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The authors' research examines how negative electronic word-of-mouth (e-WOM) alters focal customers' post-recovery justice perceptions and attitudes to determine their future behavior with the service provider. Specifically, this paper develops and tests a conceptual model to investigate how negative e-WOM alters focal customers' perceptual and attitudinal outcomes after the service recovery experience. It also examines the post-recovery effect of negative e-WOM on focal customers’ willingness to patronize the service after their recovery experience.

To test the hypotheses, two pretests and two experimental studies with created scenarios in the retail context were conducted.

The authors' findings reveal that services are judged during and well beyond failure and recovery occurrences. To maintain a loyal customer base, service managers should develop processes that address service complaints both within and beyond the service consumption stage. The authors also find that despite a favorable recovery, focal customers gravitate toward the failure experience and develop unfavorable attitudes toward the service provider, leading to likely defections.

The authors' research demonstrates the persuasive power of negative e-WOM at the post-service recovery stage, making a unique contribution to the service recovery literature. This research also contributes to the persuasive effect of negative e-WOM, demonstrating message context as a boundary condition of negative e-WOM effects. In general, the authors' work highlights the importance of understanding the psychological processes involved in eliciting the persuasive influence of negative e-WOM in the post-service recovery stage that may lead to the defection of “so-called” successfully recovered customers.

An emerging body of literature has pinpointed the role of supply chain structure in influencing the extent to which supply chain members disclose information about their internal practices and performance. Nevertheless, empirical research investigating the effects of firm-level relational embeddedness on network-level transparency still lags. Drawing on social network analysis, this research examines the effect of relational embeddedness on supply chain transparency and the contingent role of digitalization in the context of environmental, social and governance (ESG) information disclosure.

In their empirical analysis, the authors collected secondary data from the Bloomberg database about 2,229 firms and 14,007 ties organized in 107 extended supply chains. The authors employed supplier and customer concentration metrics to measure relational embeddedness and performed multiple econometric models to test the hypothesis.

The authors found a positive effect of supplier concentration on supply chain transparency, but the effect of customer concentration was not significant. Additionally, the digitalization of focal firms reinforced the impact of supplier concentration on supply chain transparency.

The study findings contribute by underscoring the critical effect of relational embeddedness on supply chain transparency, extending prior literature on social network analysis, providing compelling evidence for the intersection of digitalization and supply chain management, and drawing important implications for practices.

This research investigates whether focal firms employ strategic supply chain information disclosure, focusing on the concealment of supplier and customer identities, as part of their supply chain environmental risk management strategies (supplier sustainability risk and customer loss risk, respectively).

Using a panel dataset of Chinese listed firms from 2009 to 2019 and utilizing the suppliers’ environmental punishment of peer firms (peer events) as an exogenous shock and employing ordinary least squares (OLS) estimation, this study conducts a regression analysis to test how focal firms disclose the identities of their suppliers and customers.

Our results indicate that focal firms prefer to hide the identities of their suppliers and customers following the environmental punishment of peer firms’ suppliers. In addition, supplier concentration weakens the effect of withholding supplier identities, whereas customer concentration strengthens the effect of hiding customer identities. Mechanism analysis shows that firms hide supplier identities to avoid their reputation being affected and hide customer identities to prevent the deterioration of customers’ reputations and thus impact their market share.

Our study reveals that reputation spillover is another crucial factor in supply chain transparency. It is also pioneering in applying the anonymity theory to explain focal firms’ information disclosure strategy in supply chains.

This research investigates the role of customer forgiveness as the result of online service recovery transparency in predicting customer engagement. It also examines the moderating roles of timeliness and personalization in this proposed model.

An online survey study using retrospective experience sampling and a scenario-based experimental study were conducted to test the proposed hypotheses.

Customer forgiveness positively influences customer engagement and plays a mediating role in the relationship between service recovery transparency and customer engagement. Additionally, timeliness and personalization moderate the positive influence of service recovery transparency on customer forgiveness. The positive influence of service recovery transparency on customer forgiveness is more apparent when levels of timeliness and personalization decrease.

To retain focal customers' engagement after a service failure, firms must obtain their forgiveness. One of the firm's online complaint handling strategies to increase the forgiveness level of focal customers is to provide a high level of service recovery transparency (i.e. responding to their complaints in a public channel), especially when the firm is unable to respond to online complaints quickly or provide highly personalized responses.

This research provides new insights into the underlying mechanism of customer engagement by applying the concept of customer forgiveness. It also contributes to the social influence theory by applying the essence of the theory to explain how other customers' virtual presence during the online complaint handling influences the forgiveness of focal customers in order to gain their engagement. Additionally, it provides insight into the conditions under which the role of service recovery transparency can be very effective in dealing with online complaints.

Service failures usually occur in front of third-party customers. Third-party customers react emotionally and behaviorally to service failure and recovery efforts aimed at focal customers. However, there is a gap in the literature on how third-party customers react to a service failures incident and a recovery over another customer, depending on how socially close or distant they are from. This study investigates the effect of third-party customers' emotions on consumer forgiveness, negative word-of-mouth (WoM) and repatronage intentions in the service recovery process by comparing close and distant third-party customers.

This study utilizes a 2 (social distance to the focal customer: close, distant) × 2 (service recovery: yes, no) between-subjects design. The authors used a scenario-based experiment to test the proposed hypotheses. A total of 576 respondents were involved in the study.

The results from the authors' scenario-based experimental study show that positive and negative emotions felt by distant third-party customers are higher than those of close third-party customers. In addition, the effect of positive emotions on customer forgiveness is more substantial for distant third-party customers. Third, moderated-mediation analysis indicates that social distance has a moderator effect only on the relationship between positive emotions and customer forgiveness.

This study contributes to the service literature by comparing socially close and socially distant third-party customers' reactions to service failure and recovery attempts.

This study aims to explore how relationship trust and different types of influence strategy (i.e., non-coercive and coercive influence strategy) impact green customer integration (GCI), while investigating the moderating mechanisms of big data development and social capital.

Following hierarchical linear regression analysis, the authors examine hypothesized relationships by combining survey data from 206 Chinese manufacturers with secondary data.

The results show that relationship trust positively affects non-coercive influence strategy, while its impact on coercive influence strategy is insignificant. Non-coercive influence strategy has an inverted U-shaped impact on GCI. Furthermore, big data development flattens the inverted U-shaped relationship between non-coercive influence strategy and GCI. Conversely, social capital steepens the inverted U-shaped relationship between non-coercive influence strategy and GCI.

This study sheds light on managers on how to involve customers in GCI through friendly strategies that favor the involvement of customers and the willingness to develop environmentally friendly initiatives.

Although GCI has received widespread attention, how it can be enhanced remains unclear. These findings provide novel insights into the emerging GCI literature and complement social exchange theory.

Research on the relationship between customer bargaining power and supplier performance in supplier–customer relationships has flourished in recent decades. This study aims to empirically investigate whether product market overlap (PMO) in a supply chain moderates the effect of customer bargaining power on supplier profitability.

This study uses large-scale secondary data from multiple databases. Econometric panel data techniques are used to test the hypotheses.

The results show that PMO in a supplier–customer relationship and PMO in supplier–supplier relationships both exacerbate the negative effect of the bargaining power of customers on supplier profitability.

This study contributes to the field of supply chain management. This study brings new insights into the ongoing debate surrounding the relationship between customer bargaining power and supplier profitability. The study also contributes to the literature on supply chain networks by showing the impact of indirect supply chain relationships.

Climate change requires the reduction of direct and indirect greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, a task that seems to clash with increasing supply chain complexity. This study aims to analyse the upstream supply chain complexity dimensions suggesting the importance of understanding the information processing that these may entail. Reducing equivocality can be an issue in some dimensions, requiring the introduction of written guidelines to moderate the effects of supply chain complexity dimensions on GHG emissions at the firm and supply chain level.

A three-year panel data was built with information obtained from Bloomberg, Trucost and Compustat. Hypotheses were tested using random effect regressions with robust standard errors on a sample of 394 SP500 companies, addressing endogeneity through the control function approach.

Horizontal complexity reduces GHG emissions at the firm level, whereas vertical and spatial complexity dimensions increase GHG emissions at the firm and supply chain level. Although the introduction of written guidelines neutralises the negative effects of vertical complexity on firm and supply chain GHG emissions, it is not sufficient in the presence of spatial complexity.

This paper offers novel insights by suggesting that managers need to reconcile the potential trade-off effects on GHG emissions that horizontally complex supply chain structures can present. Their priority in vertically and spatially complex supply chain structures should be to reduce equivocality.

Research examining the joint role of serial acquisitions and subsidiary autonomy in holistic value provision within servitizing industrial firms is scarce. Thus, this paper aims to investigate the role of serial acquisition and subsidiary autonomy in providing value within servitizing industrial networks.

A conceptual framework is developed based on the case study of a large Swedish industrial group specializing in selling industrial products and providing industrial solutions to business customers through its numerous subsidiaries.

The analysis of 14 interviews with the five subsidiaries and seven customer firms and secondary data reveals interesting findings concerning the role of serial niche acquisition strategy and subsidiary autonomy in customer value provision in servitizing organizations. In particular, the authors find that the role of acquisitions in industrial firms extends beyond growth to customer sensing and proximity. Likewise, the authors find that subsidiary autonomy facilitates value provision to customers in industrial networks.

The paper provides a more nuanced understanding of how serial acquisitions and subsidiary autonomy are intertwined and jointly affect industrial firms’ value provision activities amidst the servitization transition in an intraorganizational network.

Previous literature on sustainable supply chain management has largely adopted an instrumental view of stakeholder management and has focused on understanding the effect of powerful stakeholders who have a more decisive influence on an organization's supply chain decisions. Social enterprises have emerged as organizations that often aim to create impact by integrating marginalized stakeholders into their operations and supply chains. This study examines the trade-offs that social enterprises experience due to their moral stance toward stakeholder engagement, evidenced in their commitment to serving marginalized stakeholders, as well as the responses adopted to these trade-offs.

The study follows a theory elaboration approach through a multiple case study design. The authors draw on insights from stakeholder theory and use the empirical insights to expand current constructs and relationships in a novel empirical context. Based on an in-depth analysis of primary and secondary qualitative data on ten social enterprises, the authors examine how these organizations integrate marginalized stakeholders into various roles in their operations.

When integrating marginalized customers, suppliers and employees, social enterprises face affordability, reliability and efficiency trade-offs. Each trade-off represents conflicts between the organization's needs and the needs of marginalized stakeholders. In response to these trade-offs, social enterprises choose to internalize the costs through slack creation or vertical integration or externalize the costs to stakeholders. The ability to externalize is contingent on the growth orientation of the organization and the presence of like-minded B2B (Business-to-Business) customers. These responses reflect whether organizations accept the trade-offs at the expense of one or more stakeholders or if they avoid the trade-offs and find mutually beneficial solutions.

Building on the empirical insights, the authors elaborate on stakeholder theory with a focus on the integration of marginalized stakeholders by emphasizing a moral justification for stakeholder engagement, identifying the nature of the underlying trade-offs which can arise when various stakeholder needs are in conflict and examining the contingencies affecting organizational responses to these trade-offs.