Search results

This paper aims to extend understanding of business-to-business relationship dynamics by introducing and discussing the phenomenon of a “negative critical wave” (NCW), defined as a disturbance in a relationship that emerges and develops within or beyond individual working relationships.

The dynamics of working relationships in two manufacturing firms in Finland and Sweden were studied by analysing the narratives of unstructured personal interviews with 16 middle managers and 14 operational executives, who recalled experiences of relevant situations over three years, with emphasis on unexpected disturbances, challenges and problems.

Respondents discussed 77 NCWs, the development and effect of which proved to depend upon the original “locus”, “magnitude” and “amplitude”, and embedded “energy”. Waves could be distinguished as: “silent compact”, “silent extensive”, “intense compact” or “intense extensive”.

The wave metaphor for relationships dynamics, consistent with but distinct from established notions of “critical time” and “critical incidents” and the associated classification system are a useful starting point for further research into the phenomenon. Though the qualitative methodology achieved richness, the small sample and restricted scope place limits on the objectivity and generalisability of the findings.

The NCW framework offers strategists and managers a holistic understanding of the dynamic process of criticality, synthesising the complexities of relationship dynamics and pointing to ways in which to absorb the energy of negative waves.

More is now known about the domino effects of critical incidents in internal and external business-to-business relationships.

The theory of self‐organized criticality (SOC) suggests that interdependencies and interactions among components of a system cause the system to perpetually organize itself towards a critical state. A small change in the value of any component of the system can affect the entire system (like a domino effect). Using SOC theory, we develop hypotheses to associate changes in a firm's production level and its stock prices. Change in performance and stock prices is theorized to vary positively with change in production below the critical level of production (called sub‐critical production), and vary negatively above the critical level of production (called supra‐critical production). Increasing (decreasing) economies of scale operate during sub (supra) critical levels of production. Change in production level from either the sub‐critical or supra‐critical level is posited to take the firm towards the critical production level. There are two reasons to investigate changes in production level: first, prior market research has not fully explained changes in stock prices, and, second, production (as modeled in microeconomic theory as a system of interacting input factors) provides an appealing case to investigate its SOC character. If presence of SOC‐like behavior for production process is observed, then statistical properties of critical states of production can be studied to provide better prediction abilities. Market evaluations of production‐related changes imply that change in production is a fundamental economic triggering process that can explain variations in stock prices. The results, based on analyzing 40 quarters of data, generally support the hypotheses that change in stock prices are associated with changes in production level, and that stock prices fall (rise) when the firm operates in supra (sub) critical production levels.

This study aims to improve the reliability of emergency safety barriers by using the subjective safety analysis based on evidential reasoning theory in order to develop on a framework for optimizing the reliability of emergency safety barriers.

The emergency event tree analysis is combined with an interval type-2 fuzzy-set and analytic hierarchy process (AHP) method. In order to the quantitative data is not available, this study based on interval type2 fuzzy set theory, trapezoidal fuzzy numbers describe the expert's imprecise uncertainty about the fuzzy failure probability of emergency safety barriers related to the liquefied petroleum gas storage prevent. Fuzzy fault tree analysis and fuzzy ordered weighted average aggregation are used to address uncertainties in emergency safety barrier reliability assessment. In addition, a critical analysis and some corrective actions are suggested to identify weak points in emergency safety barriers. Therefore, a framework decisions are proposed to optimize and improve safety barrier reliability. Decision-making in this framework uses evidential reasoning theory to identify corrective actions that can optimize reliability based on subjective safety analysis.

A real case study of a liquefied petroleum gas storage in Algeria is presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methodology. The results show that the proposed methodology provides the possibility to evaluate the values of the fuzzy failure probability of emergency safety barriers. In addition, the fuzzy failure probabilities using the fuzzy type-2 AHP method are the most reliable and accurate. As a result, the improved fault tree analysis can estimate uncertain expert opinion weights, identify and evaluate failure probability values for critical basic event. Therefore, suggestions for corrective measures to reduce the failure probability of the fire-fighting system are provided. The obtained results show that of the ten proposed corrective actions, the corrective action “use of periodic maintenance tests” prioritizes reliability, optimization and improvement of safety procedures.

This study helps to determine the safest and most reliable corrective measures to improve the reliability of safety barriers. In addition, it also helps to protect people inside and outside the company from all kinds of major industrial accidents. Among the limitations of this study is that the cost of corrective actions is not taken into account.

Our contribution is to propose an integrated approach that uses interval type-2 fuzzy sets and AHP method and emergency event tree analysis to handle uncertainty in the failure probability assessment of emergency safety barriers. In addition, the integration of fault tree analysis and fuzzy ordered averaging aggregation helps to improve the reliability of the fire-fighting system and optimize the corrective actions that can improve the safety practices in liquefied petroleum gas storage tanks.

This study aims to investigate the interactive network of risk factors in the construction and preparation project of gas condensate storage tanks in the presence of sanctions.

First, this paper determines and weighs the project goals using the stepwise weight assessment ratio analysis method. Then, this study identifies and categorizes the project risks and form the network of the project risk factors based on the weight of the project goals by using interpretive structural modeling and decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory techniques.

The results of the current work divide the risks of such projects into five financial, technical, managerial and contractual, social and environmental and political categories. The analyzes indicate the complicated risk network and the cause-and-effect interactions between the risks. The findings identify the financial and political risk clusters as the most effective category and select the technical, managerial and contractual and social and environmental risk clusters as the most affected categories. The technical risk has the least important among the others under the sanction conditions.

This paper model the domino effect of the risk factors considering the complicated interactions and the cause-and-effect relations in a network. Moreover, this study discusses the importance of the risk factors in oil and gas megaprojects in the presence of sanctions. Finally, this paper applies the proposed approach to a real case study in the field of gas projects.

This study seeks to illustrate empirically how person‐situation variants influence customer assessments of service quality across multiple stages in the service drama.

Using surveys that were systematically distributed to 3,000 passengers boarding 30 different flights (with 432 complete responses), the effects of consumption motive (hedonic versus utilitarian) and service duration (shorter versus longer service encounters) were examined in relationship to perceived time pressure within a multiple‐sequence service encounter.

The results indicate that the consumption motives (utilitarian‐hedonic) of passengers do influence perceptions of service quality, as well as altering perceived time pressure resulting from service delays. Also, the length of the service duration moderates the negative effects of time pressure on perceived service quality.

Extrapolating the findings from this research to other service industries should be done with care given that consumption motives and perceived time pressures may vary greatly across different service industries.

This study suggests that managers must develop systemic solutions to service delays during early stages of the encounter as such delays may prompt a “domino effect” that transcends all subsequent stages in the service encounter. Service encounters that are longer in duration may also be more susceptible to critical service evaluations if these delays are not rectified.

This study demonstrates the critical issue of measuring service quality during each successive stage of a service encounter.

This study aims to critically review and analyse the classification of supply chain risks and disruptions and thereby suggest a suitable method for classifying maritime risks. It aims to discuss the propagation effects of port disruption on the supply chain and mitigation strategies.

In addition to secondary research, six semi-structured interviews were conducted with the management personnel of two terminal operators, two shipping lines and two insurance companies.

When a port disruption happens, the most immediate impact is the adverse effects on terminal operations. It also leads to a domino effect on other parties in the supply chain including shippers and consignees, shipping companies, inter-modal transport providers and other ports. Proper risk management needs to be embraced by the supply chain members. However, there is very little or no such collaboration between the supply chain members in practice.

This article proposes a more integrative approach in assessing various kinds of risks, and more research in this area to be done for Asia.

Risk management has been the concern for many stakeholders ranging from industry practitioners to the people who are affected by the maritime business throughout the world. The maritime industry should look into risk management in the maritime logistics and supply chain context instead of dealing with risk in isolation.

There is a serious lack of research for analysing supply chain disruptions with ports as a focal point. The paper contributes by filling the research gap.

The research approach is based on the concept that a failure event is rarely random and is often generated by a chain of previous events connected by a sort of domino effect. Thus, the purpose of this study is the optimal selection of the components to predictively maintain on the basis of their failure probability, under budget and time constraints.

Assets maintenance is a major challenge for any process industry. Thanks to the development of Big Data Analytics techniques and tools, data produced by such systems can be analyzed in order to predict their behavior. Considering the asset as a social system composed of several interacting components, in this work, a framework is developed to identify the relationships between component failures and to avoid them through the predictive replacement of critical ones: such relationships are identified through the Association Rule Mining (ARM), while their interaction is studied through the Social Network Analysis (SNA).

A case example of a process industry is presented to explain and test the proposed model and to discuss its applicability. The proposed framework provides an approach to expand upon previous work in the areas of prediction of fault events and monitoring strategy of critical components.

The novel combined adoption of ARM and SNA is proposed to identify the hidden interaction among events and to define the nature of such interactions and communities of nodes in order to analyze local and global paths and define the most influential entities.

The purpose of this paper is to describe the complicated characteristics of the environment, the relationship between complicated organization and organizational transformation, and the coupling domino effect between the complication of external environment and organizational complexity by making conceptual systematic analysis.

The relative stability and certainty of the organizational structure are being replaced by uncertainty and complexity. Organizational learning and its reform are becoming all the more important to gain organizational competitive advantage. This paper designs the system analysis method to discuss the complexity of organizational environment, the relationship between organizational complexity and organizational structure reform, and also the coupling effect of the complexity of external environment and that of the organization.

It is found that organizational learning, the ways of strategic reform, and the focal point must remain consistent under the complicated environment.

The main limitation is how to construct the mathematical models describing complicated characteristics of the environment.

The paper contains very useful advice for human resource managers.

The paper focuses on the selection of learning patterns and strategic management of different organizational learning and the reform of organizational structure.

Growing social concerns and ecological issues accelerate firms’ environmental, social and governance (ESG) engagement. Hence, this study aims to advance the existing literature by focusing on the interplay between institutional and firm governance mechanisms for greater ESG engagement. More specifically, the authors investigate whether public governance stimulates excessive ESG engagement and whether corporate governance moderates this relationship.

Using a sample of 43,803 firm-year observations affiliated with 41 countries and 9 industries, the authors adopt a country, industry and year fixed-effects regression analysis.

The authors find that public governance strength via its six dimensions stimulates excessive ESG engagement. This implies that firms in countries with strong voice and accountability, political stability, government effectiveness, regulatory quality, rule of law and control of corruption are more motivated for ESG engagement. Furthermore, corporate governance negatively moderates the relationship between all public governance dimensions (except political stability) and excessive ESG engagement. This implies that public governance and corporate governance are substitutes for encouraging firms to commit to ESG. Further tests reveal that whereas these results in the baseline analyses are valid for developed countries, they are not valid in emerging markets.

The findings support the interplay between institutional and agency theories. In countries with strong (weak) institutional mechanisms, corporate governance becomes weak (strong) in inciting greater stakeholder engagement. This implies that the public governance mechanism alleviates agency costs, rendering internal mechanisms of corporate governance noncompulsory for ESG engagement.

The findings suggest that emerging countries need to reinforce their institutions for greater accountability, regulatory quality and control of corruption, which will have a domino effect on firms in addressing stakeholder expectations. The results also advise emerging country firms to augment their internal monitoring mechanisms for greater stakeholder engagement, such as structuring boards and establishing corporate social responsibility mechanisms, committees and policies.

This study contributes to the recent literature investigating the role of corporate governance mechanisms in excessive ESG engagement. The study also explores whether public governance is associated with greater ESG involvement and provides a comprehensive analysis of the association between six indicators of public governance quality and excessive ESG practices in developed and emerging economies.

The multilateral liberalisation of trade in education under the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) has achieved little progress. In a bid to overcome this lacklustre education trade liberalisation under the World Trade Organization (WTO), the purpose of this paper is to examine education trade bilateralism between Australia and India as an alternative to multilateralism. The end is to maximise bilateral trade liberalisation in education as a means to facilitate dynamic productivity gains, export opportunities, market competition, and FDI in the sector. The combined effect of this bilateralism would help accelerate economic growth in both countries, which is likely to generate domino effects on other WTO members, thereby contributing to the multilateral liberalisation of trade in services under the WTO.

The research methodology is analytical, based on pertinent empirical and secondary information.

Strong complementarities and synergies are found for the integration of trade in education services between Australia and India. Of the major exporters of education services, Australia enjoys the most competitive edge and comparative advantage in the Asia‐Pacific. India faces strong demands for quality education services due to its economic reforms and expansion requiring knowledge‐based workforce for high efficiency and productivity and has become a major importer of education services in the region.

The paper identifies new means of consolidating Australia and India's existing trade, niche areas of further opportunities, and potential challenges to be confronted for greater economic integration through trade in education. The originality of the paper lies in its core message that education trade bilateralism can be a valuable stepping stone, in many instances, to multilateral trade in education.