A critical analysis of sustainable micro-manufacturing from the perspective of the triple bottom line: A social network analysis
Introduction
Manufacturing is one of the dominant contributors to the consumption of energy and natural resources under consideration of major sectors. Being an essential component in the manufacturing sector, micro-manufacturing begins to be exploited, leading to a significant increase in the production volume of micro-components as well as a fabrication tool of scientific innovations for highly technological products. Referring to the report from Mounier (2014), the market for micro-electronic and mechanical systems values about 25 billion dollars. For such a vast economic proportion of our community, micro-manufacturing has engendered environmental concerns by the public. The impact of micro-manufacturing on the environment is similar to that of traditional manufacturing (Modica et al., 2011; Yip and To, 2018). The life cycle assessment of micro-manufacturing has proved that consumptions of raw material and energy and generations of waste are relatively high in micro-manufacturing (DeGrave et al., 2007; DeGrave and Olsen, 2006). Because of conspicuous resource consumptions by micro-manufacturing, micro-manufacturing units are responsible to work out sustainability strategies. Nowadays, sustainable micro-manufacturing is executed meticulously by manufacturing sectors due to increments of pressures from society, stakeholders and related customers. An assurance for the public towards sustainability development of micro-manufacturing leads the industries to reformulate their strategies to retain operations and comprehensive services for continuous developments (Shankar et al., 2017).
The revolution towards sustainable micro-manufacturing is not only a single aspect for the manufacturing sectors, different dimensions in terms of economy, society and environment should also be considered, which this concept is related to one of the essential sustainable frameworks: triple bottom line (TBL). TBL comprises three components which are social equity, economy, and environment. The words “people”, “planet”, and “profit” are often used to denote TBL and the desired goals of sustainability. Although TBL is frequently employed to be a framework for sustainable development of manufacturing sectors, there has always criticisms about the difficulties of executing it in practical situations from the firms. Manufacturing sectors experience undue complications because of complicated relationships between items of TBL. High complexity is mainly caused by the intricate inter-relationships between the inner dependences or items within TBL (Tullberg, 2012). Brown et al. (2006) held opinions on TBL that the complicated inter-relationships among the items in TBL distorted the benefits of sustainable development. Because of the complicated inter-relationship between items, systematic and scientific analysis of TBL are problematic. The firms turn to be compliant with spectators and adjust the policy to cope with the external pressures and conduct actions with an emphasis on particular components of TBL in order to comfort spectators (Tullberg, 2012). The inter-relationships of items of TBL are varied on occasion as the definitions and the relationships are developed case by case with the concerns of the interests and needs of the community (McKenzie, 2004). By using the TBL concept with those varied definitions and relationships, the community's and stakeholder's perceptions on the sustainable micro-manufacturing are disrupted, undergoing researches is further affected. In this regard, researchers and units should apply a proper modified TBL framework in order to ensure their competitive advantages.
Because of the complexity of the inter-relationship of items of the TBL framework, limitations have been imposed on the micro-manufacturing sectors. In this study, social network analysis (SNA) is applied for analyzing and clarifying the complicated inter-relationship between items of TBL. During conducting SNA, the various items of three dimensions of TBL for micro-manufacturing would be set as nodes with connections by ties, and consequently, the metrics were obtained. By conducting the metric and visual analyses of the TBL network corresponding to micro-manufacturing and properly interpreting the metrics determined from SNA, hidden information and the interrelationship between items could be revealed in a simple format. The significant roles of the items of TBL for supporting sustainable mico-manufacturing could be demonstrated afterward. With an adequate understanding of the items within three dimensions of TBL for micro-manufacturing, the particular items of TBL which are worth for micro-manufacturing firms to invest in can be identified to move forward to sustainability. This study contributes to providing a critical analysis of sustainable development of micro-manufacturing sectors for implementing successful sustainable micro-manufacturing strategies under full consideration of the TBL concept, also offering the fast track for optimizing the influences of adjustments of items of TBL when conducting sustainable micro-manufacturing strategies.
Section snippets
Triple bottle line
TBL normally represents the three major dimensions of sustainable development: society, environment and economy. According to the United Nations (Assembly, U.N.G., 2005), it indicated that successful achievement of sustainable development is highly dependent on the balance between the items of TBL: environment, social equity and economic demands. Normally, the three dimensions are framed as below for manufacturing nowadays:
Profit: The profit component of TBL is commonly denoted as productivity,
Conceptual interpretation of metrics
A conceptual interpretation is a necessary process in SNA, it offers accurate meanings of defined nodes, edges between items in the developed network. The metrics of every network have different meanings, which depend on the research questions and investigational targets of the researches. In this study, the TBL framework of micro-manufacturing is constructed by SNA, Table 1 shows the overview of key metrics and the specific roles of the items of the TBL framework in micro-manufacturing. The
Identification of nodes for TBL network of micro-manufacturing in SNA
A systematic literature review would be employed in this study for getting the nodes in SNA. A systematic literature review is an approach to review scientific papers to guarantee the transparency and integrity of the conclusions (Tranfield et al., 2003). Systematic literature review composed of five steps: (1) question formation, (2) locating studies, (3) study selection and determination, (4) analysis and synthesis and (5) reporting the results (Garza-Reyes, 2015). Steps (1–3) would be
The network of micro-manufacturing with the TBL concept constructed by SNA
The items of TBL regarding micro-manufacturing were assigned as nodes and inputs for SNA. The group metrics were determined finally and are shown in Tables 4–6. The constructed TBL network by SNA is shown in Fig. 4. The color of the vertex is used to classify the dimension of the group: social dimension - blue; environmental dimension – green, and economic dimension - orange. The size and opacity of the vertexes reflect the values of in-degree and out-degree of the nodes respectively.
Group metrics analysis
The
Conclusion
Due to the high complexities of inter-relationships and unclear interpretation of items in the current TBL framework, the difficulties of executing sustainable developments in micro-manufacturing are further intensified. In this study, SNA is applied for identifying the clear inter-relationships between items and giving precise definitions of items in the TBL framework. Micro-manufacturing sectors and researchers enable to efficiently plan for sustainable micro-manufacturing strategies
Declaration of Competing Interest
The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.
Acknowledgments
The work described in this paper was mainly supported by the funding support to the State Key Laboratories in Hong Kong from the Innovation and Technology Commission (ITC) of the Government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR), China. The authors would also like to express their sincere thanks for the financial support from the Research Office (Project code: BBXM and BBX) of The Hong Kong Polytechnic University.
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