Journal articles on the topic 'Environmental aspects of Interprovincial commerce'

The Internet revolution has led to the advancement of online business all over the world. The environmental, social, and economic aspects are significant to the e-commerce sector, on both the retailer and consumer sides. It cannot be over-emphasized how important the sustainability of e-commerce in all three dimensions is. E-commerce will allow consumers to shop online easily, at any hour of the day, using secure payment systems; furthermore, trust in retailers’ websites is of paramount importance to consumers. This calls our attention to the gap in previous studies, and consequently, the purpose of this study is to fill the gap, to ensure sustainable e-commerce in three dimensions; environmental, social, and economic. The question and aim under investigation are: How to integrate three dimensions into e-commerce to ensure that sustainability is achieved now and for future generations, while thriving as an industry? Collaboration is required, and all stakeholders in the virtual market must take appropriate responsibility. The methodology adopted is a review of previous studies done on each individual dimension of sustainability, since no joint studies have been carried out and integrated into the same literature framework. Furthermore, a case study involving companies in Kenya and Jordan is used in order to collect empirical data. The findings of the study show that: First, integration is essential for the sustainability of e-commerce in its three dimensions; second, trade-offs must be taken in the various dimensions in order for companies to realize sustainable e-commerce. This will go in hand with the realization of the maximum benefits of integrating the three dimensions in e-commerce to make it more sustainable. In conclusion, by applying these aspects of sustainability in e-commerce, it is clear that everyone wins. This is achieved by improving and safeguarding the quality of life by protecting the environment, preserving natural resources, and maintaining and sustaining the economy. The implications of the study are that, in order to make e-commerce more sustainable, to make decisions and take action, social/environmental/economic aspects must be considered as a fundamental element, and must be treated as a group and not separately as in previous studies. In this way, we can realize greater benefits, not only in online business sustainability, but also in policy-making and environmental protection, while companies will create economic value as well as avoiding labor unrest.

E-commerce as a medium for online transactions by business actors can increase the productivity of SMEs. This study aims to analyze the adoption of e-commerce in SMEs in Karawang Regency, Indonesia. The technology-organization-environment (TOE) framework was chosen as a variable for measuring e-commerce adoption. Data collection was carried out through a questionnaire survey which was distributed to SMEs in Karawang Regency, and obtained 301 respondents. The results of data collection by using Smart PLS with the results of the technological aspects have no significant effect on the intention to adopt e-commerce, while the organizational and environmental aspects have a significant effect on the intention to adopt e-commerce. All technology indicators, namely compatability, perceived usefulness, complexity, security concern and relative advantage, are proven to have a significant effect on technology in the intention to adopt e-commerce. Organizational indicators, namely cost, organization readiness, organization culture, organization size and top management support, are proven to have a significant effect on organizations in their intention to adopt e-commerce. Meanwhile, environmental indicators, namely government support, competitive pressure, environmental uncertainty and vendor quality, have a significant effect on the environment in the intention to adopt e-commerce. The data that has been generated can be used by the MSMEs management agency in Karawang Regency to formulate strategies for increasing the productivity of SMEs.

Abstract Non-pesticidal organotin compounds in Canadian commerce are those of monomethyltin, dimethyltin, monobutyltin, dibutyltin, monooctyltin and dioctyltin. A review is presented of the uses, methods of analysis, environmental occurrence and aquatic toxicity of these compounds, which are scheduled for assessment under the Canadian Environmental Protection Act. It is likely that the most important non-pesticidal route of entry of these compounds to the environment will be through leaching of organotin-stabilized poly(vinyl chloride) by water. Monomethyltin and dimethyltin are widespread in the global environment. Monobutyltin and dibutyltin have been found frequently in harbours, marinas and shipping channels in Canada and elsewhere, arising largely as degradation products from the use of the antifouling agent tributyltin which is now regulated in Canada. There are few reports in the literature on the occurrence of butyltin species as a result of non-pesticidal uses or uses of tributyltin other than as an antifouling agent. Monooctyltin and dioctyltin have not been found to date in Canada or elsewhere in environmental samples. Judging from concentrations which have been reported to date, it appears that the mono- and di-methyltin, butyltin and octyltin species pose no threat to aquatic organisms in Canada vis-à-vis acute toxicity. Data on the persistence of these species in aquatic environments are in some cases fragmentary or non-existent, but in general it appears that these species would not be persistent in aquatic environments, with half-lives estimated to be less than a few months at 20°C.

Social commerce is one of the most relevant technological innovations in recent years. It has strongly benefited many industries, including tourism. While many studies on social commerce have been conducted from the user perspective, less attention has been paid to the organisational perspective, particularly that of hotel organisations. To help understand the key drivers of hotel social commerce usage and their effects on hotel business performance, this study augments the integrated model of e-business usage and impact with hotel social media characteristics. Using stratified random sampling, data from 146 hotels in Lebanon were collected and analysed with the PLS-SEM approach. The model represents a theoretical advancement by offering an organisational perspective to the social commerce literature. It shows there is a significant impact of environmental, organisational, and innovation drivers and social media characteristics. The findings help hotels assess their existing social commerce utilization and identify aspects in need of more attention and improvement.

By the mid-eighteenth century, a distinctive maritime commerce in turtle and manatee products existed in the Caribbean. It was especially prevalent amongst English-speaking inhabitants, from the Cayman Islands and Jamaica to the outposts of Costa Rica, Nicaragua and the Colombian islands. Consumption patterns led to a variety of encounters between indigenous Indians, Europeans, Africans and Creoles. Commerce in these natural resources, especially turtles, grew steadily, creating prodigious consumer demands for medical uses, culinary and fashion trends in Europe and the North America by the late-nineteenth century. This study intertwines themes of environmental history, maritime cultural encounters, fisheries and food history. Topics such as indigenous hunting techniques, processing, transportation, marketization, utilitarian and luxury consumerism and evolution of social attitudes towards natural resources are addressed. It is based on contemporary sources and covers various aspects of the supply and utilization of these marine animals over the longue durée.

In this article the authors have considered and summarized results of previous scientific studies as well as some actual events and issues of comprehensive evaluation of determinants and factors of influence in particular on the development of international or domestic e-commerce. With the use of the system analysis e-commerce activities have been considered as a result of interactions between endogenous and exogenous environmental factors. Exogenous determinants of the international electronic commerce include micro- and macroenvironmental determinants. The microenvironmental determinants define a system of relations among consumers, competitors, potential competitors including manufacturers of substitutes, suppliers and intermediators. The macroenvironmental determinants are represented by economical, political and legal, scientific and technical, natural and social factors. Such an approach is a subject of our further scientific studies and it encourages the next stage of searches - research into the international aspects of institutional provisions for controlling international e-commerce activities.

The growth of e-commerce has increased urban freight transport, bringing negative externalities of emissions, pollution, noise, congestion, and habitat loss. There is a visible effort to make the urban last-mile (LM) deliveries more sustainable, mainly in the environmental aspects; however, the related literature lacks a synthesis of the up-to-date research trends and available solutions. This paper reviews relevant literature following SRL methodology in terms of topics related to green LM deliveries on the e-commerce market in urban areas, and identifies trends and the research gaps in this field. In addition, current research topics and existing solutions within the e-commerce market, which increase its environmental sustainability are presented. The findings provide an accurate and comprehensive synthesis of research in green LM e-commerce deliveries in cities, identify current and emerging interests of researchers worldwide, and discover areas requiring further studies. The topics of ICT and smart solutions, customer behavior, and performance assessment certainly seem to be underestimated in the current research. In practical terms, it is a source of knowledge and guidelines on the current developments regarding the existing solution for the LM e-commerce deliveries in the urban area, which might help local governments, freight operators, and other stakeholders of last-mile logistics to improve their sustainability.

The anticipated increase in the demand for wooden biomass for the production of pellets requires focusing attention on the issue of safety and health protection at work as well as application of modern machinery to minimize the risk of injury or damage to health. Biomass gasification is a promising technology, which can contribute to develop future energy systems which are efficient, safe in design and operation as well as environmental friendly in order to increase the share of renewable energy for heating, electricity, transport fuels and higher applications. Biomass gasification is ready for commerce but today large-scale introduction is hampered by various reasons. Health and Safety issues are recognized as a major barrier in the deployment of this technology.

The competition of oil and gas industri in Indonesia is very tight. To get survive from the competition; the company has to develop their technology. Nowadays, technological advancement have salient roles in improving the company's business. PT Pertaminan Retail is a large oil and gas company in Indonesia. This study analyzed the design of e-commerce business development models from PT Pertamina Retail called MyPertamina. The method of the study is descriptive analysis and using business model canvas (BMC), the Delphi method, SWOT (Strenghts, weakness, opportunities, & threats), and the Blue Ocean Strategy. The datas in this study were secondary dan primary data. The secondary data obtained from the literature study and the primary data was by interviewing six informants. The research period starts from November to December 2018. The results of mapping the initial business model that used BMC, showed several aspects such as: customer segments, value propositions, channels, revenue streams, key resources, key activities, key partners, and costs structure. Environmental analysis used the Delphi method and the result was key trend value was 25.48%, industri strength was 25.19%, market strengths was 24.78%, and macroeconomic strengths was 24.55%. MyPertamina's internal environment influenced by product aspects, infrastructure management, customer interface, and financial aspect. The results of the SWOT analysis of nine BMC unsurts showed that the highest strength was the key partnership and the lowest strength was customer relationship. Meanwhile, the biggest opportunity was value proposition and the lowest opportunity was cost structure. The highest threat was customer segment, and the lowest threat was key partners. The business development model in this research focused on customer segment, key partnership, and value proposition, unsurts developed using the blue ocean strategy method.

A rapid development of Internet technologies creates new opportunities for e-commerce, which is one of the fastest-growing segments of the entire economy. For policymakers, the most important aspects of e-commerce are related to the cost reduction in transportation, facilitation of administration and communication, innovations at the market level, and environmental issues. An unavoidable part of the e-commerce production process is related to the postal service. New market expectations of modern society lead to the consideration of upgrading the traditional express delivery service in terms of time availability. In this paper, we propose a new 24-h availability of postal and courier service so-called “post express nonstop”. To assess the potential demand for this kind of service, we propose a forecasting procedure based on the Bass diffusion model. In particular, the research is directed toward the examination of environmental issues, considering both types of services—traditional and the proposed new one. A comparison is done by analyzing CO2 emissions in the last-mile delivery of goods to the users’ addresses. The experiment was carried out in the city of Belgrade, simulating the last-mile delivery under realistic conditions and controlling the fuel consumption and CO2 emissions. In accordance with the results of this experiment and the forecasted number of postal items, a projection of CO2 emissions for the new service from 2020 to 2025 was carried out. The results show a significant contribution of the proposed new express delivery service to environmental well-being and sustainability.

Widespread adoption of green vehicles in urban logistics may contribute to the alleviation of problems such as environmental pollution, global warming, and oil dependency. However, the current adoption of green vehicles in the last mile logistics is relatively low despite many actions taken by public authorities to overcome the negative externalities of distributing goods in cities. This paper presents a comprehensive literature review on studies investigating the adoption of green vehicles in urban freight transportation, paying specific attention to e-commerce. To shed light on the adoption of green vehicles in city logistics, the paper conducts a systematic review of the empirical literature on the topic. The 159 articles reviewed were classified into the following: (a) Optimization and scheduling (67 papers); (b) policy (55 papers); (c) sustainability (37 papers). Among the 159 articles, a further selection of 17 papers dealing with e-commerce, i.e., studies that highlight the most relevant aspects related to the integration of green vehicles in e-commerce urban logistics, was performed. Our findings indicate that green vehicles are competitive in urban deliveries characterized by frequent stop-and-go movements and low consolidation levels while incentives are still necessary for their adoption. The use of autonomous vehicles results the most promising and challenging solution for last-mile logistics.

AbstractThis paper shows how designers of IoT-enabled products can assess the environmental impacts associated with the user behaviour and the service system around the product. High-quality secondary data and a user-behaviour survey were able to highlight critical aspects of a smart fridge's design. A streamlined LCA looked at just the in-use phase of the product within 4 PSS scenarios. The system included: the effects on the food waste; grocery shopping methods; fridge door openings; and how the users interact with the smart fridge features. The results show that a smart fridge as within a PSS can reduce the impact on the environment (GWP of 21,700 kg CO2-eq within the ‘average PSS scenario’ and GWP of 23,100 kg CO2-eq for the normal fridge with ‘typical scenario’). The product's increased emissions are counteracted by the reduction in GWP due to: reduction in food waste; and shifts from brick-and-mortar grocery shopping to e-commerce. Therefore some of the critical aspects of the product's design that are most influential on the environmental impact of an IoT fridge are: the design of the web-browsing capability; and the use-by date tracking system.

Heritage 2010 was a state-of-the-art event regarding the relationship between forms of heritage and the conceptual framework for sustainable development. The four dimensions of sustainable development—environment, economics, society, and culture—were brought together in order to define a particular approach on how to deal with and go beyond the traditional aspects of heritage preservation and safeguarding. As heritage is no longer just a memory or a cultural reference, or even a place or an object, some deeper conceptualization is needed in order to place heritage in its present context. The concept of heritage is moving toward broader and wider scenarios, where it often becomes the driving force for commerce, business, leisure, and educational politics. Heritage is currently seen, or referred to, only through its cultural definition. However, sustainable development brings heritage concepts to another dimension, as it establishes profound relationships with economics, environment, and social aspects. Consequently, heritage preservation and safeguarding is facing new and complex problems. Degradation of heritage sites is not any more just a result of materials ageing or environmental actions. Factors such as global and local pollution, climate change, poverty, religion, tourism, commerce, ideologies, and war are now on the cutting edge for the emerging of new approaches, concerns, and visions on heritage. Thus, the “Heritage 2010: Heritage and Sustainable Development” conference was conceived to embrace a global view on how heritage is being contextualized with the four dimensions of sustainable development. Furthermore, heritage, governance, and education were brought into discussion as the key factors for enlightenment of future global strategies for heritage preservation and safeguarding.

E-commerce-related last-mile logistics have a great impact on cities. Recent years have seen sustained growth in e-commerce in most developed countries, a trend that has only been reinforced by the COVID-19 pandemic. The perceived impact of this phenomenon varies depending upon the perspective of the players involved: individual members of the public, companies, or the public administrations. Tackling the issue from these perspectives, the goal of this article is to explore the kinds of impact this phenomenon has and will have. We use as the basis for their classification the so-called triple bottom line (TBL) of sustainability, encompassing people, planet, and profit; we complement this with the impact classification used by the European Science Foundation’s impact assessment working group. After performing a systematic review of the literature following PRISMA guidelines, our results show that, albeit to different degrees, the four impact dimensions analyzed (economic, social, environmental, and technological) have only received incipient coverage in the existing literature. Given its ever-growing importance, we believe that greater attention needs to be paid to this phenomenon, especially with regard to those aspects having the greatest impact upon urban systems and the different stakeholders involved. Only in this way can the public policies needed to mitigate these externalities be properly implemented.

This paper is an overview of the New Zealand legal environment as it affects petroleum explorers and their operations in New Zealand. It includes a brief summary of the New Zealand legal system and identifies the business structures commonly used and recognised under New Zealand law. It continues with an outline of the significant legal requirements governing petroleum exploration, including the Crown Minerals Act (rights and obligations of permit holders), environmental and conservation laws, Overseas Investment Act and Regulations, Commerce Act, Fair Trading Act, taxation aspects of operations in New Zealand, the no-fault Accident Compensation scheme and other operational requirements. The paper concludes with comment on government participation, current government policy and the legal and administrative framework in which that policy is implemented.

Purpose of the study. The digitization of the economy transforms the ways of delivering and consuming goods and services, which in turn affects all spheres of human activity. The field of electronic commerce is a relatively young area of statistical observation, therefore, at present, researchers, government officials, business representatives and other interested persons lack statistical information, which, in turn, helps to study the economic, social and environmental consequences of the digitized world. The purpose of this study is a quantitative description of the development trends and the degree of regional differentiation of electronic commerce in the Russian Federation in the context of international comparisons.Materials and methods. The article used the official statistical information of Rosstat and Eurostat, on the basis of which the trends in the development of electronic interaction in the business sphere were analyzed and tools were proposed for a quantitative description of regional digital gaps in the regions of Russia and the European Union countries for 2010–2017. As quantitative characteristics of regional differentiation, statistical indicators of variation and localization indicators were used (based on Gini and Lorentz coefficients). Results. The analysis conducted in the study showed the consistency of assessments of the regional digital divide based on economic and statistical indicators. This approach expands the possibilities for an in-depth quantitative description of the processes occurring in the field of digital trading. In addition, it was possible to identify the level of development of e-commerce in Russia in comparison with the leading economies of the European Union, as well as identify the scale of penetration of broadband Internet access among organizations, the involvement of Russian regions and European countries in the processes of placing and receiving orders for goods and services in the global network. According to the results of the study, it should be concluded that despite the obvious leading position of some European countries not only in comparison with Russian regions, but also on a global scale, the development of e-commerce in Russia and the European Union occurs at a comparable pace. It should also be noted that in the case of Russia, this development is more homogeneous in terms of regional differentiation.Conclusion. Despite the fact that digitalization is transforming both business and personal life, there is currently an extremely small amount of information that helps quantify the economic, social and environmental consequences of this phenomenon. In order to further improve the statistical accounting of the digital economy in general and aspects of electronic commerce in particular, at this stage it is necessary: to determine the nature, structure, characteristics, elements, levels of control, movement of the digital economy’s commodity money supply for statistical purposes; identify specific digital technologies, their use in sectors of the economy and their contribution to the gross domestic product; develop a system of statistical indicators on the basis of state programs and strategies, the current methodology of statistical accounting of the information society, international recommendations and development of quantitative measurement of non-governmental organizations.

In this paper it is argued that the music business should be regarded as an activity trading in information. The paper begins with a review of key themes in the conceptualisation of the music industry within the cultural economies tradition. These are the tensions between creativity and commerce and between global and local processes, and the characterisation of the industry in the terms of the flexible specialisation and reflexive accumulation theses. It is then suggested that these debates have downplayed a key characteristic of the contemporary music industry, its involvement with the creation, production, and distribution of information. The emergence of a global music business over the past decade is documented and analysed by means of this framework. Subsequently, two aspects of the integration processes taking place in the music industry are considered in terms of their relationship to the information economy: copyright protection and branding, and competition between producers of information storage and retrieval devices. The paper concludes that interpreting music as an information industry sheds new light on the music business, and points to important questions for further research within the information economy literature.

This paper is an edited version of a paper presented to the New Zealand Oil Exploration Conference at Wairakei, New Zealand, 1–3 July, 1987. The paper is an overview of the New Zealand legal environment as it affects petroleum explorers and their operations in New Zealand. It includes a brief summary of the New Zealand legal system and identifies the business structures commonly used and recognised under New Zealand law. It continues with an outline of the significant legal requirements governing petroleum exploration, including the Petroleum Act and Regulations (rights and obligations of Licensees), environmental and conservation laws. Overseas Investment Act and Regulations, Commerce Act. Fair Trading Act. taxation aspects of operations in New Zealand, the no-fault Accident Compensation scheme and other operational requirements. The paper concludes with comment on government participation, current government policy, the legal and administrative framework in which that policy is implemented and some comment on prospects for the future.

The high cost of operation and severe competition in the agri-food e-commerce market make it hard for the small and medium agri-food enterprises (A-SMEs) to operate cost-efficiently and in a sustainable manner. This paper seeks to organize A-SMEs to develop a cooperative organization via collaborative strategies and alliance structures, named as the home-delivery-oriented agri-food supply chain (HASC) alliance, to form a substantive relationship to gain a stable foothold in the emerging e-commerce market. A theoretical framework of the HASC alliance is built with its organizational structure and schematics of the process of implementation strategies that cover the aspects of last-mile chain extension, food transportation, and production/distribution control. Furthermore, a three-step analytical method is proposed to analyze the performance of the alliance with the aim to provide appropriate strategies to hedge against the potential risks of cooperation instability. A hypothetical case is conducted, and the results show that: (1) the performance of the hypothetical HASC alliance with time shows significant variation in the beginning, but it gains stability with the application of stability control strategies; (2) the cooperation stability of HASC alliance is very sensitive to the performance of the strategies that control the customer and environment variations; (3) the factors of trust and market fluctuation have higher effects on membership and environmental stability, respectively; (4) the minimum and maximum cost ranges of control strategies at which the alliance can maintain its stability and performance are 5% and 29%, respectively, of the total operation cost.

This paper, and the following five papers, were presented during the Telematics Automotive 99 Conference held at the National Exhibition Centre, Birmingham, 13th to 15th April 1999. This first paper sets the scene for the more detailed technical aspects of the later papers. Copies of the full proceedings of Telematics Automotive 99 are available on loan from The Cundall Library.Globalisation of both markets and supply has been nowhere more obvious than in motor cars. These vehicles create not only the most free economic pipeline known to man but also a revolution in personal freedom. They are unlikely to go away; we have to find ways of living with them by coping with the environmental problems and the many forms of traffic problem: congestion, driving and support skills and car crime. In other areas, notably manufacturing and commerce, automation and advanced communications have enabled radical improvements in quality, productivity and environmental impact. This effect has yet to reach road transport in volume; the environmental and traffic problems are growing at least as fast as the populations of vehicles grow. The risk with such an important enabler as telematics is that it is seen as a plaything for gadget-minded users, rather than a key enabler for ongoing use of the car in the face of unrelenting pressures of congestion and environmental damage.

The increase of living standard requires ever more energy, despite energy saving measures. Domestic growth was 100 PJ between 2000 and 2006, and 77% of the total utilization was importe (Hungarian Central Statistical Office, 2008).Sustainability was endangered not only in our energy and commerce policy. Our domestic natural conditions are suitable for plant production; however, the stagnation of the domestic population and decreasing livestock numbers restrict in land marketing. Therefore, significant surpluses from year to year had to be stored and sold abroad, and the fact that the interventional purchase of corn and the expected stringent new EU regulation of the sugar beet sector, make the strategic significance of these branches uncertain. The difficult marketing opportunities make the better utilization of our opportunities in producing liquid bio-fuels possible from marketing aspects, while environmental issues and realizing the EU directions enforce to do so in a longer term. Over the short term, agricultural and competitive aspects will determine its spread, which cause different effects in Europe in comparison with the developing countries. According to Nábrádi-Ficzeréné Nagymihály, 2008, one of the breaking points of Hungarian agriculture lies in the utilization of alternative energy sources. During the past period, many contradictory opinions came forward relating to economies, agricultural effects, food risks as well as the energetic and environmental efficiency of bio-fuels. One thing is certain: these fuels are already used today and their significance has been increasing. Although due to technological development, spread of new products and processes (cellulose-based bioethanol, bioethanol, biogas, hydrogen, biomethane) will obviously have to be expected in the future, at present biodiesel and bioethanol are determent among bio-fuels, thus I deal with these as well as their energetic and agricultural effects in my study.

Control of tobacco faces a huge obstacle because it is where important health issue has to face the powerful opposition from the wealth influence of tobacco industries (TI). Death and disease caused by tobacco use now constitute a pandemic. Unfortunately, the power and impact of tobacco’s nature and commerce of its addiction make tobacco control a contentious issue of public health. The task of curbing the tobacco pandemic becomes more challenging with the use of human rights arguments and constitutional issues by smokers and the TI. This is a qualitative research on medical and legal aspects of tobacco use and smoking. This paper examines the origin of tobacco and its use as well as the development of scientific and medical reports relating to the effect of tobacco use particularly smoking. It also demonstrates how national and global policies relating to tobacco were formulated based on the scientific findings and medical reports by giving priority to public health. This is also a legal research relating to international legal framework of tobacco control, namely the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (WHO FCTC), and the legal regulations relating to tobacco control in Malaysia as well as its enforcement strategies. The legal challenge mounted against the law and policy restricting tobacco use is also examined. The study shows the implementation of WHO FCTC is crucial in fighting tobacco pandemic. The convention also upheld the right of the people to breathe fresh and clean air by prohibiting environmental tobacco smoke (ETS) exposure in public spaces. Thus, the right must be respected by smokers and must not be infringed upon. The decision of the court is lauded because the law and policy relating to tobacco control are in line with rights guaranteed by the Federal Constitution and in tandem with WHO FCTC of which Malaysia is a party.

Since its conception, corporate social responsibility (CSR) has seen continuous growth and become a highly discussed issue. In this paper, we propose an evaluation of how the COVID-19 pandemic could impact CSR applications. The pandemic has provided an opportunity for commerce to move on to being more authentic, to offer genuine CSR applications and to contribute toward dealing with pressing environmental and social issues. Hence, this purpose of the research is to obtain a better understanding of whether the integration of environment, social, corporate governance and economic (ESGE) aspects into CSR strategies can support sustainable development toward more sustainable growth during the COVID-19 pandemic. To meet this challenge, we offer a mixture multiple-criteria decision making (MCDM) model. Very few empirical studies have discussed CSR in the high-tech industry and proposed strategies and planning for ESGE efficiency. Using interviews with experts and a literature review, we identify the elements related to actual practices of the high-tech industry’s appraisal and the integrated MCDM techniques to suggest efficient enhancement models. The best worst method (BWM) and modified VIKOR are implemented to estimate the strategic weights and the gaps of the aspiration value. The results are valuable for classifying the priorities of CSR and are therefore helpful for those who are associated with high-tech industry management, practices and implementation.

There are many definitions of facilities management. Wes McGregor and Danny Shiem-Shim Then describe facilities management (FM) as „the infrastructure that supports the people in the organization in their endeavours to achieve business goals”. In other words, facilities are the tools which people in the business have at their disposal to carry out their tasks. The Library of Congress (USA) provides an initial definition that is often quoted to explain the breadth of the field of facilities management: “The practice of coordinating the physical workplace with the people and work of the organization; integrates the principles of business administration, architecture and the behavioural and engineering sciences”. One of the most exact definitions of Facility Management used by F. Becker is: “Facility Management is a term which encompass the activities in planning, designing and managing complex facilities such as offices, hospitals and schools, differ from architecture and interior design”. The scope of the discipline covers all aspects of property, space, environmental control, health and safety, and support services, and requires that appropriate control point are established in the organization. The article presents an example of multiple criteria analysis of commerce centre in Vilnius. Initial data are given in Tables 1 and 2. A comparison of premises lease alternatives is carried out: from the tenant point of view and from that of the owner. The result—the best variant for tenants and owner is to rent the premises with all services.

Reverse logistics (RL) is considered the reverse manner of gathering and redeploying goods at the end of their lifetime span from consumers to manufacturers in order to reutilize, dispose, or remanufacture. Whereas RL has many economic benefits, it presents compromises to businesses that wish to remain competitive but be responsible global citizens in terms of social, environmental, risk, and safety aspects of sustainable development. Managing RL systems therefore is considered a multifaceted mission that necessities a significant level of technology, infrastructure, experience, and competence. Consequently, various commerce institutions are looking to outsourcing their RL actions to third-party reverse logistics providers (3PRLPs). In this work, a novel hybrid multiple-criteria decision-making (MCDM) framework is proposed to classify and choose 3PRLPs, which comprises the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) technique, and technique for order of preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS) technique under neutrosophic environment. Accordingly, AHP is availed for defining weights of key dimensions and their subindices. In addition, TOPSIS was adopted for ranking the specified 3PRLPs. The efficiency of the proposed approach is clarified through application on a considered car parts manufacturing industry case in Egypt, which shows the features of the combined MCDM methods. A comparative and sensitivity analyses were performed to highlight the benefits of the incorporated MCDM methods and for clarifying the effect of changing weights in selecting the sustainable 3PRLP alternative, respectively. The suggested framework is also shown to present more functional execution when dealing with uncertainties and qualitative inputs, demonstrating applicability to a broad range of applications. Ultimately, the best sustainable 3PRLPs were selected and results show that social, environmental, and risk and safety sustainability factors have the greatest influence when determining 3PRLPs alternatives.

The operation of shipping companies in today's rapidly changing conditions is associated with a number of complications due to the dependence of operating activities on many external factors. Recent developments and trends in world trade, characterized by uncertainty, a decline in the rate of growth in trade to rates below the growth of the economy as a whole, which requires a revision of the globalization model of development. Such changes can bring both positive effects and uncertainty in trade and shipping, mainly due to global shifts in the structure of transportation, production and consumption, which may reduce the demand for maritime transport services and the volume of sea transport. Recent trends in the shipping industry have weak growth rates, continuing problems of excess tonnage, imbalance between supply and demand. The article questions of compliance pace and marine transportation trends of the global economy and the need for traffic examines external factors, which have a direct or indirect effect on the development of the freight market: partnership in the field of infrastructure quality, changes in trade policy and liberalization, population growth and urbanization, growing cross-border e-commerce trade, circular economy, reduction of global use of fossil fuels. It is determined which of the factors will increase the volume of transportation and conversely, and that are able to change the structure of the world fleet. It is proposed to move on to new methods of forecasting sea trade flows, different from extrapolation of GDP and growth of trade turnover, including fiscal and environmental policies, as well as transport costs and regulatory aspects.

Synthesis or humification of humic substances (HSs) is the second widely applied organic compound transformation process after photosynthesis. Peat decomposition process results in a production of a HSs which has a high demand in agriculture, forestry, and gardening areas. Addition of the KOH is good option for environmental protection and K+ belongs to the nitrogen, potassium and phosphorous (NKP) mineral component. A homogenization process in a customize for commerce, where peat treatment technology was improved with the help of the cavitation effect. This effect was provided with the help of the high-speed mixer-disperser (HSMD) developed at Riga Technical University. Mechanical cavitation causes relatively high energy shifts from mechanical movement of cavitation causing elements to the liquid medium which causes efficient destruction of particles inside a suspension. Values of the peat particle diameter at 50 % in the cumulative distribution before and after 1, 2, and 3 homogenization cycles were measured in the present study. The aim of the present study was to find the optimal conditions (KOH concentration, cavitation cycles and reaction temperature) to produce potassium humate (K-HSs) regarding sustainable regenerative approach aspects. Cavitation treatment of the tested peat particle diameter at 50 % in the cumulative distribution (d50) from 267 down to 129 µm; the peak in the size range from 160 up to 409 µm completely disappears and significantly decreases the number of Dalton’s which causes the more efficient formation of fulvic acid caused by increased concentration of carbonyl and carboxyl groups as compared with the conventional homogenization method.

Light pollution is a well-known problem because of its negative impacts on human health, flora, and fauna. From an ecological and engineering point of view, the literature states to consider the following aspects: (1) the light intensity; (2) the composition of the spectrum; (3) the time and duration of lighting to optimize the time of illumination with the available technologies; (4) the periods of lighting and the control cone; (5) the height and spacing between the light sources to optimize the space between the light sources, to reduce the flow of light and unnecessary energy consumption; (6) the environmental impact studies on-site; and (7) the analysis of real needs and less standardized approaches, examining the evolution of use and habits of light consumption. Accordingly, we want to present the SMART LIGHT-HUB (INTERREG) project, which pretends, during the next 3 years (2019–2021), to deliver smart lighting systems to reach the widest possible public, such as companies active in the relevant subject areas. We are setting up an R&D network in the Grande Région (Belgium, Luxembourg, Germany, and France) to facilitate the emergence of new collective solutions to needs that are not addressed in the private and public sectors, in terms of lighting. We are planning exchange workshops, which serve to complete the project, concerning the interested parties on the ground (public authorities, chambers of commerce and industry, local authorities, public–private sector, private companies, etc.) and external participants representing the final consumers. We also want to work on restoring a protected nighttime environment (i.e., continuous areas of “nocturnal/black corridors” for animals that cannot tolerate artificial light).

With the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, the e-commerce trend is driving faster, significantly impacting supply chains around the world. Thus, the importance of logistics and supply chain functions has been amplified in almost every business that ships physical goods. In Vietnam, the logistics service sector has seen rapid expansion. Since more and more businesses are seeking third-party logistics (3PL) providers to outsource the logistics functions, this article aims to offer decision-makers an integrated and consistent model for evaluating and selecting the most efficient 3PLs. To this end, the authors exploit a hybrid multi-criteria method which is fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (FAHP) and fuzzy vlsekriterijumska optimizacija i kompromisno resenje (FVIKOR) while examining the most influential and conflicting criteria regarding economic, service level, environmental, social, and risk aspects. Fuzzy information in the natural decision-making process is considered, linguistic variables are used to mitigate the uncertain levels in the criteria weights. First, FAHP (the weighting method) is adopted to evaluate and calculate each criterion’s relative significant fuzzy weight. FVIKOR (the compromised ranking method) is then used to rank the alternatives. The combination of FAHP and FVIKOR methods provides more accurate ranking results. As a result, reliability and delivery time, voice of customer, logistics cost, network management, and quality of service are the most impactful factors to the logistics outsourcing problem. Eventually, the optimized 3PLs were determined that fully meet the criteria of sustainable development. The developed integrated model offers the complete and robust 3PLs evaluation and selection process and can also be a powerful decision support tool for other industries.

The aim of the paper is to map the thematic landscape of the sustainable supply-chain management (SSCM) research field and contribute to exploring “relationships among specific constructs” in the field. The use of bibliometric methodology and the focus given to relationships among topics categorized into thematic clusters within the field are the features which differ the study from other reviews in the research field. The operational objectives of the study are as follows: (1) to profile the development of the SSCM research field and its scientific output, (2) to identify leading thematic areas in the field and explore their composition and relationships among them, (3) to identify ‘hot’, emerging topics in the field. The analysis of change in the number of publications and citations related to the SSCM concept supports the study of research productivity in the field. General publication profiling focuses on the identification of subject areas and leading contributors to the research field, i.e., countries, research institutions, source titles and authors. Keywords co-occurrence analysis is employed to identify and explore leading and emerging topics. The study points out that the main thematic areas in the SSCM research field are: (1) economy and management in the context of the environment, (2) supply chain in the context of sustainability, (3) sustainable supply chains—process approach, (4) decision making for SSCM, (5) the practice context of supply-chain management, and (6) competition and social responsibility (SR) issues. The most up-to-date topics of scientific inquiry in the field focus around the following issues: (1) human aspects, (2) sustainable supplier selection, (3) manufacturing, (4) circular economy, (5) efficiency, (6) sustainable practices, (7) commerce, (8) costs, (9) environmental impact, and (10) the textile industry.

Urban logistics (or city logistics) is developing rapidly due to the strong growth of e-commerce. Accordingly, the last-mile urban logistics faces a significant number of orders that need to be fulfilled in a dense urban development, environmental constraints and permanent congestion. One of the possible systems of rational city delivery is the use of a network of consolidation centers at the micro level. Such a network provides for a two-tier system of urban delivery - 1) from the central warehouse or warehouses to the network of microconsolidation centers; 2) from microconsolidation centers to end consumers. This scheme is especially relevant in the presence of restrictions on the movement of trucks or heavy vehicles in certain areas of the city, as well as in significant congestion and the problem of parking trucks when unloading at the location of the client. Methods (research methodology). To create a rational delivery network through a microconsolidation system, the primary task is to determine the delivery zones (or geographical clusters) - their number, size, location. To solve this problem, optimization models are proposed based on several minimization criteria - delivery distance, time, cost and integrated distance-time criterion. Results. The result is the optimization models creation, based on those it is possible to divide urban consumers into several delivery zones. Delivery routes are planned within each zone of the respective centroid and minimize the cost of last-mile logistics. Delivery of goods to the centroids can be carried out by light or medium trucks, and within the zones should be dominated by delivery of environmentally friendly modes of transport (motorcycle or moped, bicycle, car, on foot delivery with the possibility of public transport usage). Conclusion. Thus, the article provides a mathematical apparatus for obtaining territorial zoning of existing customers of the city in order to minimize the cost (distance, time or their combination) for delivery within each zone. Perspectives. A perspective study may be an analysis of the costs of operating a network of urban consolidation centers and the delivery of goods from the central warehouse or warehouses to this network. Accordingly, the task of minimizing the total costs of the city freight delivery system should be solved, taking into account economic, environmental and social aspects.

ABSTRACT The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is a federal trustee within the National Contingency Plan (NCP) in addition to providing scientific and technical support to the Incident Command System (ICS) during a response. NOAA is also the home of the National Marine Sanctuary Program (NMSP), a system of 14 marine protected areas that encompass 150,000 square miles of coastal and oceanic waters. NOAA is increasing its capacity for addressing a significant incident through participating in and leading spill response exercises. One of the most intense aspects of those experiences is often the discussion of the role of NOAA as a trustee and whether they should be part of the Unified Command (UC). While the NCP outlines the expectations of Regional Response Team (RRT) members from the Department of the Interior and the Department of Commerce (NOAA), it provides the Federal On Scene Coordinator (FOSC) considerable flexibility in determining whether to include trustees within the UC or working with the Liaison or through the Environmental Unit. A recent Technical Assistance Document from the National Response Team speaks directly to this issue and provides RRT'S more specific guidance. There are some RRT'S that feel strongly that the only trustee in the UC should be the states. NOAA and the DOI believe that they should be afforded the same considerations in the marine and coastal environment as trustees or landowners in the terrestrial environment. Both the Safe Sanctuaries 2005 in Florida and the Safe Seas 2006 in California provided a forum for dialogue on this issue. In both instances, the FOSC did engage the trustees in the UC. It is not always necessary or appropriate for NOAA to participate as a member of the UC. In some situations it could be more effective to participate in other capacities within the ICS and NOAA may not be the trustee with the most significant resources at risk. When participating in a UC, it is incumbent upon the NOAA representative to work with other members of the UC to manage the response under a single, collaborative approach.

Today globalization turned the world into a global village where event in one region transmits to others almost immediately. Communication technology has played big role and transformed many aspects of business; Internet is one of most important technology which has created e-commerce and a global digital economy with new opportunities. Social media such as websites Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Pinterest have already demonstrated their potential for getting information also mobile technology have a lot of potential for gathering information. In spite of environmental turbulence, organizations must effectively depend on scanning environment and useful communication technology for operations and survival. It is crucial for every company to analyze strengths and weaknesses of the internal and external environment to enable the business sustain and growth. Both internal and external environmental scanning is important to be conducted but basically internal scanning will be done first as it will be the ground analysis to determine further direction of an organization. Increasing risk of error, failure to analyze environment included strength and weaknesses internally, opportunities and threats externally, and inefficient of communication technology may resulting to unsustainable the business in long term. Additionally a growing number of companies in Jeddah city led to the business competition between companies that increasingly tight and competitive. This paper sought the place of environmental scanning and role of communication technology as a way for providing information helpfully and as a means of business survival and sustainable competitive advantage. In this study we will focus on Suppliers who deal with sanitary ware (Bathtub) in Jeddah city, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Mostly people in Jeddah City prefer to purchase from various outlets vendors / retailers who are available usually in same area, according to their convenience, preference and selection. Increases in expectations and changing culinary style of consumers make the Sanitary Ware (Bathtub) business dynamic in general. Despite the increasing interest in the area there are very little researches on sustainable competitive advantage of sanitary ware vending service in our domestic market. Keeping these conditions in view, this study tries to explore the current scenario in which Sanitary Ware (Bathtub) has become a flourishing business for a lot of Suppliers as it has been successful in attracting a large mass of customers and projects.This study analyses environmental scanning and communication technology as a gate for sustainable competitive advantage of sanitary ware (Bathtub) in Jeddah city. The data analysis was based on 108 retailers who purchase bathtub sanitary ware from sanitary ware suppliers companies in Jeddah city, the data analysis was based on multivariate statistical techniques encompassing Factor analysis to test reliability, Percentage and frequency, descriptive analysis to describe the sample, multiple linear regressions via using SPSS analysis software. It identifies the most relevant understanding of environmental scanning and role of communication technology as agate for sustainable competitive advantage, and determines their influence in choosing of sanitary ware outlets. The results show that as environmental scanning and communication technologies (independent variables) have a positive influence on sustainable competitive advantage (dependent variable) of bathtub sanitary ware suppliers in Jeddah city.

Web services – a new breed of self-contained, self-describing, modular applications published, located, and invoked across the Web – handle functions, from simple requests to complicated business processes. They are defined as network-based application components with a services-oriented architecture (SOA) using standard interface description languages and uniform communication protocols. SOA enables organizations to grasp and respond to changing trends and to adapt their business processes rapidly without major changes to the IT infrastructure. The Inaugural International Conference on Next-Generation Web Services Practices (NWeSP'05) attracted researchers who are also the world's most respected authorities on the semantic Web, Web-based services, and Web applications and services. NWeSP'05 was held in cooperation with the IEEE Computer Society Task Force on Electronic Commerce, the Technical Committee on Internet, and the Technical Committee on Scalable Computing. This special issue presents eight papers focused on different aspects of Web services and their applications. Papers were selected based on fundamental ideas and concepts rather than the thoroughness of techniques employed. Papers are organized as follows: <I>Taher et al.</I> present the first paper, on a Quality of Service Information and Computational framework (QoS-IC) supporting QoS-based service selection for SOA. The framework's functionality is expanded using a QoS constraints model that establishes an association relationship between different QoS properties and is used to govern QoS-based service selection in the underlying algorithm. Using a prototype implementation, the authors demonstrate how QoS constraints improve QoS-based service selection and save consumers valuable time. Due to the complex infrastructure of web applications, response times perceived by clients may be significantly longer than desired. To overcome some of the current problems, <I>Vilas et al.</I>, in the second paper, propose a cache-based extension of the architecture that enhances the current web services architecture, which is mainly based on program-logic or protocol-dependent optimization. In the third paper, Jo and Yoo present authorization for securing XML sources on the Web. One of the disadvantages of existing access control is that the DOM tree must be loaded into memory while all XML documents are parsed to generate the DOM tree, such that a lot of memory is used in repetitive search for tree to authorize access to all nodes in the DOM tree. The complex authorization evaluation process required thus lowers system performance. Existing access control fails to consider information structure and semantics sufficiently due to basic HTML limitations. The authors overcome some of these limitations in the proposed model. In the fourth paper, Jung and Cho propose a novel behavior-network-based method for Web service composition. The behavior network selects services automatically through internal and external links with environmental information from sensors and goals. An optimal service is selected at each step, resulting in a globally optimal service sequence for achieving preset goals. The authors detail experimental results for the proposed model by comparing them with rule-based system and user tests. <I>Kong et al.</I> present an efficient method in the fifth paper for merging heterogeneous ontologies – no ontology building standard currently exists – and the many ontology-building tools available are based on different ontology languages, mostly focusing on how to create, edit and infer the ontology efficiently. Even ontologies about the same domain differ because ontology experts hold different view points. For these reasons, interoperability between ontologies is very low. The authors propose merging heterogeneous domain ontologies by overcoming some of the above limitations. In the sixth paper, Chen and Che provide polynomial-time tree pattern query minimization algorithm whose efficiency stems from two key observations: (i) Inherent redundant "components" usually exist inside the rudimentary query provided by the user, and (ii) nonedundant nodes may become redundant when constraints such as co-occurrence and required child/descendant are given. They show that the algorithm obtained by first augmenting the input tree pattern using constraints, then applying minimization, invariably finds a unique minimal equivalent to the original query. Chen and Che present a polynomial-time algorithm for tree pattern query (TPQ) minimization without XML constraints in the seventh paper. The two-part algorithm is a dynamic programming strategy for finding all matching subtrees within a TPQ. The algorithm consists of one for subtree recognization and a second for subtree deletion. In the last paper, <I>Bagchi et al.</I> present the mobile distributed virtual memory (MDVM) concept and architecture for cellular networks containing server-groups (SG). They detail a two-round randomized distributed algorithm to elect a unique leader and co-leader of the SG that is free of any assumption about network topology, and buffer space limitations and is based on dynamically elected coordinators eliminating single points of failure. As guest editors, we thank all authors featured in this special issue for their contributions and the referees for critically evaluating the papers within the short time allotted. We sincerely believe that readers will share our enjoyment of this special issue and find the information it presents both timely and useful.

Modern approach defines e-commerce as creation and maintenance of web-based relations. It is about enabling retailers, brands and cataloguers to be more consumer-centric across channels. The Asia-Pacific region is proving to be the world's ecommerce market hub in 2015. Because of the growing influence of mobile-oriented search, more online marketplaces, consumer goods and F&B organizations are focusing on bettering their digital visibility. India is witnessing a huge upsurge in the growth figures of this industry. Today Corporate and business houses are facing immense problem of competition, changing customer's tastes and preferences and rising operating costs. Moreover, with the changing lifestyle, customers' demands are also changing. They are searching for easily accessible markets, apt information, greater services and a wide range of comparable items. E-Commerce may reduce many of the disadvantages associated with an isolated location by decreasing marketing, communication, and information costs and increasing access to lower cost suppliers and services. It also facilitates easy transactions between a company and its facilitating partners. E-Commerce may be involved in the design, finance, production, marketing, inventory, distribution, and service aspects of business activities. As such, the use of e-commerce by a firm has the potential to increase revenues from sales as well as significantly decrease costs through greater efficiencies of operation. It provides opportunities to companies to cater huge market segments and at the same time fulfill the emerging requirements of customers with greater ease. Indian e commerce market is in its nascent stage and is holding a good area of untapped markets. The paper presents careful evaluation of opportunities and threats present in the industry along with organisational capabilities essential for a player to exploit the opportunities emerging in the market. A big strategy carries several tactics behind it, which can only be implemented in the direction of environmental flow. Paper focuses on the role of e–commerce as emerging strategic platform for business houses to expand their presence with increased sales, lower cost and enhanced sustainability. Aggressive players smelling the demands of industry to join as a prospector but at the same time they have be aware of environmental changes and have to make experiments in the field.

Purpose This study aims to answer the question of how business models (BMs) maintain stability while coping with environmental uncertainties. This study proposes a dynamic co-evolution of knowledge management and business model transformation based on a comparative analysis of the focal firms’ BMs and their main partners in two e-commerce ecosystems in China. Design/methodology/approach The open data of listed companies regarding the introduction of emerging topics on the transformation tendency of BMs in the post-COVID-19 business world is qualitatively analysed. The theoretical foundation is based on a critical review of the literature. Findings Three aspects of the co-evolution between knowledge management and business model transformation are introduced. These three aspects are as follows: knowledge integration helps with multi-system business integration and decision-making collaborations; knowledge sharing helps to enhance cognitive ability and network value based on businesses; and the creation of new knowledge helps enrich the knowledge base and promote the transformation of BMs. Research limitations/implications Solely attributing a firm’s ability to cope with environmental uncertainties to its business model weakens the importance of its knowledge management. This study argues that the co-evolution between knowledge management and business model transformation also plays a key role in a firm’s response to issues post-COVID-19. Originality/value This study calls for the development of a normative theory of co-evolution between knowledge management and business model transformation, implying uncharted territories of knowledge management based on interaction with business model designs in e-business ecosystems.

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is argued to be a flawed concept in the same way as sustainable development in that it seeks to combine two aspects which are incommensurable. Nevertheless CSR contains an expanding space for social and environmental concerns under the guise of stakeholder management which undoubtedly influences the commercial bottom line. It is proposed that the concept of corporate citizenship is separated from what is now termed corporate social responsiveness to encompass truly ethical and normative considerations which in business should be manifested by a wholehearted acceptance of the need for regulation, lobbying for the universality of that regulation and an avoidance of undue influence on government. Proper roles for the three partners in society, namely government, commerce and civil society are explored together with the nature of citizenship.

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is argued to be a flawed concept in the same way as sustainable development in that it seeks to combine two aspects which are incommensurable. Nevertheless CSR contains an expanding space for social and environmental concerns under the guise of stakeholder management which undoubtedly influences the commercial bottom line. It is proposed that the concept of corporate citizenship is separated from what is now termed corporate social responsiveness to encompass truly ethical and normative considerations which in business should be manifested by a wholehearted acceptance of the need for regulation, lobbying for the universality of that regulation and an avoidance of undue influence on government. Proper roles for the three partners in society, namely government, commerce and civil society are explored together with the nature of citizenship.

The article relevance. Currently, the world is rapidly undergoing the process of Informatization of all aspects of society, the development and introduction of new information technologies. This highlights the need for further reflection and research on the development of the Internet and its opening opportunities for people. The aim of the research is to study the peculiarities of the attitude of students to search and recommendation services on the Internet. Research methods: as a research method, we used a questionnaire survey as a method of collecting primary information, which allows us to identify various aspects related to the attitude of students to search and recommendation systems on the Internet. Research results: the article examines the specifics of Russian search and recommendation systems, students' attitude to these services, and their place in their lives. The novelty and originality of the research lies in the fact that for the first time the search and recommendation services of the Internet space were studied. It is shown that these services were initially developed in the sphere of culture and gradually began to spread to other spheres of people's life, which attracted e-Commerce figures. It is revealed that those students who discovered search and recommendation services a few years ago still use them to choose leisure activities. It is shown that students still identify some disadvantages of these systems: inaccurate recommendations, a large number of questions to determine preferences. There is some distrust to new Internet technologies among those who are used to relying on their intuition when choosing. It is determined that students often use search and recommendation services, since in most cases gadgets help them spend their free time, have fun: read a book, watch a movie, listen to music. It is revealed that the majority of students trust Internet services, although they are not always satisfied with the recommendations. It is shown that the level of student-user confidence in traditional advertising and marketing decreases simultaneously. It is determined that from the point of view of students, today not only printed versions of Newspapers, traditional radio, but even mass broadcast television are losing ground before the Internet as the most promising communication channel. Practical significance: the data Obtained in this work can be used in marketing research, economic Sciences, advertising psychology, as well as for further theoretical development of this issue.

In the third episode of the British sci-fi/thriller television series Torchwood (BBC3, 2007-) the team are investigating a portable ‘ghost machine’, which allows its users to see events which occurred in the past. After visiting an old man whose younger self the device may have allowed them to witness, the team’s medic, Owen Harper, spots Bernie Harris, who’d previously been in possession of the machine. A chase ensues; they run past a park, between a gang of kids playing football, over a railway bridge, through a housing estate, and eventually Bernie is cornered in a back garden and taken away for questioning. The scene demonstrates the series’ intention to be a fast-paced, modern, glossy thriller, with loud incidental music, fast cuts, and energetic camerawork. Yet for me the scene has quite a different meaning. The housing estate they run through is the one in which I used to live; the railway bridge they run over is the one I crossed every day on my way to and from work; the street they run down is my street; and there, in the background, clear and apparent and obvious for all to see, is my home. Yes; my house was on Torchwood. As Blunt and Dowling note, “home does not simply exist, but is made … [and] … this process has both material and imaginative elements” (23). It is through such imaginative elements that we turn ‘spaces’ that are “unnamed, unhistoried, unnarativized” into ‘places’ that are “indubitably bound up with personal experience” (Darby 50). Such experiences may be ‘real’ (as in things that actually happened there) or ‘representational’ (as in seen on television); my relationship to ‘home’ is here being inflected through the “indexical bond” (Kilborn and Izod 29) that links both of these strategies. In using a scene from Torchwood to say something about my personal history, I’m taking what is, in essence, a televisual ‘space’ and converting it into a ‘place’ which is not only defined by my “profilmic” (Ward 8) relationship to it, but also helps express that relationship. Telling everyone that my house was on Torchwood certainly says something about the programme; but more fundamentally I’m engaging in a process intended to say something about me. A bit of autobiography. The house is in Splott, a residential area of Cardiff, the capital of Wales, where Torchwood is set and filmed. I lived in Cardiff from 2000 to 2006, when I worked at the University of Glamorgan. For much of that time I lived in rented accommodation in Cathays, the student area of Cardiff. But in 2005 I bought a house in Splott, and this was the first property I ever owned. A year later I moved to Norwich (virtually the other side of the UK from Cardiff) to take a job at the University of East Anglia, but I kept the house in Cardiff and now rent it out. It was while living in Norwich that my house appeared on Torchwood, and I had no idea that the programme had been filming in that area. This means that, strictly speaking, at the time it was on television the property was no longer my ‘home’, but was instead my tenants’. Yet what I want to examine here is the “geography of feeling and emotion” (Rodaway 263) which is central to the idea of ‘home’, and which has been kick-started in me since some fictional television characters ran down the street I used to live in and the ‘real’ and the ‘representational’ began to intersect. There certainly is something personal which is required in order to turn a ‘space’ into a ‘place’, but what is it that then transforms it into ‘home’? That is, for me Cardiff is more than a ‘place’ which I know. Owning a property there makes a difference, but that is to too easily equate a commercial transaction with an emotive sense of feeling. Indeed, Cardiff felt like ‘home’ before I’d bought a house, and the majority of my memories of the city are connected to other properties I’ve lived in. In a capitalist society it’s tempting to equate ‘home’ with the property we own, and this probably is the case for the majority of people (Morley 19). Nevertheless, something emotive stirred in me when I saw my house in a chase sequence on a science-fiction television programme when I live in an entirely different city. Tuan defines this as ‘topophilia’, which is “the affective bond between people and place or setting” (Topophilia 4), and it’s clear that such bonds can be highly emotionally charged and a significant aspect of one’s sense of self. This is noticeable because of the ways in which I’ve used my house’s appearance on television. I’ve not been quiet about it; I was telling everyone at work the day after it appeared. Whenever people mention Torchwood it’s something I point out. This might not sound as if that is likely to occur very often, but considering the programme is a spin-off from the highly successful revival of Doctor Who (BBC1, 1963-89, 1996, 2005-) it is part of a well-known media landscape. Both Doctor Who and Torchwood are predominantly filmed in Cardiff and the surrounding areas of South Wales, but whereas Torchwood is also narratively set in Cardiff, Doctor Who merely uses the locations to represent other places, most often London. Yet many of these places are distinctive and therefore obviously Cardiff for those who know the area. For example, the hospital in the episode ‘New Earth’ (2006) is recognisably the interior of the Wales Millennium Centre, just as the exterior location where the Tardis lands at the beginning of the episode is clearly Rhossili on the Gower Peninsula. Inevitably, the use of such locations has often disrupted my understanding of the story being told. That is, it’s hard to accept that this episode is taking place on a planet at the other end of the galaxy thousands of years into the future if the characters are standing on a cliff you recognise because you’ve been camping there. Of course, the use of locations to represent other places is necessary in media fictions, and I’m not trying to carry out some kind of trainspotter location identification in an attempt to undermine the programme’s diegesis. But it is important to note that while “remembering is a process that today is increasingly media-afflicted” (Hoskins 110), media texts can also be affected by the memories, whether communal or individual, that we bring to bear on them. A ‘real’ relationship with a place can be so intimate that it refuses to be ignored when ‘representations’ require it to be unnecessary. I’m a fan of Doctor Who and would rather not recognise the places so I can just get on with enjoying the programme. But it’s not possible to simply erase “Expressions of community” (Moores 368) which bring together identity and place, especially when that place is your home. Importantly, my idea of ‘home’ is inextricably bound up in the past. As it is a place I no longer live in, the ways in which I feel towards it are predicated on the notion that I used to live there, but no longer do. It’s clear that notions of home – especially those related to nation – are often predicated on ideas of history with significant emotional resonance (Anderson; Blunt and Dowling 140-195; Calhoun). This is a place that is an emotional rather than geographical home, even if it used to also be my home geographically. In buying a house, and engaging in the consumer culture which dominates the ways in which we turn a house into a home (oh, those endless hours at Ikea), I spent a lot of time wondering what it was that this sofa, or those lampshades, or that rug, said about me. The idea that the buildings that we own are a key way of creating and demonstrating a particular kind of identity or affiliation with a certain social group is necessary to consumer capitalism. But as I no longer live in it, the inside of this house can no longer be used as something I can show to other people hoping that they’ll ‘read’ my home how I want them to. Instead, the sense of home invigorated by my house’s appearance on Torchwood is one centred on location, related to the city and the housing estate where my house is, rather than what I did to it. ‘Home’ here becomes something symbolised by the bricks and mortar of the house I bought, but is instead more accurately located in the city and area which the house sits in; Cardiff. More importantly, Cardiff and my house become emotionally meaningful because I’m no longer there. That is, while it’s clear I had a particular relationship to Cardiff when I was a resident, this has altered since my move to Norwich. In moving to a new city – one which I had never visited before, and had no family or friends living in – it seems that my understanding of Cardiff as my ‘home’ has become intensified. This might be because continuing to own property there gives me an investment in the city, both emotionally and financially. But this idea of ‘home’ would, I think, have existed even if I’d sold my house. Instead, Cardiff-as-home is predicated on an idea of personal history and nostalgia (Wheeler; Massey). Academics are used to moving great distances in order to get jobs; indeed, “To spend an entire working career in a single department may seem to be a failure of geographical imagination” (Ley 182). The labour market insists that “All people may now be wanderers” (Bauman, Globalization 87), and hence geographical origins become something to be discussed with new colleagues. For me, like most people, this is a complicated question; does it mean where I was born, or where I grew up, or where I studied, or where I have lived most of my life? In the choices I make to answer this question, I’m acknowledging that “migration is a complex process of cultural negotiation, resistance, and adaptation” (Sinclair and Cunningham 14). As Freeman notes, “the history one tells, via memory, assumes the form of a narrative of the past that charts the trajectory of how one’s self came to be” (33, italics in original). Importantly, this narrative must be seen to make sense; that is, it must help explain the present, conforming to narrative ideas of cause and effect. In constructing a “narratable self” (Caravero 33, italics in original) I’m demonstrating how I think I came to end up where I am now, doing the job I’m doing. In order to show that “I am more than what the thin present defines” (Tuan, Space and Place 186) it’s necessary to reiterate a notion of ‘home’ which supports and illustrates the desired identity narrative. This narrative is as much about “the reflexive project of the self” (Gauntlett 99) in these “liquid times” (Bauman, Liquid Times), as it is a “performance” (Goffman) for others. The coherence and stability of my performance was undercut in a recent episode of Doctor Who – ‘Smith and Jones’ (2007) – in which a family row occurred outside a pub. I became quite distraught that I couldn’t work out where that pub was, and was later reassured to discover that it was in Pontypridd, a town a good few miles from Cardiff, and therefore it wasn’t surprising that I couldn’t recognise it. But in being distraught at not recognising locations I was demonstrating how central knowledge is to an idea of ‘home’. Knowing your way around, knowing where certain shops are, knowing the history of the place; these are all aspects of home, all parts of what Crouch calls “lay knowledge” (217). Ignorance of a space marks the outsider, who must stand on street corners with a map and ask locals for directions. For someone like me who prides himself on his sense of direction (who says I conform to gender stereotypes?) an inability to recognise a pub that I thought I should know suggested my knowledge of the area was dissipating, and so perhaps my ability to define that city as my home was becoming less valid. This must be why I take pleasure in noting that Torchwood’s diegesis is often geographically correct, for the ‘representational’ helps demonstrate my knowledge of the ‘real’ place’s layout. As Tuan notes, “When space feels thoroughly familiar to us, it has become place” (Space and Place 73), and the demonstration of that familiarity is one of the ways of reasserting one’s relationship to home. In demonstrating a knowledge of the place I’m defining as home, I’m also insisting that I’m not a tourist. Urry shows how visitors use a “tourist gaze” (The Tourist Gaze), arguing viewing is the most important activity when encountering a place, just as Tuan (Space and Place 16) and Strain (3) do. To visit somewhere is to employ “a dominance of the eye” (Urry, “Sensing the City” 71); this is why photography has become the dominant manner for recording tourist activity. Strain sees the tourist gaze as one “trained for consumerism” (15) with tourist activity defined primarily by commerce. Since Doctor Who returned Cardiff has promoted its association with the programme, opening an ‘Up Close’ exhibition and debating whether to put together a tourist trail of locations. As a fan of these programmes I’m certainly excited by all of this, and have been to the exhibition. Yet it feels odd being a tourist in a place I want to call home, and some of my activity seems an attempt to demonstrate that it was my home before it became a place I might want to visit for its associations with a television programme. For example, I never went and watched the programme being filmed, even though much of it was shot within walking distance of my house, and “The physical places of fandom clearly have an extraordinary importance for fans” (Sandvoss 61). While some of this was due to not wanting to know what was going to happen in the programme, I was uncomfortable with carrying out an activity that would turn a “landscape” into a “mediascape” (Jansson 432), replacing the ‘real’ with the ‘representational’. In insisting on seeing Cardiff, and my house, as something which existed prior to the programmes, I’m attempting to maintain the “imagined community” (Anderson) I have for my home, distinguishing it from the taint of commerce, no matter how pointless or naïve such an act is in effect. Hence, home is resolutely not a commercial place; or, at least, it is a location whose primary emotive aspects are not defined by consumerism. When houses are seen as nothing more than aspects of commerce, that’s when they remain ‘houses’ or ‘properties’; the affective aspects of ‘homes’ are instead emotionally detached from the commercial factors which bring them about. I think this is why I’m keen to demonstrate that my associations with Cardiff existed before Doctor Who started being made there, for if the place only meant anything to me because of the programme that would define me as a tourist and therefore undermine those emotional and personal aspects of the city which allow me to call it ‘home’. It also means I can be proud that such a cultural institution is being made in ‘my’ city. But it’s a city I can no longer claim residence in. This means that Torchwood and Doctor Who have become useful ways for me to ‘visit’ Cardiff. It seems I have started to adopt a ‘tourist gaze’, for the programmes visually recreate the locations and all I can do is view them, no matter how much I use my knowledge of location in an attempt to interpret those images differently from a tourist. It’s tempting to suggest that this shows how there is a “perpetual negotiation between the real event and its representation” (Bruzzi 9), and how willing I am to engage in the “mobile privatization” that Williams saw as a defining aspect of television (26). But this would be to accept the “unhomeyness” which results from “the ultimate failures of the home in postmodern times” (Lewis and Cho 74). In adopting an autobiographical approach to these issues, I hope I’ve demonstrated the ways in which individuals can experience emotional resonances related to ‘home’ which, while clearly inflected through the social, cultural, and technological aspects I’ve outlined, are nevertheless meaningful and maintain a dominance of the ‘real’ over the ‘representational’. Furthermore, my job tells me I shouldn’t feel this way about my home; or, at least, it reminds me that such emotionality can be explained away through cultural analysis. But that doesn’t in any way make ‘home’ any less powerful nor fully explain how such dry criteria mutate into humanist, emotional significance. So, I can tell you what my home is: but I’m not sure I can get you to understand how seeing my home on television makes me feel. In that sense it’s almost too neat that the episode which kick-started all of this is called ‘Ghost Machine’, for television has become the technology through which the ghosts of my home haunt me on a weekly basis, and ghosts have always been difficult to make sense of. References Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities. London: Verso, 1983. Bauman, Zygmunt. Globalization: The Human Consequences. Cambridge: Polity, 1998. ———. Liquid Times: Living in an Age of Uncertainty. Cambridge: Polity, 2007. Blunt, Alison, and Robyn Dowling. Home. London and New York: Routledge, 2006. Bruzzi, Stella. New Documentary: A Critical Introduction. London and New York: Routledge, 2000. Calhoun, Craig. Nations Matter: Culture, History, and the Cosmopolitan Dream. London and New York: Routledge, 2007. Caravero, Adriana. Relating Narratives: Storytelling and Selfhood. Trans. Paul A. Kottman. London and New York: Routledge, 2000/1997. Crouch, David. “Surrounded by Place: Embodied Encounters.” Tourism: Between Place and Performance. Eds. Simon Coleman and Mike Crang. New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2002. 207-18. Darby, Wendy Joy. Landscape and Identity: Geographies of Nation and Class in England. Oxford and New York: Berg, 2000. Freeman, Mark. Rewriting the Self: History, Memory, Narrative. London and New York: Routledge, 1993. Gauntlett, David. Media, Gender and Identity: An Introduction. London and New York: Routledge, 2002. Goffmann, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. London: Penguin, 1959. Hoskins, Andrew. “Television and the Collapse of Memory.” Time and Society 13.1 (2004): 109-27. Jansson, André. “Spatial Phantasmagoria: the Mediatization of Tourism Experience.” European Journal of Communication 17.4 (2002): 429-43. Kilborn, Richard, and John Izod. An Introduction to Television Documentary: Confronting Reality. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1997. Lewis, Tyson, and Daniel Cho. “Home Is Where the Neurosis Is: A Topography of the Spatial Unconscious.” Cultural Critique 64.1 (2006): 69-91. Ley, David. “Places and Contexts.” Approaches to Human Geography. Eds. Stuart Aitken and Gill Valentine. London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi: Sage, 2006. 178-83. Massey, Doris. For Space. London: Sage, 2005. Moores, Shaun. “Television, Geography and ‘Mobile Privatization’.” European Journal of Communication 8.4 (1993): 365-79. Morley, David. Home Territories: Media, Mobility and Identity. London and New York: Routledge, 2000. Rodaway, Paul. “Humanism and People-Centred Methods.” Approaches to Human Geography. Eds. Stuart Aitken and Gill Valentine. London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi: Sage, 2006. 263-72. Sandvoss, Cornel. Fans: The Mirror of Consumption. Cambridge: Polity, 2005. Sinclair, John, and Stuart Cunningham. “Go with the Flow: Diasporas and the Media.” Television and New Media 1.1 (2000): 11-31. Strain, Ellen. Public Places, Private Journeys: Ethnography, Entertainment, and the Tourist Gaze. New Brunswick, New Jersey, and London: Rutgers UP, 2003. Tuan, Yi-Fu. Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes, and Values. New York: Columbia UP, 1974. ———. Space and Place: the Perspective of Experience. London: Edward Arnold, 1977. Urry, John. “Sensing the City.” The Tourist City. Eds. Dennis R. Judd and Susan S. Fainstein. New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1999. 71-86. ———. The Tourist Gaze. 2nd ed. London: Sage, 2002. Ward, Paul. Documentary: The Margins of Reality. London and New York: Wallflower, 2005. Wheeler, Wendy. A New Modernity: Change in Science, Literature and Politics. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1999. Williams, Raymond. Television: Technology and Cultural Form. 2nd ed. London and New York: Routledge, 1990. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Mills, Brett. "What Happens When Your Home Is on Television?." M/C Journal 10.4 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0708/08-mills.php>. APA Style Mills, B. (Aug. 2007) "What Happens When Your Home Is on Television?," M/C Journal, 10(4). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0708/08-mills.php>.

The compulsion to work has clearly become pathological in modern industrial societies. Millions of people are working long hours, devoting their lives to making or doing things that will not enrich their lives or make them happier but will add to the garbage and pollution that the earth is finding difficult to accommodate. They are so busy doing this that they have little time to spend with their family and friends, to develop other aspects of themselves, to participate in their communities as full citizens. Unless the work/consume treadmill is overcome there is little hope for the planet. The work ethic, and the corresponding respect accorded to those who accumulate wealth, are socially constructed but rapidly becoming dysfunctional for social and environmental welfare. Much has been written about the role of Protestant preachers in the rise of the work ethic but the continued reinforcement of a secular work ethic owes much to literature, particularly self-help books and children's literature of the nineteenth century, which promoted work as a route to success and a sign of good character. In the centuries following the Protestant reformation the emphasis on work as a religious calling was gradually superseded by a materialistic quest for social mobility and material success. This success-oriented work ethic encouraged ambition, hard work, self-reliance, and self-discipline and held out the promise that such effort would be materially rewarded. Through example and reiteration, the myth that any man, no matter what his origins, could become rich if he tried hard enough became firmly established. The self-made man owed his advancement to habits of industry, sobriety, moderation, self-discipline, and avoidance of debt (Beder). In early America the middle classes "controlled the major institutions of social influence" the schools, churches, factories, political offices and publishing companies and used them to propagate work values (Cherrington 32-3). Their children learned the value of hard work from their parents and this was reinforced by school teachers, classroom readers and popular books. Benjamin Franklin was one of the best-known early propagators of work values. Poor Richard and Franklin's autobiography sold millions of copies at the time and was translated into many languages for sale abroad. In his books he urged thrift, industry, pursuit of money and hard work. "Newspapers, books, interviews, speeches, and literature abounded with praise of the successful who had made it on their own" (Bernstein 141). Success was defined in terms of doing well in business and making lots of money. Owning one's own business was supposed to be a route to success that was open to all, as Abraham Lincoln explained in an 1861 speech to Congress: "The prudent, penniless beginner in the world, labors for wages awhile, saves a surplus with which to buy tools or land for himself, then labors on his own account for awhile, and at length hires another new beginner to help him. This is a just, and generous, and prosperous system; which opens the way to all gives hope to all, and consequent energy and progress, and improvement of conditions to all." (qtd. in Chinoy 4) The earliest textbooks published in America promoted work values as part of good character and the formula to success. These included the Peter Parley books first published by Samuel Goodrich during the 1820s and 30s (Peter Parley was a pseudonym). Goodrich wrote some 150 children's books beginning with Tales of Peter Parley about America. The Parley books covered geography, history, commerce and even mathematics. McGuffey's Eclectic Readers were the standard English textbooks in American schools from 1830s through to 1920s. They were first published in 1836 and became perhaps the most widely read children's books in the 19th century with 122 million copies of the six readers sold to an estimated four fifths of US school children (Cherrington 36). American children learned to read and write using these books, which also taught middle-class values including the work ethic and success through hard work: "Work, work, my boy, be not afraid; Look labor boldly in the face" (qtd. in Bernstein 161). They are again being promoted today by conservative groups in the US (see for example http://www.liberty-tree.org/ltn/mcguffeys-reader.html and http://www.aobs-store.com/reviews/mcguffey.htm). American story books also taught work values. Horatio Alger (1832-99) was one of the most prolific American writers. He wrote some 130 books that taught work values to young boys. Twenty million copies of Alger's books were sold with titles such as Strive and Succeed, Ragged Dick, Mark the Matchboy, Risen from the Ranks, Bound to Rise. They typically told of poor boys who became self-made men through their own efforts and perseverance. In the twentieth century children continued to learn at school about how various successful businessmen had started from humble origins. From the 1940s the American Schools and Colleges Association presented an annual "Horatio Alger Award" to businessmen whose "rise to success symbolizes the tradition of starting from scratch under our system of free competitive enterprise" (Chinoy 1) and there are still a range of Alger associations and awards current today (see for example http://www.ihot.com/~has/ and http://www.horatioalger.com/). Self-help books supplemented fiction in showing the way to success. Books at the turn of the 20th century with names such as The Conquest of Poverty, Pushing to the Front, Success under Difficulty, all preached the message of how any motivated, hard-working individual could overcome life's obstacles. Work as a route to success was also promoted in Britain in books, newspapers and official reports. Workers were urged to work hard towards success, to be independent and raise themselves above their lowly stations in life through saving, striving, and industriousness. Nineteenth century organisations such as the Bettering Society promoted thrift and self-improvement and criticised measures to aid the poor (Roach 69). Samuel Smiles was one of the foremost advocates of "the spirit of self-help". His 1859 book Self-Help argued: "In many walks of life drudgery and toil must be cheerfully endured as the necessary discipline of life... He who allows his application to falter, or shirks his work on frivolous pretexts, is on the sure road to ultimate failure... even men with the commonest brains and the most slender powers will accomplish much..." (qtd. in Ward 22-3) The myth of the self-made man was also evident in popular music hall songs in the 19th century, such as Work Boys Work by Harry Clifton (1824-1872): ...labour leads to wealth and will keep you in good health, so its best to be contented with your lot. Whilst it was true that some of the early English manufacturers started off as workers themselves, they tended to come from the middle classes and as time went by the opportunity for working people to become capitalists were reduced as the income gap between capitalists and workers broadened. In fact the much publicised gospel of improvement and self-help served only to obscure the very limited prospects and achievements of the self-made men within early and later Victorian society, and investigations of the steel and hosiery industries, for instance, have shown how little recruitment occurred from the ranks of the workers to those of the entrepreneurs. (Thomis 86) However, there were enough oft-repeated stories of individuals moving from poverty to wealth to keep alive, at least in the minds of the well-to-do, the idea that hard work could lead from rags-to-riches, despite this not being the case for the vast majority of people who were born in poverty and died in poverty after a life time of hard work (Furnham 198). In this way the affluent were able to feel comfortable about poverty in their midst, blaming it on individual weakness rather than societal failings. In Britain, as in America, the myth of the self-made man persisted in children's literature into the twentieth century. Academic Philip Cohen noted: When I was growing up in the early 1950s it was still possible to get given 'improving books' for one's birthday, consisting of biographies of self-made men, engineers, inventors, industrialists, entrepreneurs, philanthropists and the like. These men, and they were all men, had usually lived in the 'heroic' age of nineteenth-century capitalism and the books themselves were clearly prepared for the edification of the young. (Cohen 61) The contemporary reception by audiences of the texts discussed in this article is unknown. In particular, the degree to which children were able to resist the none too subtle moral lessons contained in their texts and stories is a question requiring empirical research that has yet to be carried out. However, it is evident that the promotion of the work ethic has been a successful enterprise and this article has shown that 19thcentury books played an active part in that. Although not everyone subscribes to the work ethic today, the myth of the self-made man remains a myth in most English speaking countries, even though the disparities between rich and poor are widening and it is becoming more and more difficult for the poor to become rich through talent, effort and opportunities. Despite the dysfunctionality of the work ethic it continues to be promoted and praised, accepted and acquiesced to. It is one of the least challenged aspects of industrial culture. Yet it is based on myths and fallacies which provide legitimacy for gross social inequalities. If we are to protect the planet and our social health we need to find new ways of judging and valuing each other which are not work and income dependent. References Beder, Sharon. Selling the Work Ethic: From puritan pulpit to corporate PR. London: Zed Books, 2000. Bernstein, Paul. American Work Values: Their Origin and Development. Albany, NY: State U of New York P, 1997. Cherrington, David J. The Work Ethic: Working Values and Values that Work. New York: AMACON, 1980. Chinoy, Ely. Automobile Workers and the American Dream. 2nd ed. Urbana and Chicago: U of Illinois P, 1992. Cohen, Philip. "Teaching Enterprise Culture: Individualism, Vocationalism and the New Right." The Social Effects of Free Market Policies: An International Text. Ed. Ian Taylor. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1990. 49-91. Furnham, Adrian. The Protestant Work Ethic: The Psychology of Work-Related Beliefs and Behaviours. London: Routledge, 1990. Roach, John. Social Reform in England 1780-1880. London: B T. Batsford, 1978. Thomis, Malcolm I. The Town Labourer and the Industrial Revolution. London: B.T.Batsford, 1974. Ward, J. T. The Age of Change 1770-1870. London: A&C Black, 1975. Links http://www.horatioalger.com/ http://www.aobs-store.com/reviews/mcguffey.htm http://www.ihot.com/~has/ http://www.liberty-tree.org/ltn/mcguffeys-reader.html Citation reference for this article MLA Style Beder, Sharon. "The Promotion of a Secular Work Ethic" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 4.5 (2001). [your date of access] < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0111/Beder.xml >. Chicago Style Beder, Sharon, "The Promotion of a Secular Work Ethic" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 4, no. 5 (2001), < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0111/Beder.xml > ([your date of access]). APA Style Beder, Sharon. (2001) The Promotion of a Secular Work Ethic. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 4(5). < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0111/Beder.xml > ([your date of access]).

Economics of Cute There are many ways to study cute: for example, neuro-biology (cute as adaptation); anthropology (cute in culture); political economy (cute industries, how cute exploits consumers); cultural studies (social construction of cute); media theory and politics (representation and identity of cute), and so on. What about economics? At first sight, this might point to a money-capitalism nexus (“the cute economy”), but I want to argue here that the economics of cute actually works through choice interacting with fixed costs and what economists call ”the substitution effect”. Cute, in conjunction with the Internet, affects the trade-offs involved in choices people make. Let me put that more starkly: cute shapes the economy. This can be illustrated with internet animals, which at the time of writing means Grumpy Cat. I want to explain how that mechanism works – but to do so I will need some abstraction. This is not difficult – a simple application of a well-known economics model, namely the Allen-Alchian theorem, or the “third law of demand”. But I am going to take some liberties in order to represent that model clearly in this short paper. Specifically, I will model just two extremes of quality (“opera” and “cat videos”) to represent end-points of a spectrum. I will also assume that the entire effect of the internet is to lower the cost of cat videos. Now obviously these are just simplifying assumptions “for the purpose of the model”. And the purpose of the model is to illuminate a further aspect of how we might understand cute, by using an economic model of choice and its consequences. This is a standard technique in economics, but not so in cultural studies, so I will endeavour to explain these moments as we go, so as to avoid any confusion about analytic intent. The purpose of this paper is to suggest a way that a simple economic model might be applied to augment the cultural study of cute by seeking to unpack its economic aspect. This can be elucidated by considering the rise of internet animals as a media-cultural force, as epitomized by “cat videos”. We can explain this through an application of price theory and the theory of demand that was first proposed by Armen Alchian and William Allen. They showed how an equal fixed cost that was imposed to both high-quality and low-quality goods alike caused a shift in consumption toward the higher-quality good, because it is now relatively cheaper. Alchian and Allen had in mind something like transport costs on agricultural goods (such as apples). But it is also true that the same effect works in reverse (Cowen), and the purpose of this paper is to develop that logic to contribute to explaining how certain structural shifts in production and consumption in digital media, particularly the rise of blog formats such as Tumblr, a primary supplier of kittens on the Internet, can be in part understood as a consequence of this economic mechanism. There are three key assumptions to build this argument. The first is that the cost of the internet is independent of what it carries. This is certainly true at the level of machine code, and largely true at higher levels. What might be judged aesthetically high quality or low quality content – say of a Bach cantata or a funny cat video – are treated the same way if they both have the same file size. This is a physical and computational aspect of net-neutrality. The internet – or digitization – functions as a fixed cost imposed regardless of what cultural quality is moving across it. Second, while there are costs to using the internet (for example, in hardware or concerning digital literacy) these costs are lower than previous analog forms of information and cultural production and dissemination. This is not an empirical claim, but a logical one (revealed preference): if it were not so, people would not have chosen it. The first two points – net neutrality and lowered cost – I want to take as working assumptions, although they can obviously be debated. But that is not the purpose of the paper, which is instead the third point – the “Alchian-Allen theorem”, or the third fundamental law of demand. The Alchian-Allen Theorem The Alchian-Allen theorem is an extension of the law of demand (Razzolini et al) to consider how the distribution of high quality and low quality substitutes of the same good (such as apples) is affected by the imposition of a fixed cost (such as transportation). It is also known as the “shipping the good apples out” theorem, after Borcherding and Silberberg explained why places that produce a lot of apples – such as Seattle in the US – often also have low supplies of high quality apples compared to places that do not produce apples, such as New York. The puzzle of “why can’t you get good apples in Seattle?” is a simple but clever application of price theory. When a place produces high quality and low quality items, it will be rational for those in faraway places to consume the high quality items, and it will be rational for the producers to ship them, leaving only the low quality items locally.Why? Assume preferences and incomes are the same everywhere and that transport cost is the same regardless of whether the item shipped is high or low quality. Both high quality and low quality apples are more expensive in New York compared to Seattle, but because the fixed transport cost applies to both the high quality apples are relatively less expensive. Rational consumers in New York will consume more high quality apples. This makes fewer available in Seattle.Figure 1: Change in consumption ratio after the imposition of a fixed cost to all apples Another example: Australians drink higher quality Californian wine than Californians, and vice versa, because it is only worth shipping the high quality wine out. A counter-argument is that learning effects dominate: with high quality local product, local consumers learn to appreciate quality, and have different preferences (Cowen and Tabarrok).The Alchian-Allen theorem applies to any fixed cost that applies generally. For example, consider illegal drugs (such as alcohol during the US prohibition, or marijuana or cocaine presently) and the implication of a fixed penalty – such as a fine, or prison sentence, which is like a cost – applied to trafficking or consumption. Alchian-Allen predicts a shift toward higher quality (or stronger) drugs, because with a fixed penalty and probability of getting caught, the relatively stronger substance is now relatively cheaper. Empirical work finds that this effect did occur during alcohol prohibition, and is currently occurring in narcotics (Thornton Economics of Prohibition, "Potency of illegal drugs").Another application proposed by Steven Cuellar uses Alchian-Allen to explain a well-known statistical phenomenon why women taking the contraceptive pill on average prefer “more masculine” men. This is once again a shift toward quality predicted on falling relative price based on a common ‘fixed price’ (taking the pill) of sexual activity. Jean Eid et al show that the result also applies to racehorses (the good horses get shipped out), and Staten and Umbeck show it applies to students – the good students go to faraway universities, and the good student in those places do the same. So that’s apples, drugs, sex and racehorses. What about the Internet and kittens?Allen-Alchian Explains Why the Internet Is Made of CatsIn analog days, before digitization and Internet, the transactions costs involved with various consumption items, whether commodities or media, meant that the Alchian-Allen effect pushed in the direction of higher quality, bundled product. Any additional fixed costs, such as higher transport costs, or taxes or duties, or transactions costs associated with search and coordination and payment, i.e. costs that affected all substitutes in the same way, would tend to make the higher quality item relatively less expensive, increasing its consumption.But digitisation and the Internet reverse the direction of these transactions costs. Rather than adding a fixed cost, such as transport costs, the various aspects of the digital revolution are equivalent to a fall in fixed costs, particularly access.These factors are not just one thing, but a suite of changes that add up to lowered transaction costs in the production, distribution and consumption of media, culture and games. These include: The internet and world-wide-web, and its unencumbered operation The growth and increasing efficacy of search technology Growth of universal broadband for fast, wide band-width access Growth of mobile access (through smartphones and other appliances) Growth of social media networks (Facebook, Twitter; Metcalfe’s law) Growth of developer and distribution platforms (iPhone, android, iTunes) Globally falling hardware and network access costs (Moore’s law) Growth of e-commerce (Ebay, Amazon, Etsy) and e-payments (paypal, bitcoin) Expansions of digital literacy and competence Creative commons These effects do not simply shift us down a demand curve for each given consumption item. This effect alone simply predicts that we consume more. But the Alchian-Allen effect makes a different prediction, namely that we consume not just more, but also different.These effects function to reduce the overall fixed costs or transactions costs associated with any consumption, sharing, or production of media, culture or games over the internet (or in digital form). With this overall fixed cost component now reduced, it represents a relatively larger decline in cost at the lower-quality, more bite-sized or unbundled end of the media goods spectrum. As such, this predicts a change in the composition of the overall consumption basket to reflect the changed relative prices that these above effects give rise to. See Figure 2 below (based on a blog post by James Oswald). The key to the economics of cute, in consequence of digitisation, is to follow through the qualitative change that, because of the Alchian-Allen effect, moves away from the high-quality, highly-bundled, high-value end of the media goods spectrum. The “pattern prediction” here is toward more, different, and lower quality: toward five minutes of “Internet animals”, rather than a full day at the zoo. Figure 2: Reducing transaction costs lowers the relative price of cat videos Consider five dimensions in which this more and different tendency plays out. Consumption These effects make digital and Internet-based consumption cheaper, shifting us down a demand curve, so we consume more. That’s the first law of demand in action: i.e. demand curves slope downwards. But a further effect – brilliantly set out in Cowen – is that we also consume lower-quality media. This is not a value judgment. These lower-quality media may well have much higher aesthetic value. They may be funnier, or more tragic and sublime; or faster, or not. This is not about absolute value; only about relative value. Digitization operating through Allen-Alchian skews consumption toward the lower quality ends in some dimensions: whether this is time, as in shorter – or cost, as in cheaper – or size, as in smaller – or transmission quality, as in gifs. This can also be seen as a form of unbundling, of dropping of dimensions that are not valued to create a simplified product.So we consume different, with higher variance. We sample more than we used to. This means that we explore a larger information world. Consumption is bite-sized and assorted. This tendency is evident in the rise of apps and in the proliferation of media forms and devices and the value of interoperability.ProductionAs consumption shifts (lower quality, greater variety), so must production. The production process has two phases: (1) figuring out what to do, or development; and (2) doing it, or making. The world of trade and globalization describes the latter part: namely efficient production. The main challenge is the world of innovation: the entrepreneurial and experimental world of figuring out what to do, and how. It is this second world that is radically transformed by implications of lowered transaction costs.One implication is growth of user-communities based around collaborative media projects (such as open source software) and community-based platforms or common pool resources for sharing knowledge, such as the “Maker movement” (Anderson 2012). This phenomenon of user-co-creation, or produsers, has been widely recognized as an important new phenomenon in the innovation and production process, particularly those processes associated with new digital technologies. There are numerous explanations for this, particularly around preferences for cooperation, community-building, social learning and reputational capital, and entrepreneurial expectations (Quiggin and Potts, Banks and Potts). Business Models The Alchian-Allen effect on consumption and production follows through to business models. A business model is a way of extracting value that represents some strategic equilibrium between market forms, organizational structures, technological possibilities and institutional framework and environmental conditions that manifests in entrepreneurial patterns of business strategy and particular patterns of investment and organization. The discovery of effective business models is a key process of market capitalist development and competition. The Alchian-Allen effect impacts on the space of effective viable business models. Business models that used to work will work less well, or not at all. And new business models will be required. It is a significant challenge to develop these “economic technologies”. Perhaps no less so than development of the physical technologies, new business models are produced through experimental trial and error. They cannot be known in advance or planned. But business models will change, which will affect not only the constellation of existing companies and the value propositions that underlie them, but also the broader specializations based on these in terms of skill sets held and developed by people, locations of businesses and people, and so on. New business models will emerge from a process of Schumpeterian creative destruction as it unfolds (Beinhocker). The large production, high development cost, proprietary intellectual property and systems based business model is not likely to survive, other than as niche areas. More experimental, discovery-focused, fast-development-then-scale-up based business models are more likely to fit the new ecology. Social Network Markets & Novelty Bundling MarketsThe growth of variety and diversity of choice that comes with this change in the way media is consumed to reflect a reallocation of consumption toward smaller more bite-sized, lower valued chunks (the Alchian-Allen effect) presents consumers with a problem, namely that they have to make more choices over novelty. Choice over novelty is difficult for consumers because it is experimental and potentially costly due to risk of mistakes (Earl), but it also presents entrepreneurs with an opportunity to seek to help solve that problem. The problem is a simple consequence of bounded rationality and time scarcity. It is equivalent to saying that the cost of choice rises monotonically with the number of choices, and that because there is no way to make a complete rational choice, agents will use decision or choice heuristics. These heuristics can be developed independently by the agents themselves through experience, or they can be copied or adopted from others (Earl and Potts). What Potts et al call “social network markets” and what Potts calls “novelty bundling markets” are both instances of the latter process of copying and adoption of decision rules. Social network markets occur when agents use a “copy the most common” or “copy the highest rank” meta-level decision rule (Bentley et al) to deal with uncertainty. Social network markets can be efficient aggregators of distributed information, but they can also be path-dependent, and usually lead to winner-take all situations and dynamics. These can result in huge pay-offs differentials between first and second or fifth place, even when the initial quality differentials are slight or random. Diversity, rapid experimentation, and “fast-failure” are likely to be effective strategies. It also points to the role of trust and reputation in using adopted decision rules and the information economics that underlies that: namely that specialization and trade applies to the production and consumption of information as well as commodities. Novelty bundling markets are an entrepreneurial response to this problem, and observable in a range of new media and creative industries contexts. These include arts, music or food festivals or fairs where entertainment and sociality is combined with low opportunity cost situations in which to try bundles of novelty and connect with experts. These are by agents who developed expert preferences through investment and experience in consumption of the particular segment or domain. They are expert consumers and are selling their “decision rules” and not just the product. The more production and consumption of media and digital information goods and services experiences the Alchian-Allen effect, the greater the importance of novelty bundling markets. Intellectual Property & Regulation A further implication is that rent-seeking solutions may also emerge. This can be seen in two dimensions; pursuit of intellectual property (Boldrin and Levine); and demand for regulations (Stigler). The Alchian-Allen induced shift will affect markets and business models (and firms), and because this will induce strategic defensive and aggressive responses from different organizations. Some organizations will seek to fight and adapt to this new world through innovative competition. Other firms will fight through political connections. Most incumbent firms will have substantial investments in IP or in the business model it supports. Yet the intellectual property model is optimized for high-quality large volume centralized production and global sales of undifferentiated product. Much industrial and labour regulation is built on that model. How governments support such industries is predicated on the stability of this model. The Alchian-Allen effect threatens to upset that model. Political pushback will invariably take the form of opposing most new business models and the new entrants they carry. Conclusion I have presented here a lesser-known but important theorem in applied microeconomics – the Alchian-Allen effect – and explain why its inverse is central to understanding the evolution of new media industries, and also why cute animals proliferate on the Internet. The theorem states that when a fixed cost is added to substitute goods, consumers will shift to the higher quality item (now relatively less expensive). 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