Search results

Future is rarely explicitly addressed or problematized in business network research. This study aims to examine the possibilities of developing a business actor’s future orientation to network studies and imports ideas and concepts from futures research to support the development.

The study is conceptual and interdisciplinary. The authors critically analyze how extant studies grounded in the sensemaking view and process research approach integrate future time and how theoretical myopia hinders the adoption of a future orientation.

The prevailing future perspective is restricted to managers’ perceptions and actions at present, ignoring the anticipation and exploration of alternative longer-term futures. Future time is generally conceived as embedded in managers’ cognitive processes or is seen as part of the ongoing interaction, where the time horizon to the future is not noticed or is at best short.

To enable a forward-looking perspective, researchers should move the focus from expectation building in business interaction to purposeful preparation of alternative future(s) and from the view of seeing future as enacted in the present to envisioning of both near-term and more distant futures.

This study addresses the growing need of business actors to anticipate future developments in the rapidly changing market conditions and to innovate and change business practices to save the planet for future generations.

This study elaborates on actors’ future orientation to business markets and networks, proposes the integration of network research concepts with concepts from futures studies and poses new types of research questions for future research.

The purpose of this paper is to nurture reflections on the colonization of the future in the present with a particular focus on Africa. This paper aims at exploring how participatory research and particularly anticipatory action research can contribute to a decolonising process.

Considering the future as a public good, this paper develops a reflection on the colonization processes that can turn it into a club or a private good. This paper mobilizes the notions of participatory knowledge production and local action research as a way to decolonize the future and empower imagination. This paper revisits the tenets of participatory action research as a means to achieve this objective and discusses the main features of a non-colonial anticipatory action research in the context of African futures.

This paper highlights the challenges associated with connecting anticipatory endeavours focusing on action research, the creation of collective intelligence and co-design, with the intention of encouraging the decolonisation process. It includes design principles and anticipates a possible process of counter-decolonization.

This is a conceptual paper, which does not provide field-tested evidence. Yet, the authors hope it serves as an input enabling to design methodologies that will prevent the colonisation of the future when engaging in future-oriented research activities in Africa and elsewhere.

This paper provides an integral approach to the colonisation of the future, as a renewed old question. This paper also connects this process with a reflection on the nature of what could be non-colonizing anticipatory action research.

The financial industry offers a unique setting to study innovations. Financial innovations have fueled the growth of economies, markets and societies. The financial industry has successfully become the breeding ground for innovative services, processes, business models and technologies. This study seeks to provide a holistic view of the literature on financial innovations, synthesize the research findings and offer future directions for research in light of three market developments that are disrupting the industry and opening up a new era for the financial services industry. Disruptions from within and outside the industry offer new generations of radically innovative services. Moreover, new generations of consumers differ from previous generations in their needs and wants and look for innovative ways to handle their financial needs. Finally, significant developments related to financial innovations have emerged in Asia and developing countries.

This study systematically reviews the academic research literature on financial innovations in two phases. The first phase provides a quantitative review of 546 journal articles published between 1990 and 2018. In the second phase, the study synthesizes the extant research on financial innovations and maps them in five research areas: firms' introduction and adoption of FIs, financial innovation development, the outcomes of financial innovations, regulations and intellectual property, and consumers.

The analysis found that disciplines differ with regard to the employed research methodologies, the units of analysis, sources of data and the innovations they examined. A positive trend in the number of published articles during this period is observed. However, studies have primarily focused on the USA and Europe and less so on other parts of the world. The literature synthesis further identifies research gaps in the available research that highlight future research opportunities in light of the three market disruptions. The financial services industry is on the brink of a new era due to disruptions from within and outside the industry and the entrance of new generations of consumers. Moreover, the financial industry has successfully become the breeding ground for innovative services, processes and business models. Therefore, financial innovations offer promising opportunities for bridging the gap between research on product and service innovations.

The work provides a holistic and systematic overview of extant research on financial innovations and highlights future research opportunities in light of the three disruptive market developments. It helps researchers take advantage of the opportunities in studying financial innovations while maintaining industry relevance.

The study is the first to review and synthesize the academic research literature on financial innovations across marketing, finance and innovation disciplines. In addition, the study highlights three primary disruptive forces in the financial industry and identifies future research directions in light of these disruptive forces.

The purpose of this study is to formulate exploratory scenarios of Operations Research through the critical uncertainty approach and Soft Systems Methodology.

In this study, to formulate plausible scenarios, the discipline of operation research internal and external experts’ opinions of this field have been gathered through Delphi approach and uncertainty questionnaires. After use of the most important uncertainties, plausible scenarios of operations research have been mapped with the help of experts through co-thinking workshops.

Four scenarios are presented in this study. These scenarios include Solar System, Esfandiar's Eye, Rival’s Setraps and Legendary Simurgh. Naturally, the imagination of such a unitary future for all academic communities is an expectation far from reality, and given the conditions of each of these futures or any integration of them is imaginable.

Operations Research models have been faced with variously multiple changes since its emergence until now. Investigation into the future of operations research on the necessity for his planning has not received a reasonable notice in the literature. Sporadic activities that have been carried out are also lacking in the necessary methodology. Also, there has been no research about future study using the soft Operation Research tools (Soft Systems Methodology).

The study provides the emergence and evolution of the socioemotional wealth (SEW) concept in the family business field from 2007 (the inception date) until 2021. To provide a better overview of this notion, the study unfolds a deeper understanding of this term throughout the systematic literature review (SLR).

The study applies a systematic literature review (SLR) by analyzing the sample of 185SEW articles extracted from the Scopus database. To identify all relevant studies, the article selection process was carefully designed and divided into two phases with clear steps: identification of studies via databases and identification of studies via previous studies' reference lists. Selected studies were analyzed using the Bibliometrix R-tool, resulting in an analysis of the evolution of the trends in the SEW literature, citation analysis, and network analysis. Finally, this SLR included the content analysis of the 25 most-cited SEW articles.

The study provides a relevant and comprehensive overview facilitating empirical and theoretical research in this field and paving the way to develop new themes. The bottom line of the important findings is that the SEW concept is relatively new, alluding to a wealthy venue for future works. Other results and implications are discussed on the family business and SEW theme. Additionally, the study provides suggestions which could be used for future works in this area.

This is the first article related to the SEW concept in the family business. It portrays a clear picture of this field, providing relevant information on what has been done, as well as what the future possibilities are that might bode the future horizons in family businesses.

Given that the literature in terms of business ambidexterity is continually growing, the of this paper is to identify the future research suggestions made by several authors with regard to ambidexterity and to group them into meaningful themes.

A systematic literature review (SLR) of peer reviewed journal articles in the field of ambidexterity was conducted. A total of 128 relevant articles were selected, which were published in 58 journals over the past 2 decades (2000–2021).

The plethora of the future research suggestions made by several authors with regard to ambidexterity are analytically presented. Moreover, based on these suggestions, meaningful future research themes were revealed and these were further classified into three broad categories, namely “factors influencing the adoption of ambidexterity and its success”, “the types of ambidexterity” and “the effects of ambidexterity”.

The subjectivity of grouping the future research suggestions into themes as well as not examining the interrelationships among these themes, are limitations of the present study. Based on these limitations, future literature review studies can be conducted.

As this is a SLR focusing on developing future ambidexterity research themes, there are no direct practitioner implications. However, practitioners may benefit from future research prompted by this SLR.

This study contributes to management literature by suggesting future research not only on organizational ambidexterity like previous studies, but also on four different approaches to ambidexterity.

This paper aims to address the potential of hunting humans as sport tourism activity in the twenty-second century. The paper explores past and current trends related to sport hunting, animal extinction, human violence and the normalisation of violence via fictional media. This paper paints a provocative picture of society with the aim of encouraging dialogue across the wider community regarding the challenges facing society in relation to practices related to sport hunting and tourism.

This paper takes a scenario narrative approach in presenting potential discussion on the future of sport hunting as a tourism activity. The importance of narrative writing as a method to research is its ability in telling a story to the reader. By embracing diverse philosophical methods, this research draws on past and current trends via secondary data sources to justify the future scenario narrative.

This paper presents interesting insights into the future of sport hunting and its potential relationship to tourism. However, considering the following quote, “Yet another uncertainty is that predictions themselves can alter the future – which, of course, is part of the motivation behind futurism” (Larson, 2002, p. 5), this paper concludes with a sobering message, if previous research as well as the ideas presented here are to become a future reality, one where humans hunt each other for sport, are we content to allow this to happen? Or do we want to encourage debate to ensure we create better futures?

This paper offers original and novel research within the sport-tourism literature by taking a futures perspective and applying a scenario narrative approach. The paper offers original insight into attitudes towards sport hunting and its future potential, moving away from its traditions of hunting animals to hunting humans. This paper encourages debate around a taboo-subject, by drawing on a popular past-time, sport. Death is also universal, and by aligning the topic with sport and as a hunting activity, this paper is offering original approaches to addressing difficult questions that need to be asked.

A literature review within the manufacturing strategy (MS) discipline with a focus on thematic developments is provided. Based on recent studies, a set of challenges posed to manufacturing enterprise of the future are summarized, and thematic areas are analyzed in relation to meeting those challenges. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

Based on a select set of 506 articles published in top-ranked refereed international journals in the discipline of operations management, major and subthemes are identified and the publication trends in these themes are provided with time and across geographical regions, namely: North America, Europe, and other parts of the world.

MS literature is predominantly focussed on the economic objectives of firms without a due focus on the social and environmental perspectives. MS literature covers 11 major thematic areas, namely: MS components and paradigms, manufacturing capabilities (MCs), strategic choices (SCs), best practices (BPs), the strategy process (SP), supply-chain management (SCM), performance measurement, transnational comparisons, global manufacturing, environmental/green manufacturing, and literature reviews. The research in two areas – SCs, and MCs – has been in decline, while the research in BPs, the SP, and transnational comparisons is growing (in absolute figures). Various research opportunities for future studies are identified.

The literature review is limited in its selection of articles and journals, however, the identified trends clarify the state of research by the MS research community at large.

For researchers, multiple new research directions are identified in order to advance knowledge in the field of MS. The publication trends also highlight thematic areas where most of the MS body of knowledge is currently available and can be utilized by practitioners.

The paper’s novelty comes from: first, a broader and deeper review of thematic areas that has not been researched before, second, trends in thematic areas by time, across geographical regions, and including time-region dyads, and third, coverage provided by MS literature in meeting challenges posed to manufacturing enterprise of the future.

This paper aims to explore the determinants of citizens’ future use of mobile applications provided by government. Research on citizen-initiated contacts with government has focused on both non-technology and technology related contacts. Existing research, however, has not examined the impact of mobile applications or “apps” on citizen-initiated contacts with government. Furthermore, existing research has not examined satisfaction with mobile government and whether this impacts future use.

The authors examine future use of mobile apps through an empirical analysis of a public opinion survey of citizen users in four of the largest cities in China (Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen).

Using ordered logistic regression analysis, this study found that the strongest predictors of future use were demand and satisfaction with mobile apps. However, there was no wide-scale evidence of socioeconomic status and age impacting mobile apps future use.

The findings in this study contribute to both theory and practice of the determinants of mobile government adoption.

The results challenge the citizen-initiated contact theory, as socioeconomic status was not a major predictor of mobile apps future use in China. The results further indicate that satisfaction was a good predictor of mobile apps future use.

The purpose of this paper is to identify the future research suggestions which have been made by several authors with regard to cost of quality (CoQ) and to group them into respective themes.

This study was based on a systematic literature review (SLR) of 97 peer-reviewed journal articles in the field of CoQ published in well-known academic databases, such as Emerald, Elsevier, SpringerLink, Taylor & Francis, Wiley and Scopus. The time horizon for reviewing the literature was 9 years, particularly in the period between 2010 and 2018. The “Affinity diagram” was applied to group the future research suggestions into logical themes and the “Pareto diagram” to further categorize and prioritize these themes.

A plethora of future research suggestions identified in the literature are analytically presented. Moreover, the analysis showed that the future research suggestions in the field of CoQ can be grouped under eleven meaningful themes, which are further categorized into two broad categories, meaning the vital and the useful.

This SLR was based on only fully accessed English articles published in international, peer-reviewed journals of the selected publishers. The restricted number of keywords used and the subjectivity in applying the “affinity diagram” are also limitations of this study.

This paper provides insights into the future research perspectives in the field of CoQ. Thus, this analysis can serve as a resource for both researchers and practitioners to further develop this area according to the future research suggestions and the respective themes revealed.

To the best of the authors' knowledge, this is the first SLR presenting and analyzing the future research suggestions of CoQ.