Supermarkets and agro-industrial foods : the strategic manufacturing of consumer trust

There is increasing evidence of a weakened platform of consumer trust in mass produced food products. The resistance shown by consumers to the agro-industrial paradigm is evident in an emergent phase of reflexive consumerism, public reactions to an overly-concentrated retail sector and the rise of alternative food networks such as farmers' markets and organic box schemes. Supermarkets are responding strategically by aiming to manufacture new trust relations with consumers. This paper identifies three key strategies of trust manufacturing: (i) reputational enhancement though the institution of “behind the scenes,” business-to-business private standards; (ii) direct quality claims via private standard certification badges on food products, and ; (iii) discursive claimsmaking through symbolic representations of “authenticity” and “tradition.” Drawing upon the food governance literature and a “visual sociology” of supermarkets and supermarket produce, we highlight how trust is both commoditized and increasingly embedded into the marketing of mass-produced foods.

Cultural forces in journalism : the impact of cultural values on Māori journalists’ professional views

Social system-level analyses of journalism have tended to focus on political and economic influences, at the expense of other factors, such as the role that culture and cultural values play in shaping journalists' professional views and practices. This paper identifies cultural values as a particularly fruitful area for providing a more nuanced analysis of journalism culture. It examines this issue in the context of in-depth interviews with 20 M?ori journalists from Aotearoa New Zealand. The study finds that Indigenous journalism in that country is strongly influenced by M?ori cultural values, such as showing respect to others, following cultural protocols, and making use of culturally-specific language. Cultural limitations are also identified in the form of the social structures of M?ori society, and journalists' strategies in working around these are discussed. The paper highlights the implications a renewed focus on cultural values can have for the study of journalism culture more broadly.

Strategic capability development : a multi-level case study of the role of knowledge integration within product innovation

Capability development is at the heart of creating competitive advantage. This thesis intends to conceptualise Strategic Capability Development as a renewal of an organisation's existing capability in line with the requirements of the market. It followed and compared four product innovation projects within Iran Khodro Company (IKCO), an exemplar of capability development within the Iranian Auto industry. Findings show that the maturation of strategic capability at the organisational level has occurred through a sequence of product innovation projects and by dynamically shaping the learning and knowledge integration processes in accordance with emergence of the new structure within the industry. Accordingly, Strategic Capability Development is conceptualised in an interpretive model. Such findings are useful for development of an explanatory model and a practical capability development framework for managing learning and knowledge across different product innovation projects.

Built to last or meant to end : intertemporal choice in strategic alliance portfolios

A salient but rarely explicitly studied characteristic of interfirm relationships is that they can intentionally be formed for finite periods of time. What determines firms' intertemporal choices between different alliance time horizons? Shadow of the future theorists suggest that when an alliance has an explicitly set short-term time frame, there is an increased risk that partners may behave opportunistically. This does not readily explain the high incidence of time-bound alliances being formed. Reconciling insights from the shadow of the future perspective with nascent research on the flexibility of temporary organizations, and shifting the focus from the level of individual transactions to that of strategic alliance portfolios, we argue that firms may be willing to accept a higher risk of opportunism when there are offsetting gains in strategic flexibility in managing their strategic alliance portfolio. Consequently, we hypothesize that environmental factors that increase the need for strategic flexibility—namely, dynamism and complexity in the environment—are likely to increase the relative share of time-bound alliances in strategic alliance portfolios. Our analysis of longitudinal data on the intertemporal alliance choices of a large sample of small and medium-sized enterprises provides support for this argument. Our findings fill an important gap in theory about time horizons in interfirm relationships and temporary organizations and show the importance of separating planned terminations from duration-based performance measures.

Numerical estimation of 3D mechanical forces exerted by cells on non-linear materials

The exchange of physical forces in both cell-cell and cell-matrix interactions play a significant role in a variety of physiological and pathological processes, such as cell migration, cancer metastasis, inflammation and wound healing. Therefore, great interest exists in accurately quantifying the forces that cells exert on their substrate during migration. Traction Force Microscopy (TFM) is the most widely used method for measuring cell traction forces. Several mathematical techniques have been developed to estimate forces from TFM experiments. However, certain simplifications are commonly assumed, such as linear elasticity of the materials and/or free geometries, which in some cases may lead to inaccurate results. Here, cellular forces are numerically estimated by solving a minimization problem that combines multiple non-linear FEM solutions. Our simulations, free from constraints on the geometrical and the mechanical conditions, show that forces are predicted with higher accuracy than when using the standard approaches.

Strategic intelligence in law enforcement : anticipating transnational organised crime

This thesis is an explorative study of four national level law enforcement agencies' applications of strategic intelligence against transnational organised crime. The thesis develops a hybrid conceptual model for strategic intelligence in law enforcement, which explains how strategic intelligence influences police management. Dr Coyne explored case studies of strategic intelligence in the Criminal Intelligence Service Canada, Serious and Organised Crime Agency United Kingdom, Australian Crime Commission and the Australian Federal Police. The research provides an understanding of the impact of strategic intelligence across strategic responses to transnational organised crime and the implications this has for police management and intelligence theory.

Design of light gauge steel roofing systems subject to high wind forces

Light gauge steel roofing systems made of thin profiled roof sheeting and battens are used commonly in residential, industrial and commercial buildings. Their critical design load combination is that due to wind uplift forces that occur during high wind events such as tropical cyclones and thunderstorms. However, premature local failures at their screw connections have been a concern for many decades since cyclone Tracy that devastated Darwin in 1974. Extensive research that followed cyclone Tracy on the pull-through and pull-out failures of roof sheeting to batten connections has significantly improved the safety of roof sheeting. However, this has made the batten to rafter/truss connection the weakest, and recent wind damage investigations have shown the failures of these connections and the resulting loss of entire roof structures. Therefore an experimental research program using both small scale and full scale air-box tests is currently under way to investigate the pull-through failures of thin-walled steel battens under high wind uplift forces. Tests have demonstrated that occurrence of pull-through failures in the bottom flanges of steel batttens and the need to develop simple test and design methods as a function of many critical parameters such as steel batten geometry, thickness and grade, screw fastener sizes and other fastening details. This paper presents the details of local failures that occur in light fauge roofing systems, a review of the current design and test methods for steel battens and associated short comings, and the test results obtained to date on pull-through failures of battens from small scale and full scale tests. Finally, it proposes the use of suitable small scale test methods that can be used by both researchers and manufacturers of such screw-fastened light gauge steel batten systems.

Strategic IMC : from abstract concept to marketing management tool

Although integrated marketing communication (IMC) has progressed towards midrange maturity level, its full-scale adoption has been impeded by a lack of consensus on its defining constructs. The purpose of this study is to move from abstraction to define the construct of strategic integration (SI) and develop this into a management tool, thus making an important contribution to both the theory and practice of IMC. Drawing from both IMC and strategic management literature, the construct of SI is operationalised into a number of key factors and a well-cited management model, Fuchs’ ‘integration valuator’ is explored as the starting point of a measurement tool for IMC. To do this, a Delphi study invites the scrutiny of an expert panel of world-leading IMC researchers and practitioners. The panel validated the model construction process,redefined overarching constructs and key factors with a high degree of consensus, supported a process measure, suggested a weighted evaluation measure and recognised the importance of developing such a measure. They delivered clear and consistent imperatives guiding model development. The result is a measure of SI that evaluates organisational proficiency and diagnoses the integration of IMC campaigns. It also advances theory by providing a better understanding of the construct of SI.

eHealth-as-a-Service (eHaaS) : towards universal stakeholder engagement

With the introduction of the Personally Controlled Health Record (PCEHR), the Australian public is being asked to accept greater responsibility for their healthcare by taking an active role in the management of personal health information. Although well designed, constructed and intentioned, policy and privacy concerns have resulted in an eHealth model that may impact future health sharing requirements. Hence, as a case study for a consumer eHealth initative in the Australian context, eHealth-as-a-Service (eHaaS) serves as a disruptive step in in the aggregation and transformation of health information for use as real-world knowledge. The strategic value of extending the community Health Record Bank (HRB) model lies in the ability to automatically draw on a multitude of relevant data repositories and sources to create a single source of the truth and to engage market forces to create financial sustainability. The opportunity to transform the beleaguered Australian PCEHR into a realisable and sustainable technology consumption model for patient safety is explored. Moreover, the current clerical focus of healthcare practitioners acting in the role of de facto record keepers is renegotiated to establish a shared knowledge creation landscape of action for safer patient interventions. To achieve this potential however requires a platform that will facilitate efficient and trusted unification of all health information available in real-time across the continuum of care. eHaaS provides a sustainable environment and encouragement to realise this potential.

Strategic play among family members when making long-term care decisions

This paper describes a strategic model of bargaining within a family to determine how to care for an elderly parent. We estimate the parameters of the model using data from the National Long-term Care Survey. We find that the parameter estimates generally make sense and that the model is consistent with the data. The results have strong implications for using less structural empirical models for policy analysis.

Self-organization in arrays of surface-grown nanoparticles : characterization, control, driving forces

Some important issues related to the self-organization in the arrays of nanoparticles on solid surfaces exposed to the low-temperature plasma are analysed and discussed. The available tools for the characterization of the size and position uniformity in nanoarrays are examined. The technique capable of revealing the realistic adsorbed atom and adsorbed radical capture zone pattern based on the surface physics is indicated as the most promising characterization tool. The processes responsible for the self-organization are analysed, the main driving forces of the self-organization are discussed, and possible ways to control the self-organization by controlling the plasma parameters are introduced. A view on the possible ways to further improve the methods of nanoarray characterization and self-organization is presented as well.

Dust charge and ion drag forces in a high-voltage, capacitive radio frequency sheath

The charge of an isolated dust grain and ion drag forces on the grain in a collisionless, high-voltage, capacitive rf sheath are studied theoretically. The studies are carried out assuming that the positive ions are monoenergetic, as well as in more realistic approximation, assuming that the time-averaged energy distribution of ions impinging on the dust grain has a double-peaked hollow profile. For the nonmonoenergetic case, an analytical expression for the ion flux to the dust grain is obtained. It is studied how the dust charge and ion drag forces depend on the rf frequency, electron density at plasma-sheath boundary, electron temperature and ratio of the effective oscillation amplitude of rf current to the electron Debye length. It is shown that the dust charge and ion drag forces obtained in the monoenergetic ion approximation may differ from those calculated assuming that the ions are nonmonoenergetic. The difference increases with increasing the width of the ion energy spread in the ion distribution. © 2009 American Institute of Physics.

Biaxial fiber Bragg grating accelerometer using axial and transverse forces

We demonstrate the first biaxial fiber Bragg grating (FBG) accelerometer using axial and transverse forces. An inertial object is fixed at the middle of two FBGs inscribed in one fiber. The difference between the resonant wavelengths of the two FBGs can distinguish the acceleration in the axial direction, while being insensitive in the transverse direction. The average of the resonant wavelengths of the two FBGs can distinguish the acceleration in the transverse direction, while being insensitive in the axial direction. In the experiments, when the transverse direction was vertical, the crest-to-trough sensitivity at 5 Hz and resonant frequency of the average were 0.545 nm/g and 34.42 Hz, respectively. When the axial direction was vertical, those of the difference were 0.0454 nm/g and 900 Hz, respectively. For each FBG, the crest-to-trough sensitivity at 5 Hz and resonant frequency in the transverse/vertical direction were 24 and 1/26 times those in the axial/vertical direction, respectively.

Strategic entry deterrence : does it constitute a misuse of market power?

A challenge for regulators and the courts has been establishing the boundary between behaviour is exclusionary and should be condemned under s 46 of the then Trade Practices Act 1974 (Cth) (TPA), now s 46 of the Competition and Consumer Act 2010 (Cth) (CCA), and behaviour that is not exclusionary and might even be pro-competitive. This boundary can be especially difficult to draw in the case of entry deterring strategies. Section 46(1) prohibits corporations with a substantial degree of market power from taking advantage of that market power for one of the statutorily proscribed purposes which include preventing the entry of a person into that or any other market. Section 45(2) separately prohibits corporations from making and giving effect to contracts arrangements and understandings that have the purpose, effect or likely effect of substantially lessening competition in a market. The latest case in which the ACCC has failed to satisfy the s 46 criteria is the decision of Greenwood J in ACCC v Cement Australia Pty Ltd [2013] FCA 909 (Cement Australia case). Final orders were published in a separate judgment, in ACCC v Cement Australia Pty Ltd [2014] FCA 148 (28 February 2014). The case concerned an entry deterring strategy, namely the pre-emptive buying of input factors in an upstream market to protect an incumbent with substantial market power in a downstream market and to prevent new entry in the downstream market. Greenwood J found that while Cement Australia Pty Ltd, formerly known as Queensland Cement Ltd (QCL), had substantial market power, its conduct in entering into the pre-emptive contracts was not a contravention of s 46, because Cement Australia had not “taken advantage” of its market power. However, since Cement Australia’s purpose in entering into the pre-emptive contracts was anti-competitive, they were held to contravene s 45(2) of the TPA. The purpose of this Note is to consider only the reasons for judgment in the Cement Australia case in relation to the “taking advantage” element. The judgment was handed down on 10 September 2013. The final hearing date was 15 July 2011, so it was long-awaited. At 714 pages, it is carefully drafted.