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To be able to continuously provide affordable services to consumers, managers of critical infrastructure (CI) maintenance supply networks have to balance investments in resilience with costs. At the same time, CI providers need to consider factors that influence resilience such as the geographical spread or the location of the network. This study aims to contextualize supply chain resilience knowledge by exploring how maintenance resource configurations impact resilience and costs in CI supply networks.

An in-depth longitudinal single case study of a representative CI provider that has centralized its maintenance supply network is used. Data were collected before and after the change to evaluate the effect of the changes on the maintenance supply network.

This study shows that in this specific CI maintenance context, structural resource choices such as the quantity or location of spare parts and tools, the creation and exploitation of tacit knowledge and staff motivation impact both resilience and costs due to geographical spread, network location and other network properties.

This study extends general supply chain resilience knowledge to a new setting (i.e. CI) and shows how existing insights apply in this context. More specifically, it is shown that even in engineered supply networks there is a need to consider the effect of human agency on resilience as the creation and exploitation of tacit knowledge are of immense importance in managing the network. In addition, the relationship between normal accidents theory and high reliability theory (HRT) is revisited as findings indicate that HRT is also important after a disruption has taken place.

This paper explores the nature and operations of the supply chain that serves disadvantaged groups. With the increasing reliance on supplementary food provision through food aid, the authors seek to emphasise efficiency and sustainability in these supply chains.

Semi-structured interview data from 32 senior managers and experts from both commercial and food aid supply chains were abductively analysed to develop a relationship-based map of the food chains that serve disadvantaged groups.

Disadvantaged groups are served by a hybrid food supply chain. It is an interconnected supply chain bringing together the commercial and the food aid supply chains. This chain is unsurprisingly plagued with various challenges, the most critical of which are limited expertise and resources, operational inefficiencies, prohibitive logistics costs and a severe lack of collaboration.

This study identifies the currently limited role of logistics companies in surplus food redistribution and highlights future pathways. Additionally, the authors present useful actionable propositions for managers, practitioners and policymakers.

The attempt to establish a common European framework for core platforms' duties and responsibilities toward other actors in the digital environment is at the core of the recent scholarly debate surrounding the Digital Markets Act (DMA) proposal. In particular, the everlasting juxtaposition between the “data power” – as emerging from recent cases (Section 2) – that dominant tech companies enjoy and the concept of consumer sovereignty (Section 3) lies at the core of the proposal's attempt to identify digital core platforms as market gatekeepers. Accordingly, this chapter critically investigates the divide between power imbalance and consumer sovereignty in light of the architecture designed by the DMA, with a specific focus on its effectiveness in identifying gatekeepers' power drivers (Section 4). After highlighting the main critical aspects of the pertinent rules, opportunities for fruitful developments are then identified through the reframing of some of the notions considered in the proposal, and namely the role of “lock-in” effects and “data accumulation” (Section 5). Lastly, this chapter suggests that the DMA advancements – while desirable – are bound to be fragmentary in the absence of a wider appraisal of the nature of data power imbalance dynamics in the modern digital markets (Section 6).

Internationalization is viewed as an important strategy in the context of a country in transition from central planning to market orientation. Efforts to internationalize universities are being carried out at both national and institutional levels. However, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, there has been no study to investigate how individual institutions approach internationalization and what they gain from that process. This paper aims to investigate the enhancement of teachers’ and students’ knowledge and skills using internationalization in Vietnam universities as a strategy.

Semi-structured interviews with leaders from 12 universities were conducted to investigate their perceptions, strategies and perceived outcomes of the internationalization process of their universities. Data analysis involved coding the transcripts of interviews into themes.

Results show that current approaches to internationalized activities in Vietnamese universities are ad hoc in nature, while resources and language incompetence of staff and students are limited. In line with other previous studies, limited resources and lack of English competence among educators and students were found to be the key obstacles and challenges for internationalized activities. The authors also note an issue that apparently has not been raised elsewhere in the relevant research literature, which is the challenge for the sustainability of knowledge production via research and publications.

Findings from this study not only contribute to Vietnamese universities but also to other developing institutions which do not have strong international exchange programs or have not experienced strong benefits from international exchange programs.

Twenty-first century education has been reconfigured to keep up with growing societal shifts in an effort to support a wide variety of learners. As changes occur, the workload for teachers continues to expand with little to no support and resources within classroom spaces to keep up with the current times. Post pandemic, the expectations and systems have shifted emphasizing the need for more programming around social emotional learning and systems to help mitigate the learning disruption. The insurmountable pressure placed on teachers has led to a robust and persistent departure of the profession causing the entire education system to rethink the policies, structures, and systems that influence teacher burnout.

While the metaverse is promised to be the next big step for the Internet, this new technology may also bear negative impacts on individuals and society. Drawing on innovation resistance literature, this article explores the reasons for metaverse resistance.

The study is based on 66 semi-structured interviews, and the subsequent data were analysed thematically.

The findings revealed 11 reasons for metaverse resistance: lack of understanding, lack of regulation, addiction avoidance, claustrophobia, loss of social ties, disconnection from reality, privacy concerns, extreme consumer society, unseen benefits, infeasibility and nausea.

By understanding the various reasons for metaverse resistance managers and policymakers can make better decisions to overcome the challenges facing this innovation, rather than adopting a “one-size-fits-all” approach.

While the literature has mainly adopted a positive perspective on the metaverse, this research offers a more nuanced view by identifying the reasons why consumers may resist the metaverse. Furthermore, this study introduces for the first-time “addiction-driven-innovation-resistance (ADIR)” as a potential reason for metaverse resistance, which may also apply to other cases of innovation resistance, when new innovations are perceived as being “too good” and therefore potentially addictive.