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The purpose of this paper is to compare online labor platforms (OLPs) such as Upwork, Fiverr, YoungOnes and Temper with traditional temp agencies. At a first glance, OLPs and temp agencies strongly resemble each other while they aim to meet the need for short-term labor of organizations. The authors ask the question how these labor market intermediaries differ on issues such as information technology usage, ways how labor supply and demand are matched and working conditions (e.g. status, pay and social security of workers).

Next to a review of the academic literature, the authors conducted interviews with representatives of six OLPs and temp agencies in the Netherlands as well as a legal specialist in Dutch labor law.

The authors found that OLPs and temp agencies differ on several issues. First, although OLPs rely on online marketplaces for matching labor supply and demand, temp agencies generally rely on human matchmakers. Second, although OLPs enable workers and client organizations to initiate transactions themselves, temp agencies employ representatives that do the matching for workers and clients. Third, and as a result, OLPs afford client organizations to almost instantly hire workers on-demand, whereas the flexibility and speed that temp agencies can offer depend on availability and processing capacity of human matchmakers.

According to the authors’ knowledge, this paper is the first to compare OLPs and temp agencies and, in doing so, offers academics and practitioners an analytical framework to compare different types of labor market intermediaries.

This paper aims to enrich knowledge management theory and practice by investigating how boundary spanners’ willingness to share their knowledge contributes to innovation success and by examining the contingent role of market turbulence.

Cross-sectional survey data were collected from 296 top income Hungarian firms. Structural equation modelling with bootstrap procedures was used to test the hypotheses.

Boundary spanners’ willingness to share their knowledge has a dual effect on innovation success, which is captured by new product development innovativeness and performance. It has a direct effect on both new product development innovativeness and performance, and it has a mediated effect on new product development performance, where new product development innovativeness serves as a mediator. The study’s results indicate that these effects are robust and not contingent on the turbulence of the firm’s marketplace.

This study’s respondents were managers in boundary-spanning positions charged with the task of linking the organisation with its external environment. Owing to their proximity to the external environment, their evaluation of market turbulence may be distorted.

Maintaining the willingness of managers in boundary-spanning positions to share what they know is essential to the continuous creation of superior new product development performance. Hence, firms should develop organisational cultures where employees’ knowledge-sharing willingness is presented as an important asset. While turbulent markets may be unpredictable and hostile, firms should not adjust their knowledge management practices.

Building on the research on knowledge sharing, boundary spanning theory and contingency theory, this paper increases the understanding of the salient factors that are often implicitly assumed in mechanisms involved in transforming knowledge into new product performance. This is the first empirical study to focus on boundary spanners’ knowledge behaviour and to consider the contingent role of market turbulence in knowledge management.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a synthesis of the contingent work field and to advocate a sustainable career perspective on contingent work.

Adopting a broader review approach allowed to synthesize the contingent work literature across contingent work types (temporary agency work, gig work and freelance work) and develop a sustainable career perspective on contingent work. The authors searched for empirical, conceptual and review articles published from 2008 to December 2021. In total, the authors included 208 articles.

The authors advocate a sustainable career perspective that allows for organizing and synthesizing the fragmented contingent work literature. Adopting a sustainable career perspective enables to study contingent work from a dynamic perspective transcending one single organization.

The field is suffering from fragmentation and most importantly from an oversight of how contingent work experiences play a role in a persons’ career. This paper addresses this problem by adopting a sustainable career perspective on contingent work.

The purpose of this paper is to gain insight into the contingent use of rational, intuitive and political decision-making in R&D.

This research is based on a study in an R&D department of a multinational high-tech firm in the Netherlands. The study consists of a case study design, focusing on four embedded cases, longitudinally studying each case.

The literature distinguishes three dimensions of innovation decision-making processes: rational, intuitive and political. By studying these interwoven dimensions over time, this study finds that the dominant use of each of these dimensions differs across the innovation process. There is an emphasis on intuitive decision-making in an early phase, followed by more emphasis on political decision-making, and moving to more emphasis on rational decision-making in a later phase of the R&D process. Furthermore, the predominant choice in a specific innovation phase for one of the three decision-making dimensions is influenced by the decision-making dimension that is dominantly employed in the preceding phase.

This study contributes to the innovation decision-making literature by developing and applying a model that distinguishes rational, intuitive and political decision-making dimensions, the interactions among these dimensions in innovation decision-making in R&D, and the contingency of these dimensions upon the innovation phase. It calls for further research into the contingent nature of innovation decision-making processes.

For practitioners this study has two relevant insights. First it highlights the importance and usefulness of intuitive and political decision-making in addition to the prevailing emphasis on rational decision-making. Second, practitioners may be more alert to consciously changing their dominant decision-making approach across the phases of the innovation process. Third, companies may adjust their human resource policies to this study’s findings.

The literature on rational, intuitive and political decision-making is quite extensive. However, research has hardly studied how these decision-making dimensions develop in conjunction, and over time. This paper reports on a first study to do so and finds that the dominant use of these dimensions is contingent upon the phase of the R&D process and on the decision-making dimensions used in earlier phases. The study suggests that using a contingency approach can help to further integrate the debate in research and practice.

The purpose of this paper is to consider recent field evidence to analyse what online public services citizens need, explores potential citizen subsidy of these specific services and investigates where resources should be invested in terms of media accessibility. The authors explore these from a citizen-centric affordability perspective within three exemplar developing countries in sub-Saharan Africa. The World Bank and United Nations in particular promote initiatives under the “Information and Communication Technologies for Development” (ICT4D) to stress the relevance of e-Government as a way to ensure development and reduce poverty. The authors adopt a contingency value approach to determine directly reported citizens willingness to pay for digital public services. Hence, our focus is mainly upon an empirical investigation through extensive fieldwork in the context of sub-Sahara Africa. A substantive survey was conducted in the respective cities of Addis Ababa (Ethiopia), Lagos (Nigeria) and Johannesburg (South Africa). The sample of citizens was drawn from each respective Chamber of Commerce database for Ethiopia and South Africa, and for Nigeria a purchased database of businesses, based on stratified random sampling. These were randomly identified from both sectors ensuring all locations were covered with a total sample size of 1,297 respondents. It was found, in particular, that citizens were willing to pay to be able to access digital public services and that amounts of fees they were willing to pay varied depending on what services they wish to access and what devices they use (PCs or mobile phones).

The authors adopt a contingency value approach to determine directly reported citizens willingness to pay for digital public services. A survey was conducted in the respective cities of Addis Ababa (Ethiopia), Lagos (Nigeria) and Johannesburg (South Africa). The sample of citizens was drawn from each respective Chamber of Commerce database for Ethiopia and South Africa, and for Nigeria a purchased database of businesses, based on stratified random sampling. These were randomly identified from both sectors ensuring all locations were covered with a total sample size of 1,297 respondents.

The findings suggest that by understanding citizen needs, demands and how they can benefit from online public services could drive decisions related to what public services need to be prioritised for economically active citizens, potentially explore citizen subsidy of these specific public services which will have a trickle-down benefit to poorer citizens by reducing the pressures on traditional channels of public service delivery and investigate where resources should be invested in terms of media to access online services. Willingness to pay between the top online public services showed no statistically significant difference among all respondents.

The research focused on economically active digitally savvy citizens in the major capital cities in each of our selected countries. While these are not representative of the population at large, our intention was to understand what citizen-led government services would look like from the perspective of this group, with an insight into the value they place on these online services and their ability to access them. Technology diffusion starts with the early adopters (Rogers, 2010), and here the authors have focused on those that are likely to be early adopters.

Poor fiscal capacity, namely, the amount and type of resources a state has at its disposal, not only has an impact on economic wellbeing, but particularly relevant in this case, also has an impact on the quality of government (Baskaran and Bigsten, 2013). Thus, e-government is one way in which developing countries can focus on developing good governance and strengthening civil society to improve the quality of government and motivate citizens to participate in the political process.

The economic performance of African countries has been viewed with pessimism, consistently considered to be the poorest continent (Harrison et al., 2014). Recent studies have empirically shown that new information technologies have contributed to longer term economic growth in African countries and stress the need for government to further invest in developing telecommunications infrastructures and internet access (Donou-Adonsou et al., 2016). However one of the major constraints and challenges for developing countries is the limited fiscal capacity and ability to mobilise fiscal resources to finance the provision of public services, which is essential for economic development (Ali et al., 2015).

The authors contribute to the World Bank and United Nations initiatives to promote ICT for Development’ (ICT4D) the relevance of e-government as a way to ensure development and reduce poverty. If online services are of no benefit, even if they are more convenient and lower cost, they are unlikely to be used. Accessing digital public services directly addresses the needs of economically active citizens and can also facilitate the steps towards an improved quality of government and interaction with civil society. The study has contributed to an insightful understanding of the value, cost and benefits of citizen-led e-Government in this respect.

This paper explores how global pandemic crises affect the financial vulnerability of municipalities.

This paper is developed from the relevant literature an analytical framework to examine municipal financial vulnerability before a global pandemic crisis and in its immediate aftermath by mapping and systematizing its dimensions and sources. To illustrate how it can be used and evaluate its robustness and flexibility, such a tool was applied to Portugal and Italy, two countries that particularly suffered from the Covid-19 crisis.

The application of the analytical framework has shown how financially vulnerable municipalities are to global pandemic crises. Financial vulnerability relates to issues ranging from institutional design to internal financial conditions and the perception of the capacity to cope with a crisis. Results further reveal that vulnerability has an inherent contingent nature in time and space and can lead to paradoxical outcomes.

This paper provides a tool that can be useful for both academic and public policy purposes, to further appreciate municipal financial vulnerability, especially during crises.

Municipalities can use the framework to better manage their financial vulnerability, strengthening their anticipatory and copying capacities, while oversight authorities can use it to help municipalities become less financially vulnerable or, at least, more aware of their financial vulnerability.

Municipal financial vulnerability to global shocks has not been explored extensively. Also, the Covid-19 pandemic is different from previous global crises as it affected society overnight with the implementation of lockdown and social distancing measures.

The aim of this study is to investigate the relationship between heterogeneous collaborative networks and firm performance, using the resource-based view (RBV) and its extension through the knowledge-based view (KBV) as theoretical lens. Moreover, the authors examine family management and intellectual property rights (IPRs) as contingent factors that enhance the effectiveness of heterogeneous collaborative networks in achieving superior firm performance.

The hypotheses are developed and checked by using a panel data sample of 10,985 firm-year observations from 1,766 Spanish manufacturing firms over the period 2007–2016.

The results indicate that heterogeneous collaborative networks positively influence firm performance. Furthermore, the positive impact of these innovation networks on firm performance is reinforced by high levels of family management, and such effect is even stronger when there exists high levels of IPRs.

This research is the first, to our knowledge, to provide important new insights into the manner in which the effect of both family management and IPRs have the potential to amplify the performance gains attained from heterogenous collaborative networks.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a contingent model that facilitates knowledge of the strategies followed by the research technology organizations (RTOs) of Valencia and the Basque Country, Spain, to adapt to the turbulence of their environment.

The research includes context, organizational and results variables and identifies some barriers that the RTOs encounter in collaborating with SMEs and also the best practices they follow to develop competitive advantages. The methodology used consisted of applying the proposed model to the 27 RTOs of both autonomous regions; a factor analysis was then performed to determine whether there exist groups of related (correlated) variables; finally, the authors proceeded to carry out a hierarchical cluster analysis to observe how the 27 RTOs are distributed according to their ability to adapt and respond to environmental turbulence.

The technological policy must consider the characteristics of each region to propose more efficient and equitable mechanisms that allow the RTOs to face new challenges.

This study proposes a theoretical model suitable for RTOs to respond to environmental changes, to the current economy globalization and to cope with new challenges. This proposal means that RTOs must manage an appropriate combination of key factors, including the development of more proactive innovation strategies, an organic organizational structure to relate better with other innovation agents and universities, which help them to work more efficiently with SMEs and to obtain a higher innovative performance.

Drawing on paradox theory, this study explores how ambidextrous sustainability relates to organisational performance in hybrid organisations represented by Swedish municipal housing corporations, and how this relationship is contingent on the organisational structure of these organisations.

The study relies on the data collected from Swedish municipal housing corporations. These data sources consist of a survey sent to the management team members in Swedish municipal housing corporations, financial and non-financial archival data on these corporations, interviews with the management team and board members, and observations of meetings involving the management team and board of directors at a Swedish municipal housing corporation. Quantitative data of the study were analysed using descriptive statistics, correlation analysis and linear multiple regression analysis. Qualitative data were analysed employing deductive thematic analysis and were used to illustrate and discuss the results of the quantitative analysis.

The quantitative findings show that ambidextrous sustainability, i.e. the alignment between an explorative orientation and an exploitative orientation towards sustainability, has a weakly positive relationship with financial performance and a positive relationship with social performance in hybrid organisations represented by Swedish municipal housing corporations. The study further shows that a high level of the structural element “connectedness” weakened the relationship between the ambidextrous sustainability and financial performance of the organisation in the study. In contrast, a lower level of connectedness reinforced and strengthened this relationship. Our qualitative material illustrates how the quantitative findings could be explained by the interaction between the board of directors and the management team of these hybrid organisations.

The study shows how ambidextrous sustainability, employed for conceptualisation of the sustainability strategy in hybrid organisations, represented by Swedish municipal housing corporations, can impact on facets of performance (i.e. financial, social and environmental) differently. The study further highlights the importance of organisational structures in these relationships in a hybrid context.

The purpose of this paper is to report on research into the impact of two sequential dimensions of strategic purchasing – purchasing recognition and purchasing involvement – on the development and deployment of dynamic capabilities. The authors also examine how such dynamic capabilities impact on both cost and innovation performance, and how their effects differ for service as opposed to manufacturing firms.

The authors test hypotheses using structural equation modeling of survey data from 309 manufacturing and service firms.

From a dynamic capability perspective, the analysis supports the positive relationships between purchasing recognition, purchasing involvement, and dynamic capability in the form of knowledge scanning. The authors also find support for the positive impact of knowledge scanning on both cost and innovation performance. From a contingency perspective, data supports hypothesized differences caused by industry, whereby service-based firms experience stronger positive linkages in our model than manufacturing-based firms. Finally, emerging from the data, the authors explore a re-enforcing effect from cost performance to purchasing involvement, something that is in line with the dynamic capabilities perspective but not typically addressed in operations management (OM) research.

The research offers a number of theoretical and managerial contributions, including being one of a relative few examples of empirical assessment of dynamic capability development and deployment; examining the enablers of dynamic capability in addition to the more commonly addressed performance effect; assessing the contingency effect of firm type for dynamic capabilities; and uncovering a return (re-enforcing) effect between performance and enablers of dynamic capabilities.