Oecotrophologie · Facility Management (OEF)
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Can Newly Scientific Acquired Healthy Behaviors Persist? An Analysis of Health Behaviour Decay
(2008)
Association between cardiovascular risk factors and erectile dysfunction – a population-based study
(2006)
Familiness is considered one of the most valuable assets of family firms. But how familiness-related forces at the top management level of family firms may work their way into positive firm performance has not been addressed empirically before. The present field study couples upper-echelon theory with team-leadership theory and examines the effects of the transformational leadership style (TFL) of family- based CEOs in top management team (TMT) processes and on firm performance. Survey measures were gathered from 72 CEOs of German family firms as well as from 245 members of their TMTs. We tested the aggregated firm-level data, including objective firm-performance indicators of the 72 German family firms they led. Support was obtained for a four-path mediation model, in which three distinct familiness-related team forces (TMT cohesion, behavioral integration, and efficacy) serve as mediators between CEO TFL and family-firm performance in a series. With our model we focus on the under- researched area of familiness vis-à-vis family-firm performance. Theoretical and practical implications of the findings are discussed, and suggestions are offered for new avenues of family-firm familiness inquiry.
Purpose. The purpose of this paper is to examine the successful implementation of a digital work method named Building Information Modelling (BIM) and make recommendations to help organizations better test and implement innovative work approaches. Learning experiences not only provide insights into the building sector, but also into any organization interested in culture and effective response mechanisms during technological change.
Design/methodology/approach.
By applying a critical incident technique, BIM experts at one mid-sized case organization were interviewed to examine the learning experiences from converting implementation intentions into actions. The information from these interviews was used to formulate a number of practical recommendations.
Findings. The interviews outlined the various development opportunities that implementing new digital methods may offer for senior management and staff. Investing in small projects that work and the corresponding behavioral change required, together with regular project reviews, all help to build unique capabilities and to frame a culture that supports organizational development.
Originality/value. The discussion of the various benefits and conditions under which new technology implementation can improve organizational learning provides practitioners with insights into how effectively to convert change intentions into action.
Purpose. Several studies of family firm failures have pointed to non-family members in leading positions as a reason. However, non-family members have often played a key role in family-firm longevity, while non-family executives’ involvement in family firms is increasing. These non-family executives who (co-)run family firms are thought to require an almost impossible set of behavioural qualities. The aim of this exploratory study is to find out how specific leader behaviours of effective family executives and non-family executives may differ.
Design/methodology/approach.
Based on Dulewicz and Higgs’ (2005) broad leadership frame, the authors draw attention to a large range of behaviours of family-firm executives. In-depth interviews were conducted with successful German executives, both family and non-family ones. Their answers had to contain specific behavioural examples.
Findings. More behavioural similarities than differences are shown between family- and non-family-based executives. Yet, the self-reflective communicative behavioural qualities of the non-family executives could balance a lack of such qualities among the family-based executives. Based on the three major differences – decision-making style, communication versatility and self-awareness – specific new research propositions are distilled about effective family firm leadership.
Originality/value. Practical suggestions for recruiting non-family executives are offered. Future quantitative longitudinal research on how to pair specific behavioural qualities of family and non-family based executives that optimise family-firm longevity is urgently needed.
Purpose. Experience suggests that a loss of trust may occur on both sides of the merger and acquisition (M&A) equation – acquirer and acquiree – though the latter is more generally considered the most affected. The purpose of this paper is to explore how a loss of trust during the M&A process in family firms can be avoided. An acquisition potentially triggers a loss of trust in the workplace and, as a result, a loss of productivity thereby causing the merged business to totter. Moreover, trust in a firm’s owner tends to be a key driver in merging family firms.
Design/methodology/approach. The authors investigated an expanding German family firm that recently acquired other family firms. They conducted in-depth interviews on all hierarchical levels in both the acquiring and the acquired firm. These cases are taken from a wider study of acquiring family firms completed in 2019.
Findings. Value congruence, integrity and openness are found to enhance trust during M&As, in particular, if the new owner of a merged enterprise is also a family entrepreneur. Under certain circumstances, the trust of employees in the acquired firm’s previous owner can be transferred to the new owner.
Originality/value. This study explores how specific circumstances of family firms impacts organizational trust in M&A processes. The developed framework helps family firms to use characteristics of their specific nature as an asset to maintain their employees’ organizational trust before, during and even after M&As.
Purpose. Organization renewal through innovation represents a difficult managerial challenge in family firms. Our research reveals a framework for sustaining innovation capabilities through a perspective of value and process principles.
Design/methodology/approach. We examined findings from consulting projects in high performing family firms and literature from the areas of family firm strategy and leadership.
Findings. We describe how combining patterns of innovative organizations with patterns of high-performing family firms can help leaders to sustain innovation. This study indicates that a value- and process-driven perspective is important for effective innovation. In particular, the four value principles are continuity-, community-, connection- and command-related factors (4C’s). The four process principles, in turn, are profession-, project-, product- and purchaser-related factors (4P’s).
Originality/value. This paper is part of a wider study of innovative German family firms initiated in 2012. Our 4C’s and 4P’s framework suggests a practical means to better implement innovation by reconciling the firm’s innovation strategy, leadership behavior
and organizational learning.
What Leads to Lunch—How Social Practices Impact (Non-)Sustainable Food Consumption/Eating Habits
(2017)
Social Sustainability through Social Interaction—A National Survey on Community Gardens in Germany
(2018)
In this paper, we scrutinise the sharing economy from a moral householding perspective and evaluate the moral justifications for a sustainable form of the sharing economy. We consider the emergence of normative moral justifications through householding practices that rest on local mobilisation of people in defence of communities and commitments against the adverse impacts of neoliberal market capitalism.
Our perspective draws on Karl Polanyi's conceptualisation of householding, that is, autarchic, communistic provision in a closed community. Using timebanking as an example, we illustrate how a moral sharing economy can be mobilised in collective battles against the current neoliberal system of economic crisis. We contribute to the amassing sharing economy literature emphasising a central, yet missing element of the current discourse: householding as practices creating self-sufficiency and autonomy as well as combining both kin and stranger.
The United Nations formulated the sustainable development goals (SDGs) in 2015 as a comprehensive global policy framework for addressing the most pressing social and environmental challenges currently facing humanity. In this paper, we analyse SDG 12, which aims to ‘‘ensure sustainable consumption and production patterns.’’ Despite long-standing political recognition of this objective, and ample scientific evidence both on its importance and on the efficacy of various ways of promoting it, the SDGs do not provide clear goals or effective guidance on how to accomplish this urgently needed transformation. Drawing from the growing body of research on sustainable consumption and production (SCP), the paper identifies two dominant vantage points—one focused on promoting more efficient production methods and products (mainly through technological improvement and informed consumer choice) and the other stressing the need to consider also overall volumes of consumption, distributional issues, and related social and institutional changes. We label these two approaches efficiency and systemic. Research shows that while the efficiency approach contains essential elements of a transition to sustainability, it is by itself highly unlikely to bring about sustainable outcomes. Concomitantly, research also finds that volumes of consumption and production are closely associated with environmental impacts, indicating a need to curtail these volumes in ways that safeguard social sustainability, which is unlikely to be possible without a restructuring of existing socioeconomic arrangements. Analysing how these two perspectives are reflected in the SDGs framework, we find that in its current conception, it mainly relies on the efficiency approach. On the basis of this assessment, we conclude that the SDGs represent a partial and inadequate conceptualisation of SCP which will hamper implementation. Based on this determination, this paper provides some suggestions on how governments and other actors involved in SDGs operationalisation could more effectively pursue SCP from a systemic standpoint and use the transformation of systems of consumption and production as a lever for achieving multiple sustainability objectives.
Technological solutions to the challenge of dangerous climate change are urgent and necessary but to be effective they need to be accompanied by reductions in the total level of consumption and production of goods and services. This is for three reasons. First, private consumption and its associated production are among the key drivers of greenhouse-gas (GHG) emissions, especially among highly emitting industrialized economies. There is no evidence that decoupling of the economy from GHG emissions is possible at the scale and speed needed. Second, investments in more sustainable infrastructure, including renewable energy, needed in coming decades will require extensive amounts of energy, largely from fossil sources, which will use up a significant share of the two-degree carbon budget. Third, improving the standard of living of the world’s poor will consume a major portion of the available carbon allowance. The scholarly community has a responsibility to put the issue of consumption and the associated production on the research and policy agenda.
Power: the missing element in sustainable consumption and absolute reductions research and action
(2016)
In this essay, we aim to demonstrate the value of a power lens on consumption and absolute reductions. Specifically, we illuminate what we perceive to be a troublesome pattern of neglect of questions of power in research and action on sustainable consumption and absolute reductions. In pursuit of our objectives, we delineate how many of the informal and implicit “theories of social change” of scholars and activists in sustainable consumption and sustainable development fail to address power in a sufficiently explicit, comprehensive and differentiated manner and how that failure translates into insufficient understandings of the drivers of consumption and the potential for and barriers to absolute reductions. Second, we develop the contours of a power lens on sustainable consumption. Third, we illustrate the value of such a power lens, with a particular focus on the case of meat consumption.
Veblen’s concept of conspicuous consumption is often cited to explain why consumption habits in our consumer societies tend to be unsustainable and ever increasing. However, much more than blaming individual consumption habits Veblen sharply analyzed quite some of the societal and economic forces which drive the framework conditions for un-sustainable consumption: the vested interests and the absentee ownership. The paper follows the path Veblen’s thoughts have taken trough economic and social literature over the last centuryand highlights how the actual sustainable consumption debate could make better use of Veblen’s insights e.g. in requesting the constitutive institutions for property. Opportunities for Strong Sustainable Consumption obviously presuppose radical changes, social innovations and thinking out of the box.
The paper looks at NGOs activities in Sustainable Production and
Consumption and obstacles being faced. It identifies lessons for policymakers seeking to engage civil society and makes recommendations on how academics can co-operate more effectively with civil society. Insights are drawn from recent studies on stakeholder involvement in the international political process and a series of surveys and semi-structured interviews. The authors identify four challenges. Effort should (1) be planned more strategically, (2) link sustainable consumption to current priorities, (3) ensure better links between global and local and (4) NGOs have to better link to other interest groups.
Actual initiatives to cultivate more sustainable modes of consumption have not materialized and there are indications that an implementation gap is becoming manifest.
Research must begin to systemically integrate initiatives to promote improvements in quality of life, to distinguish long-term structural consumption trends, and to identify the social mechanisms and cultural aspects of consumer behavior and household decision making.
What are the implications of the current international political, and
economic settings for consumer policy, and, in particular, those regarding sustainable consumption? In terms of improvements in the efficiency of consumption, the settings have induced efforts to this effect and show potential for further progress. In terms of necessary changes in consumption levels and patterns, however, little progress has been made since the Rio Summit nor is there likely to be any in the near future. These two dimensions of sustainable consumption need to be differentiated, as there is a substantial amount of controversy regarding our ability to achieve sustainable consumption on the
basis of improvements in efficiency alone. The paper traces these differences with respect to the work of the major international governmental organizations (IGOs) engaged in developing sustainable consumption governance. It argues that the lack of commitment
to strong sustainable consumption among IGOs can be explained by their ‘‘weakness’’ as actors in global governance and the existence of strong opposing interests among consumers and business actors.
Contemporary food production and consumption cannot be regarded as sustainable and raises problems with its wide scope involving diverse actors. Moreover, in the face of demographic change and a growing global population, sus-tainability problems arising from food systems will likely become more serious in the future. For example, agricultural production must deal with the impacts of climate change, increasingly challenging land-use conflicts, and rising health and social costs on both individual and societal levels. The unsustainability of current arrangements arises from the industrialization and globalization of agriculture and food processing, the shift of consumption patterns toward more dietary animal protein, the emergence of modern food styles that entail heavily processed products, the growing gap on a global scale between rich and poor, and the paradoxical lack of food security amid an abundance of food. These factors are attributable to national and international policies and regulations, as well as to prevalent business prac-tices and, in particular, consumers’ values and habits. The most effective ways for affluent societies to reduce the environmental impact of their diets are to reduce consumption of meat and dairy products (especially beef), to favor organic fruits and vegetables, and to avoid goods that have been transported by air on both individual and institu-tional levels (e.g., public procurement, public catering). In examining the unsustainability of the current food system this article reviews the pertinent literature to derive a working definition of sustainable food consumption, outlines the major issues and impacts of current food-consumption practices, and discusses various policy interventions, including information-based instruments, market-based initiatives, direct regulations, and “nudges.” It concludes with a call for integrative, cross-sectoral, and population-wide policies that address the full range of drivers of unsustainable food production and consumption.
It is increasingly obvious that for safeguarding environmental sustainability, eco‐efficiency measures will need to be complemented by sufficiency, in particular by strong sustainable consumption. The Theory of Planned Behaviour TPB and Social Practice Theory SPT offer different views on consumer behaviour, and on ways to change it. This paper briefly describes the challenges, discusses the applicability of both theories and their meaningfulness for policy recommendations.
We suggest an approach combining results of both bodies of theory, complemented by ideas from political economy, to substantiate the Prism of Sustainable Consumption we introduce as a heuristic sufficiency policy tool. It is useful to identify affordability criteria for change in each dimension, as the basis for deriving suggestions for effective policy interventions. We conclude
that (i) effective interventions are possible, (ii) they have to address several dimensions of affordability simultaneously, and (iii) the sufficiency policy space prism can be a useful tool in structuring planned interventions.
Experience shows that energy savings through energy efficiency measures are partly compensated by income growth, and partly by rebound effects. Therefore to be effective, efficiency measures have to be embedded in a concept of sufficiency which strives for limits and absolute reduction of energy consumption. While the sufficiency concept is not new, it only recently gained attention in the field of housing. This paper provides a basis for broader and more informed debates in policy and research on the potential of sufficiency considerations to contribute to the overall reduction of energy consumption in the residential sector. It recommends shifting the attention from energy consumption of buildings towards a concept of sustainable homes in which e.g. the size of the living area plays a crucial role. A further important aspect is the possibility to fulfil other basic needs like the provision with food, recreation and social contacts in the nearby environment. The paper describes first examples of housing projects guided by sufficiency criteria, depicts the potential roles of different actor groups and points towards some general policy recommendations.
Improving residential energy efficiency is widely recognized as one of the best strategies for reducing energy demand, combating climate change and increasing security of energy supply. However, progress has been slow to date due to a number of market and behavioural barriers that have not been adequately addressed by energy efficiency policies and programmes.
This study is based on updated findings of the European Futures for Energy Efficiency Project that responds to the EU Horizon 2020 Work Programme 2014-15 theme 'Secure, clean and efficient energy'. This article draws on five case studies from selected European countries - Finland, Italy, Hungary, Spain, and the UK - and evaluates recent energy efficiency developments in terms of indicators, private initiatives, and policy measures in the residential sector. Our analysis shows that the UK government has implemented a better range of policies, coupled with initiatives from the private sector, aimed at improving energy efficiency. However, its existing conditions appear to be more problematic than the other countries. On the other hand, the lack of effective and targeted policies in Finland resulted in increased energy consumption, while in Hungary, Spain and Italy some interesting initiatives, especially in terms of financial and fiscal incentives, have been found.
Is German family firm performance affected by CEO and TMT behavior and emotional intelligence?
(2019)
In the last decade, in many European Countries more and more measures have been initiated aiming at the prevention of food losses and wastes along the entire value chain. In order to evaluate or monitor such important measures it is crucial to obtain quantitative information on generated food waste amounts, subsequently enabling the quantitative evaluation of the measure’s outcomes and efficiency. Currently there is a paucity of quantitative information, particularly on food losses that are directly generated during harvesting processes. Up to date, no method is available or standardised aiming at the in-situ or on-site quantification of food losses during harvest. Using the example of the potato harvest, this study presents a practical approach for determining potato losses. To test the applicability of the developed method, on-site measurements were conducted directly on the field at five different locations in Austria and Germany. Our method enables the quantification of food losses based on defined areas along the harvested potato rows, where the analyser manually collects potatoes during their harvest. Hereby, two types of potato losses needs to be considered: non-harvested, under-sized potatoes that remain under the earth and the harvested ones, which are rejected on-site because of quality requirements regarding their size, shape, and state of health. Our study shows that between 1 and 9% of field losses (based on yield potential) can be generated during the potato harvest. In future, this method may be the basis for standardised protocols in order to be able to derive cultivar-specific benchmarks and, consequently, to develop measures for preventing food losses. In general, more case studies and evidence-based ground-up measurements on other cultivars and for other regions are needed focusing on the on-site quantification of post-harvest losses.