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Agenda for knowledge creation within inter-project alliances and inter-firm supply chain networks has been extensively debated. However, the existing knowledge networks within consultant-supplier interfaces in the architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) industry seem to be vague, loose, incidental and insignificant. This study examines factors affecting knowledge networking intention (KNI) within construction service supply chain (CSSC) networks.

Data analysis was conducted on a quantitative survey of 161 consulting professional service firms in Tanzania, employing stepwise regression modelling as the statistical technique.

The results indicate that three types of knowledge inertia (KI) exert varying effects on KNI. While both procedural (PI) and learning inertia (LI) negatively impact KNI, experience inertia (EI) has no impact on KNI. In addition, knowledge governance (KG) mechanisms are found to strongly strengthen and leverage the negative effects of PI and LI on KNI and the positive link between EI and KNI within outbound and heterogeneous CSSC actors, with formal KG having greater leverage than informal KG.

The study offers guidance on how managers of PBOs should strategically orchestrate knowledge governance mechanisms within CSSC networks to leverage KI behaviours.

Current literature on KNI, KI and KG within CSSC networks offers a limited understanding of how KI behaviours influence KNI of project-based organizations (PBOs) in tapping vibrant outbound peripheral knowledge. The research presents two major original contributions. First, the empirical evidence contributes to deepening the current understanding of how heterogeneous external knowledge within consultant-supplier interactions is negatively influenced by KI. Lastly, the study suggests formal and informal knowledge governance strategies for managers on how to counteract KI forces, thus extending the theoretical debate on KNI, KI and KG literature.

In this paper, a systematic review of 284 articles published between 2015 and 2022 and a full-text thematic analysis of 70 selected articles was conducted to catalog and synthesize factors in a framework. Thematic analysis subsequently revealed 18 selective codes under three groups of drivers, barriers, and outcomes. These three groups were explained by four key aspects including organization, stakeholders, infrastructure, and business environment that set a framework for the digitalization of construction. The study finally concluded digitalization strategies with a focus on support mechanisms, government incentives, regulations, the transition from manual labor to technicians, organizational technology culture, methodology development, and innovation processes. Such strategies provide insight into prioritizing resources towards smooth digital transformation in construction businesses.

A two-stage methodology is adopted by undertaking a systematic literature review followed by thematic content analysis. This work concludes with an analysis of remaining research gaps and suggestions for potential future research.

In this paper, a systematic review of 284 articles published between 2015 and 2022 and a full-text thematic analysis of 70 selected articles was conducted to catalog and synthesize variables in a framework. Thematic analysis subsequently revealed a set of variables and factors describing construction digitalization under three groups of success factors, barriers, and outcomes. A critical content analysis of the representative studies was conducted to identify five future research trends as well as associated research gaps and directions on the topic.

This study contributes to practice by providing directions concerning the key strategies and priorities associated with the digitalization of construction businesses.

This ground-breaking research brings to light a classified set of factors that are important for the digitalization of construction businesses. The elicited framework contributes to the current body of knowledge by offering a unique conceptualization of both driving and adverse aspects for the seamless digital transformation of construction.

The aim of this research was to understand how governmental stakeholder engagement facilitates the sustainability of industrial engineering (IE) projects. A model for governmental stakeholder engagement activities is presented.

The authors relied on a single-case study of a mining project in Northern Europe, where a novel collaboration and engagement approach with governmental stakeholders was piloted in the project's front-end phase. The analysis focused on the collaborative practices through which the IE project investor engaged governmental stakeholders during the project's front-end phase and how the engagement contributed to solving challenges in the early planning and permitting process and achieving project plans that balanced economic, social and environmental aspects.

The findings show how four collaborative engagement practices reduced uncertainty and equivocality related to the legal sustainability requirements, enabled the development of sustainable design solutions and overall accelerated the permitting process without compromising the quality of final project plans.

The findings can be used to plan governmental stakeholder engagement and understand related challenges that need to be overcome. The study highlights the need to develop established practices and guidelines for governmental stakeholder engagement.

This study complements prior research on stakeholder engagement and project sustainability by developing an understanding of how governmental stakeholder engagement can be a key mechanism enabling the sustainability of IE project's end product. This research contributes to stakeholder theory by elaborating on a new stakeholder role, intermediary stakeholder.

The research problem in this study is how a client (as a project owner) should organise early stakeholder involvement and integration in the front-end phase of a project. This study aims to create normative managerial statements as propositions from the client's perspective and to combine them into a set of activities enabling efficient organisation in the front-end phase of a hospital construction project.

Action design research (ADR) was carried out in a large hospital construction project where the first author acted as an “involved researcher” and the other authors acted as “outside researchers”.

The authors created seven normative managerial propositions that were verified by the case project stakeholders and developed a managerial framework describing the client's essential stakeholder involvement and integration activities in the front-end phase of a hospital construction project based on these propositions. The authors have also depicted the subphases of the front-end phase: value definition phase in the client permanent organisation, value proposition phase in the client Programme Management Office (PMO) and finally development phase in the alliance organisation ending on the final investment decision.

The collaborative contract delivery model enables the early involvement and integration of stakeholders. It has been somewhat surprising to note the extent to which collaborative contracts change the client role in the project front-end. The results offer practical activities for how clients can manage front-end activities in collaborative contracts.

The case project offered a platform to analyse how the collaborative contract delivery model changes the emphasis of activities in the front-end of a project. One of the key benefits of collaborative contracts is that development, design and delivery occur partially in parallel, thereby enabling contributions from production to be included in the design and development. The benefit of having a real-life case under study provides the possibility to triangulate and analyse rich data, however limited by the qualitative case method.

The global market for cloud gaming is growing rapidly. How gamers evaluate the service quality of this emerging form of cloud service has become a critical issue for both researchers and practitioners. Building on the literature on service quality and software as a service, this study develops and validates a gamer-centric measurement instrument for cloud gaming service quality.

A three-step measurement instrument development process, including item generation, scale development and instrument testing, was adopted to conceptualize and operationalize cloud gaming service quality.

Cloud gaming service quality consists of two second-order constructs of support service quality and technical service quality with seven first-order dimensions, namely rapport, responsiveness, reliability, compatibility, ubiquity, smoothness and comprehensiveness. The instrument exhibits desirable psychometric properties.

Practitioners can use this new measurement instrument to evaluate gamers' perceptions toward their service and to identify areas for improvement.

This study contributes to the service quality literature by utilizing qualitative and quantitative approaches to develop and validate a new measurement instrument of service quality in the context of cloud gaming and by identifying new dimensions (compatibility, ubiquity, smoothness and comprehensiveness) specific to it.

Sports marketing and sponsorship research is located at the intersection of behavioral and design research, which means that it analyzes the current world and shapes a future world. This dual focus poses challenges for formulating and testing theories of sports marketing.

This article develops criteria for categorizing theoretical concepts as either behavioral or formed as different ways of expressing ideas of sports marketing research. It emphasizes the need for clear concept categorization for proper operationalization and applies these criteria to selected theoretical concepts of sports marketing and sponsorship research.

The study defines three criteria to categorize theoretical concepts, namely (1) the guiding idea of research, (2) the role of observed variables, and (3) the relationship among observed variables. Applying these criteria to concepts of sports marketing research manifests the relevance of categorizing theoretical concepts as either behavioral or formed to operationalize concepts correctly.

This study is the first in sports marketing to clearly categorize theoretical concepts as either behavioral or formed, and to formulate guidelines on how to differentiate behavioral concepts from formed concepts.

The development of project managers and leadership has been highlighted as crucial for improving project success and performance, resulting in a rise of interest in project leadership research over the last two decades. While several qualitative reviews have been conducted, there have been limited quantitative and systematic reviews on project leadership. This study fills this gap by portraying the knowledge landscape and tracking the evolution of project leadership research from 1998 to 2022 through bibliometric approaches.

Based on 816 records, including 793 articles extracted and selected from the Web of Science database and specific journals, and 23 articles selected from three non-SCI/SSCI indexed journals, the authors used CiteSpace and bibliometrix R-package to depict visualizations of the trajectory of co-cited references, the landscape of co-occurred keywords and emerging trends in project leadership via reference co-citation analysis, keyword co-occurrence analysis and thematic mapping.

The bibliometric analyses enabled the authors to understand the conceptual aspects of project leadership and its theoretical background. Three stages of the intellectual bases were identified and tracked: the infancy phase (1998–2007), the growth phase (2008–2014) and the new development phase (2015–2022). The results of keyword co-occurrence analysis indicated that the research focus evolved from investigating traits and competences to examining the effects of traditional leadership behaviors, and then considering context-specific leadership. The findings of thematic mapping and theoretical interpretation illustrate the potential directions of the competence comparison, new and appropriate leadership, and the interaction between leadership and context.

This study advanced the field by providing a systematic review of project leadership, developing potential future directions for project leadership research and providing practical implications for career development and training.

Food and beverage (F&B) small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) must diversify their markets and obtain predictable sources of revenues to withstand difficult and volatile periods such as the post-pandemic geopolitical scenario, recently burdened by the Russian-Ukrainian conflict. On the other hand, another strand of the literature suggests that public procurement could be considered a great source of income, enabling solid contracts, revenues and cash-flow stability. Therefore, this paper aims to explore the role of public procurement, the adoption of e-commerce platforms and their interactions in affecting the exporting performances of SMEs operating in the F&B sector.

The study retrieves data from 2,186 Italian F&B manufacturing SMEs relying on Margò by Cribis database. Therefore, it conducts a structured equational model (SEM) to test the developed hypotheses empirically.

The findings reveal that digital selling platforms positively affect exports, whereas public procurement negatively affects F&B SMEs exports. Nonetheless, findings underline that the interaction between public procurement and the adoption of digital selling platforms dampens public procurement's negative effects on exports.

This study brings an original contribution to the F&B literature by conducting empirical research on an extensive sample of firms from one of the most influential countries in the F&B vertical, Italy, with officially registered data. More importantly, to the best of the authors' knowledge, this study pioneers the investigation of the relationship between public procurement and e-commerce platforms in affecting F&B SMEs' export performances.

This research paper aims to examine two hybrid models of logistics service quality (LSQ) and its influence on satisfaction, loyalty and future purchase intention in a business-to-consumer (B2C) e-commerce context. This study extends the literature for LSQ by incorporating the second-order assurance quality construct, which comprises personnel contact quality, order discrepancy handling and order returns, into one of the hybrid models.

A survey-based approach is used to collect data. Participant responses to questions concerning multiple LSQ dimensions and behavioral perceptions from their most recent online shopping experience are measured using structural equation modeling.

Findings highlight the importance of including a second-order construct assurance quality as a more explanatory model. Results illustrate that online ordering procedures and assurance quality impact customer satisfaction more than other prominent LSQ dimensions. Furthermore, the findings revealed a customer loyalty is a partial mediator between customer satisfaction and future purchase intention. This underscores the significance of improved logistics services as a competitive edge for e-commerce retailers.

Implications are limited to the e-commerce B2C domain.

The findings of this study underscore critical LSQ dimensions that garner greater satisfaction and retention in the online shopping experience. The results indicate that the effective and efficient handling of the initial order and any order problem significantly influences customer satisfaction and reaps the long-term benefits of customer retention.

The authors present and empirically test a hybrid model of LSQ in a B2C e-commerce domain that captures many of the important elements of the customer experience as espoused in the literature.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how gamification may be used for project stakeholder engagement.

The paper presents the results of a systematic literature review of extant research concerning the gamification of projects. Based on this, an agenda for future studies is outlined.

Extant research on the gamification of projects is scarce and scattered among various disciplines, but the engineering fields dominate. The research performed does indicate that gamification may be used for involving stakeholders in projects, primarily by promoting learning, but also by engaging them, motivating action and solving problems.

In several cases, extant research display poor quality in research design and a lack in cross-disciplinary perspectives, which means that more research is needed. The users’ perspective is often lacking. Furthermore, the ideas gamification might be “hidden” within other technologies.

The findings of this research may assist project management practitioners in the endeavor of adopting gamification principles to better involve stakeholders.

The study fills a gap in summarizing the research on how gamification may be used to promote project stakeholder engagement. Based on this, it proposes a research agenda for future research on the use of gamification to promote project stakeholder engagement.