All over the world, farmers have to face up to increasing uncertainties (market and climate). They have to adapt their activity to the new contexts and challenges of livestock farming (producing more and better, and satisfying the expectations of society, consumers, and of downstream operators), while at the same time responding to their own expectations in terms of income, quality of life, and working conditions. In order to understand these changes and consider the future, work organization must be taken into account. The Work Assessment Method, developed by French livestock researchers, provides a framework able to capture work organization, taking into account the specifics of the livestock activity. Based on a comparative analysis of nine case studies that used the Work Assessment Method from six contrasted countries, this review (1) gives generic ideas on work organization indicators and their variation; (2) identifies four generic patterns of work organization which are not linked to the local context but marked by the workforce composition; (3) demonstrates that the relevance of the Work Assessment Method to tackle work issues, and its capacities to be adapted to a variety of livestock farming contexts throughout the world, is linked to the properties of its framework, which was developed by combining different disciplinary approaches; (4) highlights the principal limits of the method: lack of coordination with other dimensions of work (labor productivity; sense of the job), and limited characterization of the work organization flexibility; and (5) proposes some possibilities of change to better respond to the diversity of work situations and questions about work, and take better into account the evolutions of livestock farming systems.

To date, cash on delivery (COD) is one of the most popular payment methods in developing countries thanks to the blossom of customer-to-customer e-commerce. With the widespread of a very small business model and the Internet, online shopping has become part of people's daily activity. People browse for desirable products at the comfort of their homes and ask the online vendor that a shipper can deliver the merchandise at their doorstep. Then, COD allows customers to pay in cash when the product is delivered to their desired location. Since customers receive goods before making a payment, COD is, therefore, considered as a payment system. However, the crucial issue that previous research has not yet addressed is that their models only support single delivering session at a time. More precisely, if the current buyer is not available to receive the goods, the shipper has to wastefully wait for the complete payment and he/she cannot start shipping another merchandise. The tracking system seems to poorly handle this issue. In particular, we propose a multi-session mechanism, which consists of blockchain technology, smart contracts and hyperledger fabric platform to achieve distributed and transparent across delivering sessions in the decentralized markets. Our proposed mechanism ensure the efficiency of delivering process. The authors release our sources codes for further reproducibility and development. We conclude that the integration of multi-session mechanism and blockchain technology will cause significant efficiency across several disciplines.

No abstract

No abstract