Search results for "General Social Sciences"

Using long-term ecosystem service and biodiversity data to study the impacts and adaptation options in response to climate change: insights from the …

2013

The International Long Term Ecological Research (ILTER) network can coordinate ecological research to provide observations of the ecosystem changes, and their socio-economic impacts on human societies at different scales. In this paper we demonstrate the importance of the ILTER network in the study and monitoring of environmental changes at a global level. We give examples of how biodiversity and ecosystem service data can be used to study impacts and adaptation options in response to climate change. Analysis of the 107 recent publications from LTER networks representing 21 countries show that LTER studies are often local and heterogeneous. There are some ecosystem types, such as agricultur…

From Metaphor to Practice: Operationalizing the Analysis of Resilience Using System Dynamics Modelling

2017

This paper operationalizes an analysis of resilience for social-ecological systems using system dynamics (SD) modelling. Resilience is a versatile concept that continues to gain popularity among researchers who study ways to reduce the vulnerability of social-ecological systems to a wide range of disturbances. However, its application in the policymaking domain still remains underdeveloped because it is difficult to understand the mechanisms that might enhance resilience and to measure the impact of potential policies. This paper proposes to use SD modelling as a tool to analyse resilience using simulations to quantify system response to disturbances and a causal analysis to identify ways t…

Outward Investments and Productivity: Evidence from European Regions

2016

Castellani D. and Pieri F. Outward investments and productivity: evidence from European regions, Regional Studies. Using a novel data set on international investment projects, this paper builds measures of outward foreign direct investments (FDIs) for 262 regions of the European Union. This allows as estimation to be made of regressions of productivity growth over the 2007–11 period as a function of the number of FDIs. The number of outward FDIs in manufacturing activities is negatively associated with productivity growth in the home region, but investments in sales, distribution and marketing are associated with a boost in local productivity. This is driven especially by investments toward…

Applying System Dynamics Modelling to Strategic Management: A Literature Review

2016

System dynamics (SD) has been proved to be a useful methodology to support both understanding and learning processes of complex systems and phenomena. Since its origin, SD has been successfully applied to many different fields of studies (e.g. climate change, physics, engineering, environmental sciences, economics, management, etc.). Among these, strategic management (SM) has a particular relevance as testified by several streams of research that originate from the combination between SD modelling and SM. The aim of this paper is to explore and discuss the theoretical and empirical development of SD in the SM field through a systematic analysis of the literature in order to highlight the ma…

2019

Final disposal of spent nuclear fuel (SNF) from nuclear power plants (NPPs) is an ethical issue with implications within and across generations. We address this issue from the perspective of nuclear communities that host nuclear waste disposal sites. These are primarily the communities that face injustice due to the potential radiological risks. A resident survey (n = 454) was conducted in two Finnish nuclear communities, i.e. Eurajoki and Pyhajoki, that are being considered as alternative sites for a second repository for SNF. The nuclear waste management (NWM) company Posiva is already building a repository in Eurajoki, the first in Finland. These communities are in different stages of th…

Sustainable growth and environmental catastrophes

2017

Abstract In the standard AK growth model we introduce the threat of an ecological catastrophe and study the consequences for the economic variables in the long-run. We extend the basic framework by considering two environmental externalities: the first one is local and gives account of the marginal damage from emissions flow; the second one is aggregate, or global, and relates to the extreme damage which may happen if the accumulated stock of pollutants is on the threshold of a worldwide catastrophe. In this context dominated by market failures, we focus on the socially optimal solution and the search of conditions for sustainability. We identify the efficient balanced growth path, which ma…

Investigating parental beliefs concerning facilitators and barriers to the physical activity in down syndrome and typical development

2017

Family is a crucial factor to determine the amount, the duration, and the complexity of children’s sport activities. This study aims at comparing the beliefs concerning the involvement in sport activities among parents of children with Down syndrome (DS) and parents of typically developing children (TDC). A phenomenological theoretical framework was adopted to realize semistructured interviews with the parents. The participants were 35 parents: 19 with children and adolescents with DS and 16 with TDC. The main facilitation/barrier themes identified by the parents of children with DS were the family and the expert at Adapted Physical Activity (APA) instructors. Conversely, the parents of TD…

Territorial servitization in Marshallian industrial districts: the industrial district as a place-based form of servitization

2018

This paper is the first general study of territorial servitization in Marshallian industrial districts (MIDs). It introduces the novel idea of place-based servitization as a form of territorial servitization, which is then used conceptually to reframe the traditional perspective on MIDs, manufacturing places par excellence. Drawing on comparable quantitative data from Italy and Spain for 1991, 2001 and 2011, the paper then provides generalizable empirical evidence about the stylized facts of servitization in MIDs, casting a light on the transition to services of the MID as one model of place-based servitization.

Ecovillages in Spain: Searching an emancipatory social transformation?

2018

Today the second most important country after the United States, in the number of ecovillages, and by far, the most prominent in Europe, is Spain. The question to be addressed here is whether this revival or boom of ecovillages in Spain is an incipient social transformation and cultural change, following Erik Olin Wright theory of emancipatory social transformation. This work is divided into five main sections. The first one introduces three different approaches that remark the importance of ecovillages for radical cultural and social studies. The second part explains the methodology performed for the study of 29 ecovillages in Spain, using six critical variables on material interests and i…

Invisibilization and Silencing as an Ethical and Sociological Challenge

2017

AbstractExcluded and/or marginalized social groups frequently face problems involving representation in the public sphere. Moreover, the very notion of exclusion typically refers to communicatively or discursively produced mechanisms of being considered irrelevant in public processes of communication. Exclusion and marginalization, understood as processes of silencing or invisibilizing social groups, are particularly serious in cases involving social suffering, i.e. socially produced suffering and/or suffering that can be eliminated or alleviated socially. Making silence heard, giving voice to the silenced and bringing the invisibilized back into the public domain are therefore fundamental …