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Notes that as we move towards an information‐based society, information technologies will play a key role in establishing and maintaining economic competitiveness and that while the systems development life cycle approach has brought some order to the software development process, information engineering brings additional structure to the process. Points out that re‐engineering techniques are used to align every area of the enterprise: people, strategy, technology and business processes. Describes software re‐engineering activities and processes with a special emphasis on developing and maintaining quality systems.

The purpose of this paper is to review “institutional experimentation” for protecting workers in response to the contraction of the standard employment relationship and the corresponding rise of “non-standard” forms of paid work.

The paper draws on the existing research and knowledge base of the authors as well as a thorough review of the extant literature relating to: non-standard employment contracts; sources of labour supply engaging in non-standard work; exogenous pressures on the employment relationship; intermediaries that separate the management from the control of labour; and entities that subvert the employment relationship.

Post-war industrial relations scholars characterised the traditional regulatory model of collective bargaining and the standard employment contract as a “web of rules”. As work relations have become more market mediated, new institutional arrangements have developed to govern these relations and regulate the terms of engagement. The paper argues that these are indicative of an emergent “patchwork of rules” which are instructive for scholars, policymakers, workers’ representatives and employers seeking solutions to the contraction of the traditional regulatory model.

While the review of the institutional experimentation is potentially instructive for developing solutions to gaps in labour regulation, a drawback of this approach is that there are limits to the realisation of policy transfer. Some of the initiatives discussed in the paper may be more effective than others for protecting workers on non-standard contracts, but further research is necessary to test their effectiveness including in different contexts.

The findings indicate that a task ahead for the representatives of government, labour and business is to determine how to adapt the emergent patchwork of rules to protect workers from the new vulnerabilities created by, for example, employer extraction and exploitation of their individual bio data, social media data and, not far off, their personal genome sequence.

The paper addresses calls to examine the “institutional intersections” that have informed the changing ways that work is conducted and regulated. These intersections transcend international, national, sectoral and local units of analysis, as well as supply chains, fissured organisational dynamics, intermediaries and online platforms. The analysis also encompasses the broad range of stakeholders including businesses, labour and community groups, nongovernmental organisations and online communities that have influenced changing institutional approaches to employment protection.

Digital servitization concerns how manufacturers utilize digital technologies to enhance their provision of services. Although digital servitization requires that manufacturers possess new capabilities, in contrast to strategic (or dynamic) capabilities, little is known about how they develop the required operational capabilities. The paper investigates the mechanisms for developing operational capabilities in digital servitization.

This paper presents an exploratory study based on 15 large manufacturers operating in Europe engaged in digital servitization.

Three operational capability development mechanisms are set out that manufacturers use to facilitate digital servitization: learning (developing capabilities in-house), building (bringing the requisite capabilities into the manufacturer), and acquiring (utilizing the capabilities of other actors). These mechanisms emphasize exploitation and exploration efforts within manufacturers and in collaborations with upstream and downstream partners. The findings demonstrate the need to combine these mechanisms for digital servitization according to combinations that match each manufacturer’s traditional servitization phase: (1) initial phase - building and acquiring, (2) middle phase - learning, building and acquiring, and (3) advanced phase - learning and building.

This study reveals three operational capability development mechanisms, highlighting the parallel use of these mechanisms for digital servitization. It provides a holistic understanding of operational capability development mechanisms used by manufacturers by combining three theoretical perspectives (organizational learning, absorptive capacity, and network perspectives). The paper demonstrates that digital servitization requires the significant application of building and acquiring mechanisms to develop the requisite operational capabilities.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate National Hockey League (NHL) expansion draft decisions to measure divestment aversion and endowment effects, and analyze bias and its affect on presumed rational analytic decision making.

A natural experiment with three variables (age, minutes played and presence of a prior relationship with a team’s management), filtered athletes that were exposed or protected to selection. A machine learning algorithm trained on a group of 17 teams was applied to the remaining 13 teams.

Athletes with pre-existing management relationships were 1.7 times more likely to be protected. Athletes playing fewer relative position minutes were less likely to be protected, as were older athletes. Athlete selection was predominantly determined by time on ice.

This represents a single set of independent decisions using publicly available data absent of context. The results may not be generalizable beyond the NHL or sport.

The research confirms the affect of prior relationships on decision making and provides further evidence of measurable sub-optimal decision making.

Decision making has implications throughout human resources and impacts competitiveness and productivity. This adds to the need for managers to recognize and implement de-biasing in areas such as hiring, performance appraisal and downsizing.

This natural experiment involving high-stakes decision makers confirms bias in a setting that has been dominated by students, low stakes or artificial settings.

This purpose of this paper is to describe a fast and easy method of both clustering samples and identifying active genes in cDNA microarray data.

The method relies on alternation of identification of the active genes using a mixture model and clustering of the samples based on Ward hierarchical clustering. The initial‐point of the procedure is obtained by means of a χ² test. The method attempts to locally minimize the sum of the within cluster sample variances under a suitable Gaussian assumption on the distribution of data.

This paper illustrates the proposed methodology and its success by means of results from both simulated and real cDNA microarray data. The comparison of the results with those from a related known method demonstrates the superiority of the proposed approach.

Only empirical evidence of algorithm convergence is provided. Theoretical proof of algorithm convergence is an open issue.

The proposed methodology can be applied to perform cDNA microarray data analysis.

This paper provides a contribution to the development of successful statistical methods for cDNA microarray data analysis.