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Supply chain flexibility has been acknowledged as a necessity in the context of constantly changing operational and service requirements in the global marketplace. However, limited research has focused on analyzing and empirically testing the dynamics of achieving enhanced flexibility performance. Drawing upon the knowledge-based view of the firm, the purpose of this paper is to address this research gap by introducing supply chain learning (SCL) and integration as key factors in the process.

Survey data were collected in India. Structural equation modeling technique was used as the main analysis method to test the proposed conceptual model on SCL, integration, and flexibility performance.

Research findings indicate that the supply chain integration construct (in its internal and external dimensions) mediates the proposed SCL-flexibility performance relationship. The analysis also confirms the positive relationship between cross-functional integration and inter-firm integration.

Focusing on only one country may limit the generalizability of the findings. Also, cross-sectional data collection may not be the ideal approach for evaluating the impacts of SCL. Therefore, future research with longitudinal data and in different contexts is warranted to validate the research results of this study.

The proposed conceptual model adds to the limited existing knowledge body of SCL and links SCL, integration, and flexibility performance. It also provides a new venue for future research in this area.

The purpose of this paper is to empirically investigate the antecedents and impacts of a largely overlooked concept, employee development, within the challenging area of returns management.

The proposed relationships are validated through structural equation modeling analysis with survey data collected in India.

Combining the ability–motivation–opportunity model in human resource management and the theoretical tenets associated with dynamic capabilities, the authors confirmed that supply chain learning, returns management orientation and information support are important antecedents of returns management employee development. In turn, the findings suggest that, as a dynamic capability, returns management employee development positively impacts a firm’s returns management and market performance.

To successfully tackle the challenges related to handling returns, companies must focus their resources not only on new technologies and related processes, but also on employee training and development as well.

Although recruiting and retaining talent in supply chain management has long been recognized as a serious global challenge, no previous research has empirically studied employee development practices in the returns management context.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze how the Intellectual Capital perspective can be altered in order to include ethically questionable practices of knowledge acquisition.

The paper explores the relationship between formal and illicit forms of intellectual capital acquisition through a case study of the Formula 1 industry. The paper is based on secondary data from public sources.

Ethically questionable practices are a part of the knowledge economy. In the case study, the view on what was ethical and accepted was changed due to uncovered practices of espionage.

Firms in knowledge‐intensive industries often employ unrecognized informal channels for intellectual capital acquisition. Managers should consider the boundary between right and wrong in their particular industry, and whether they have the tools for dealing with ethically questionable practices.

The paper suggests a complementary interpretation of the Formula 1 industry not only as a best‐practice case of how community and trust knowledge spillovers facilitate innovation, but also how ethically questionable practices of intellectual capital acquisition exist as an accepted part of the process.

To explain how an organization has been able to use seismic changes in its wider external environment to transform its performance without the need for radical internal restructuring or coercive forms of leadership.

This paper utilises a three year case study from elite sport, an under‐represented sector in the management literature but one that offers a fascinating view of change.

Whilst the change management literature typically emphasises dramatic and rapid coercive restructuring accompanying open‐ended environment change, this study found that known routines and historical ways of working existed alongside innovation, risk‐taking and learning; the paradoxical foundation upon which performance flourished.

Although the dangers of single cases are noted, difficulties regarding access and comparability with other similar organizations prevented a similar degree of focus on multiple cases. Future research either within elite sports teams or other organizations facing similar environmental change is needed to extend and enhance the asset maximization model presented here.

This analysis and the development of an asset maximisation approach questions the traditional processual or design‐based approaches towards managing change and argues for the capture and incorporation of business and strategic decision making within such accounts.

The paper is a rare account of change within elite sports. The asset maximisation approach developed within this case study illustrates how holistic value creation in turbulent times is achieved. As such, its conclusions will have much to offer organizations as well as academics interested in the management of change.

The main policy discourses in education in Sweden now emphasise personal flexibility, creativity, responsibility for learning and freedom of choice for learners and the aim to produce creative, motivated, alert, inquiring, self-governing and flexible users and developers as opposed to just recipient reproducers of knowledge. These curriculum ideas are reflected in National Curricula (such as Lpo 94; Lpf 94) in statements relating to such things as “students developing capacities to take personal responsibility for learning…by taking part in planning and evaluation and by choosing courses, subjects, themes and activities” (Lpo 94, p. 85). However they derive from policy writing at the political level of the education system internationally (Zackari, 2001) as exemplified in writing such as OECD (1992) and (1995), which states that individual schools should create their own profiles and help individual pupils to influence the content of their studies’ (OECD, 1995, s. 137) and exhort the “willingness and ability of individual citizens and families to take responsibility for choices and priorities of their own” (OECD, 1995, s. 86). These ideas have filtered through things like official national propositions (Dir. 1991, p. 117; SOU, 1992, p. 94) and reports (e.g. Skolverkets rapport 1999, p. 443) to the arenas of action comprised by schools and colleges, where they are developed into new working aims for our modern schools and are described as contributing toward a new school vision (see also Lundahl, 2001).

There are certain accepted points that influence ethnographic work, even though they do not condition or fully determine it. They include the notion that in order to develop theories about human life, an ethnographer must study human activities and the way people interpret their realities in their every-day context and must also identify and then synthesise the conditions of the field, the perspectives of the participants, the latent meanings of the context and the researcher's own ideas for the grounding, generation and expansion of propositions about what is actually going on in the events and places researched. In this process, foreshadowed problems are accepted to frame the initial focus, but producing and analysing materials from multiple sources and perspectives are also important in order to prevent over-steering from private ideas and concepts. Once formed, ethnographic propositions, descriptions or theories are explored and tested in terms of their general scope against further data. Ethnographic field-notes are one of the most important foundations in this activity.

The paper advocates a Darwinian explanation of the process of firm transformation. Existing but generally opposing views related to the selection‐adaptation debates are united to consider the dialogic nature of both approaches. It is argued that a Darwinian approach, as opposed to a neo‐Darwinian or Lamarckian approach, provides the means to scale the sides of a debate that has for too long divided scholars interested in firm and industry transformation.

The paper addresses three specific issues to develop its Darwinian argument. First, the various works of Geoff Hodgson that have for many years advanced Darwin's evolutionary ideas are used to argue the nature and application of Darwinism in the socio‐economic domain. Second, the nature of what constitutes the elements of firm‐environment interaction is considered to establish basic areas of focus through which the process of firm transformation is more understandable. Finally, the construct absorptive capacity is likened to a mechanism of transmission through which the learning processes associated with the acquisition of favoured variations can be reconciled with the generic evolutionary processes of variation, selection, and retention.

To understand the process of firm learning, the role of habits and routines must be outlined in specific detail. They cannot be assumed to perform interacting and replicating roles simultaneously. To do so undermines the fundamental qualities of an evolutionary theory.

The preliminary framework advanced takes us beyond the Darwinian‐Lamarckian debate and provides elements of focus from which a greater understanding of the process of firm/industry transformation is possible.

The authors consider current policy debates in the UK about the professionalisation of the police to respond to changing patterns of crime and, specifically, the suggestion that officers be educated to degree level. Drawing on the ethnographic evidence, the purpose of this paper is to focus attention on how officers learn, and continue to develop the applied, that is the craft aspects of the work of uniformed constables.

The authors draw on a long-term ethnographic project observing officers during the course of their duties. The focus is on the use of discretion and of particular powers. But in the course of the research, the authors also observe the way officers behave and the way they talk about their job.

The authors suggest that, while there may be a role for degree qualifications, attention needs to be paid to the practices the authors observe, practices that have long been the core craft skills of uniformed officers.

The authors suggest that, despite the emergence of cybercrime and other new forms of crime/threat, the evidence suggests that much has not. Not least, crime is not the only focus of police work.

Within current educational management literature, it could be argued that the cultural perspective that is generally articulated is one in which the social context of education policy, school culture and educational management is almost entirely overlooked (Angus, 1996). The emphasis is typically on individual school ‘leaders’ and an internally constructed organizational culture in which principals are expected to become manipulators of culture and belief. School principals, in this literature, and in current government policy in many countries, are expected to construct or impose corporate control within their institutions in the increasingly decentralized organizational form that is considered necessary for organizational efficiency and, most importantly, market success and legitimacy in the increasingly complex post-industrial society (Parker, 1992). My general argument is that this perspective misconceives culture as an internal aspect of organizations that may be manipulated by management in order to enhance organizational commitment and efficiency (Caldwell & Spinks, 1993, 1998; Deal & Peterson, 1999).