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The relationship between urbanization, energy use, and CO2 emissions has been extensively studied in recent years, however little attention paid to the differences in urban forms. Previous studies implicitly assume that the urban form is homogenous across different urban areas. Such an assumption is questionable as urban form can have many different facets. This paper investigates the effects of urbanization on the road transport energy use by considering different urban forms from a dataset of (3) there is a non-linear (quadratic) relationship between road energy use per capita and urban population. This implies that an increase in total municipality population over a specific turning point can result in a decrease in road energy use per capita. However, (4) the ratio of urban residential buildings with private gardens has a negative and significant influence on road transport energy use.This implies that there may be a trade-off between compact and sprawl city development strategies, highlighting that sustainable energy use requires further investigation.

There is an increased focus on relevance of higher education. Mostly it is about enhanced job opportunities or job advancements for the individual. However, relevance of higher education may also be towards solving important issues or problems at a workplace. There are some necessary preconditions as to how an educational activity becomes relevant. Firstly, the student must be capable to discover how generic knowledge and acquired skills may or may not apply to concrete situations at work. This requires experience, understanding of the norms and culture of the organisation and a certain form of practical intelligence. Secondly, the conditions at work place must be conducive to innovation and change in various ways. In this article, we present a case study where employee turnover and lack of effective training routines were a major efficiency constraint in a Norwegian firm. With constant competition, changes in markets and other factors that influence the sustainability of an organization, cutting costs, such as high turnover and the time from being newcomer to being fully operative in the job. The responsible for training activities in the firm realized that additional formal education at the higher education level was needed, and he decided to enrol in a Knowledge Management study program at The Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences in order to learn how he could improve knowledge management and learning processes of new employees at his workplace. The case study ultimately demonstrates how crucial the interplay between content and form of education on one hand and specific conditions facilitating changes and improvements at work on the other is for the relevance in formal higher education narrative.

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Many studies on buyer–supplier-supplier triads demonstrate the value of the interactions between three business actors instead of two for identifying triadic collaboration strategies that can lead firms to improve their performance. However, there is little research to date that has explored which specific lean improvements the various types of buyer–supplier-supplier triads lead to. This paper fills this gap. We study an automotive supplier manufacturing company (the buyer) and its seven types of buyer–supplier-supplier triads emerging from the buyers’ attempt to implement zero-defect manufacturing (ZDM) in the production process of a crash management system. The case study shows how a buyer manages their first-tier suppliers through three types of closed buyer–supplier-supplier triads, where all three actors collaborate to work for the common goal of ZDM. The case also shows four additional types of open triads, where the buyer relies on the first-tier supplier to manage the second-tier supplier without directly interacting with the latter. The paper discusses what types of triads in the case study seem to be associated with the buyers’ efforts to achieve the following lean sub-goals of ZDM: full automation, production line flexibility, product flexibility, low cost, low defect rate, short cycle time, and minimum quality control. Finally, we also analyze the role of geographic proximity between the actors in open and closed buyer–supplier-supplier ZDM triads.