Keramische lagers, stalen kogels, industrielagers, kogelbaan, naaldlagers of cup-conus, als leek duizelt het je. Moet je nu keramische kogels gebruiken of niet? En hoe onderhoud je een industrielager? Het antwoord op al je vragen over lagering.
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Een kleine 40 jaar geleden onderging de bouw een ware revolutie. De seriematige productie van cascos werd tot kunst verheven. Kern van deze revolutie was een tot in detail doordachte organisatie van het werk op de bouwplaats. En, conform het aloude adagio meten is weten, was dat weer gebaseerd op gedegen arbeidskundige metingen op de bouwplaats. De productiviteit op de bouwplaats benaderde het theoretisch optimum. Inmiddels lijkt die kennis te zijn verdampt. De arbeidsproductiviteit ligt momenteel op veel bouwplaatsen onder de 50%! We moeten over het primaire proces weer gestructureerd kennis gaan opbouwen!
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This paper theorizes the spiritual processes of community entrepreneuring as navigating tensions that arise when community-based enterprises (CBEs) emerge within communities and generate socio-economic inequality. Grounded on an ethnographic study of a dairy CBE in rural Malawi, findings reveal that intra-community tensions revolve around the occurrence of ‘bad events’ – mysterious tragedies that, among their multiple meanings, are also framed as witchcraft. Community members prepare for, frame, cope and build collective sustenance from ‘bad events’ by intertwining witchcraft and mundane socio-material practices. Together, these practices reflect the mystery and the ambiguity that surround ‘bad events’ and prevent intra-community tensions from overtly erupting. Through witchcraft, intra-community tensions are channelled, amplified and tamed cyclically as this process first destabilizes community social order and then restabilizes it after partial compensation for socio-economic inequality. Generalizing beyond witchcraft, this spiritual view of community entrepreneuring enriches our understanding of entrepreneuring – meant as organization-creation process in an already organized world – in the context of communities. Furthermore, it sheds light on the dynamics of socio-economic inequality surrounding CBEs, and on how spirituality helps community members to cope with inequality and its effects.
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Sustainable business decision-making as villagers of the world In making our society resilient and future-proof we are faced with many complex and multi-faceted challenges and opportunities. Many promising sustainable initiatives require the proactive contribution of businesses to be successful, but fail to reach the required decision making level of individuals and companies, and thus fail to reach their positive impact. The result is a multiple waste: in creativity and innovation, in investment of the organisations involved, in opportunities to improve society and in our overall belief that we can make the necessary changes. In this project we focus on the reasons why individuals and thus companies act and decide negatively on new and existing sustainable innovations and projects, starting from the perspective that a professional’s and a company’s inherent sustainable decision making is at the heart of truly improving society. The aim is to create multiple value (economic, social and ecological) of SMEs by increasing the success rate of sustainability initiatives out of an implicit business professional’s choice to do so. Based on the theory of psychological distance, we combine exploratory case studies of successful pilots with exploratory research via interviews with business decision makers, to analyse what drives professional’s and companies’ decision making, and how this affects sustainable initiatives. The aim is to propose ways to increase the quality of sustainable decision making, and thus the likelihood of success. The learnings are translated to practical guidelines a SME should consider for executing their business in the most sustainable way, and form a base for further applied research on sustainable business behaviour towards a circular economy.
