Van V. Miller

Exchanges: physical, economic, but also institutional

Industrial ecology has devoted almost exclusive attention to the flows that connect industrial processes. Though understandable given its metaphorical roots in natural ecosystems, it has neglected the exchanges that necessarily accompany the flows found in human-designed systems. After reviewing the seminal literature of institutional theory for a better understanding of exchanges, several current examples involving industrial flows are used to illustrate the relevance of exchange to the enactment of systems in line with the norms of industrial ecology.

The Complexity of Offshoring: A Comparative Study of Mexican Maquiladora Plants and Indian Outsourcing Offices from an Institutional-Prospect Theory Perspective

To improve our understanding of offshoring and how it is evolving, salient ideas from both institutional and prospect theories are utilized to build a more descriptive model of how decisions are made to (re)direct foreign investment into offshored activities. Careful examinations of the offshoring programs in India and Mexico reveal that they took different investment trajectories during the past decade that can be aptly explained by this integrative model. The primary information used to measure the population trends of offshoring firms in India and Mexico comes from proprietary data sources for each country that issue annual reports on the number of operators in their respective offshoring sectors, that is, services and manufacturing.

US feedlots and slaughterhouses: bounding industrial ecology with the extreme case

The potential contribution of Industrial Ecology (IE) to sustainable development, though immense, remains elusive. This is due to the field boundaries whose demarcation lacks specificity. To address the challenge of boundary definition, an agro-industrial complex, the US Cattle Feedlot-Slaughterhouse System (CFSS), has been chosen to illustrate and provoke a discussion about where those boundaries should be set. The selection of the CFSS, a system opposed to the practices usually associated with IE, is justified in the light of the extreme events research methodology. On this basis, the author highlights the many agro-industrial flows among the main CFSS components and then analyses them in terms of their appropriateness for specifying the boundaries of IE.