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In this paper, we focus on the relative efficiency of different e‐collaboration tools and their impact on the performance of individual firms positioned along the supply chain. In exploratory study, the supply chain of one large telecommunications OEM was analyzed in two consecutive phases, namely a detailed case study and an electronic survey. This led to the examination of an entire supply chain from both upstream and downstream perspectives. Supply chain execution and supply chain planning e‐collaboration tools were identified and their relative efficiency was assessed. We attempt to map out the tools' potential to enhance the performance of, individual firms, in particular the link between e‐collaboration configurations and key performance dimensions.

Closing the loop at the end of products' useful life is earning increased attention from industry and academia. The recent or upcoming enactment of regulations regarding the management of end‐of‐life products is forcing manufacturers to consider strategies to increase the residual value of the products they make. Facilitating the residual value extraction process for end‐of‐life products is a challenging issue deserving investigation. This paper proposes to investigate this issue.

This paper analyzes empirical evidence from a sample of 205 environmentally responsive SMEs operating in the fabricated metal products and electric/electronic products industries. A coherent research model is developed which classifies the closed‐loop supply chain (CLSC) activities along two dimensions, the forward and reverse supply chains.

This first proposed taxonomy has been shown to be relevant for both sectors. The results also demonstrate that firms' abilities to implement CLSC environmental initiatives vary in their intensity and in their locus along the product value chain. Furthermore, benefits derived from these initiatives seem to vary according to the strategy favored by the firms.

This research is valuable for those firms interested in implementing CLSC strategies in a synergistic manner with their forward supply chain.

The purpose of this paper is to explore a central issue in industrial marketing, namely the buyer‐seller relationship, by focusing on how its development influences and is influenced by the use of B2B e‐commerce strategies. More specifically, the paper aims at identifying what kinds of B2B electronic interactions are imposed by influential buyers; exploring the link between these electronic interactions and the buyer‐seller relationship; and seeing how influential buyers and SME suppliers adapt their own strategies in this online environment.

The multi‐case study methodology was used to allow for rich data collection and analysis and to support the discovery of patterns.

The results indicate that large buyers use specific e‐commerce processes and tools for the different relationships they have with their SME suppliers. The latter must adapt to these requirements to attain the next relationship level or risk forfeiting their established position. When a supplier reaches the new level, other requirements arise, forcing it to continuously adapt its e‐commerce strategy.

The model proposed in this paper can serve as a tool to align B2B e‐commerce strategies and buyer‐seller relationship levels.

Some SME suppliers have developed a competitive advantage by going through this cycle faster than their competitors. The following relationship stages were observed: pre‐relationship, spot relationship and contractual relationship. Interestingly, there was no collaboration stage in the relationships studied.

The paper contributes to an understanding of the link between electronic interactions and the buyer‐seller relationship. Its information is particularly relevant to organizations that transact or plan on transacting electronically with clients or suppliers in a B2B setting.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the variation in migrant labour market regimes and what these reveal about variant patterns of state and extra state regulation in two contemporary political economies.

Research based upon a participatory action research agenda in Mexico and the north of Ireland. Migrant workers and their families where involved in the project and its development. This included participation in the research design, its focus and purpose.

Migrant workers experiences of labour market subordination are part of wider processes of subordination and exclusion involving both the state, but also wider, often meta- and para-state, agents. In different locations, states and contexts, the precarity experienced by migrant workers and their families highlights the porosity of the formal rational legal state and moreover, in the current economic context, the compatibility of illegality and state sponsored neoliberal economic policies.

It is important to extend this study to other geographic and political economy spaces.

The study challenges the limits of state agency suggesting the need for extra state, i.e. civil society, participation to support and defend migrant workers.

Notwithstanding the two very different socio-economic contexts, the paper reveals that the interaction, dependence and restructuring of migrant labour markets can be understood within the context of meta- and para-state activities that link neoliberal employment insecurities. Migrants’ experiences illustrate the extent to which even formal legal employment relations can also be sustained by para- and meta- (illegal and alegal) actions and institutions.

The difficulties of basing healthcare on literary warrant have been explained in different ways: busy practitioners have no time to read extensively, physical access is difficult, and adequate surrogates for texts like indexes, abstracts, systematic reviews are partial in their coverage. The author suggests that a deeper problem of domain conflict must be addressed. This paper reviews problems identified in previous research on evidence‐based nursing practice, which indicates that there are conflicts between medical and nursing domains. EBM (evidence‐based medicine, or “text”) poses challenges for nurses (proponents of “caritas”). An additional surrogate for the medical corpus, the clinical guideline, is discussed. When based on inclusive consultation, this may prove to be a hospitable epistemological bridge for groups whose domains are in conflict. Drawing on “social studies of science” literature, the author explores the provenance and status of the clinical guideline as a “translation artefact” or bridging mechanism, and presents a “snapshot” case study of the Scottish Intercollegiate Guidelines Network in 1998. She suggests that the clinical guideline is a powerful documentary genre, which links several strands of information science: information retrieval, literary warrant and the politics of classification.

The “Training to Communicate” research (1999‐2001) explored “communication” training needs and provision in 76 health and social care public and independent sector agencies in London and South East England, including enhancement of work with adults having communication impairments. The focus of this paper is to examine how training managers discussed their activities and constructed their identities as training “experts”.

Seventeen semi‐structured interviews with male and female managers responsible for key aspects of training (workforce development) in public health trusts or social services agencies are analysed using a narrative approach. The wider project included a questionnaire‐based survey of agency representatives and documentary analysis of training materials.

Health and social care services were undergoing extensive reorganization as part of wider managerialist agendas. Discourses of “change”, “continuous improvement” and “quality” therefore pervaded all aspects of these organizations. Interviewees identified with “new” (managerial) occupational knowledges and identities but some appeared to be in an ambiguous position, negotiating between “new” occupational knowledges and identities, and “old” identities based on occupational/practitioner expertise. Aspects of this positioning appeared gendered; female interviewees often readily embraced “new” managerialist identity(ies). Interviewees discussed collaborative processes (in “space” not “place”), including networking, managing relationships with other managers within the organization, and broader “political” awareness, to justify their own positions, responsibilities and performances as “training” experts.

This research extends theories on gendered performances in higher education contexts to public sector, work‐based education settings.

This study aims to explore gender performance in entrepreneurial pitching. Understanding pitching as a social practice, the authors argue that pitch content and body gestures contain gender-based norms and practices. The authors focus on early-stage ventures and the hegemonic masculinities and femininities that are performed in entrepreneurial pitches. The main research question is as follows: How is gender performed in entrepreneurial pitching?

The authors carried out the study with the post-structuralist feminist approach. The authors collected and analyzed nine online pitches with the reflexive thematic method to depict hegemonic masculinities and femininities performed at the pitch.

The authors found that heroic and breadwinner masculinities are dominant in pitching. Both male and female founders perform hegemonic masculinities. Entrepreneurs are expected to be assertive but empathetic people. Finally, there are connections between what entrepreneurs do and what investors ask, indicating the iteration of gender performance and expectations.

While the online setting helps the authors to collect data during the pandemic, it limits the observation of the place, space and interactions between the judges/investors and the entrepreneurs. As a result, the linguistic and gesture communication of the investors in the pitch was not discussed in full-length in this paper. Also, as the authors observed, people would come to the pitch knowing what they should perform and how they should interact. Therefore, the preparation of the pitch as a study context could provide rich details on how gender norms and stereotypes influence people's interactions and their entrepreneurial identity. Lastly, the study has a methodological limitation. The authors did not include aspects of space in the analysis. It is mainly due to the variety of settings that the pitching sessions that the data set had.

For social practices and policies, the results indicate barriers to finance for women entrepreneurs. Women entrepreneurs are rewarded when they perform entrepreneurial hegemonic masculinities with a touch of emphasized femininities. Eventually, if women entrepreneurs do not perform correctly as investors expect them to, they will face barriers to acquiring finance. It is important to acknowledge how certain gendered biases might be (re)constructed and (re)produced through entrepreneurial activities, in which pitching is one of them.

Practitioners could utilize research findings to understand how gender stereotypes exist not only on the pitch stage but also before and after the pitch, such as the choice of business idea and pitch training. In other words, it is necessary to create a more enabling environment for women entrepreneurs, such as customizing the accelerator program so that all business ideas receive relevant support from experts. On a macro level, the study has shown that seemingly gender-equal societies do not practically translate into higher participation of women in entrepreneurship.

For theoretical contributions, the study enhances the discussion that entrepreneurship is gendered; women and men entrepreneurs need to perform certain hegemonic traits to be legitimated as founders. The authors also address various pitching practices that shape pitch performance by including both textual and semiotic data in the study. This study provides social implications on the awareness of gendered norms and the design of entrepreneurial pitching.

Addresses the problem of psychotherapy coming to understand itself formally as a conversation in which healing of distortions and breakdowns in communication occurs. The paper proposes making concepts the basis for the psychotherapy conversation by linking psychotherapy to second‐order cybernetics and utilizing Pask’s conversation theory. The first part describes cybernetics as the context for the study of the distortions and breakdowns in communication. The second part discusses conversation theory as a formal description of the procedures of psychotherapy, as a way to converse in psychotherapy, as a way to talk about psychotherapy and as a way to change the conversation of psychotherapy. The final part discusses four distinctive characteristics of the evolving conversation of psychotherapy where psychotherapy composes itself as a conversation. These characteristics are what psychotherapy is (its definition), what it is about (its object), how it proceeds (its methods), and what it is for (its value).

The purpose of this paper is to map the process of (social) valuing by people encountering built heritage in their daily environments. Value-based approaches are not well researched and formalized in Flemish policy context. New questions and issues are emerging in relation to values-based heritage management and the (adaptive) reuse of heritage within a context of spatial development and urban renewal practices. This paper firstly focus on what factors influence the process of (social) valuing, secondly on the hybrid character of the process and finally at the conflicts between the values frames of the different actors. This way it also inquires the potentials of participatory design supporting alternative regimes of care.

Within the research trajectory, the authors approached built heritage as a social construction and a social product, where there are as many stories as users. What heritage is and how heritage is dealt with, forms the basis of negotiation and valuation processes. An ethnographic approach was embarked on to get a grip on the socio-cultural significance of immovable property heritage in Flanders.

This paper describes the process of (social) valuing of by people encountering built heritage in their daily environments and offers an integrated conceptual framework for this kind of dynamic processes.

New questions and issues are emerging in relation to values-based heritage management and the (adaptive) reuse of heritage within a context of spatial development and urban renewal practices. This paper firstly focuses on what factors influence the process of (social) valuing, secondly on the hybrid character of the process and finally at the conflicts between the values frames of the different actors.