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The purpose of this paper is to explore the key influential factors and their implications on food supply chain (FSC) location decisions from a Thailand‐based manufacturer's view.

In total, 21 case studies were conducted with eight Thailand‐based food manufacturers. In each case, key influential factors were observed along with their implications on upstream and downstream FSC location decisions. Data were collected through semi‐structured interviews and documentations. Data reduction and data display in tables were used to help data analysis of the case studies.

This exploratory research found that, in the food industry, FSC geographical dispersion pattern could be determined by four factors: perishability, value density, economic‐political forces, and technological forces. Technological forces were found as an enabler for FSC geographical dispersion whereas the other three factors could be both barriers and enablers. The implications of these four influential factors drive FSC towards four key patterns of FSC geographical dispersion: local supply chain (SC), supply‐proximity SC, market‐proximity SC, and international SC. Additionally, the strategy of the firm was found to also be an influential factor in determining FSC geographical dispersion.

Despite conducting 21 cases, the findings in this research are based on a relatively small sample, given the large size of the industry. More case evidence from a broader range of food product market and supply items, particularly ones that have significantly different patterns of FSC geographical dispersions would have been insightful. The consideration of additional influential factors such as labour movement between developing countries, currency fluctuations and labour costs, would also enrich the framework as well as improve the quality and validity of the research findings. The different strategies employed by the case companies and their implications on FSC location decisions should also be further investigated along with cases outside Thailand, to provide a more comprehensive view of FSC geographical location decisions.

This paper provides insights how FSC is geographically located in both supply‐side and demand‐side from a manufacturing firm's view. The findings can also provide SC managers and researchers a better understanding of their FSCs.

This research bridges the existing gap in the literature, explaining the geographical dispersion of SC particularly in the food industry where the characteristics are very specific, by exploring the internationalization ability of Thailand‐based FSC and generalizing the key influential factors – perishability (lead time), value density, economic‐political forces, market opportunities, and technological advancements. Four key patterns of FSC internationalization emerged from the case studies.

The necessity of geographical accessibility between service provider and the customer has been essential for face‐to‐face contact in many service industries. However, the emergence of electronic commerce (EC) and new technologies has altered the concept of location and geographical accessibility of service industries in a traditional economy. This study developed factors representing characteristics of product/service processes and verified that those factors are significantly related to customer needs of geographical accessibility in the transactions of EC. In addition, it investigated the relationships with the reasons for customer needs of geographical accessibility. Data for analyses were collected through customer surveys and statistically analyzed through exploratory factor analysis, multiple regression analysis, and canonical correlation analysis.

This study aims to investigate the impacts of geographical proximity on social capital development through the inter-relationship between three social capital dimensions (structural, relational and cognitive dimension) and the knowledge sharing between small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). The authors empirically test a main hypothesis that the mechanism of social capital development that subsequently results in tacit knowledge sharing is different for SME buyer-supplier partners across their different geographical distances.

Multiple-group analysis in structural equation modeling (SEM) was conducted to test the research hypotheses using data collected from approximately 200 SMEs in Thailand’s food industry.

At a great geographical distance, the structural dimension impacts the cognitive dimension only in an indirect way through a relational dimension, which subsequently leads to knowledge sharing between SME buyer-supplier partners. At close geographical proximity, while the indirect impact of structural dimension on cognitive dimension through a relational dimension is still presented as it is in a great geographical distance, structural dimension has a positive and direct impact on the cognitive dimension as a complementary way to jointly reinforce knowledge sharing between SME partners. Among distant SME partners, the relational dimension shows a stronger impact on the cognitive dimension. In contrast, the direct influence of structural, relational and cognitive dimensions on knowledge sharing is identical, regardless of geographical distance.

The managers of SMEs can design their network-building approach in such a way that different location partners can enhance knowledge sharing. Policymakers could consider these results as a guideline when imposing SME development policies and geographical cluster policies in emerging economies.

This study provides empirical evidence that demonstrates how geographical proximity between SME partners in an emerging economy influences their social proximity through the lens of social capital development mechanism and thus leads to knowledge sharing between them.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a way of using already existing archival resources in the geographic information system (GIS).

The essence of the methodology used was to identify semantic relations of archival documents with geographical space and develop their metadata into spatially related metadata, ready to use in GIS and to join geographical names occurring in these metadata with exact places to which they were related to. Research was based on two digital collections from the Library of Contemporary History in Stuttgart on-line service. These collections were related to the First World War and they included metadata prepared in MAB standard.

As the results of the research, two sample metadata sets related to posters and ration coupons were developed. Thesauruses of coordinates of places and regions mentioned in documents metadata in different semantic context were also created. To complete the methodology, the assumptions of the GIS structure and concept of applying metadata in them, have been proposed.

The research also presents limitations in effective implementation of the proposed solutions, which lie mainly in lack of rules and consequences in recording geographical names in metadata.

The value of the proposed solution is easy way of using already existing data in GIS and possibilities of gathering, managing, presenting and analyzing archives with one parameter more than in traditional databases – with spatial information. The added value and an effective use of already collected data lies in the strong recommendation of defining and implementation of rules for recording geographical names in archival documents metadata. This will help in a wide use of collected data in any spatial-based solutions as well as in automation of process of joining archives with geographical space, and finally in dissemination of collected resources.

Loyalty of customers is an essential factor influencing the development of geographical indication products industry. The purpose of this paper is to construct a model to detect factors influencing customers’ loyalty on geographical indication products. With analysing four teas, i.e., Lu’an Gua Pian, Huoshan Huangya, Huangshan tribute chrysanthemum and Yuexi Cuilan, this paper measures the factors strengthening consumers’ loyalty and examines how much impact these factors have.

This paper is characterised as an exploratory research using the grey incidence analysis model and data are obtained by questionnaire survey.

In general, result of the analysis indicates that customer’s attitude towards its producing areas, perceived quality and cognition of the protection of geographical indications are the important factors that influence their loyalty towards geographical indication products. Detailed rank of their power that goes from highest to lowest is: customer’s attitude towards its producing areas, perceived quality and cognition of the protection of geographical indications. It also shows that the method of grey incidence analysis is adaptable to evaluate factors affecting consumers’ loyalty, which can make the result more persuasive and objective.

The authors construct a model from three aspects: customer’s attitude towards the producing areas of geographical indication products, the perceived quality and cognition of the protection of geographical indications. On the basis of this model, the authors analyse the factors which influence customer’s loyalty with grey incidence analysis.

Geographical query formulation is one of the key difficulties for users in search engines. The purpose of this study is to improve geographical search by proposing a novel geographical query reformulation (GQR) technique using a geographical taxonomy and word senses.

This work introduces an approach for GQR, which combines a method of query components separation that uses GeoNames, a technique for reformulating these components using WordNet and a geographic taxonomy constructed using the latent semantic analysis method.

The proposed approach was compared to two methods from the literature, using the mean average precision (MAP) and the precision at 20 documents (P@20). The experimental results show that it outperforms the other techniques by 15.73% to 31.21% in terms of P@20 and by 17.81% to 35.52% in terms of MAP.

According to the experimental results, the best created taxonomy using the geographical adjacency taxonomy builder contains 7.67% of incorrect links. This paper believes that using a very big amount of data for taxonomy building can give better results. Thus, in future work, this paper intends to apply the approach in a big data context.

Despite this, the reformulation of geographical queries using the new proposed approach considerably improves the precision of queries and retrieves relevant documents that were not retrieved using the original queries. The strengths of the technique lie in the facts of reformulating both thematic and spatial entities and replacing the spatial entity of the query with terms that explain the intent of the query more precisely using a geographical taxonomy.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the extent to which the geographical location of and thus the geographical distance between buyer and supplier impact on the efficacy of purchasing practices (i.e. strategic purchasing management, tactical purchasing management, relational purchasing management) in terms of operational performance.

The authors utilise cross-country data collected through the International Purchasing Survey group across a variety of countries and industry sectors. The authors conduct exploratory factor analysis to assess construct validity and regression analysis to test the varying effects of purchasing practices on operational performance. The authors split the sample to compare potential differences in the efficacy of purchasing practices between buyers and suppliers through geographical characteristics.

The results indicate that the efficacy of purchasing practices does indeed vary depending on differences in geographical location. Specifically, the authors identify that in cases where the buyer and supplier are located in the same country tactical and relational purchasing tools have a positive impact on operational performance. However, in cases where they are situated in different countries none of the purchasing tools seems to significantly improve operational performance.

Research that has taken a cross-country perspective on the efficacy of supply chain practices is surprisingly sparse. Since most supply chains are becoming more and more global it is important to consider the geographical location of the supply chain members when assessing the performance benefits of supply chain practices such as purchasing tools. Thus, the authors introduce and test the concept of geographical distance on the efficacy of purchasing practices at the dyadic level. To test the implications of geographical distance for purchasing practices the authors use a large-scale cross-country survey.

“It should also be noted that the objective of convergence and equal distribution, including across under-performing areas, can hinder efforts to generate growth. Contrariwise, the objective of competitiveness can exacerbate regional and social inequalities, by targeting efforts on zones of excellence where projects achieve greater returns (dynamic major cities, higher levels of general education, the most advanced projects, infrastructures with the heaviest traffic, and so on). If cohesion policy and the Lisbon Strategy come into conflict, it must be borne in mind that the former, for the moment, is founded on a rather more solid legal foundation than the latter” European Commission (2005, p. 9)Adaptation of Cohesion Policy to the Enlarged Europe and the Lisbon and Gothenburg Objectives.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the ways in which the geographical distance between headquarters and subsidiaries moderates the relationship between cultural intelligence and the knowledge transfer process.

A sample of 103 senior expatriate managers working in Croatia from several European and non-European countries was used to test the hypotheses. Data were collected using questionnaires, while the methodology employed to test the relationship between the variables was partial least square. Furthermore, interaction-moderation effect was utilized to test the impact of geographical distance and, for testing control variables, partial least square multigroup analysis was used.

Cultural intelligence plays a significant role in the knowledge transfer process performance. However, geographical distance has the power to moderate this relationship based on the direction of knowledge transfer. In conventional knowledge transfer, geographical distance has no significant impact. On the contrary, data have shown that, in reverse knowledge transfer, geographical distance has a moderately relevant effect. The authors supposed that these findings could be connected to the specific location of the knowledge produced by subsidiaries.

Multinational companies should take into consideration that the further away a subsidiary is from the headquarters, and the varying difference between cultures, cannot be completely mitigated by the ability of the manager to deal with cultural differences, namely cultural intelligence. Thus, multinational companies need to allocate resources to facilitate the knowledge transfer between subsidiaries.

The present study stresses the importance of cultural intelligence in the knowledge transfer process, opening up a new stream of research inside these two areas of research.

Geographic diversification results in the improvement of firm value through an increase in scale and scope of economies, gains in synergy, reduction in cost and improved corporate governance, however, the capabilities of financial institutions get heavily affected due to information asymmetries, varied macro and microeconomic factors across economies. In this context, the purpose of this paper is to empirically analyze the impact of geographical diversification on the performance of Indian Banks.

For an unbalanced panel data set of Indian Banks over the period 2001–2016, fixed effect model (FEM) with a distributed lag is used and tested for firm and time fixed effects. Further, the study also examines the role of bank size and ownership on the above association.

Findings of the study suggests that geographical diversification helps in increasing bank returns for the overall sample but does not have any significant impact on bank risk. For foreign and public banks, geographical diversification helps in increasing bank returns but does not have any significant impact on bank risk. This indicates toward the adverse selection, poor monitoring incentives in new markets and suggesting a lack of managerial skills.

The study indicates that while formulating the policies regarding branching and expansion these findings can serve as a guiding tool for managers and regulators. Findings have important implications for financial institution and policymakers in globalized financial markets.