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This paper aims to develop a performance measurement (PM) system for fourth-party reverse logistics (RL). In this regard, it proposes simultaneous utilization of a procedural approach and hybrid use of existing performance frameworks.

The paper first describes fundamentals of RL and PM approaches in literature to build a basis for further discussion. It then carries out a systematic review of the literature on PM in RL to highlight current trends and approaches in this regard. At last, it develops a PM system for fourth-party RL by exploring relevant performance frameworks and by defining a procedure in detail.

The paper identifies the ongoing interest in development PM in RL, and the gap and the need for the development of comprehensive PM system for fourth-party RL. It also identifies the best approach is to use existing performance frameworks in literature and a procedural approach together as they complement each other rather than contradicting.

The paper fills a gap in literature by developing a comprehensive PM framework for the fourth-party RL. The presented procedure is well suited to be used as part of strategic management process in any fourth-party RL organization. It forces users a top-down approach, from strategies to measures, so that a strong linkage is established in the process. When used together with the proposed PM framework, it guarantees a comprehensive and balanced PM system.

The paper identifies the need for the development of a PM framework as well as a measurement system for the fourth-party RL in the literature. In this regard, it develops a PM framework first, and then a procedure on how to implement it. As a result, users can effectively use them as a part of strategic management process of their organizations.

The fourth-party RL is growing and very promising mode of RL for well-being of society, by offering a strong path to sustainable development in the midst of diminishing resources in the world. The existence of a well measurement system is crucial for the healthy operations and development of fourth-party RL organizations. The paper is offering a strong PM model in this regard.

The paper fulfills an identified need to study how to develop a PM system for fourth-party RL.

This chapter presents the outcome of a study that examined the phenomena ‘Is Tourism Regulation Catalyst for Abuja Federal Capital Territory (FCT) Nigeria, Hotels Business Performance Innovation?’ Previous studies on this subject area have been largely done around tourism and its impact on hotel business performance and the relationship between tourism regulation and hotel business performance from mostly western perspectives. Hence, this study aims to investigate the direct effect of tourism regulations on hotel business performance in Nigeria. Quantitative survey questionnaires were used to collect data from 176 participants comprising general managers and departmental heads in 22 key Abuja FCT Nigerian hotels. Balanced Scorecard (BSC) developed by Norton and Kaplan was adopted as the study’s theoretical framework. Data collected were analysed using the simple linear regression technique and Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) statistical analysis software tool.

The result of the analysis shows that tourism regulation has a significant and positive correlation with Abuja hotel business performances based on the BSC four dimensions of financial, customer, processes and learning and growth. The unique city characteristics of Abuja FCT were also identified as an issue for consideration in future tourism regulation innovation by the regulatory authorities. This study contributes to business performance measurement literature from the Abuja FCT hotels, Nigerian perspective, and sets an agenda for the Nigerian tourism regulators, the Nigeria Tourism Development Corporation (NTDC) charged with diversifying the Nigerian economy revenue through tourism performance innovation. Also, a policy study into city characteristics classification as a way of innovating tourism regulations and hotels business performance is suggested.

The paper develops a model for enhancing R&D productivity for Indian public funded laboratories. The paper utilizes the productivity data of five Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) laboratories for analysis and to form the constructs of the model.

The weighted average method was employed for analyzing the rankings of survey respondents pertaining to the significant measures enhancing R&D involvement of researchers and significant non-R&D jobs. The authors have proposed a model of productivity. Various individual, organizational and environmental constructs related to the researchers working in the CSIR laboratories have been outlined that can enhance R&D productivity of researchers in Indian R&D laboratories. Partial Least Squares-Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM) was used to find the predictability of the productivity model.

The organizational factors have a crucial role in enhancing the R&D outputs of CSIR laboratories. The R&D productivity of researchers can be improved through implementing the constructs of the proposed model of productivity.

The R&D productivity model can be adapted by the R&D laboratories to enhance researchers’ R&D involvement, increased R&D outputs and achieving self-sustenance in long run.

The R&D laboratories can initiate exercises to explore the most relevant factors and measures to enhance R&D productivity of their researchers. The constructs of the model can function as a guideline to introduce the most preferable research policies in the laboratory for overall mutual growth of laboratory and the researchers.

Hardly any studies have been found that have focused on finding the measures of enhancing R&D involvement of researchers and the influence of significant time-intensive jobs on researchers’ productivity.

This study systematically assesses and empirically examines the research question: How do social skills influence resource acquisition and social performance? Specifically, this study applies RBV theory from strategy to link social skills, resource conditions and the performance of social enterprises.

For this, we surveyed social enterprises in Korea to collect data and used SPSS 18.0 for hierarchical regression analysis.

In the Korean context, first, the results show that all social skills of social entrepreneurs are positively related to social performance. Second, among independent variables, self-promotion is positively associated with financial support and expressiveness is positively associated with marketing support. However, the rest of the independent variables have no significance. Finally, obtaining financial support from their partner mediates the relationship between self-promotion and social ventures' social performance, and obtaining marketing support from their partner mediates the relationship between expressiveness and social ventures' social performance.

This study provides two contributions. First, this is the first study to apply and test the RBV systematically and empirically in the context of social enterprises. Second, the results suggest that social skills and support types are important to social value creation.

Existing conceptual, empirical and case studies evidence suggests that manufacturing industries find the joint implementation of Kaizen philosophy initiatives. However, the existing practices rarely demonstrated in a single framework and implementation procedure in a structure nature. This paper, therefore, aims to develop, validate and practically test a framework and implementation procedure for the implementation of integrated Kaizen in manufacturing industries to attain long-term improvement of operational, innovation, business (financial and marketing) processes, performance and competitiveness.

The study primarily described the problem, extensively reviewed the current state-of-the-art literature and then identified a gap. Based on it, generic and comprehensive integrated framework and implementation procedure is developed. Besides, the study used managers, consultants and academics from various fields to validate a framework and implementation procedure for addressing business concerns. In this case, the primary data was collected through self-administered questionnaire, and 244 valid questionnaires were received and were analyzed. Furthermore, the research verified the practicability of the framework by empirically exploring the current scenario of selected manufacturing companies.

The research discovered innovative framework and six-phase implementation procedure to fill the existing conceptual gap. Furthermore, the survey-based and exploratory empirical analysis of the research demonstrated that the practice of the proposed framework based on structured procedure is valued and companies attain the middling improvements of productivity, delivery time, quality, 5S practice, waste and accident rate by 61.03, 44, 52.53, 95.19, 80.12, and 70.55% respectively. Additionally, the companies saved a total of 14933446 ETH Birr and 5,658 M² free spaces. Even though, the practices and improvements vary from company to company, and even companies unable to practice some of the unique techniques of the identified CI initiatives considered in the proposed framework.

All data collected in the survey came from professionals working for Ethiopian manufacturing companies, universities and government. It is important to highlight that n = 244 is high sample size, which is adequate for a preliminary survey but reinforcing still needs further survey in terms of generalization of the results since there are hundreds of manufacturing companies, consultants and academicians implementing and consulting Kaizen. Therefore, a further study on a wider Ethiopian manufacturing companies, consultants and academic scale would be informative.

This work is very important for Kaizen professionals in the manufacturing industry, academic and government but in particular for senior management and leadership teams. Aside from the main findings on framework development, there is some strong evidence that practice of Kaizen resulted in achieving quantitative (monetary and non-monetary) and qualitative results. Thus, senior management teams should use this research out to practice and analyze the effect of Kaizen on their own organizations. Within the academic community, this study is one of the first focusing on development, validating and practically testing and should aid further study, research and understanding of Kaizen in manufacturing industries.

So far, it is rare to find preceding studies proposed, validated and practically test an integrated Kaizen framework with the context of manufacturing industries. Thus, authors understand that this is the very first research focused on the development of the framework for manufacturing industries continuously to be competitive and could help managers, institutions, practitioners and academicians in Kaizen practice.

This chapter of the book seeks to use famous mathematical functions (statistical distribution functions) in evaluating and analyzing supply chain network data related to supply chain management (SCM) elements in organizations. In other words, the main purpose of this chapter is to find the best-fitted statistical distribution functions for SCM data. Explaining how to best fit the statistical distribution function along with the explanation of all possible aspects of a function for selected components of SCM from this chapter will make a significant attraction for production and services experts who will lead their organization to the path of competitive excellence. The main core of the chapter is the reliability values related to the reliability function calculated by the relevant chart and extracting other information based on other aspects of statistical distribution functions such as probability density, cumulative distribution, and failure function. This chapter of the book will turn readers into professional users of statistical distribution functions in mathematics for analyzing supply chain element data.

This chapter of the book aims to introduce multiobjective linear programming (MLP) as an optimum tool to find the best quality engineering techniques (QET) in the main domains of supply chain management (SCM). The importance of finding the best quality techniques in SCM elements in the shortest possible time and at the least cost allows all organizations to increase the power of experts’ analysis in supply chain network (SCN) data under cost-effective conditions. In other words, this chapter aims to introduce an operations research model by presenting MLP for obtaining the best QET in the main domains of SCM. MLP is one of the most determinative tools in this chapter that can provide a competitive advantage. Under goal and system constraints, the most challenging task for decision-makers (DMs) is to decide which components to fund and at what levels. The definition of a comprehensive target value among the required goals and determining system constraints is the strength of this chapter. Therefore, this chapter can guide the readers to extract the best statistical and non-statistical techniques with the application of an operations research model through MLP in supply chain elements and shows a new innovation of the effective application of operations research approach in this field. The analytic hierarchy process (AHP) is a supplemental tool in this chapter to facilitate the relevant decision-making process.

This study aims to structure a model for integrating social value into strategic management based on identifying the critical success factors (CSF) for such integration in the investigated companies.

This research was based on the actor–network theory. Through a rigorous approach to the case study methodology in a two-stage process lasting 21 months, we carried out this study.

Companies that use the polyhedral social accounting model in their strategic management processes do so without a reference model. We identified CSF for integrating social value, which was incorporated into a protocol model based on stakeholder theory and the use of social accounting.

Practitioners can use the proposed model to maintain the alignment of strategic performance and purpose. Using social accounting based on indicators and financial proxies allows managers to incorporate social value into strategic management in terms of financial value.

The institutional demand for social information is based on the growing sensitivity of companies. Aligning social values with business strategies contributes to social sustainability.

This study focuses on an unresearched emerging phenomenon. Since the first approach to stakeholder theory, the development of a stakeholder-oriented strategy has faced the lack of a stakeholder accounting system. The polyhedral model of social accounting could help overcome this problem as it provides information that allows a novel and innovative method to make a stakeholder-oriented strategy effective.

Organisational strategy becomes reality by connecting organisation’s resources and capabilities in daily operations, and physical workspace is one of the environments in which this takes place. This study aims to explore to what extent factors required for successful strategy implementation are considered when designing, using and managing workspaces of knowledge-intensive organisations.

For the study, managers in 25 large and medium-sized knowledge-intensive organisations were interviewed. The semi-structured interviews focused on organisation’s strategy, strategy implementation practices and workspace design and management. To form a comprehensive framework of strategy implementation success factors for the study, the factors of 11 frameworks were analysed, grouped and renamed.

Current workspace design, usage and management mainly support human-related strategy implementation factors. However, both organisation- and human-related factors are needed for the strategy implementation to be successful. Therefore, the organisations studied may have unused potential in their workspaces to ensure strategy-aligned operations and behaviour.

Due to the potential imbalance between organisation- and human-related strategy implementation factors, a more holistic, organisational-level approach to workspace design, usage and management is recommended to ensure the success of strategy implementation.

Workspaces have extensively been studied from individual strategy implementation factors’ as well as employees’ perspectives. Prior to this work, there are only few studies exploring workspace in the holistic, strategy implementation context.