Search results

This study presents evidence of the role of performance measurement and management (PMM) in sustainable supply chain governance. This study tests a model hypothesizing whether it is the PMM itself or the mediating effect of supply chain governance that is essential for both business and sustainability performance.

This study builds on a survey of 274 SMEs in Finland.

The findings indicate that PMM does not directly contribute to SMEs’ business or sustainability performance. Supply chain governance mediates the relationship between PMM and business performance. Business performance also enhances sustainability.

These findings can guide managers in managing company relationships with customers and suppliers. The mediating role of supply chain governance highlights the potential of PMM to enhance performance. Without supply chain governance, the PMM, while efficient in traditional business practices, may lose its effectiveness because of the pressure to advance sustainability values within firm operations.

The role of PMM in enhancing supply chain sustainability is frequently overlooked in the existing research, necessitating an empirical evaluation of PMM’s impact on supply chain sustainability. This study addresses this gap by focusing on the SME context, where the pressure to adopt sustainable practices is increasing, yet SMEs employ PMM less frequently than larger firms.

Firms are increasingly digitalizing their business processes and expanding them into digital platforms, which are believed to generate digital and relational resources that can facilitate and deliver innovations for firms. Instead of focusing on the extent of digital integration capability (DI), this paper seeks to empirically evaluate whether the DI asymmetry between the buyer and supplier firms influences bilateral information sharing and the buyer’s product innovation. We also examine the moderating effects of firms’ external (environmental dynamism) and internal (innovative climate) environments on these relationships.

Primary and secondary archival data on 180 buyer-supplier Chinese dyadic relationships were collected and analyzed using multiple linear regression models. Additionally, the Process macro was used to shed a nuanced light on the moderation effects of environmental dynamism and innovative climate.

The results show that DI asymmetry negatively impacts buyer firms’ product innovation through decreased information sharing. Environmental dynamism weakens the negative relationship between DI asymmetry and information sharing. Meanwhile, the innovative climate negatively moderates the relationship between information sharing and product innovation.

This study adds knowledge to the literature regarding the dark side of “one-sided digitalization.” By exploring the influences of unbalanced DI in buyer-supplier relationships, this study yields essential theoretical and managerial implications for product innovation success in a digital era.

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.

This paper aims to provide a conceptual understanding of the drivers and outcomes of actor opportunism in the context of the three key actors of the sharing economy – the service provider, the platform and the consumer.

The research uses a conceptual approach by drawing on literature from within and outside of marketing.

The current research introduces a conceptual framework of opportunism in the sharing economy with seven underlying propositions. The framework posits a U-shaped moderating effect of social capital for the relationship between opportunism and its drivers, actor vulnerability and asset specificity. Furthermore, a 2 × 2 matrix consisting of two types of opportunistic behaviors (active and passive) and two coping strategies by other actors (defensive and nondefensive) suggests that passive opportunism tends to lead to value codestruction independently of the coping strategies employed by other actors. Counterintuitively, the combination of active opportunism and defensive coping strategy presents an opportunity for value cocreation due to its potential to break up older structures and generate new ones.

While our research provides a higher-level understanding of opportunism pertaining to platform, consumers and service providers in the sharing economy, future research could situate our framework within specific regulatory environments, incorporate the role of competitors and examine individual interaction effects between type of opportunism and coping strategies.

The framework enables service providers, platforms and consumers to identify drivers of opportunistic behaviors of their partners and discern instances in which opportunistic behaviors lead to value codestruction for all actors.

This research transcends prior work on the bright and dark sides of the sharing economy by identifying its dynamic nature and examining the contributing role of opportunism.

The purpose of this paper is to explore networked business models on a nascent market for a sustainable innovation.

The study takes a qualitative approach through a comparative case study of three solar photovoltaic (PV) parks in Sweden. Data was collected from 14 interviews with multiple supply chain and network actors as well as secondary data. Industrial marketing and purchasing is applied for theoretical framing.

The study demonstrates transactional, relational, environmental and social drivers for participating in the network. The study reveals the duplicity of the nascent market, which encourages supply chain actors to develop their individual business models to take a larger market share or become future competitors to current collaborators. On the nascent market with few developed regulations, the network enables actors to influence regulations on local and regional levels.

The study is limited to the nascent solar PV industry in Sweden, which is characterized by institutional turbulence, market uncertainties and few established supply networks.

Practitioners need to consider multifarious drivers for participating in networked business models, where the economic driver may be the least motivating.

This study provides several multiactor business models and classifies them into specific applications and general applications. The study provides unique insight into the complexity of interactions among supply chain actors in networked business models on a nascent market for sustainable innovation. Due to the scarcity of available partners on the nascent market, actors need to look beyond their on-going relationships and their network horizon, or actors’ roles evolve to include activities that was not part of their individual business models.

Despite the unparalleled importance of value within healthcare, value-based models remain underutilised in the procurement of medical devices. Research is needed to understand what factors incentivise standard, low-priced device purchasing as opposed to value-adding devices with potentially higher overall health outcomes. Framed in agency theory, we examine the conditions under which different actors involved in purchasing decisions select premium-priced, value-adding medical devices over low-priced, standard medical devices.

We conducted 2 × 2 × 2 between-subjects scenario-based vignette experiments on three UK-based online samples of managers (n = 599), medical professionals (n = 279) and purchasing managers (n = 449) with subjects randomly assigned to three treatments: (1) cost-saving incentives, (2) risk-sharing contracts and (3) stronger (versus weaker) clinical evidence.

Our analysis demonstrates the harmful effects of intra-organisational cost-saving incentives on value-based purchasing (VBP) adoption; the positive impact of inter-organisational risk-sharing contracts, especially when medical professionals are involved in decision-making; and the challenge of leveraging clinical evidence to support value claims.

Our results demonstrate the need to align incentives in a context with multiple intra- and inter-organisational agency relationships at play, as well as the difficulty of reducing information asymmetry when information is not easily interpretable to all decision-makers. Overall, the intra-organisational agency factors strongly influenced the choices for the inter-organisational agency relationship.

We contribute to VBP in healthcare by examining the role of intra- and inter-organisational agency relationships and incentives concerning VBP (non-) adoption. We also examine how the impact of such mechanisms differs between medical and purchasing (management) professionals.

Forced labour is one of the most exploitative practices in supply chains, generating serious human right abuses. The authors seek to understand how relationships for reducing forced labour are influenced by institutional logics. The emerging supply chain efforts of social enterprises offer particularly intriguing approaches, as their social mission can spur creative new approaches and reshape widely adopted management practices.

The authors study supplier relationships in the smartphone industry and compare the evolving practices of two cases: the first, a growing novel social enterprise; and the second, a high-profile commercial firm that has adopted a progressive role in combating forced labour.

The underlying institutional logic influenced each firm's willingness to act beyond its direct suppliers and to collaborate in flexible ways that create systematic change. Moreover, while both focal firms had clear, well-documented procedures related to forced labour, the integration, rather than decoupling, of forced labour and general supply chain policies provided a more effective way to reduce the risks of forced labour in social enterprises.

As authors’ comparative case study approach may lack generalizability, future research is needed to broadly test their propositions.

The paper identifies preconditions in terms of institutional logics to successfully reduce the risk of forced labour in supply chains.

This paper discusses how social enterprises can provide a learning laboratory that enables commercial firms to identify options for supplier relationship improvement.

Motivated by the severe impact of global supply chain disruptions and the lack of understanding of supply chain resilience from an SME exporter perspective in the international marketing literature, this paper sets out to explore how SME exporters achieve resilience through strategic choices related to sourcing and manufacturing during global disruptions.

The study adopts a qualitative, multiple-case-studies approach to identify the key strategic drivers and contextual factors influencing SME exporters’ supply chain resilience. Our study adopted an SME exporter perspective and featured an unprecedented global supply chain disruption context. New Zealand (NZ) was chosen as the key home country context for the participants of this study. Five NZ SME exporters were selected for our case studies.

This study redefines buffering, bridging and a mixed strategy for an SME exporter facing global supply chain disruptions. SME exporters with high situational control are likely to pursue a buffering strategy that reduces their resource dependence on foreign suppliers and their reliance on information support from these suppliers. In contrast, when the firm perceives little control over the supply chain, it will decide upon a bridging strategy that aims to build solid relationships with supply chain partners. Exporters opt for a mixed strategy when they do not see themselves clearly in high or low situational control.

As global disruptions arise and evolve, supply chain uncertainty and exporters’ sense of situational control manifest differently across industries, product lines, markets and sourcing countries. It is essential to understand that firms can choose a mixed strategy based on these supply chain conditions. While our study was fortuitously timed, conducting multi-country studies could provide more comparative insights that transcend national borders. Additionally, our study did not examine organizational and capability-based factors. Future research may benefit from exploring how an SME exporter develops strategic capabilities to achieve resilience over its lifetime.

Businesses see survival as the most pivotal concern during a global supply chain disruption. Many companies have had to make on-the-spot decisions about whether they should shift or redesign their supply chains in the middle of a global disruption. There is no “best strategy” for an SME exporter to take. Rather, managers should make strategic decisions based on how much control or influence they have over a particular part of their supply chain. The level of control is determined by the SME exporter’s overall resource dependencies and information needs in particular parts of their supply chain.

We adopt resource dependence theory and information processing theory to guide our study and place exporters' situational control in the centre of drivers to firms' strategic choices during global disruptions. We make a novel attempt to incorporate the contextual conditions of the COVID-19 pandemic into the theorization of supply chain resilience. We make managerial recommendations to help SME exporters navigate global supply chain disruption challenges.

This study examines the relationship between financial reporting quality, Industrial Revolution 4.0 and social well-being of stakeholders among public companies in Malaysia.

The sample of the study includes 232 firm-year observations of Malaysian publicly listed companies from 2013 to 2017. Social well-being is measured using social pillar scores from the Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) data provided by Refinitiv. The study identified companies as an adopter of IR 4.0 based on their disclosure on the use of autonomous robots, simulation, cloud, horizontal and vertical system integration, cybersecurity, additive manufacturing, augmented reality and big data analytics in their financial reports. Financial reporting quality is measured using discretionary accruals.

This study found that financial reporting quality and IR 4.0 are related to social well-being, particularly the workforce. These results imply that companies with higher adoption of IR 4.0 are more likely to provide more information concerning job satisfaction, a healthy and safe workplace, maintaining diversity, equal and development opportunities for its workforce. Furthermore, the results show that firms with lower discretionary accruals (i.e. higher quality of financial reporting) are more likely to provide more information about social well-being. The results are robust even after addressing endogeneity issues.

This research contributes new insights into the role of financial reporting quality and IR 4.0 in enhancing social well-being in Malaysia. These findings offer valuable input for regulators striving to advance the United Nations' 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.

This study carries substantial practical implications for policymakers and businesses alike. It underscores the importance of embracing IR 4.0 technologies and integrating them into strategic planning to foster social well-being. These insights can guide policymakers in shaping economic strategies and assist businesses in prioritizing financial reporting quality while engaging stakeholders to promote social well-being.

This is the first study to investigate the combined relationship of financial reporting quality and IR4.0 on social well-being, which provides valuable evidence in this novel domain. While previous studies have primarily explored the relationship of IR4.0 on sustainability from an environmental and human resource perspective, this study sheds light on the specific dimension of social well-being, hence promoting sustainable development goals by the United Nations in 2030.

This study aims to examine decision factors for global sourcing, differentiated into transcontinental and continental sourcing to obtain insight into locational aspects of sourcing decisions and global trends. This study analyzed various country perceptions to reveal their influence on sourcing decisions. The country of origin (COO) theory explains why certain country perceptions and images influence purchasing experts in their selection of suppliers.

This study used a two-study approach. In Study 1, the authors conducted discrete choice card experiments with 71 purchasing experts located in Europe and the USA to examine the importance of essential decision factors for global sourcing. Given the clear evidence that location is a factor in sourcing decisions, in Study 2 the authors investigated purchasers’ perceptions and images of countries, adding country ranking experiments on various perceived characteristics such as quality, price and technology.

Study 1 provides evidence that the purchasers’ personal relationship with the supplier plays a decisive role in the supplier selection process. While product quality and location impact sourcing decisions, the attraction of the buying company and cultural barriers are less significant. Interestingly, however, these factors seem as important as price to respondents. This implies that a strong relationship with suppliers and good quality products are essential aspects of a reliable and robust supply chain in the post-COVID-19 era. Examining the locational aspect in detail, Study 2 linked the choice card experiments with country ranking experiments. In this study, the authors found that purchasing experts consider that transcontinental countries such as Japan and China offer significant advantages in terms of price and technology. China has enhanced its quality, which is recognizable in the country ranking experiments. Therefore, decisions on global sourcing are not just based on such high-impact factors as price and availability; country perceptions are also influential. Additionally, the significance of the locational aspect could be linked to certain country images of transcontinental suppliers, as the COO theory describes.

The new approach divides global sourcing into transcontinental and European sourcing to evaluate special decision factors and link these factors to the locational aspect of sourcing decisions. To deepen the clear evidence for the locational aspect and investigate the possible influence of country perceptions, the authors applied the COO theory. This approach enabled authors to show the strong influence of country perception on purchasing departments, which is represented by the locational effect. Hence, the success of transcontinental countries relies not only on factors such as their availability but also on the purchasers’ positive perceptions of these countries in terms of technology and price.