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Why are elite jewelers reluctant to sell turquoise, despite strong demand? Why did leading investment bankers shun junk bonds for years, despite potential profits?Status Signalsis the first major sociological examination of how concerns about status affect market competition. Starting from the basic premise that status pervades the ties producers form in the marketplace, Joel Podolny shows how anxieties about status influence whom a producer does (or does not) accept as a partner, the price a producer can charge, the ease with which a producer enters a market, how the producer's inventions are received, and, ultimately, the market segments the producer can (and should) enter. To achieve desired status, firms must offer more than strong past performance and product quality--they must also send out and manage social and cultural signals. Through detailed analyses of market competition across a broad array of industries--including investment banking, wine, semiconductors, shipping, and venture capital--Podolny demonstrates the pervasive impact of status. Along the way, he shows how corporate strategists, tempted by the profits of a market that would negatively affect their status, consider not only whether to enter the market but also whether they can alter the public's perception of the market. Podolny also examines the different ways in which a firm can have status. Wal-Mart, for example, has low status among the rich as a place to shop, but high status among the rich as a place to invest. Status Signalsprovides a systematic understanding of market dynamics that have--until now--not been fully appreciated.

In the last thirty years, there have been fierce debates over how civilizations develop and why the West became so powerful.The Measure of Civilizationpresents a brand-new way of investigating these questions and provides new tools for assessing the long-term growth of societies. Using a groundbreaking numerical index of social development that compares societies in different times and places, award-winning author Ian Morris sets forth a sweeping examination of Eastern and Western development across 15,000 years since the end of the last ice age. He offers surprising conclusions about when and why the West came to dominate the world and fresh perspectives for thinking about the twenty-first century. Adapting the United Nations' approach for measuring human development, Morris's index breaks social development into four traits--energy capture per capita, organization, information technology, and war-making capacity--and he uses archaeological, historical, and current government data to quantify patterns. Morris reveals that for 90 percent of the time since the last ice age, the world's most advanced region has been at the western end of Eurasia, but contrary to what many historians once believed, there were roughly 1,200 years--from about 550 to 1750 CE--when an East Asian region was more advanced. Only in the late eighteenth century CE, when northwest Europeans tapped into the energy trapped in fossil fuels, did the West leap ahead. Resolving some of the biggest debates in global history,The Measure of Civilizationputs forth innovative tools for determining past, present, and future economic and social trends.

Much popular belief--and public policy--rests on the idea that those born into poverty have it in their power to escape. But the persistence of poverty and ever-growing economic inequality around the world have led many economists to seriously question the model of individual economic self-determination when it comes to the poor. InPoverty Traps, Samuel Bowles, Steven Durlauf, Karla Hoff, and the book's other contributors argue that there are many conditions that may trap individuals, groups, and whole economies in intractable poverty. For the first time the editors have brought together the perspectives of economics, economic history, and sociology to assess what we know--and don't know--about such traps. Among the sources of the poverty of nations, the authors assign a primary role to social and political institutions, ranging from corruption to seemingly benign social customs such as kin systems. Many of the institutions that keep nations poor have deep roots in colonial history and persist long after their initial causes are gone. Neighborhood effects--influences such as networks, role models, and aspirations--can create hard-to-escape pockets of poverty even in rich countries. Similar individuals in dissimilar socioeconomic environments develop different preferences and beliefs that can transmit poverty or affluence from generation to generation. The book presents evidence of harmful neighborhood effects and discusses policies to overcome them, with attention to the uncertainty that exists in evaluating such policies.

This article deals with a triangular dense fuzzy set having special property on Cauchy sequence. In this set, the normality will never be attained unless we unlock by a special key on triangular dense fuzzy set at its final defuzzified state. We give several definitions on triangular dense fuzzy lock sets first and then discuss its locking unlocking property for single-key, double-key, and multiple keys environments with special reference to the convergence of Cauchy sequence. The non-membership function of the proposed lock set has also been studied. The graphical representations of the (non-)membership functions are developed, and the defuzzifications are done by existing methods of dense fuzzy sets as well as cloudy fuzzy sets implicitly. However, we have extended this fuzzy lock set into fuzzy lock matrix to generalize the concept. Finally, we discuss the fields of its practical application and draw a conclusion for better motivation. Graphical Abstract of the Triangular Dense fuzzy lock sets

Purpose>In December 2019, news broke out from the World Health Organisation (WHO), with the first outbreak of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) in Wuhan, China. On 11 March 2020, the WHO declared COVID-19 to officially be a pandemic. The UK was put under lockdown on the 23 March 2020 by the Prime Minister Boris Johnson, the lockdown introduced strict measures put into place including the restriction for unnecessary working from offices, and only leaving houses if it is deemed essential. Therefore, this paper focusses on the changes that the infrastructure sector has had to undertake in order to adhere to the COVID-19 lockdown rules while being productive.Design/methodology/approach>Given the new and unexplored nature of the research problem, a qualitative research methodology was adopted. In total, five semi-structured interviews from three infrastructure sector organisations were conducted to collect data, which was then analysed using thematic analysis for inference and conclusion.Findings>The results indicate that the lockdown is proving to be difficult to manage projects as staff members are working from home. This leads to delays on a project activities as many staff members cannot physically go on site and conduct works. The managers are finding difficult to manage their teams. However, technological tools such as video chat and meetings via online platforms have proven to be most effective in communications with project teams. The Building Information Modelling Design has been useful as the 3D design models helps to visualise the project within team meetings in order to comply with the COVID-19 rules and follow social distancing guidelines while still carrying on works. However, induction to any new starter is proving to be difficult to manage with the pandemic and lockdown as it involves a drugs and alcohol test prior to commencing work of that project.Originality/value>This paper provides a rich insight into the understanding and awareness of the impact of COVID-19 and the changes that the infrastructure sector has had to undertake in order to adhere to the lockdown rules while being productive. This study contributes towards informing policymakers on some lessons learnt from the management of the COVID-19 from an infrastructure sector perspective. Furthermore, 12 key implications are drawn for decision-makers within the infrastructure sector business to rethink and act to deal with the pandemic crisis.

The Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs) face numerous environmental challenges encompassing resource and energy conservation; waste generation and disposal; water and air pollution; and so on. As a result, it becomes critical to implement policies, strategies, and technologies that can help in reducing the adverse impacts of manufacturing activities on the environment. In this context, the current study identified 15 critical environmental sustainability indicators to assess the impact of manufacturing activities on the environment by taking a case study of lock manufacturing MSMEs. To understand the interdependence among the selected indicators, the study further utilizes an integrated DEMATEL-MMDE-ISM approach to analyze the inputs of industry professionals. The results of the study highlighted that green product design, which facilitates the product to be disassembled, reused, or recycled and are free from hazardous materials, plays a significant role in enhancing the environmental sustainability of the concerned industry. Green product design significantly affects 12 other indicators out of 15 under consideration; thus, incorporating green practices in the design and development of a product leads to significant improvement in environmental sustainability. The study is expected to aid decision-makers (industry practitioners and academic researchers) to identify strategic areas in order to achieve higher environmental sustainability in manufacturing organizations.

Lock-in is defined as the tendency to continue with an inefficient decision or project proposal. The front-end phase is critical to project success, yet most studies have focused on lock-in in the implementation phase. Moreover, little is known about the way in which decision-makers perceive the risk of lock-in. In this paper we identify determinants of lock-in in the front-end phase and we reveal decision-makers’ perceptions of risk of lock-in. Our findings show that risk attitudes towards lock-in vary with the level of risk aversion. However, this is not sufficiently acute to drive the level of regret needed to avoid lock-in. This implies that decision-makers do not accurately assess the risk of lock-in and as such their risk perceptions are a mediating factor in the formation of lock-in. Based on escalation of commitment, path dependency, and prospect theory, the main contribution lies in providing a more comprehensive understanding of lock-in in the front-end phase.

This paper focuses on a three-level distribution process in a supply chain (SC) modeling where the raw materials are received batchwise with imperfect quality. Defective batches are rejected instantly under “all or none” policy. Allowing partial backlogging and random disruption in supply, we develop an expected average cost function of the production inventory SC model first. Then, considering the several cost components of the model as linguistic triangular dense fuzzy lock set, the cost function itself has been fuzzified according to the needs of the problem defined at case study. Utilizing the proper application (growth) of key vectors, the objective function has been solved under crisp, general fuzzy, dense fuzzy, dense fuzzy lock of single and double keys environment, respectively. For managerial importance, numerical results and graphical illustrations are made to justify the novelty.

In the environment of global warming, it is very important to choose rail transport solutions with the lowest possible CO2 emissions, taking into account economic, technical and safety factors. As an important part of the modern transportation system, railway transportation appears in most transportation scenarios. Therefore, choosing an eco-friendly railway transport selection scheme is conducive to further reducing pollution emissions and preventing the further deterioration of the ecological environment. Triangular Dense Fuzzy Linguistic Term Lock Set (TDFLTS) is a tool for describing uncertain information. CODAS-COPRAS is a method to solve the multi-attribute group decision-making problem. This paper first introduces TDFLTS to describe uncertain information. Secondly, the distance measure and similarity measure between TDFLTS are proposed. Then, MEREC and DEMATEL methods are used to obtain attribute weights. Finally, CODAS-COPRAS method is used to solve the multi-attribute decision-making problem under TDFLTS environment, and it is applied to the research of railway transportation scheme selection.

Residual waste is a key fraction of municipal solid waste generated, yet its management is poorly understood and has gained little attention over the past years. Using London as a case study, the present study analyses the amount of residual waste collected and managed to check on how well ahead the UK is in making progress on achieving the circular economy principles. The study found that 5 Mt of residual waste is reported to be managed in London, of which 3.5 Mt is managed via recovery operations and 1.59 Mt is managed via disposal operations. For the latter, landfills are the principal disposal option taking in 0.82 Mt of residual waste each year. Amongst the recovery options, incineration with energy recovery, is the most prevalent, accounting for the management of 1.44 Mt of residual waste. This highlights the presence of an important technological lock-in that could jeopardise UK’s ability to achieve its net zero carbon ambition. It is worth noting that the data collated and analysed depicts the movements of residual waste rather than its final treatment, pointing to blind spots in the final fate of residual waste as well as potential double counting; both of which prevent decision- and policy-making. Therefore, the need for transparency in data recording and monitoring and the creation of a level playing field for all stakeholders involved in residual waste management are of paramount importance in gradually breaking reliance on destructive treatment processes. This could empower improved segregation of waste at source, and in turn, enable the better management of residual waste. The study underlines that residual waste has a significant role to play in making the transition to a circular economy and therefore is imperative to pave the way for future policy direction on residual waste management.