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With the growing need for employees to be innovative, public-sector organizations are investing in employee training. This study aims to examine the effects of a combined Lean Six Sigma and innovation training, using action learning, on public-sector employees’ creative role identity and innovative work behavior.

The authors studied a public service agency in Singapore in which a five-day Lean Innovation Training was implemented, using a combination of Lean Six Sigma and Creative Problem-Solving tools, with a simulation on day one and subsequent team-based project coaching, spread over six months. The authors administered pre- and postintervention surveys among all the employees, and initiated group interviews and observations before, during and after the intervention.

Creative role identity and innovative work behavior had significantly improved six months after the intervention, enabled through senior management’s transformational leadership. The training induced managers to role-model innovative work behaviors while cocreating, with their employees, a renewal of their agency’s core processes. The three completed improvement projects contributed to an innovative work culture and reduced service turnaround time.

Starting with a role-playing simulation on the first day, during which leaders and followers swapped roles, the action-learning type training taught all the organizational members to use various Lean Six Sigma and Creative Problem-Solving tools. This nimble Lean Innovation Training, and subsequent team-based project coaching, exemplifies how advancing the staff’s creative role identity can have a positive impact.

Organizational scholars studying compensation often place an emphasis on certain employee groups (e.g., executives). Missing from this discussion is research on the compensation systems for low-wage jobs. In this review, the authors argue that workers in low-wage jobs represent a unique employment group in their understanding of rent allocation in organizations. The authors address the design of compensation strategies in organizations that lead to different outcomes for workers in low-wage jobs versus other workers. Drawing on and integrating human resource management (HRM), inequality, and worker literatures with compensation literature, the authors describe and explain compensation systems for low-wage work. The authors start by examining workers in low-wage work to identify aspects of these workers’ jobs and lives that can influence their health, performance, and other organizationally relevant outcomes. Next, the authors explore the compensation systems common for this type of work, building on the compensation literature, by identifying the low-wage work compensation designs, proposing the likely explanations for why organizations craft these designs, and describing the worker and organizational outcomes of these designs. The authors conclude with suggestions for future research in this growing field and explore how organizations may benefit by rethinking their approach to compensation for low-wage work. In sum, the authors hope that this review will be a foundational work for those interested in investigating organizational compensation issues at the intersection of inequality and worker and organizational outcomes.

The study aims to promote the use of qualitative methods in service research by investigating how these methods are reported in service journals, how the level of reporting has evolved and whether methodological reporting influences the downloads or citations received by qualitative articles.

Methodological reporting practices were identified through content analysis of 318 qualitative articles published in three major service research journals and comparison with prior methodological literature. Regression analysis was used to test how the level of methodological reporting influences article downloads and citations.

The study identifies 29 reporting practices related to 9 key methodological reporting areas. The overall level of methodological reporting in published qualitative articles has increased over time. While differences in the level of reporting between service journals persist, they are narrowing. The level of methodological reporting did not influence downloads or citations of qualitative articles.

Service scholars using qualitative methods should pay attention to methodological reporting as it can improve the chances of being published. Factors such as theoretical contributions are likely to have a greater influence on article impact than methodological reporting.

No prior study has explored methodological reporting practices across different qualitative methodologies or how reporting influences article impact. For authors, reviewers and editors, the study provides an inventory of reporting practices relevant for evaluating qualitative articles, which should lower barriers for qualitative methods in service research by providing practical guidelines on what to focus on when reporting and assessing qualitative research.

This study aims to develop an in-depth understanding of how supplier selection helps social enterprises achieve their social missions while maintaining commercial viability.

The paper applies a multiple-case design to study the supplier selection processes of 15 Dutch social enterprises.

Social enterprises tend to build supply relationships through existing networks and evaluate suppliers based on value alignment, relationship commitment, resource complementarity, and cost. Depending on the possibility of social value creation in supplier selection, the importance of these criteria varies across different social enterprise models and between key and non-key suppliers. Moreover, suppliers’ long-term relationship commitment can help reconcile tensions between the social and commercial logic of a social enterprise and facilitate impact creation.

Data collection is limited to the perspectives of buyers – the social enterprises. Future research could collect supplier-side data to explore how they engage with social enterprises during the selection process.

Managers of social enterprises can use our research findings as guidance for selecting the most suitable suppliers, while organizations that want to collaborate with social enterprises should actively build network ties to be identified.

We contribute to the cross-sector collaboration literature by showing the underlying reasons for the preference for network reinforcing and indirect networking in supplier identification. We contribute to the social impact supply chain literature by revealing the critical role of supplier selection in shaping collaboration outcomes.

Circular economy (CE) is guided by principles, the key being the R-framework. All R-frameworks have a hierarchy. Although several studies have prioritized these principles, there is still an urgent call for country-specific prioritization. This study prioritized circular economy (CE) principles among Ghana's built environment (BE) professionals.

An explanatory sequential mixed methods approach was adopted. Six principles of CE were identified through a review of related literature and incorporated into a questionnaire. In total, 162 questionnaire responses were received. The quantitative data were analyzed through descriptive and inferential analyses. The data were further validated via semi-structured interviews with eight interviewees of different professional backgrounds in the BE.

The findings revealed that BE professionals in Ghana highly perceived CE principles as important. The findings further revealed the order of prioritization of the CE principles as follows: (1) recycle, (2) reuse, (3) repair/remanufacture, (4) renewable energy usage, (5) redesign and (6) reduce. To further elaborate on these prioritized principles via the qualitative phase, the interviewees agreed to and confirmed the importance of the identified principles through their verbatim comments.

Although there is a growing interest in research regarding CE in the Ghanaian construction industry, its principles have yet to be prioritized and ranked by professionals in the Ghanaian construction industry. This study unearths why, in terms of prioritization of the CE principles, the construction industry in Ghana does not follow the well-known hierarchy (i.e. reduce, reuse and recycle) in the order of high to low level of circularity.

This paper seeks to understand how a new elite, known as the cork aristocracy, emerged in the Bordeaux wine field, France, between 1850 and 1929 as wine merchants replaced aristocrats. Classic class and status perspectives, and their distinctive social closure dynamics, are mobilized to illuminate the individual and organizational transformations that affected elite wineries grouped in an emerging classification of the Bordeaux best wines. We build on a wealth of archives and historical ethnography techniques to surface complex status and organizational dynamics that reveal how financiers and industrialists intermediated this transition and how organizations are deeply interwoven into social change.

Universities strategically organize themselves around sustainability, including transformative goals in teaching and learning. Simultaneously, the role of online education has become more prominent. This study aims to better understand the purpose and process of creating online sustainability education (OSE) and to identify challenges and opportunities for implementing these courses and programs to achieve universities’ broader transformative sustainability goals.

This study uses a multiple case study design to research three universities in diverse geographical and institutional contexts (Finland, the USA and Colombia). Qualitative data was collected by interviewing program-related experts (n = 31) and reviews of universities’ strategic documents.

The findings suggest that despite important advances, further attention is merited regarding aligning the purpose of OSE with student learning outcomes, clarifying the values underlying the process of online program/course creation and developing transformative and process-oriented approaches and pedagogies to implement OSE. The authors also highlight emerging challenges and opportunities in online environments for sustainability education in different institutional contexts, including reaping the benefits of multilocality and diverse student experiences regarding sustainability issues.

There is a paucity of studies on university-level sustainability education in relation to online environments. This research expands on the existing literature by exploring three different geographical and institutional contexts and shedding light on the relationship between the practical implementation of OSE and universities’ broader sustainability goals.

Organizations remain a vital sociological topic, but organizational sociology, as a subfield, has evolved significantly since its inception. In this paper, I argue that organization sociology is becoming increasingly disconnected from organizational theory, as currently conceived. The focus of sociological research on organizations has become more empirically grounded in the study of social problems and how organizations contribute to them. Sociologists continue to see organizations as important actors in society that play a role in shaping social order and as contexts in which social processes play out. I propose two main sociological approaches for organizational research, which I describe as “organizations within society” and “society within organizations.” The first approach examines the role of organizations as building blocks of social structure and as social actors in their own right. The second approach treats organizations as platforms and locations of social interactions and the building of community. These approaches are somewhat disconnected from the sort of grand theorizing that characterizes much of organizational theory. I argue that the problem-oriented sociology of these two approaches offers a vital way for organizational scholars to expand and theoretically revitalize the field.

Sociologists have long thought of the integration of people in communities – social integration – and hierarchical social systems – systemic integration – as contradictory goals. What strategies allow organizations to reconcile social and systemic integration? We examine this question through 40 in-depth, longitudinal interviews with leaders of nonprofit organizations that engage in the dual pursuit of social and systemic integration. Two processes reveal how the internal structure of organizations often mirrors the ways in which organizations are embedded in their local environments. When organizations engage in loose demographic coupling, relegating those who “match” the community to the work of social integration, they produce internal inequalities and justify them by claiming community building as sacred work. When engaging in community anchoring, organizations challenge internal and external inequalities simultaneously, but this process comes with costs. Our findings contribute to a constructivist understanding of community, the mechanisms by which organizations produce inequalities, and a place-based conception of organizations as embedded in community.