Variety and Trajectories of New Forms of Organizing
Cover page of the book.
The sharing economy is one of the most influential developments of the last decade. The emergence of new forms of organizing it brings with it has affected modern (business) life at multiple levels: sharing organizations have blurred the distinction between the individual roles of provider, user, and employee; they have introduced organizational practices of coordinating members and communities; and they have sparked societal, political, and economic debates in multiple fields.
In food supply chains, products and services are continuously adapted to changing consumer demands. As the public becomes more concerned about environmental and social issues, sustainable business models are becoming more and more important. Altogether consumers' growing demand for local food has led to an increased importance of local food production and distribution networks.
In this study, environmental impacts and abatement costs of reducing food waste in the life cycle of bread were calculated by connecting life cycle assessment with environmental life cycle costing. The life cycle includes production, processing, sale, consumption and disposal of mixed grain bread in Germany. The functional unit (FU) was set as 1 kg bread consumed.
What do a sustainable economy, quality of life and urban transformation mean in cities such as Wuppertal, which are struggling with deep structural changes? How can impulses for more sustainability coming from the city’s civil society be described, structured and supported? How can quality of life be decoupled from material economic growth and resource consumption? The project WTW seeks comprehensive answers to these questions.
The production and consumption of food has an impact on the environment. In this context we question the importance of food waste. To analyse this, we quantify the agricultural and food sectors along the entire value chain. Food waste can often be avoided with relative ease. In different case studies we study the main points and reasons for the creation of waste and examine different ways to reduce them.
The final goal of this project is to develop and validate a toolbox of instruments and methods for small and medium sized enterprises (KMUs) that help to integrate sustainability in the whole food industry chain. Furthermore, the goal is to learn more about motives of action, structural and psychological barriers – respectively the behavior of the employees and the companies that have business relationships. It will also be evaluated how to establish transparency between the resource and the consumer and how to tackle insufficient consumer willingness to get product information.
In order to develop a sustainable food supply system, that enables food sovereignty and resilient food production on a regional level, the focus on local initiatives is increasing.
Initiatives with transformative potential are no longer exclusively situated in the sphere of either production or consumption, they are not only situated in either urban areas or the countryside, and are not only driven by economical success and/or limited by ecological demands. Instead these initiatives may diminish the impact of exogenous shocks and facilitate creative adaptation to changing environmental, socio-economic, and political conditions.
KoBeFisch has the hypothesis that European fisheries policies has not been able to prevent overfishing due to its current responsibility structures. In the current EU fisheries management, it is governmental actors that have the responsibility. For example, the council of ministries determines many regulations, including the catch quotas. At the same time, fishermen and fish consumers have almost no opportunity to influence the catch quotas in order to shift to more sustainable fishing. In KoBeFisch, alternatives are researched and developed on how governmental and non-governmental actors could share more responsibility for sustainability. Traditional coastal fishermen are considered alongside fish consumers as a point of special interest in the analysis.
Ornamental plants are an integral part of people’s life and consumption. Three out of four households buy a decorative plant at least once in the year. The project will take use of the big sustainability potential of the ornamental plant industry by developing new business models. Currently, the environmental conditions in the production sites are aligned to growth performance and sales quality, but not to later everyday – and environmental conditions at the consumers’ households. As a result, ornamental plants show there stress symptoms. In addition, many consumers lack the necessary competence in plant care. Product failures are the result.
Severe environmental problems seem to require a substantial and near-term shift towards greater sustainability in our production and consumption patterns. While many individual initiatives already exist in practice, comprehensive governance approaches targeted towards substantial transformations of whole socio-technical systems are lacking. In this respect, there is a great public need for systemically oriented and field-proven recommendations for forms of (more) successful governance of transformation processes.
The overall objective of the project is the development and testing of a heuristic, and the drafting of a manual planned as an E-Book to support practitioners in contributing to the initiation and in actively shaping socio-ecological transfor¬mation processes.
Businesses based in the out-of-home dining sector (Außer-Haus-Gastronomie, AHG) work continuously on a range of dishes that are healthier and more sustainable to cope with these changes in lifestyles and demand. To do that they further develop their supply in response to consumer needs with the help of dialogues with them. This project aims to initiate and disseminate trans-formative processes for more sustainable production and consumption in the out-of-home dining sector.
The Handprint is an innovative and holistic approach to facilitate the measurement, evaluation and communication of the ecological, economic and social sustainability impacts of products.
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