Sally Randles

Aviation, consumption and the climate change debate: ‘Are you going to tell me off for flying?’

‘Are you going to tell me off for flying?’ This question was asked three times by a lady in South Manchester, England, when we asked her to participate in our qualitative in-home study on flying. She asked it once when we approached her in the street to ask if we may interview her. She asked again when we phoned to confirm the time and address of the interview, and she asked it a third time while serving tea and biscuits at the beginning of the interview. Needless to say we had given absolutely no indication that the interview would pass ‘judgment’ on her flying activities. The lady had undertaken six return trips by air for leisure in the previous year, and in the final section of the interview commented ‘I will have a conscience, but I wont not fly to Miami…’. As this one example shows, the frequent flying/environmental impact question is currently a hot topic. It brings forth a cocktail of rich unprompted discussion and a mixed bag of responses, it has become emotionally charged and polemic. Accounts and justifications concerning frequent flying range from surprise that a taken-for-granted everyday activity which until very recently had been considered a culturally desirable thing to do, has suddenly become frowned upon; to a sense of almost guilty pleasure, apology and, at its extremes, defiance. What the significance and explanation for this might be in sociological terms is the focus of this paper. The answers are important, in particular for policy stakeholders seeking to curb consumption behaviours as one of a portfolio of emissions reduction strategies. It is to the policy audience that this paper primarily speaks. It also provides a quite different – out of the box – insight and contribution to the aviation and emissions debate, which complements the more ‘supply side’ technology and research and development focused papers which dominate the aviation and emissions-reduction literature currently.

Industrial ecology and spaces of innovation

Part I: Introduction Part II: Industrial Ecology: Techniques and Cases Part III: Innovation Systems: Perspectives on Transformations and Variety Part IV: Consumption and Intermediation Part V: Governance and Values Part VI: Conclusion.

Converging technologies at the nanoscale: The making of a new world?

The design of artefacts commonly involves the convergence of many technologies and this remains true for artefacts being created at the nanoscale. However, since 2000 the phrase ‘converging technologies’ has acquired a special interpretation related to the convergence of nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology and cognitive science (acronym NBIC) for the improvement of ‘human performance’, raising the visibility of what has colloquially been called ‘nanotechnology’. Exaggerated forecasts soon followed for the value of innovatory markets for nano-artefacts or artefacts highly dependent on the various emergent nanoscale technologies. Many of these activities have resulted from a creative collision between chemistry and biology, and engineering and physics, especially where the latter have been related to micromechanical devices and electronics. The outcome has been rising expectations that the field, now designated as converging technologies, may be the beginnings of a ‘new world’ within a notional time horizon of 2030. The paper considers the possibility, feasibility and desirability of nanoscale artefacts (nano-artefacts) in contributing to a ‘new world’. By distinguishing between nano-artefacts and nanotechnology, some of the more unrealistic expectations surrounding the possibilities can be discouraged, facilitating investment decisions by business and informed debate by stakeholders regarding the future development and diffusion of nano-artefacts. The paper concludes that nano-artefacts are likely to have pervasive, radical effects by 2030, particularly in the fields that underpin life on the planet, including energy and food and the possibility of improving human performance. However, the effects are unlikely to be on the scale seen in the industrial revolution.

Complex Systems and the Merger Process

This paper considers how some of the generic principles that have emerged in the course of recent study and thinking around complex systems might be applied in a helpful way to the particular context of understanding the nature of the merger process. Theoretically, the paper stresses the connections between the processual and time-dependent nature of learning and knowledge acquisition and the systemic nature of socio-economic development and transformation. When carried into the substantive domain of mergers and their contribution to restructuring in the pharmaceuticals industry, we suggest that the complex systems approach provides a fruitful complement to alternative conceptual frameworks, albeit one which is still at an early stage of development in terms of this particular application.

Issues for a Neo-Polanyian Research Agenda in Economic Sociology

Kari Polanyi Levitt has commented that her fathers writing was met with a deafening silence in England, a silence which she suggests is yet to be explained. Given The Great Transformation was purpose fully , situated in England Polanyi Levitts point is an interesting one, and one which still deserves attention. But the last two decades have witnessed an intensification of interest in Karl Polanyis methodological approach and theoretical insights, from England as well as elsewhere, and representing a range of disciplines. This raises a string of associated questions: interest from who? Why now? And how? Further we could ask: Does this new interest have the potential to redress the Polanyi Levitt charge without falling prey to an opposite one of misusing or abusing the Polanyi legacy? This paper contributes to the much larger agenda of examining in a serious way the usefulness and applicability of Polanyis key ideas and methods, particularly as they apply to the burgeoning interest in markets and exchange within New Economic Sociology (NES) . A sub-set of this agenda is to explore whether Polanyian insights provide a more nuanced and critical understanding of competitive processes and innovation than is currently available within Economics, Sociology or indeed Economic Sociology.

Theorising the Normative Business Model

We begin with a critique of the ontological underpinnings of the mainstream business model literature with its origins in design-science and offer instead insights from sociology and organisational institutionalism to argue for a more accurate representation of actual processes of organisational transformation, especially necessary where scholarship is concerned to address societal mission-oriented normative cares beyond the objectives of efficiency and profit maximisation. We propose the foundations of a new theoretical construct: the Normative Business Model (NBM) distinguishing deep institutionalisation as the embedding of values (normative orientations) into the design, practices and identity of organisations. The NBM comprises four cornerstones: (a) normativity, (b) (de)institutionalisation and deep institutionalisation processes, (c) institutional entrepreneurialism and (d) economic and financial governance. A case overview of Arizona State University is used to highlight that the NBM refers to the full range and variety of organisation types, not exclusively businesses.

‘Scale’ and the Instituted Construction of the Urban: Contrasting the Cases of Manchester and Lyon

This paper combines recent advances which appreciate the ontological intricacies of scale; with the (re)turn of institutional perspectives on social and economic life and its governance. The authors use these perspectives to understand better questions of contingency, difference, and indeed convergence when comparing the historical process of scale construction and political governance (both institution building and image/narrative building) in two European cities. The paper thus reveals contrasting scalar strategies of interurban competition in two city case studies. The authors first outline the main theoretical and conceptual developments in the now burgeoning literature on scale, adding that in their opinion the perpetual construction and reconstruction of scale is not only an example of socially instituted process, but also one of constructed variety. The authors go on to propose a musical metaphor—a keyboard of scale—to capture the properties of simultaneity, elasticity, and multiplicity in scale construction, and use this metaphor to frame the discussion of the two cases. The authors conclude that when comparing cities—indeed all superficially commensurable territorial units—we must be sensitive to the specificity of scale construction in each and every instance. For example, the cases reported here demonstrate that a range of meanings shelter under the umbrella of the ‘urban’. Moreover, these meanings are reconstituted and reconfigured through history.

Aviation, emissions and the climate change debate

These are turbulent times for the aviation industry. Previously proudly bearing the mantle of nation-state icon by, and within, countries across the world (though arguably exemplified and exaggerated in Britain), we see everywhere the legacy of something which is symbolic, but also very real, tangible and present still: national pride. Perhaps reaching its zenith in the 1960s, we can see its traces throughout the industry and in the history books (Hudson 1972). We find it also across all the different ‘classes of agent’ which comprise the aviation sector – aircraft and components manufacturers, airline and airport operators, and air traffic controllers – such that it significantly contributes to a collective aviation psyche. For manufacturers, we see it in state-of-the-art aerospace engineering. For airlines: in the plane-tail livery of ‘national flagships’; for airports: in airy chandelier bedecked terminals; for pilots and crew: in passengers moving aside as smartly uniformed teams hurry by: hats and stripes, high heeled shoes, identical overnight trolleys: peacocks of national brands. What we might call the ‘clip-clop factor’. In sum it is captured in a word: status. Such symbols are important for underpinning a sense of collective self-identity and professional self-worth (Abbott 1988), yet gradually at first, and in recent years at an alarming, even accelerated rate, the basis of these iconic symbols have been undermined and challenged. The aftermath of the 9/11 attacks brought heightened security at airports and with it understandably longer, more rigorous, and unfortunately de-personalising security procedures and a newly anxious flying public. The ‘low cost’ or as we prefer ‘high volume’ business model changes the flying experience – more people equates to more crowded terminals, longer check-in queues and quicker flight turnarounds – into a discernibly different ‘service’ with corresponding shifts in service levels throughout the sector. This includes drastic changes to the working terms and conditions of aircrews. Into this mix we add the two latest and arguably most striking factors in terms of their structural significance for the sector as a whole:

Multiscalar landscapes: transnational corporations, business ethics and industrial ecology

This article connects Industrial Ecology (IE) to two literatures which the discipline has, to date, ignored. The first is the human geography literature on scale. I argue that IE suffers something of a blind spot when it comes to appreciating the ontology of multiscalar landscapes. Following the geographers I argue for re-thinking scale as comprising multiple, overlapping socio-political constructions. The second literature is the equally burgeoning one on business ethics. Combining insights from these sources an attempt is made to discern which scales are involved in the formation of business ethics and good practice environmental behaviour, illustrated here with reference to the transnational cement group, Holcim. I propose an analytical framework which brings scale, ethics, and industrial ecology together and suggest that absence/presence of scalar alignment may explain why many evaluations of local industrial symbiosis projects find in practice that success is elusive, patchy and difficult to sustain, but that on the contrary in some cases positive outcomes give grounds for optimism.

Complex Systems Applied? The Merger that made Glaxo SmithKline

With reference to the Glaxo SmithKline (GSK) case, and more widely, this paper asks whats going on? when two separate corporations choose to combine their organizational and administrative facilities to pursue asserted shared corporate goals through merger. The paper explores whether complex systems thinking can help to capture and represent the interactions that occur across different classes of agent involved in the extended merger process. It is therefore explicitly concerned with the application of complex systems in socio-economic contexts as opposed to physical or natural systems. The paper argues that in order to understand the merger phenomenon, it is important to disentangle the revealed (as opposed to assumed) rationality of different classes of economic agent--operating across the corporate sector, across regulatory regimes, and from all sides of the market/exchange process. The analysis draws attention to the ways in which that rationality is both incentivized and (economically) expressed. Further, the paper uses the Instituted Economic Process (IEP) perspective to sketch an analytical framework representing the structures and structuring of interdependent markets in the pharmaceuticals sector. It argues that these interactions are responsible for instituting particular recurrent behaviours, appearing as event regularities in terms of outcomes. It further argues that these recurrent behaviours and interactions themselves change under pressure from various parts of the system and explores how these changes are revealed in this particular merger case. The analysis describes an unfolding situation which is inherently emergent, experimental, restless, and transformatory.