Search results

This paper presents an analytical framework for modeling and measuring strategic alignment. The resource-product-market (RPM) model is introduced as a means of representing the alignment of the firm's internal resources with its product lines and external markets. A strategic alignment index is defined to measure the degree of alignment represented by a model.

The RPM model is derived as an extension of prior research on diversification indexes. The strategic alignment index is mathematically defined and the properties of the model are characterized using graph theory. The approach is illustrated for two example firms.

The RPM model is flexible and can be used with different types and measures of resources, products and markets. The model represents strategy in a structural manner addressing a vertical type of alignment. The index ranges continuously from 0 to 1.0, providing a useful scale for measurement and comparison.

Practitioners may use RPM modeling to assess the current alignment of their respective firms and to identify strategic alternatives which increase alignment through a taxonomy of 13 strategic moves. The results of applying the model to ten firms are summarized.

The paper contributes to the literature by providing a new method for modeling firm strategy which integrates resource and industry views, thereby enabling a measurement of their alignment. The paper is also novel in the application of graph theory to management.

Recently, there has been a shift toward the embodied energy assessment of buildings. However, the impact of material service life on the life-cycle embodied energy has received little attention. We aimed to address this knowledge gap, particularly in the context of the UAE and investigated the embodied energy associated with the use of concrete and other materials commonly used in residential buildings in the hot desert climate of the UAE.

Using input–output based hybrid analysis, we quantified the life-cycle embodied energy of a villa in the UAE with over 50 years of building life using the average, minimum, and maximum material service life values. Mathematical calculations were performed using MS Excel, and a detailed bill of quantities with >170 building materials and components of the villa were used for investigation.

For the base case, the initial embodied energy was 57% (7390.5 GJ), whereas the recurrent embodied energy was 43% (5,690 GJ) of the life-cycle embodied energy based on average material service life values. The proportion of the recurrent embodied energy with minimum material service life values was increased to 68% of the life-cycle embodied energy, while it dropped to 15% with maximum material service life values.

The findings provide new data to guide building construction in the UAE and show that recurrent embodied energy contributes significantly to life-cycle energy demand. Further, the study of material service life variations provides deeper insights into future building material specifications and management considerations for building maintenance.

New business practices and the globalization of markets force firms to take innovation as the fundamental pillar of their competitive strategy. Research and Development (R&D) plays a vital role in innovation. As technology advances and product life cycles become shorter, firms rely on R&D as a strategy to invigorate innovation. R&D project portfolio selection is a complex and challenging task. Despite the management's efforts to implement the best project portfolio selection practices, many projects continue to fail or miss their target. The problem is that selecting R&D projects requires a deep understanding of strategic vision and technical capabilities. However, many decision-makers lack technological insight or strategic vision. This article aims to provide a method to capitalize on the expertise of R&D professionals to assist managers in making informed and effective decisions. It also provides a framework for aligning the portfolio of R&D projects with the organizational vision and mission.

This article proposes a new strategic approach for R&D project portfolio selection using efficiency-uncertainty maps.

The proposed strategy plane helps decision-makers align R&D project portfolios with their strategies to combine a strategic view and numerical analysis in this research. The proposed strategy plane consists of four areas: Exploitation Zone, Challenge Zone, Desperation Zone and Discretion Zone. Mapping the project into this strategic plane would help decision-makers align their project portfolio according to the corporate perspectives.

The new approach combines the efficiency and uncertainty dimensions in portfolio selection into an integrated framework that: (i) provides a complete representation of the stochastic decision-making processes, (ii) models the endogenous uncertainty inherent in the project selection process and (iii) proposes a computationally practical and visually unique solution procedure for classifying desirable and undesirable R&D projects.

India has the biggest number of active users on social media platforms, particularly Twitter. The purpose of this paper is to examine public sentiment on COVID-19 vaccines and COVID Appropriate Behaviour (CAB) by text mining (topic modeling) and network analysis supported by thematic modeling.

A sample dataset of 115,000 tweets from the Twitter platform was used to examine the perception of the COVID-19 vaccination and CAB from January 2021 to August 2021. The research applied a machine-learning algorithm and network analysis to extract hidden and latent patterns in unstructured data to identify the most prevalent themes. The COVID-19 Vaccine Hesitancy Amplification Model was formulated, which included five key topics based on sample big data from social media.

The identified themes are Social Media Adaptivity, Lack of Knowledge Providing Mechanism, Perception of Vaccine Safety Measures, Health Care Infrastructure Capabilities and Fear of Coronavirus (Coronaphobia). The study implication assists communication strategists and stakeholders design effective communication strategies using digital platforms. The study reveals CAB themes as with Mask Wearing Issues and Employment Issues as relevant themes discussed on digital channels.

The themes extracted in the present study provide a roadmap for policy-makers and communication experts to utilize social media platforms for communicating and understanding the perception of preventive measures of vaccination and CAB. As evidenced by the increased engagement on social media platforms during the COVID-19-induced lockdown, digital platforms are indeed valuable from the communication perspective to be proactive in the event of a similar situation. Moreover, significant themes, including social media adaptivity, absence of knowledge-providing mechanism and perception of safety measures of the vaccine, are the critical parameters leading to an amplified effect on vaccine hesitancy.

The COVID-19 Vaccine Hesitancy Amplification Themes (CVHAT) equips stakeholders and government strategists with a preconfigured paradigm to tackle dedicated communication campaigns and assess digital community behavior during health emergencies COVID-19.

The increased acceptance of vaccines and the following of CAB decrease the advocacy of mutation of the virus and promote the healthy being of the people. As CAB has been mentioned as a preventive strategy against the COVID-19 pandemic, the research preposition promotes communication intervention which helps to mitigate future such pandemics. As developing, economies require effective communication strategies for vaccine acceptance and CAB, this study contributes to filling the gap using a digital environment.

Chan et al. (2020) recommended using social media platforms for public knowledge dissemination. The study observed that the value of a communication strategy is increased when communication happens using highly trusted and accessible channels such as Twitter and Facebook. With the preceding context, the present study is a novel approach to contribute toward digital communication strategies related to vaccination and CAB.

This paper proposes an intact framework for building life cycle energy estimation (LCEE), which includes three major energy sources: embodied, operational and mobile.

A systematic review is conducted to summarize the selected 109 studies published during 2012–2021 related to quantifying building energy consumption and its major estimation methodologies, tools and key influence parameters of three energy sources.

Results show that the method limitations and the variety of potential parameters lead to significant energy estimation errors. An in-depth qualitative discussion is conducted to identify research knowledge gaps and future directions.

With societies and economies developing rapidly across the world, a large amount of energy is consumed at an alarming rate. Unfortunately, its huge environmental impacts have forced many countries to take energy issues as urgent social problems to be solved. Even though the construction industry, as the one of most important carbon contributors, has been constantly and academically active, researchers still have not arrived at a clear consensus for system boundaries of life cycle energy. Besides, there is a significant difference between the actual and estimated values in countless current and advanced energy estimation approaches in the literature.

This paper aims to provide a comprehensive understanding of the supply chain learning (SCL)–performance relationship based on the existing empirical evidence.

We sampled 54 empirical studies on the SCL–performance relationship. We proposed a conceptual research framework and adopted a meta-analytical approach to analyse the SCL–performance relationship.

The results of the meta-analysis confirm the positive effects of SCL on the performance of both firms and supply chains. In addition, building on the knowledge-based view, we found that learning from customers has a stronger positive effect on performance than does learning from suppliers, while joint learning has a stronger positive effect on performance than does absorptive learning. Business knowledge had a greater effect on performance than did general knowledge, process knowledge or technical knowledge, while explicit knowledge had a stronger effect than tacit knowledge. Moreover, the SCL–performance relationship is moderated by performance measure and industry type but not by regional economic development, highlighting the broad applicability of SCL.

This study is the first meta-analysis on the SCL–performance relationship. It differentiates between learning from customers and learning from suppliers, examines a more comprehensive list of performance measures and tests five moderators to the main effect, significantly contributing to the SCL literature.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the structure and dynamics of academic articles relating to public procurement (PP) in the period 1984–2022 (up to May). The researchers also intend to analyse how this knowledge domain has grown since 1984.

A bibliometric analysis was carried out to examine the existing state of PP research. Based on 640 journal articles indexed in the Scopus database and written by 1,247 authors over nearly four decades, a bibliometric analysis was conducted to reveal the intellectual structure of academic works pertaining to PP.

Findings reveal that PP research from Scopus has significantly increased in the past decade. Major journals publishing PP research are International Journal of Procurement Management, Journal of Cleaner Production, Journal of Purchasing and Supply Management and Public Money and Management. Results also indicate that authors’ cooperation network is fragmented, showing limited collaboration among PP researchers. In addition, results suggest that the institutional collaboration network in PP research mirrors what is commonly referred to as the North–South divide, signifying insufficient research collaboration between developed and developing countries’ institutions. According to the co-occurrence keyword network and topic modelling, PP revolves around five main themes, including innovation, corruption, sustainable and green PP, PP contracts and small and medium enterprises. Based on these results, several directions for future research are suggested.

This paper provides an increased understanding of the entire PP field and the potential research directions.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first-ever application of bibliometric techniques and topic modelling to examine the development of PP research since 1984 based on scholarly publications extracted from the Scopus database.

There are various methods to assess the failure of a road construction project that does not meet quality and performance standards. This study aims to evaluate the factors affecting the quality management of road construction projects in Indonesia by identifying the critical challenges in implementing quality management processes and examining the countermeasures to address these problems.

In this research, the quality management processes in Indonesian road construction projects are evaluated using a mixed quantitative and qualitative approach. Quantitative data obtained from two rounds of Delphi questionnaire surveys as the primary data source, and focus group interviews as the qualitative data are used to achieve the aims of this study.

It is found that from as early as in the preconstruction stage of a project, the availability of quality standards and documentation is problematic when implementing quality management processes. The critical factor of the quality control activities of a project and the quality management roles and responsibilities of the stakeholders during road construction is the project team. This constraint deals with the interaction of the competency, commitment, and mutual cooperation among the main stakeholders to ensure that quality management processes are implemented. This implementation is a part of controlling the road pavement materials, supervising the project activities according to a specified standard, and reporting the project performance. The findings of this study add parameters relating to quality management and quality processes in a road construction project area.

This study is the first to evaluate the quality management processes in the construction of Indonesian road projects. The investigation identifies and evaluates the causes of the persistence of poor road quality. All revealed constraints are substantial factors that hinder the implementation of quality management processes when delivering quality road products. This study addresses the key influencing factors and scenarios related to quality management during road construction projects in Indonesia and other developing countries as practical examples and provides case-based insights for construction practitioners and civil engineering academics in developed countries.

The aim of this paper is to assess the behavioural factors that influence professionals' intention to adopt green construction based on the theory of planned behaviour (TPB).

The study adopted a quantitative research design with the use of online questionnaires to elicit information from construction professionals in South Africa. Descriptive statistics of frequencies, mean and standard deviation were used to analyse the data obtained from the survey. Linear regression was also used to assess the effect of behavioural factors on professionals' intention to adopt green construction.

The results showed that attitude and perceived behavioural control (PBC) have a significant effect on the intention to adopt green construction. These were significant at p < 0.05, having p-values of 0.000 and 0.015 respectively. The study also found that there was a positive disposition towards green construction, particularly with regards to insisting on green construction. This had a mean value of 3.99. There was also a high perception of succeeding in the execution of green projects with mean score of 3.76.

The practical implication of the findings is that adoption of green construction in South Africa is majorly based on the positive attitude of stakeholders towards green construction and also the PBC or the perceived ease of executing green construction. However, these factors are not sufficient to generate long term commitment for green transformation among a critical mass of stakeholders in the South African construction industry. Hence, there is a need for focus on subjective norms (pressure) particularly from the government, to encourage the widespread adoption of green construction in South Africa.

Findings present one of the pioneering efforts to empirically validate the influence of behavioural factors on the intention to adopt green construction in South Africa and the outcomes can provide policy directions and baseline data for further research.

This study aims to proposed that blockchain helps the organization improve supply chain (SC) performance by improving integration, agility and security through real-time information sharing, end-to-end visibility, transparency, data management, immutability, irrevocable information and cyber-security platforms.

This study has made an initial effort toward proposing a framework that shows the problems and challenges for the O&G SC under its segments (upstream, midstream and downstream) and provides the interlink among blockchain properties for SCM problems. SC managers were selected for survey questionnaires from the Pakistan O&G industries.

This study analyzes the impact of blockchain-enabled SC on firm performance with an understanding of the SC robustness capabilities as a mediator. The result revealed that the SC manager believes that the blockchain-enabled SC has a positive and significant on firm performance and robustness capabilities.

Blockchain technology is reflected as high-tech to support the firm process, responses and methods. The technology helps eliminate bottlenecks, avoid uncertainties and improve decision-making, leading to improved SC functions. This study guides managers about the potential problems of existing SC and how blockchain solves SC problems more effectively.

The oil and gas (O&G) sectors are neglected by researchers, and there are limited studies on O&G supply chain management (SCM). Additionally, no empirical evidence suggests implementing blockchain for O&G as a solution for potential problems. Furthermore, present the roadmap to other industries those having complex SC networks for the implication of blockchain to improve the SC performance.