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This case study aims to examine the role of demand management in balancing distribution efficiency and responsiveness to customer needs in the downstream of a retail supply chain.

A major machine part supplier in Australia is used as a case study to investigate the challenges faced by the industry in distributing goods to customers. The use of demand management techniques to help improve distribution efficiency without significantly impacting on responsiveness is also explored.

The findings of the case study reveal that appropriate demand management measures, such as customer segmentation and price discrimination, can help improve overall distribution efficiency of the supply chain while providing the required responsiveness to meet genuine customer needs. Other management attempts, such as vendor‐managed inventory and rationalisation of retail network, can facilitate demand aggregation and improve vehicle utilisation in distribution with minor impact on customer service. These changes require a full understanding of customer requirements and supply capabilities of the company as well as corresponding adjustments in business strategy, leadership style, and organisational culture.

This study lends insight into the use of demand management techniques to improve efficiency in downstream wholesale and retail distribution, thereby enhancing sustainability and profitability of business. To serve mainly as a case study and an illustration of the approach, the scope of the study is limited to six stores in the distribution network of the case company.

Retailers can explore the use of demand management techniques to increase distribution efficiency and hence competitiveness of the company. The approach can also assist managers in adopting best practices among stores and facilitate more effective allocation of distribution resources to serve different market segments.

Using demand management techniques to increase distribution efficiency can reduce delivery frequency and total travel distance. This will help lessen energy usage, carbon emission, traffic congestion, and other negative impacts on the environment.

Research in retail distribution efficiency to date focuses mainly on delivery optimisation through routing and scheduling. Attempts to link demand with supply and use demand management techniques to improve distribution efficiency are relatively limited. This paper fills the gap in the literature by investigating the value of demand management in distribution and explores empirically the significance of the approach to achieve higher wholesale and retail distribution efficiency.

New Zealand reintroduced titular honours (i.e. knighthoods and damehoods) in 2009. We document the prevalence of knights and dames on the board of directors.

We use a probit regression to investigate what firm characteristics are significantly associated with having a knight or dame on the board of directors.

We find 19 of 112 companies have a knight or dame on the board. These companies are bigger and have larger and more independent boards than other companies. We also find a knight or dame is more likely to serve in companies that have higher dividend yields.

The generalisability of our results is limited by the small number of knights and dames on the boards of listed companies and our archival regression approach. Although we document an association, we cannot prove causation.

We show that directors with greater and easily visible reputational capital are more likely to supply their services to companies that mitigate risks to their reputation and protect minority shareholder interests.

The purpose of this paper is to reflect back over his career as a management and business historian so far as to consider opportunities for the future of management and business history as a disciplinary area.

The paper consists of two segments – the first half is an auto-ethnographic personal reflection looking at the author’s research journey and how the discipline as experienced by the author has evolved over that time. The second half is a prescriptive look forward to consider how we should leverage the strengths as historians to progress the discipline forward.

The paper demonstrates opportunities for management and business history to encompass new agendas including the expansion of the topic into teaching, the possibility for the advancement of empirical contributions and opportunities for findings in new research areas, including the global south and public and project management history.

The paper demonstrates that historians should be more confident in the disciplinary capabilities, particularly their understandings of historic context, continuity, change and chronologies when making empirical and theoretical contributions.

Drawing on the literature from the field and the recent experience of an evaluation into a child abuse investigation in Scotland, the purpose of this paper is to argue that evidence from the literature suggests that a more holistic approach drawing on the ideas of communities of practice could improve the way in which child abuse investigations are conducted.

This paper has been informed by a recent evaluation of a new national unit that was set up to investigate suspected child abuse in Scotland. This unit was established as part of the transition from eight regional police services in Scotland to a single national police service, Police Scotland. An important part of this evaluation was to consider the messages from previous research into the development of national police units and the role of the police in child protection investigations more generally.

What was uncovered were the challenges that police officers face in the current context of child abuse investigation particularly around construction of child abuse investigations, collaborative working, staff well-being and training.

The practical implications of this paper are as follows: police investigations into child abuse experience a range of issues, multi-agency and holistic approaches are more effective, agencies should be encouraged to establish communities of practice and staff need adequate levels of support and training.

This paper contributes towards a growing body of work examining the way in which child abuse investigations are conducted by police and the importance of inter-agency collaboration to support this. It contributes to academic debates and knowledge of the overall investigation process where, to date, there has been a paucity of literature and research that has tended to focus on evidence and experiences and to a boarder literature recognising the need for holistic approaches to tackle child abuse.

The financial restructuring of the US department store industry is commonly interpreted as a time of corporate excess, value‐destruction and ultimately collapse. The purpose of this paper is to re‐analyse these events using qualitative methods to understand the background to the leveraged transactions and to review the implications that their failure had for the longer term strategy and structure of the US department store industry.

The research is based on two extensive periods of fieldwork in the US when the author interviewed (n=28) many of the protagonists of the 1980s restructuring period and those who inherited the management of the bankrupt businesses in the 1990s. By adopting a qualitative perspective, we are accessing social and human perspectives of these developments as well as their wider effects.

The leveraged transactions were conceptually an appropriate attempt to centralise the structure of the industry but their execution was not possible under such extreme financial distress. However, bankruptcy protection provided the environmental conditions to realise the benefits of more efficient strategic and subsequent wide‐ranging structural change.

This research differs from economistic readings of the period that analyse changes in market value of the constituent firms and the more reactionary journalistic accounts. The paper re‐casts the failed financial restructuring in a new light, underlining the regenerative effects of Chapter 11 Bankruptcy Protection in promoting firm revival, alongside visionary leadership.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss recent developments in neuroscientific methods and demonstrate its potential for the service field. This work is a call to action for more service researchers to adopt promising and increasingly accessible neuro-tools that allow the service field to benefit from neuroscience theories and insights.

The paper synthesizes key literature from a variety of domains (e.g. neuroscience, consumer neuroscience and organizational neuroscience) to provide an in-depth background to start applying neuro-tools. Specifically, this paper outlines the most important neuro-tools today and discusses their theoretical and empirical value.

To date, the use of neuro-tools in the service field is limited. This is surprising given the great potential they hold to advance service research. To stimulate the use of neuro-tools in the service area, the authors provide a roadmap to enable neuroscientific service studies and conclude with a discussion on promising areas (e.g. service experience and servicescape) ripe for neuroscientific input.

The paper offers service researchers a starting point to understand the potential benefits of adopting the neuroscientific method and shows their complementarity with traditional service research methods like surveys, experiments and qualitative research. In addition, this paper may also help reviewers and editors to better assess the quality of neuro-studies in service.

Advances in computers and telecommunications and the development of the Internet have been applied to develop new transaction technologies that lower transaction costs. By lowering transaction costs, these changes in transaction technology make possible transaction innovation, that is, the development of new types of market transactions. Transaction innovation changes not only business methods and organizational design, but the content of transactions and the way that markets are organized. I consider the impact of transaction innovation on the role of the firm in various economic activities including market clearing, auction design, price adjustment, quality certification, and agency.

This paper aims to propose positive and negative firm competitiveness effects of knowledge acquisition of pertinent, irrelevant and erroneous knowledge based on its distinctiveness, the source of knowledge and the presence of firm complements.

Aspects of knowledge acquisition from the innovation, knowledge and routines literatures are integrated to create propositions showing the effects of knowledge acquisition on firm competitiveness. Examples from different eras of the automobile industry are used to illustrate the propositions and demonstrate the enduring nature of these issues.

Various combinations of firm complements and knowledge type and criticality can cause significant competitive effects, such as parity, relative harm and opportunity capture, that managers should be cognizant of when planning knowledge acquisition.

Knowledge researchers should use a more integrative, holistic approach concerning firm resources to their empirical studies. This better allows for the competitive effects of interactions between new and existing firm resources to be captured.

The propositions emphasize the importance of increased managerial attention and understanding of potential problems of new knowledge acquisition. Moreover, managers should pay particular attention to their firm’s existing complements when assessing knowledge acquisition benefits.

The positive value of firm knowledge receives substantially more research attention than the potential negative effects. This paper identifies the competitiveness effects of acquiring pertinent, irrelevant or erroneous knowledge. Increased attention on the interaction of new knowledge and complements illustrates the positive and negative effects on firms.

This paper reconsiders the criticisms of the most influential theory of the rise of the large corporations, and to see how these criticisms can be met without entirely abandoning the basic elements of the theory.

This problem is approached by first analyzing the weaknesses inherent in Chandler's theory as presented in The Visible Hand, and then by reworking elements of the theory by relying on data generated by other historical accounts.

The author found that the theory could be salvaged by reordering the evolution of managerial practices based on a variety of historical studies, many not considered by Chandler, but even some of his own earlier work. Given these changes in historical order, vital managerial reforms can be placed sufficiently early that organizational techniques existed to solve the problems and exploit the opportunities that Chandler identifies as creating the pressures necessary to generate the large industrial corporation, thus responding to one class of criticism. My approach can also incorporate other factors that critics see as missing in Chandler's account.

What is new in this paper is that it reconciles Chandler's analysis with those of his critics by re‐examining and correcting some of his assumptions. The result is a theory of corporate evolution that is less global but more realistic. Economic and business historians as well as sociologists of organizations will find this reassessment valuable.