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The purpose of this paper is to explore how operations decision-making may keep the growing firms within the boundaries of corporate and societal sustainability.

The authors classify operations decisions during growth periods according to the three dimensions of the triple bottom line (economic, social and environmental). By means of a longitudinal case study of a family-owned wood construction firm that is in a process of intense growth, the authors identify, visually represent and analyse the complex sequences of selected managerial operations decisions.

The empirical data suggest that operations decisions made by managers during growth periods follow specific patterns. From the analysis, the authors derive various research propositions that investigate how a well-understood and therefore efficient and effective decision-making process can facilitate sustainable business growth.

The findings offer opportunities for future studies to zoom in on specific parts of the decision-making process during growth periods. Moreover, given the exploratory nature of this study, future research should test hypotheses derived from the research propositions.

This study investigates operations decision-making during growth, which is crucial for guiding companies through this complex transition phase.

This conceptual and empirical analysis explores new theory and contributes to the vastly under-researched subject of sustainable business growth.

Foreign governments do not always welcome international humanitarian organizations responding to a disaster in their country. Many governments even impose restrictions on humanitarian supply chains through import barriers, travel restrictions or excessive bureaucracy. The purpose of this paper is to analyze these restrictions and try to identify the government characteristics that best explain the tendency to impose such restrictions.

Through a multiple case study among four international humanitarian organizations the authors identify and analyze the restrictions imposed on humanitarian supply chains in 143 different programs. The authors compare the average number of restrictions per country with different governmental and socio-economic situational factors.

The authors find that state fragility, a combination of government ineffectiveness and illegitimacy, is the characteristic that best explains the tendency of a government to impose restrictions on humanitarian supply chains.

Knowing that fragile states tend to impose a high number of restrictions helps humanitarian organizations to prepare adequately before entering a country with a fragile government. The organization can, for example, anticipate possible concerns and establish trust with the government. Commercial companies starting to do business in such country can learn from this knowledge.

Multiple studies have mentioned the strong impact of governments on humanitarian supply chains, but no paper has yet analyzed this problem in detail. The paper is the first to identify the characteristics that explain the number of restrictions governments impose on humanitarian supply chains, and what humanitarian organizations can do to address them.

The purpose of this paper is to examine whether modular product design is an appropriate practice to improve manufacturers’ flexibility performance and cost performance as well as to evaluate whether combined effects of modular product design and delivery performance on flexibility performance and cost performance exist.

Structural equation modeling with moderating effects is used. Moderating effects allow an evaluation whether combined effects of modular product design and delivery performance exist. For the analysis, data from the international high-performance manufacturing survey are used.

Analysis results show a positive relationship between modular product design and cost performance, but do not show a significant moderating effect. Thus, no combined effect of modular product design and delivery performance exists in the data at hand.

A potential limitation of this study is the cross-sectional nature of the analysis. In order to test for causal relationships or chronological sequences, longitudinal data are deemed more suitable.

The findings make improvement processes more predictable and help managers to overcome traditional trade-off situations, especially in terms of flexibility performance and cost performance. Manufacturers are still neglecting the implementation of complementary methods for achieving an increase in flexibility while maintaining efficiency.

This paper complements prior research on the effect of improvement practices on operational performance dimensions. It also takes an alternative approach to examine whether a beneficial implementation sequence of improvement practices can be assumed.

Despite geographical proximity, major economic differences exist between Western European countries and the formerly socialist Eastern European countries. The main objective of this study is to develop a better understanding of internationalization decision processes in this specific context.

By means of multiple case study research, six Austrian and five Hungarian companies in order to extend and refine existing theory on internationalization decisions given the current situation in Central Europe are analyzed. In particular, the paper uses extant literature to build a conceptual framework from which we derive propositions as a basis and a guide for data collection and analysis.

In addition to cost considerations, process and product innovations are becoming increasingly important dimensions in explaining the reasons for internationalization projects. The reasons for internalization and solutions (relocated products and processes, entry mode and location) are closely interrelated.

Although this framework for the internationalization decision process is applied in a very specific context, the authors believe that the framework can also be very helpful in understanding these decision processes in a more general setting. In particular, companies in other regions where developed and emerging countries are relatively close to one another might be able to utilize our framework and results (in Asia or America).

In this paper, we first present the conceptual framework for the customer satisfaction‐oriented evaluation of process improvements that is embedded in an improvement cycle. The basic feature of the evaluation model is the relationship between the overall customer satisfaction value of a company and its process‐specific customer satisfaction values. The results of an empirical research project show that this model is an interesting alternative to traditional primarily finance‐oriented techniques for identifying potential process improvements. In the third part of the paper, some extensions of the model, based on the customer satisfaction‐oriented evaluation of process improvements, are discussed.

The purpose of this paper is to give an up‐to‐date and structured insight into the most recent literature on humanitarian logistics, and suggest trends for future research based on the gaps identified through structured content analysis.

The authors use a quantitative and qualitative content analysis process to analyse the characteristics of the existing literature, identifying the most studied topics in six structural dimensions, and presenting gaps and recommendations for further research.

It was found that existing humanitarian logistics research shows too little interest in continuous humanitarian aid operations, in slow onset disasters and man‐made catastrophes. While several papers address different phases of disasters, very few focus particularly on the reconstruction following a disaster. Empirical research is underrepresented in the existing literature as well.

While five of the authors’ structural dimensions are inspired by previous reviews, the sixth dimension (situational factors) is derived from a theoretical framework which the authors developed and which has never been tested before. The validity of the study could therefore be increased by testing this framework.

The authors analyse the broadest set of papers (174) ever covered in previous literature reviews on humanitarian logistics. A quantitative analysis of the papers was conducted in order to analyse the situational factors which have mostly been studied so far in literature. This paper is also the first in humanitarian logistics to use content analysis as the main methodology to analyse literature in a structured way, which is of particular value to the academic community as well as practitioners.