This research addresses life cycle environmental and economic sustainability in the baby food sector. In the UK, this sector has been growing rapidly, expanding by around 30% between 2009 and 2014, by which time it was worth an estimated £181 million per year. This growth sits within a context of high emissions from the food sector: in 2015, UK net GHG emissions were estimated to be 496 million tonnes (Mt) and the domestic food chain was responsible for 115 Mt CO2 eq. emissions. However, within this overall food chain, very little is known about the sustainability of the baby food sector, with almost no prior literature in the area. The research presented here begins with market research to identify the characteristics of products available in the ready-made food market, in which wet and dry products in jars and pouches dominate sales. Subsequently, 12 representative products are selected from those available on the market and each is assessed in detail to establish its environmental and economic impacts using life cycle assessment (LCA), life cycle costing (LCC) and value added (VA) assessment. The findings of these product-level assessments are then compared to home-made equivalents and finally scaled up according to sales volumes to provide an overall view of the baby food sector as a whole. Wet and dry variants of ready-made porridge products are assessed first as the most commonly consumed breakfast option. The dry product is shown to have 5%-70% the impacts of the wet, on average, and the importance of product formulation is clear: for dry porridge, reformulation could reduce impacts by up to 67%. For the wet porridge, switching from glass jars to plastic pouches is also shown to decrease impacts by up to 89%. Assessment of 11 wet ready-made products demonstrates that the highest impacts are found in spaghetti Bolognese and salmon risotto, and that raw materials are the major hotspot of the life cycle, contributing 12-69%, followed by manufacturing at 2-49%. When combined into a range of weekly diets limited differences are observed between diets, except in cases where dairy-free diets result in compensatory increases in meat consumption. When the aforementioned selection of ready-made products is compared to its home-made equivalent, the home-made options are shown to have lower impacts by 50% to 17 times. This is due to the avoidance of manufacturing and extra packaging stages, as well as shorter supply chains resulting in less waste overall. At the product level, the LCC of ready-made meals ranges from £0.08 to £0.26 per 125 g product, compared to £0.02-£0.20 for the home-made equivalents. Value added is, on average, approximately four times higher for ready-made meals than homemade, illustrating the potential profit of the sector. Annually, the ready-made baby food sector has an LCC of £40m and carbon footprint of 109 kt CO2 eq. This carbon footprint represents only 0.1% of the UK food and drinks sector. The results of this research show that considerable improvements can be made to the environmental and economic sustainability of baby foods, both ready- and homemade, while home-made options tend to have lower costs and environmental impacts. The outputs provide benchmarking and improvement opportunities for industry and government, as well as insight for consumers.

This work deals with comparison of business in the Czech and Slovak Republics, focusing on a limited company and specifically on the comparison of the possible ways and conditions of its acquisition in both states. The first chapter is devoted to the characteristics of some basic concepts, the second chapter the description of the legal forms of business in the CR and the third focuses on the general characteristics of the company. In the fourth and fifth chapter lists analyzed by a public company and limited partnership under the laws of both states. The sixth chapter focuses on the core theme of work and it is a limited liability company, a detailed analysis Ltd. under the laws of both countries and a description and comparison of ways to within Ltd. start a business. Gradually options are compared to set up Ltd. in both countries by self-help, by consulting firms and buy ready made Ltd. together with a practical comparison of prices of the services. The seventh chapter is devoted to the joint-stock company and its modification in the law of the CR and SR. The last chapter is a comparison of Czech and Slovak Republic in terms of their tax burden and agenda.

L’art moderne et contemporain a quitté le régime de la Représentation pour expérimenter d’autres fonctions et proposer à un nouveau « regardeur » d’autres rapports avec la réalité vécue. Pour cela, il faut que quelque chose de fondamental ait changé dans la relation de l’artiste au monde : l’espace n’est plus quelque chose qu’il élabore au moyen de l’oeuvre, ou en elle. L’espace est, pour l’artiste moderne, une « donnée » dans laquelle il est placé d’emblée, à l’instar de tout être. Cela veut dire qu’il n’y a pas d’espace propre à l’oeuvre d’art qui ne soit l’espace du monde lui-même. L’art, c’est le monde, à travers l’engagement de tout ce qui l’occupe.C’est ce que Jean Paulhan (1884-1968), en parlant des cubistes, avait appelé « l’espace brut » ou « l’espace spontané », et qui est désigné ici comme « l’espace réel », pour le différencier de toute fiction spatiale. C’est aussi ce que Marcel Duchamp a élaboré à travers ses expérimentations sur les choses et le langage, l’ayant conduit à concevoir cette complexematrice de l’art qu’est le Ready-made en remplacement de la Perspective. Ainsi, ce qu’on nomme art contemporain est un art qui s’élabore dans le monde, impliquant les êtres et les choses, les formes et les signes, mais aussi la « lumière » des idées, toujours déjà là. Comprendre l’art, c’est, pour chacun, appréhender, sans pouvoir se dérober, comment se joue une rencontre entre ces entités contradictoires, visant une unité nouvelle et exprimant l’intuition du monde comme Tout.Cette thèse est un tel effort de compréhension qui, dans ma pratique de commissaire d’exposition et de critique d’art, a été partagé avec des artistes, au plus près des oeuvres et dans de multiples contextes, dans le cadre de ces institutions « d’aménagement du territoire » que sont les Fonds régionaux d’art contemporain / Modern and contemporary art have abandoned the system of Representation to experiment with other functions and to offer a new “beholder” different relations with a lived reality. To do this, something fundamental had to alter the artist’s relation to the world: space is no longer developed by means of the work, or within it. For modern artist, space is a “given” in which he is immediately placed, like any being. This means that there is no space peculiar to the work of art which is not the space of the world itself. Art is the world, through the involvement of everything occupying its space.This is what, in talking about the Cubists, Jean Paulhan (1884-1968) called “raw space” and “spontaneous space”, which is here described as “real space”, to differentiate it from any spatial fiction. It is also what Marcel Duchamp developed in his experiments involving things and language, leading him to devise that new matrix of art known as the Readymade,replacing Perspective. So what we call contemporary art is an art that is developed within the world, involving beings and things, forms and signs, invariably already there. For everyone, understanding art is grasping how, without being able to sidestep, the encounter between these contradictory entities is enacted, aimed at a new unity and expressing the intuition of the world as a Whole.This thesis is such an effort at comprehension, which, in my activities as an exhibition curator and art critic, has been shared with artists, at very close quarters with works and in many different contexts, within the framework of those institutions of “regional development”, the regional contemporary art collections (FRAC).

Emerging countries have enriched supply chains of influential multinational organizations. Business in emerging markets have led to both positive and negative outcomes. Stakeholders have a strong impact in emerging markets in relation to local communities. There have been lots of research connecting stakeholder responsibility with sustainability. Those studies have been the inspiration for this study. This research recognizes how stakeholders can contribute in the emerging market through the help of third parties. The study models the relation between CSR and stakeholders. The risk factor is more pronounces in some industries more than others, so this study primarily seeks to examine how risk factors can be mitigated in the Bangladesh garments industry.  In this case study, the qualitative method was approached and followed up by semi-structured interviews to answer the research question. The interview was held in various organizations, and 13 respondents shared their experiences through interviews. Six of the interviewees were managers from different parts of ready-made garments business and operations functions. The rest of the interviewees belong to the production floor. The interviewees answered questions related to the importance of buyers, safety regulations, and NGOs in the industry. From the findings, thematic analysis was conducted. Based on the findings, the study has concluded that engagement of third parties can impact work conditions in the examined setting. The importance of audit is underscored by in the data and seems to be instrumental for efforts of preventing accidents. To successfully develop an industry without creating negative effects on society, stakeholders need to be more involved in the safety of factory workers. Approaching this issue with third party involvement can be a useful solution for the buyer. / <p>Confidential</p>

Background: The World Health Organization estimates that there are 517 million people in the world who are visually impaired due to uncorrected presbyopia. Equal sphere ready-made bifocal and single vision reading spectacles are an inexpensive alternative to custom made spectacles. Methods: A visual satisfaction questionnaire was administered before patients were examined at an outreach clinic and again after ready-made bifocals or reading spectacles were dispensed. The results of both sets of questions along with presenting acuities, corrected acuities, refractive data, and willingness to pay were analyzed. Results: There was an unmet need of 38% (of the 338 subjects that needed glasses only 208 had them). There was no gender bias; the unmet need was higher in the rural areas (47% rural, 36% urban). Those who could not read were 3.4 times less likely to have the glasses they needed than the literate. Unmet need decreased with every level of education. Those without any schooling showed 77% prevalence of unmet need and those with university education had an unmet need rate of 32%. Ready-made spectacles were dispensed to 89.5% of those examined. The ready-made bifocals were very well accepted, with the percentage of subjects giving the highest satisfaction rating improving from a presenting value of 11% to 89.4% with the bifocals at distance and from 6.6% to 89.4% at near. Distance visual acuity of 20/40 or better improved from the presenting value of 60% to 84.5% and near vision of 20/40 or better improved from the presenting value of 44% to 97%. With ready-made single vision readers, functionally good near vision (20/40 or better) improved from a presenting value of 38% to 97%. The highest ranking for near satisfaction improved from 6.3% to 86.6%. The subjects indicted that they would be willing to pay US$18.39 to replace the bifocals and US$16.67 to replace the readers. Conclusion: There is a high unmet need for vision correction in the population over age 35 in Nicaragua. Dissatisfaction with distance and near vision is very high. Although custom made glasses are ideal, ready-made bifocals and ready-made single vision readers are an acceptable and affordable alternative.

By conceptualizing repetition with the Swedish avantgarde aesthetics of the 1960s as a point of departure, this thesis argues that the repetition phenomena in the mature works of Per Olov Enquist (1934–2020) are indebted to the period. Hereby it brings together two major trends in the Enquist research that previously have been separate. In accordance with the main tendency of the period, the Enquistian repetitions reuse concrete constituents and are of technical and combinatory nature. According to the taxonomy introduced in the thesis, they are mainly internarrative, i.e., they transcend the limits of the individual stories. Thus, in Enquist, the superficial, anti-mimetic as well as anti-hermeneutical qualities pertaining to the period are a consequence of the specifically internarrative character of the repetitions, whereas the individual stories remain mimetically coherent. Furthermore, the thesis investigates a metapoetic discourse in the mature works; in part, it demonstrates a continuity between this discourse and the non-metapoetic notion of repetition in Enquist’s novels of the ‘60s. Altogether, the thesis proposes a way of historically situating the Enquist oeuvre as a whole; supposedly, it will contribute to further studies with similar aims.

This thesis is an attempt to expand upon the ideas that permeate the practice of art making that has developed over the past two years. Art criticism, theory, history, and practice are used to give definition to the boundaries of my ever-shifting body of work. Focusing on the elusive nature of communication in both public and private spheres, these projects range from installation and sculptural work, to web projects, photography, and drawing.

L’analyse des processus de création de l’écrivain américain William Burroughs et de l’artiste brésilien Cildo Meireles construit deux figures exemplaires de l’artiste en tant que sujet politique. Les choix faits par ces deux artistes pendant le processus de réalisation de leurs œuvres déclarent en effet leur position face à la littérature, à l’art et à la réalité. Ils les construisent en tant que sujets-artistes et produisent des rencontres qui (re) configurent l’espace artistique. Ils renouvellent les pratiques de création. Nous étudions ces processus avec pour outils différentes notions théoriques. Outre celle de la politique, qui, selon Jacques Rancière, est le processus de l’égalité ; celle du sujet, définie par Alain Badiou, comme une construction qui se produit quand un événement arrive ; et celle de choix qui, selon Slavoj Zizek, ne laisse pas intacte la subjectivité du sujet. Nous essayons ainsi de définir le caractère politique des choix faits par ces deux artistes et de mettre en évidence l’idée de l’art et de la politique que leurs œuvres mobilisent.Nous étudions le processus de création de Burroughs, de son premier roman jusqu’à la découverte du cut-up et l’écriture de son texte Last Words. Nous analysons le processus de création des œuvres de Meireles : Insertions dans les circuits idéologiques, œuvre qui se constitue dans un processus en marche ; et Le sermon sur la montagne : Fiat lux. Construction d’une situation : transformation d’un espace en une bombe potentielle.Malgré leurs différences, ces œuvres ont une procédure de réalisation similaire, une sorte de travail tabulaire, de collage d’éléments hétérogènes. / The analysis of the creation process of both Americain writer Willam Burroughs and Brazilian artist Cildo Meireles construct two exemplary figures of the artist as political subject. The choices made by these artistes during the process of realization of their works declare indeed their position on literature, art and reality. Their choices construct them as artists-subjects and produce encounters that (re) configure the art space. They renew the creative practices. We study these processes with some theoretical tools: such as the notion of politics which according to Jacques Rancière, is the process of equality; the notion of subject, defined by Alain Badiou as a construction that is produced when an event happens; and the notions of choice which, according to Slavoj Zizek, does not leave intact the subjectivity of the subject. Thus we try to define the political nature of the choices made by these artists and to highlight the idea of art and politics that their works mobilize. We study the process of creation of Burroughs, from his first novel until his discovery of cut-up technique and the writing of his text Last Words. We analyze the process of creation of Meireles’s works: Insertions into Ideological Circuits, a work that is established as a running process and The Sermon on the Mount: Fiat Lux that is the construction of a situation. It is the transformation of a space into a potential bomb. Despite their differences these works have a similar implementations procedures a kind of a tabular work, a collage of heterogeneous elements.

The purpose of this study is to investigate what effect COVID-19 has had on the buyer-supplier relationship (BSR) in the ready-made garment (RMG) supply chain (SC) - focusing mainly on the Bangladeshi supplier point of view, but with a complementary perspective of the buyer. As the area is new and relatively unexplored, there is a gap in previous literature and research. It has not previously been studied how COVID-19 affected the relationship between buyer and supplier in the RMG SC. This study aims to narrow this gap. In this study, a qualitative research strategy was adopted, emphasizing words rather than quantification in the data collection and analysis. An inductive approach was used, starting from collecting data, where theories and literature are proposed towards the end of the research process as a result of interviews. A narrative state of the art review of literature was conducted to provide a comprehensive and unbiased review. Semi-structured in-depth interviews with Bangladeshi supplier managers were conducted over Zoom or Teams. The empirical data were coded in first-order concepts, second-order concepts, and aggregate level through the qualitative research program Nvivo. Four main second-order concepts could be identified from the interviews with the supplier side. The codes and empirical data were then analyzed through a developed analysis model based on the Conceptual Model of Social Capital. The effects that COVID-19 has had on BSR from a Bangladeshi supplier perspective are discussed and presented.

This study explores employee welfare and working conditions in relation to ethical HRM practices from the employees’ perspective in the Bangladeshi Ready-Made Garment (RMG) sector. This research is inspired by the need to understand the challenges that employees face in their practical work settings and the unfair Human Resource Management (HRM) process that they experience in their work. The interpretivist philosophical approach and the qualitative research approach have been adopted in this research study, while the semi-structured interview method has been applied for primary-data collection. A total of 25 semi-structured interviews with General Employees, Informal Representative Leaders, Employees, Middle and Senior Managers have been undertaken in this process. Five focus-group discussions have also been applied to corroborate the data generated from the 25 semi-structured interviews. The case-study strategy has also been implemented as a research strategy and thematic analysis has been applied to the data-analysis process. The findings of this research study show the need for deeper understanding and application of ethical HRM practices in particular national and sectoral contexts, specifically in the Bangladeshi RMG sector. These ethical HRM practices include, but are not limited to, the initiation of rights-based understanding and respect-based perception, the inclusion of welfare facilities, the implementation of a fair payment policy, the equitable recruitment and selection policy, and the initiation and equality of training and development facilities. These new ethical understandings contribute to the field of ethical HRM in the context of the development of employee welfare and decent working conditions in this sector.