No abstract

Since the emerging of its idea circa four decades ago, Appropriate Technology (AT) had been proven as a comprehensive solution in a limited condition. However, practitioners & academia have different opinions with engineers on how an AT must be designed. Researchers had noted the crucial factors in the issue as such, and they gave a notion of the urgency for a dedicated design methodology for AT. This study, therefore, aims to provide it. Such methodology is developed by incorporating AT characteristics, fundamental issues in community empowerment, and the principles of existing design methodologies. The methodology emphasizes combination between bottom-up and top-down design approaches. It means that an AT must be started purely from local conditions rather than given technical specifications, and be given back to local people to be seamlessly integrated into their routines. It also underlines the crucial importance of community involvement throughout design stages. By looking at previous design methodologies that were developed based on pure Engineering Problem Solving (EPS), this study delivers a fresh and comprehensive one that covers surrounding issues and concepts to produce an AT based on the real meaning of technological appropriateness.

Smart city movements are growing all over the world. The undertaking is expected to solve a plethora of problems arising from urbanization. Indonesia is one of the countries who march toward the development of sustainable smart cities. However, before the government can start a smart city project, they need to assess the readiness of each target city. Data in this article illustrate the readiness of six major cities in Indonesia, which are Semarang, Makassar, Jakarta, Samarinda, Medan, and Surabaya. They represent the four biggest islands in Indonesia. The readiness assessment was based on three main elements and six Smart City Pillars taken from Smart City Master Plan Preparation Guidance Book prepared by Ministry of Communication and Information Technology of the Republic of Indonesia. Those elements serve as a checklist to determine the readiness of the cities. Data for qualitative analysis were gathered through interviews and triangulated through secondary sources, such as publication from Statistics Indonesia and the assessment reports. The dataset contains information on the readiness assessment is presented in this article. The indices of the six region's readiness assessment are presented in percentages.

Reverse logistics activities are widely used application to preserve the environment in many developed countries from e-waste problem. Due to lack of public awareness in many emerging countries, implementation of reverse logistics program must be initiated by government. Besides that, reverse logistics practices often fail to balance among profit target achievement, the environmental conservation, and social harmony. Moreover, in the recent years, triple bottom line is not enough since many parties are only focused on their reputation due to they are afraid to be blame as the source of problems. Therefore, this research aims to build sustainable reverse logistics theory for emerging countries through quattro bottom line approach from government perspectives. Theory building process consists of systematic literature review, triangulation of data collection, major part of theory description, conceptualization and operationalization of theory. The result indicates a number of obligation that must be regulated by government for all parties that was divided into four categories, i.e. infrastructures and facilities provision, human resource commitment, regulation establishment, and managerial orientation. This theory can be adopted to measure performance of SRL Implementation.

The Corona Virus Disease (COVID)-19 pandemic has disrupted the business and industry landscape and changed consumers' behavior. The purpose of this paper was to explore how the behavior of online shoppers and sellers changed because of the COVID-19 outbreak. The originality of this paper lies in combining four main constructs: digital promotion capability, supply chain capability, customer experience, and performance of the e-commerce platform. It incorporates intervening factors like seasonal pricing and logistics outsourcing in the context of COVID 19. The main findings were that, before the pandemic, customer review ratings had a significant positive effect on the performance of the e-commerce platform, but not after the outbreak. Meanwhile, logistics outsourcing does not intervene in the relationship between perceived supply chain capability and (relative) e-commerce platform performance, unlike before the pandemic. This research is a longitudinal study before and after the COVID 19 pandemic, with a call-back sample size of 88 end customer respondents and 55 seller respondents. Data gathered from previous and current e-commerce research were processed by multivariate regression using SPSS software.