While industrialized agro-food supply systems have gained tremendous success in recent decades, it has been increasingly criticized for its adverse environmental and social impact. Amongst this criticism, Short Food Supply Chains (SFSCs) have emerged as a promising sustainable alternative to the industrialized agri-food supply systems. In recent years there have been some attempts to explore the relationship between SFSCs and sustainability, but these are mostly theoretical discussions and lacks empirical validation. This study, therefore, attempts to provide empirical validation of the SFSCs and sustainability linkages. Additionally, from the theoretical perspective, our work extends the traditional triple bottom line constructs and explores two extra dimensions of sustainability in the food supply chain system, namely, governance and culture, thus exploring five dimensions of sustainability. Furthermore, while SFSCs have proven to improve farmers’ livelihoods and reconnect producers with consumers, little or no attention has been given to understand the consumers' attitudes towards the SFSC practices. Therefore, this study aims to explore the customers’ attitudes towards participating in SFSCs through the concept of a moral economy and personal relationship. Based on the 532 valid responses from Chinese consumers, our study shows that all five pillars of sustainability, moral economy and Chinese relationship have a positive influence on consumers’ participation in SFSCs. With its intuitive benefits, the economic pillar emerged as the most approved factor by the participants. Interestingly our findings show that the social aspect is less prominent than others, which is contrary to existing studies conducted in developed countries.

This article addresses issues relating to the policy shift in developing countries aimed at making universities increasingly relevant to the socio-ec

Based on the post-independence industrialization experience of Algeria, this paper explores the need for and the challenges and prospects of shifts of policies and strategies from central planning to decentralization and liberalization; from a heavy industry-dominated scenario to one dominated by SMEs; and from reliance on technology transfer to the development of a culture of innovation and technological learning. The paper highlights the business incubation system as an aspect of the triple helix model of innovation in which universities, industry, government and non-government organizations feature as principal actors in the national innovation system. The paper notes the need for both technology transfer and the development of the triple helix culture in developing countries. It also underlines the need for policy in developing countries to ensure that the former played only a residual role, while the latter took the lead in providing for the development of a culture of innovation. The culture of bureaucracy and institutional fragmentation has been a major factor militating against initiatives for technological capability development; and the conventional technology transfer practice has reinforced this culture. A major policy initiative is needed in developing countries to put the national system of innovation in place and remove the constraints on the development of the triple helix culture.

This paper is aimed at discussing a novel approach in linking Knowledge Management Enablers (KMEs) to an object-based Business Process Architecture (BPA) method using a semantic-driven approach. The semantic enriched Riva BPA (srBPA) has been selected to be linked to the abstract knowledge management enablers' ontology (aKMEOnt). The aKMEOnt has been utilized in order to generate the Essential Business Entities (EBEs) of the srBPA ontology. Linking between these two artifacts is demonstrated using a typical example of the deposits department in banking. In conclusion, this new linkage approach between KMEs and BPA has informed the effectiveness of using semantic KMEs and Semantic Web Rule Language (SWRL) rules in the semi-automatic identification of representative EBEs. These EBEs constitute the first essential building block of the Riva BPA method which drives the development of Units of Work and the subsequent 1 ^st and 2 ^nd cut Riva process architectures.

To sustain their competitive advantage in a highly competitive landscape, SMEs, in spite of their limited resources, need to effectively learn. The ability to access and successfully use knowledge is at the heart of absorptive capacity. The main purpose of this empirical study is to investigate the importance of awareness as an antecedent dimension of the concept of absorptive capacity of manufacturing SMEs from aerospace and advanced engineering industry in the UK. The study will also attempt to explore the impact of awareness on the other dimensions of absorptive capacity. Awareness is related to the importance, motivation and interest of learning and innovating. Our study, which focuses on internal processes adopts a mixed method approach and is based on the data collected from 43 SMEs. Our finding suggests that awareness as an antecedent dimension can play a vital role in helping SMEs to improve their knowledge-based resources through changes within their internal organisational and cognitive processes.