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The purpose of this paper is to explore why some firms succeed while others flounder or fail to implement quality improvement programmes. It synthesises self-efficacy literature to propose a model of self-efficacy’s role in affecting implementation success of quality improvement programmes in organisations.

A review of scholarly articles on the topics of self-efficacy and quality initiatives brings to light self-efficacy’s role in successful quality programme implementation. When considered in the context of organisation barriers, it can lead to organisational success.

It is determined that quality training programmes play an important role in affecting existing efficacies and leading to “quality self-efficacy” in employees. The proposed model and related propositions suggest that right approaches of implementing quality training among certain types of employees and/or organisations can promote teamwork to achieve performance success.

Moving forward, the proposed model should be empirically tested to improve our understanding of quality self-efficacy construct and its role in aiding organisational success. Furthermore, it would offer guidelines for the implementation of quality programmes in the most optimal way.

In applying theories on self-efficacy, motivation, empowerment, and quality training, the authors posit that existing efficacy and quality self-efficacy are crucial for quality implementation efforts to overcome organisational barriers and lead to effective teamwork and performance success.

The authors postulate that deciding factors for organisational success originate from employees themselves as existing efficacies. Even though employees can foster quality self-efficacy through the implementation of quality improvement initiatives, existing self-efficacy, and organisation barriers will be moderating forces on eventual effectiveness of quality self-efficacy, teamwork, and organisational performance.

The model and related propositions, linking self- and collective efficacies to quality training, teamwork, and quality performance, offered in this paper will prove useful for organisational decision-makers in selecting quality programmes for implementation in organisation to achieve performance success.

The main purpose of this paper is to identify and rank various barriers to pharmacovigilance (PV) in context of emerging economies and examine their interrelationships using the interpretive structural modeling (ISM) approach. The result is a model that offers insights about how to achieve rational and safe use of medicines and ensure patient safety as realized through robust national PV systems.

The paper develops a model to analyze the interactions among PV barriers using the ISM approach. Based on input from clinical and medical product development experts, PV barriers in emerging economies were identified and reviewed. The hierarchical interrelationships among these PV barriers were analyzed in context of their driving/dependence powers.

Findings of the study identify key PV barriers—lack of resources/infrastructure, weak legislation, unfair burden of disease, lack of PV capacity, training, and enforcement authority—that drive, or strongly influence, other barriers and thwart implementation of robust national PV systems in emerging economies. Pharmaceutical industry factors were PV barriers that were identified as autonomous, implying their relative disconnection from other barriers, and patient PV practices barrier was strongly dependent on other barriers.

The paper offers policy- and decision-makers alike with a framework to support further research into interdependencies among key PV barriers in emerging economies. It can serve as an impetus for further research with potential to broadening the understanding of how and why PV systems may be rendered ineffective. Future studies can be planned to apply the ISM approach to study PV barriers in the context of developed economies and draw lessons and implications for policy- and decision-makers by contrasting results from these studies.

This paper contributes to the understanding of the multifaceted nature of PV and its barriers. The proposed approach gives public health decision-makers a better comprehension of driver PV barriers that have most influence on others versus dependent PV barriers, which are most influenced by others. Also, knowledge, attitude and practices of patients and caregivers can also be critical PV barriers in emerging economies. This information can be instrumental for public health policymakers, government entities, and health/PV practitioners to identify the PV barriers that they should prioritize for improvement and how to manage trade-offs between these barriers.

PV barriers in emerging economies, as compared to developed economies, are inherently different and need to be examined in their specific context. The hierarchical ISM model suggests that resources and regulation initiatives by governments in emerging economies lead to through informed/enabled pharmaceutical supply chain players and eventually drive PV-specific knowledge, attitude, and practice outcomes improvements across their populace.

This paper highlights the deployment of ISM approach as a health policy decision support tool in the identifying and ranking barriers to effective PV systems in emerging economies, in terms of their contextual relationships, to achieve a better understanding as to how these interrelationships can affect national PV system outcomes.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce a transformative service-based model, which analyzes tripartite service interaction logics among trafficking survivors, anti-trafficking agencies and the community during a process of actively- and passively transformative exchanges. It aims to help researchers and practitioners better understand services that facilitate reintegration of trafficking survivors into society.

Using theory development from sociological and liminality schools of thought, this paper explores a variety of coping strategies that anti-trafficking agencies can offer human-trafficking survivors in post-trafficking service settings.

A novel transformative service-based framework extends current conceptualizations of social and service exchange in a tripartite interaction setting. Anti-trafficking agencies can create a supportive community environment to offer trafficking survivors passively transformative services and to cultivate and nurture their coping skills towards reintegration into society.

Important implications for transformative service-based theory and practice of serving trafficking survivors are discussed. In addition, the study limitations are addressed.

The transformative service-based model analyzes tripartite service interaction logics during a process of exchanges between trafficking survivors, anti-trafficking agency and community ecosystem to achieve meaningful post-trafficking reintegration into society.

Using the transformative service model, community ties need to be re-established for trafficking survivors to achieve successful reintegration into society, and for communities to heal and restore human dignity.

This research proposes a new framework for actively- and passively-transformative service logic for anti-trafficking agencies to offer assistance to trafficking survivors, based on sociological and liminality schools of thought.

It has been proposed that critical linkages exist between product distribution and after‐sales service support functions in business organizations operating in marketing channel environments. By using the data from the US computer‐equipment manufacturing industry, this paper attempts to test empirically the propositions proposed by Loomba. Empirical results support that both product distribution and after‐sales service support strategies of business organizations operating in the computer‐equipment industry are closely linked to one another.

The purpose of this study is to consider the acquisition of end‐of‐life products under variable quality consideration for remanufacturing so as to determine optimal control policy that minimizes per‐period expected costs that may guide future consideration by practitioners.

The authors review recent literature on reverse supply chains and remanufacturing. They utilize an undiscounted Markov decision process methodology to ascertain the order amount of remanufacturable products using optimal control under minimum cost criterion.

The authors conclude that it makes sense for firms to focus on the cost management with production control based on quality levels with different acquisition costs of remanufacturable products.

Although the Markov decision process methodology – which is well supported in literature – was diligently followed, the nature of analysis and discussion may be subject to authors’ bias. Future investigation and adoption of the methodological approach used will verify the paper findings.

This study determines optimal control policy for ordering specific amount of product that minimizes per‐period expected costs for remanufacturing. Reverse supply‐chain professionals now have an easy‐to‐follow guide when acquiring end‐of‐life remanufacturable products alternatives with variable quality.

This study determines the optimal policy for ordering remanufacturable products. This information enables practitioners to reduce their carbon footprint in reverse supply chain through inspection/sorting before remanufacturing by processing only the type, quality, and quantity of needed product.

For reverse supply chain to be taken seriously by senior management in firms, it is imperative that practitioners in this field synchronize their operational‐level ordering decisions with holistic cost minimization objective (to maximize value recovery) to stay viable.

Provides a chronological account of the evolution of the concept of product warranty and its development over the four millennia to its present state at the dawn of twenty‐first century. This study examines how the concept of product warranty originated and illustrates how this concept was an integral element of accepted business practices in commerce and trade over the ages in almost all civilizations spanning the globe. The civilizations include the Babylonian and Assyrian civilizations twenty‐first century bc, the Roman era of the fifth century bc, Bavarian rule at the start of the Christian era, earlier Jewish period of the second century ad, Hindu period of the fifth, Islamic era of the eighth, Russian period of the early tenth, church rule of the medieval times, customs of the English boroughs, and ultimately the post‐industrial era of consumerism and today’s times of warranty legislation.

Focuses on some of the ethical concerns pertinent to the application process of the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award programme and highlights some of the critical problems which the programme faces. Based on analysis of these issues, endeavours to distil an adequate opinion of the inherent value, merit and significance of Baldrige Award. Observes that, while the Baldrige Award programme does raise certain critical concerns ‐ specifically those related to unfairness, superficiality and publicity ‐ the inherent value of the continuously improving award programme far outweighs its limitations. As has been seen, the Baldrige paradigm is not limited exclusively to the world of business, and can be applied to reinforce quality and enhance productivity in virtually any kind of organization.

Value‐added services expand manufacturing organizations’ ability to compete beyond traditional measures of manufacturing competitiveness such as cost, quality, flexibility, and delivery. This concept of expanding the roles of factories to include service has received considerable attention and wide acceptance among both researchers and practitioners. For example, recent empirical studies have demonstrated that manufacturing performance, particularly delivery performance can be enhanced through expanded service roles that focus on effective information flows within the company and to external customers. Despite such benefits, the scope of analysis has been limited to individual manufacturing organizations. Given the realities of global competition, practitioners require knowledge that extends beyond individual organizations. The domain of their problems includes the complexities of interactions with multiple stakeholders along global supply chains. The purpose of this paper, therefore, is to extend the concept of the service factory to global supply chains. Specifically, the approach will be to provide a conceptualization of the role of service in global supply chain management that can be used as a starting point for discussion and further research in this area. We provide several propositions and conclude with implications for both researchers and practitioners.

Reports that pressures to address citizens’ needs amid growing financial constraints have led government agencies to consider adopting total quality management (TQM) philosophy as a change agent in the public sector. Examines one state agency’s attempt to institutionalize TQM and explores the effectiveness of TQM implementation in the agency by assessing the perceptions of management and employees. Also, offers a conceptual model that identifies TQM elements essential for success in both implementation and post‐implementation phases in all federal, state, and local government agencies. Believes that by examining the TQM elements identified in the model (internal/external environment, learning, and teamwork), public administrators can anticipate opportunities, avoid barriers to change, and improve agency performance.

Examines the interfunctional linkages between product distribution and after‐sales service support functions in business organizations operating in marketing channel environments. Also discusses managerial and logistic implications of the process of selecting product distribution and service support channels in the context of specific market segments of a particular product industry. An examination of the operations of two computer equipment manufacturing firms indicates that in “low substitutability” environments, such as in the case of specialty products, manufacturing firms tend to centralize both product distribution and service support functions. In contrast, in “high substitutability” environments, such as in the case of commodity products, manufacturing firms tend to decentralize both product distribution and service support functions. These case studies suggest that both product distribution and after‐sales service support strategies are closely linked to each other. Also, several product‐, firm‐, and industry‐related attributes, which dictate the choice of product distribution and after‐sales service support channels, were identified for the computer‐equipment industry.