Benchmarking Security Standards and Knowledge Innovations of Physical Protection of Nuclear Materials and Facilities: Organizational Absorptive Capacity Perspectives

The need for adequate physical protection of nuclear materials and facilities has emerged as a strategic imperative that is increasingly tied to benchmarking its security standards and knowledge innovations into the organization. In the light of this, CPPNM, and IAEA have developed convention, recommendations for physical protection standards for nuclear materials and facilitated to assist member states in implementing a comprehensive physical protection regime. Individual states assure physical protection through establishing and operating a physical protection oversight system. However, despite the clear benefit of protection, there is currently lack in many organizations establishing standards of physical protection. Hence, the benchmarking of these physical protection standards raises the issues of absorptive capacity of an organization. These gaps are the prime motivators for this work. To fill these gaps, a conceptual model is developed to benchmarking the process of security standards and knowledge innovations of physical protection of nuclear materials and facilities in organization grounded upon contextual theories of organizational absorptive capacity, and benchmarking principle. The findings of this paper offer a useful framework to assess the organizational absorptive capacity as a driving force for sustainable physical protection standards and knowledge innovations in organization. Finally, the implications of the findings for the research and practices are discussed. (author)