Richard Adams

Institutional barriers to enterprise support: an empirical study

This paper reports on empirical research amongst clients of the Government Office for the East of England, exploring levels of satisfaction in order to generate, rather than validate, understanding. As the landscape of public enterprise support in Britain changes and new institutions come on stream, this case poses searching questions about the manner in which policy for economic growth can be delivered in the English regions. Efforts to eliminate confusion and incoherence in the support infrastructure appear not to have succeeded. Findings indicate that barriers between policy ambitions and effective take-up by client communities continue to exist. Clients perceive behavioural rigidities as a barrier to the development of the most effective public-private relationships. A sometimes centralist perspective (arguably, the predisposition of the support infrastructure) is in danger of allowing the benefits of support tailored to regional need to be overlooked. The objective is by “constructively discrediting the system” (as Bowen et al suggest) to stimulate useful debate about the way in which the enterprise culture might be supported.

Pre-paradigmatic status of industrial sustainability: a systematic review

This paper seeks to progress Operations Management (OM) theory and practice by organising contributions to knowledge production, in Industrial Sustainability, from disparate researcher communities. It addresses the principal question ‘What scholarly dialogues can be explicated in the emerging research field of Industrial Sustainability?’ and sub-questions (i) what are the descriptive characteristics of the evidence base? and (ii) what thematic lines of scientific inquiry underpin the body of knowledge? Using an evidenced based approach, a Systematic Review of 574 articles from 62 peer-reviewed scientific journals associated with Industrial Sustainability is conducted. This paper distinguishes three prevailing dialogues in the field of Industrial Sustainability, and uses Kuhn’s Theory of Paradigms to propose its pre-paradigmatic scientific status. The three dialogues (i) ‘productivity and innovation’, (ii) ‘corporate citizenship’ and (iii) ‘economic resilience’ are conjectured to privilege efficiency strategies as a mode of incremental reductionism. Industrial Sustainability espouses the grand vision of a generative, restorative and net positive economy, and calls for a future research trajectory to address institutional and systemic issues regarding scaling-up and transition, through transformative strategies. The review is limited by the nature of the inquiries addressed in the literatures by specific researcher communities between 1992 and 2014. This study performs the first systematic review in the field of Industrial Sustainability, synthesises prevailing scholarly dialogues and provides an evaluation of the scientific status of the field.

Blockchain for Good? Digital Ledger Technology and Sustainable Development Goals

Blockchain technology (aka Distributed Ledger Technology or DLT) is a novel configuration of Peer-to-Peer, cryptographic and distributed computing technologies that have the potential to shift the internet from an internet of information to an internet of value network, with significant disruptive potential. To date, the cryptocurrency ‘bitcoin’ is the application of DLT that has attracted most attention, not all of it favourable. However, DLTs are about much more than cryptocurrencies and, as Kranzberg’s (1986) first law of technology, that ‘Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral’ reminds us, we can ethically frame applications of new technologies. To date, research has tended to focus on the technical characteristics of DLTs, and there has been little reflection on potential socially and environmentally beneficial use cases: Blockchain for Good (B4G). The aim of this this exploratory and descriptive paper is to reflect on innovative B4G applications that could help deliver socially and environmentally beneficial outcomes, framed in terms of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, through challenging existing business models and providing new opportunities for value creation.

Data supply chain (DSC): Research synthesis and future directions

In the digital economy, the volume, variety and availability of data produced in myriad forms from a diversity of sources has become an important resource for competitive advantage, innovation opportunity as well as source of new management challenges. Building on the theoretical and empirical foundations of the traditional manufacturing Supply Chain (SC), which describes the flow of physical artefacts as raw materials through to consumption, we propose the Data Supply Chain (DSC) along which data are the primary artefact flowing. The purpose of this paper is to outline the characteristics and bring conceptual distinctiveness to the context around DSC as well as to explore the associated and emergent management challenges and innovation opportunities. To achieve this, we adopt the systematic review methodology drawing on the operations management and supply chain literature and, in particular, taking a framework synthetic approach which allows us to build the DSC concept from the pre-existing SC template. We conclude the paper by developing a set of propositions and outlining an agenda for future research that the DSC concept implies.

A Conceptual Framework for Designing, Embedding and Monitoring a University Sustainability Culture

Universities across the globe are giving increasing priority to the challenges of sustainability, encouraged by a variety of drivers including international and national policy, student and societal pressures. Many extant initiatives focus on a narrow set of activities including curriculum design and operational efficiency, and overlook the importance of cultural change in embedding sustainability. Drawing and building upon previous studies in the cultural change and sustainability literature, the purpose of this article is to propose a conceptual framework for designing interventions and measuring and monitoring progress in building and embedding a university sustainability culture. Our efforts are contextualised in the case of a UK university.