, the paper will trace the historical evolution of the alliance between the two countries, then will identify some of the challenges that have faced the alliance on both the regional and bilateral levels, and finally will assess the impact of these challenges on the resilience of the Saudi–US alliance.

This paper will use the alliance theory literature to analyze the challenges and the resilience of the Saudi–US relations.

The Saudi–US alliance has encountered several challenges in the past decade such as the Arab spring, the Iranian nuclear deal and the Civil War in Syria and Yemen. However, this alliance proved to be resilient, and the strategic partnership between the two countries managed to overcome these challenges.

The importance of this paper stems from the fact that the USA and the Saudi Arabia are two pivotal countries, and their relationship affects regional and international dynamics. The paper contributes to the literature on the Saudi–US bilateral relations as well as their views on recent regional issues such as the Arab Spring, the civil war in Yemen and Syria. Assessing the limits and potentials of the alliance between the two countries could also help us understand the future of regional developments in the Middle East.

This study aims to deepen the understanding of the challenges and implications entailed by deploying mobile clinics in conflict zones to reach populations affected by violence and cut off from health-care services.

This research combines an integrated literature review and an instrumental case study. The literature review comprises two targeted reviews to provide insights: one on conflict zones and one on mobile clinics. The case study describes the process and challenges faced throughout a mobile clinic deployment during and after the Iraq War. The data was gathered using mixed methods over a two-year period (2017–2018).

Armed conflicts directly impact the populations’ health and access to health care. Mobile clinic deployments are often used and recommended to provide health-care access to vulnerable populations cut off from health-care services. However, there is a dearth of peer-reviewed literature documenting decision support tools for mobile clinic deployments.

This study highlights the gaps in the literature and provides direction for future research to support the development of valuable insights and decision support tools for practitioners.

The study aims to provide a critical review of the extent to which digital technologies are likely to replace human labour, the exponential rise in the amount of work to be done and how far distinctively human skills are future-proofed and therefore likely to be in short supply. It reviews the evidence for a permanent switch to home and remote working enabled by emerging technologies. It assesses the business, digital and labour strategies of work organisations and the promise and challenges from a dominant trend towards a digitally enabled flexible labour model.

A critical review of 1020 plus case studies and the extant literature was carried out.

The relationship between emerging technologies and work is widely misunderstood, and there are major qualifiers to the idea of an overwhelming tsunami of technology drastically reducing headcounts globally. Distinctive human skills remain valuable, the amount of work to be done is increasing exponentially and automation is becoming more a coping than a labour replacement mechanism. Moves to a hybrid digitalised flexible labour model are promising but not if short-term, and if the challenges they represent are not managed well.

The main limitation is that we are making projections into the future, though we are drawing on a lot of different sources and evidence and past data projected into the future.

The problem is not labour displacement but large skills shortages that will slow down the speed of technology adoption. Skills development is vital, as is the taking of long-term perspectives towards the management of hybrid, flexible working based on human-machine interactions.

Organisations need to revitalise their training and development and labour management models. Governments and intermediary institutions need to manage transition states if the skills required to gain economic growth are to be available, and to ensure that large labour pools do not get bypassed from not having requisite skills.

The study offers a more subtle and complex perspective on the emerging evidence about the future of technology and work.

Historically, academia, typically universities have had two major groups of professionals. One is those who are responsible for teaching and research, including university professors, associate professors, researchers, research assistants, etc. The other is the administrative staff who are responsible for administrative tasks. Both groups have existed since the inception of a university.

As societal expectations of universities have evolved, so has the need for professionals with advanced skills, who are often referred to as Research Managers and Administrators (RMAs) or University Research Administrators (URAs). In Japan, the profession is called URA because it was modelled after the American system in the beginning of its formation. In India, on the other hand, it is often referred to as RMA because of its reference to the United Kingdom. In this chapter, we will use the term RMA as a consistent term. In Asia, the trend of increasing need for this profession has been increasing over the past decade, starting around the 2010s.

This section provides an overview of the history and background that resulted in the current situation surrounding RMAs, as well as a future prospect in the six Asian countries featured in this book: China, India, Japan, Malaysia, Singapore, and Vietnam.

Trade relations between China and the USA have been marked by conflict, especially since China’s membership in the World Trade Organization (WTO). These conflicts have been analyzed from a variety of perspectives, including the loss of jobs in the USA due to Chinese imports, competition in high technology sectors and the balance of trade. Conceptual frameworks have employed models of domestic differences as well as models of international power distribution. Among domestic differences examined are the existence of state-owned enterprises in China compared to the domination of the USA economy by private firms, the large role of the Communist Party in China and the influence of labor and environmental and labor groups in the USA. Power distribution theories focus on the systemic effects of the distribution of power on trade openness and on the pattern of intra-bloc versus between-bloc trade. This paper aims to examine the role of macroeconomic policy factors in China and the USA, in particular, the role of national patterns of savings, investment and consumption (both private and government). The paper concludes that insofar as the balance of trade is an important component of the trade conflict, domestic macroeconomic factors continue to be important. The resolution of the conflict will have to take into account the respective macroeconomic policies of China and the USA.

The design is an analytic case study of US–China trade relations with a particular focus on the balance of trade. The conceptual framework employed involves an analysis of macroeconomic policy categories, especially the overall pattern of savings (household, firm and government), investment and consumption. Process tracing over time since China's membership in the WTO is carried out with an eye toward the relationship between the balance of trade and macroeconomic policy.

The main findings are that there is a strong relation between the respective macroeconomic policies of the USA and China and their trade relations. The domestic political economy of the USA encourages consumption and a low rate of savings. The opposite is true of China where household income is low by design and national savings are high. China depends on the USA to consume what is not consumed domestically. The USA depends on Chinese imports for additional consumption encouraged by its low rate of savings. The two economies are locked in a mutual dependence.

Key research implications are that there should be more focus on domestic macroeconomic policies since these are the root causes of the trade imbalance. This is not to say that trade frictions centering on jobs, subsidies and competition in high technology are unimportant. However, without the resolution of differences in the management of macroeconomic policies, trade conflicts between the USA and China will continue.

Practical implications are huge, in some ways much more important than the academic implications. Macroeconomic policy differences in savings, investment, government spending, taxation and infrastructure are important. Furthermore, there are available tools in both China and the USA to manage the macroeconomy, particularly, monetary and fiscal policy.

One implication of this paper is that satisfaction or dissatisfaction of workers is dependent on income distribution which in turn affects trade. Treatment of people in different socioeconomic categories, such as the elderly, the young, and those at working age are a function of macroeconomic policies.

Many people have written about macroeconomics. It is a conventional subfield of economics. The originality of this paper lies in its advocacy of a shift of focus and attention and in the argument that traditional macroeconomics is related to trade. Despite its importance, macroeconomics has not been the center of attention for most political scientists, though economists have made it more central.