Research Series Review for Transdisciplinarity Assessment—Validation with Sustainable Consumption and Production Research

Abstract

In light of the escalating challenges for the sustainability of our societies, the need for improving the research of sustainable consumption and production (SCP) aiming to make real changes on the societies towards sustainability is evident. Transdisciplinary (TD) research is a promising way to enhance SCP research; however, insights to operationalize the concept of TD research are needed for both funders and researchers. Therefore, this article proposes an innovative way to capture and analyse a research series for transdisciplinarity assessment in qualitative and quantitative terms. This new way is termed research series review (RSR). This article adopted literature analysis and partly reflexive retrospective reasoning. In particular, citation content analysis was carried out in relation to two research series selected as the cases. The results show that RSR has advantages such as clearer traceability with cause-and-effect relationships. Furthermore, a successful SCP research series is hypothesised to form an iterative process between practical and theoretical fields as well as finding opportunities and proposing solutions.

A Product/Service System Design Schema: Application to Big Data Analytics

“…An issue with the general quality of review articles, in general, is not new [54]. However, this issue deserves more attention now, as we face an "insanely" growing number of review articles (e.g., as reported in [55] (annual publications for systematic reviews in PubMed between 1991 and 2014 increased by 28 times, and many of them were concluded not to be useful)), but we are expected to conduct academic research for societal challenges in the real world [56] (often called trans-disciplinary research [23]): the recipients of the insights in an academic article are not only academic researchers in the concerned discipline, but also researchers in other disciplines and, more importantly, practitioners in industry and governments. For instance, in health research, a need was recently found to synthesize many review articles in a manner that is accessible and usable to practice [57].…”

“…Here, the evidence from industrial cases was considered, because the applicability and effects of BDA depend highly on contexts. This criterion originated from the target recipients, including practitioners in industry in the spirit of trans-disciplinary research series [56]. In addition, the aspects of contribution to design by each article were documented: quality, cost, time, and environment.…”

Analyzing cognitive processes of a product/service-system design session using protocol analysis

“…The relevance of co-creation in PSS design is confirmed with the practical case of Rolls-Royce (Smith, 2013) 1 . In general, this implies the importance of addressing the contexts in the industry practice, where the PSS design is performed (Sakao, 2019). The design object model for PSS by Maussang et al (2009) and the PSS design process model by Morelli (2003) consider the social construct and incorporate interaction between different actors, such as customers and a provider.…”

“…The relevance of co-creation in PSS design is confirmed with the practical case of Rolls-Royce (Smith, 2013) 1 . In general, this implies the importance of addressing the contexts in the industry practice, where the PSS design is performed (Sakao, 2019).…”

A framework of sustainable consumption and production from the production perspective: Application to Thailand and Vietnam

“…Vergragt et al (2014) introduced four research frameworks, 11 enabling mechanisms, and nine main research areas, whereas Vergragt et al (2016) introduced ten different themes for SCP from 40 selected papers. Sakao (2019) proposed a model to review such SCP studies for transdisciplinary assessment. In addition, the literature has suggested that SCP policies have several aspects.…”