This Chapter's Learning Goals • You know what social innovation is, why it matters and how you ca... more This Chapter's Learning Goals • You know what social innovation is, why it matters and how you can measure it. • You know how social innovation can be implemented in practice, specifically through social entrepreneurship and self-organization. • You know what differentiates a social enterprise from other organizations, and can apply the social business model canvas. • You know that social innovation can be scaled and replicated using certain models. Activities enacted by economic and governmental actors at various levels will not be sufficient to achieve the necessary turnaround of our consumption patterns and economic systems. What is needed instead are orchestrated, multilevel, and possibly cross-sectoral approaches that offer new solutions to the grand challenges we are currently confronted with (Ferraro et al., 2015). There is growing recognition among scholars that civil society plays an important role in addressing so-called "wicked" social, economic, and environmental problems. For instance, Schneidewind (2019, 208ff.) from the Wuppertal Institute therefore points out that, in addition to the state and private enterprise, civil society will have three central tasks in this change: • Serving a warning function in which civil society actors point to and create public awareness for ecological dangers and inequalities. Recent examples comprise the "Fridays for Future" or "Black Lives Matter" activists. • Mediating society initiatives, such as anti-racism, development, and environmental organizations, stand up and fight for superior values and concerns of society.
This Chapter's Learning Goals • You know the concept of circular economy and its three fundamenta... more This Chapter's Learning Goals • You know the concept of circular economy and its three fundamental strategies. • You know the meaning of circular economy at the macro and micro level. • You know the relevance of circular economy for future ecological and economic development. 9.1 The Concept of a Circular Economy The latest IPCC report on climate change has made it clear once again. We are not on track to meet our environmental targets, and stabilizing the climate will require fast action. Carbon intensity declined by 0.3% per year in the 2010s; a 3.5% reduction would be needed for 2 °C, and a 7.7% reduction for 1.5 °C. Achieving the 1.5 °C Paris target means that global coal use must decline by 95% by 2050 compared to 2019. Oil consumption must decrease by 60% and gas consumption by 45% over this period. In all scenarios, there is no room for new, unabated fossil fuel projects (e.g., power plants), and most existing projects must be shut down more quickly than planned. Removal of greenhouse gases from the atmosphere is required in all scenarios because residual emissions from some sectors of the economy are always assumed (The Economist, 2022). These targets will be all the more difficult to achieve because population growth and rising incomes will lead to a sharp increase in demand for goods and services in the coming years. As a result, global material consumption is projected to more than double to 167 Gt by 2060. This will have a direct impact on the environment, as more than half of all greenhouse gas emissions are caused by material management activities (OECD, 2019). To meet environmental targets, it will therefore be central that we use existing materials more efficiently. Accordingly, the future of sustainable
This Chapter's Learning Goals • You know the biggest social and environmental challenges facing t... more This Chapter's Learning Goals • You know the biggest social and environmental challenges facing the world today and understand the basic processes, causes, and effects of climate change. • You know the concepts of the Planetary Boundaries and the Doughnut Economics.
The challenge of OwnData service features: A step towards an informed choice of an OwnData service
The goal of this paper is to raise awareness to the fact that the choice of data storage system i... more The goal of this paper is to raise awareness to the fact that the choice of data storage system is an increasingly significant one to make and to propose a number of dimensions to categorize such systems in a simple yet meaningful way. Many data subjects already use some kind of data service to store their messages, pictures, music, videos, etc. and in the light of increasing data production and a growing number of databased services, this trend is expected to continue. Advancing from storing pop songs to storing personal health or geo-location data, however, requires data subjects to get themselves acquainted with the quality features of data storage providers, should they wish to make an informed decision. The introduction chapter explores the consequences of the GDPR implementation in the European Union regarding the expectations towards storage of personal data, while the subsequent chapter explains the labeling decisions in this paper. The two ensuing chapters present the quality criteria for data storage widely used in contemporary reviews and completes them with additional dimensions advocated for by the author. In a final step, a quick assessment of popular data storage providers is made, using the discussed dimensions, to demonstrate the categorical imbalance in the data storage provider community.
2017 Conference for E-Democracy and Open Government (CeDEM), 2017
Smart Cities depend on data from numerous different sources to live up to their full potential. A... more Smart Cities depend on data from numerous different sources to live up to their full potential. Adding personal data from private sources to a smart city's resources significantly increases this potential. Sustainable utilisation of such data must base on legal compliancy, ethical soundness, and consent of the providing data subjects. They have to be assured that their personal data will not be used for anything beyond the scope they agreed to, and that it will not suffer from any additional risk exposure. For this we propose a solution for self-determined data subjects (SDDS), which keeps the private and personal data at their decentralized, safe locations, without depriving the smart city from the information contained within. SDDS achieves this with strict compartmentalization of its different system elements, by exclusively storing non-mnemonic indices and IDs in a public ledger, and by sending mere analytical results, yet no original data across the network. Such a setup ensures the data subjects' privacy, grants the smart city access to a high number of new data sources, and simultaneously handles the user-consent to ensure compliance with data protection laws.
Geplante Obsoleszenz im Geschäftsmodell sozialer Innovationen
Integrierte nachhaltige Unternehmensführung, 2020
Die Belastungsgrenzen der Erde erfordern fur eine nachhaltige Entwicklung eine grundlegende Umges... more Die Belastungsgrenzen der Erde erfordern fur eine nachhaltige Entwicklung eine grundlegende Umgestaltung unserer Gesellschaft und des vorherrschenden Wirtschaftssystems. Soziale Innovationen mit geplanter Obsoleszenz bieten die Moglichkeit als Instrument gezielt den Wandel zu unterstutzen und voranzutreiben. Das Unternehmen wird zum systemischen Veranderungshebel, um einen Beitrag zur gewunschten Transformation zu leisten. Der temporare Charakter solcher Unternehmen scharft deren Positionierung und das Erreichen des gesetzten Zieles beendet ihren Daseinszweck. So konnen im Zuge von soziookonomischen Experimenten wertvolle Lernerfahrungen gemacht werden, die Entrepreneurship und Innovationskraft fordern. Es ergibt sich auserdem ein neuer Orientierungsrahmen fur eine integrierte nachhaltige Unternehmensfuhrung, z. B. wie mit Stakeholdern umgegangen werden kann, wie Unternehmenswerte, Vision und Mission definiert werden konnen, und was die Pramisse fur unternehmerisches Handeln sein sollte. Somit ist die geplante Obsoleszenz in Geschaftsmodellen sozialer Innovationen als wirtschaftliche Sonderform ein vielversprechender Ansatz in Richtung konkreter Zielerreichung hinsichtlich nachhaltiger Entwicklung der Schweiz.
International Journal of Business and Applied Social Science
Many corporations define values and publish them in their yearly reports or on their websites. Ma... more Many corporations define values and publish them in their yearly reports or on their websites. Managers see the benefit of having corporate values. This article critically evaluates the idea of corporate values and presents a set of criteria that functional corporate values should meet. We will show how corporate values contribute to the identity of a company and signal its identity to society, thus providing a base for its “license to operate”. This concept of corporate values was assessed empirically with the self-stated values of 50 Swiss companies. We show that many companies have an insufficient concept of corporate values and, if stated at all, they are in many cases dysfunctional. It can be concluded that there is a knowing-doing gap but also a pronounced lack of knowledge regarding corporate values. More research is recommended to address the perception of the function of values from a managerial point of view.
Corporate values - a socio-functionalist approach exemplified along corporate sustainability values
This dissertation strives to create a systematic, comprehensive, theory-guided, analytic framewor... more This dissertation strives to create a systematic, comprehensive, theory-guided, analytic framework able to analyze corporate values beyond the false equation with human values. To accomplish this, the dissertation is based on two methodological blocks: The first block comprising chapter 2 to chapter 5 contributes the theoretical foundations and the theoretical reasoning supporting the creation of the analytical framework. This first block also undertakes a functional differentiation between corporate and individual values as well as outlines their different functional layers and phases. Based on these insights, the constitutive elements of the framework are identified, discussed and correlated to form a functional framework. The second methodological block consists of chapter 6 and constitutes the practical validation of the theoretical approach developed in the preceding chapters. The framework’s ability to analyze corporate values and disclose value inconsistency is validated by applying it to the publicly declared corporate value of sustainability proclaimed by a real-life corporation. While all corporate values are validated using the framework, the framework is also utilized when some corporate values are replaced with new, reworked editions to validate the forming capabilities of the framework and demonstrate the explanatory power of well-designed corporate values. The dissertation’s findings should be considered on different levels. On a characterization level, the dissertation performs a literature-based, functional separation between corporate and individual values, while on an analytical level it places a detailed and theory-guided framework at one's disposal, facilitating the analysis and discussion of functional corporate values. Finally, the results of the framework’s application indicate that even though a corporation’s values can be award-winning, well intended, and successful, they can still base on misconceptions, inaccuracy, and gaps. Such corporate values have to rely on like-minded value recipients to close the communication gap according to the corporation’s ideology. Approaching the topic of corporate values with a framework specifically laid out to analyze and form corporate values turns out to result in a more accurate, conceivable, conveyable and therefore more successful analysis of corporate values
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Papers by Jan Frecè