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Incumbent retail organisations need to develop new capabilities to adapt with the increasingly competitive retail landscape. Despite the growing relevance of innovation in retail practice, the strategic management of innovation in retailing is still vastly under-researched. This explorative study thus aims to investigate how incumbent retail firms can organise for innovation from an organisational ambidexterity perspective.

A single-case study of an established Swedish retail firm was conducted from December 2016 to July 2018 and followed up in June 2021. The authors followed the process of implementation of organisational changes aimed to increase innovation in the company, particularly the introduction of a digital marketing initiative and a corporate innovation hub. Data collection was based on nine semi-structured interviews and participant observations and unstructured interviews from 13 meetings and workshops. An abductive approach to data analysis was followed, iteratively comparing theoretical concepts and empirical data using open, axial and selective coding to distil findings into aggregated themes.

Given the inherently limited formalisation of innovation processes in most retail organisations, structural ambidexterity appears to be necessary when the aim is radical, strategic retail innovation. Structural mechanisms are able to safeguard the space and resources to focus on long-term research and projects with higher risk and uncertainty; however, integration of innovation activities to the mainstream organisation is critical. Pursuing contextual ambidexterity, wherein instead of structural solutions, employees are empowered to divide employees' time between innovation-related and efficiency-related tasks, is more likely related to retail innovations that are incremental and operational.

The paper contributes to the emerging topic of strategic management of innovation in retailing, by explicating how incumbent retailers can organise for innovation depending on the type of innovation that is aimed for, using organisational ambidexterity as a novel perspective.

The authors study how cloud adoption decision making unfolds in organizations and present the dynamic process leading to a decision to adopt or reject cloud computing. The authors thus complement earlier literature on factors that influence cloud adoption.

The authors adopt an interpretive epistemology to understand the process of cloud adoption decision making. Following an empirical investigation drawing on interviews with senior managers who led the cloud adoption decision making in organizations from across Europe. The authors outline a framework that shows how cloud adoptions follow multiple cycles in three broad phases.

The study findings demonstrate that cloud adoption decision making is a recursive process of learning about cloud through three broad phases: building perception about cloud possibilities, contextualizing cloud possibilities in terms of current computing resources and exposing the cloud proposition to others involved in making the decision. Building on these findings, the authors construct a framework of this process which can inform practitioners in making decisions on cloud adoption.

This work contributes to authors understanding of how cloud adoption decisions unfold and provides a framework for cloud adoption decisions that has theoretical and practical value. The study further demonstrates the role of the decision-leader, typically the CIO, in this process and identifies how other internal and external stakeholders are involved. It sheds light on the relevance of the phases of the cloud adoption decision-making process to different cloud adoption factors identified in the extant literature.

The purpose of this study is to determine the main challenges that IT security practitioners face in their organizations, including the interplay among human, organizational, and technological factors.

The data set consisted of 36 semi‐structured interviews with IT security practitioners from 17 organizations (academic, government, and private). The interviews were analyzed using qualitative description with constant comparison and inductive analysis of the data to identify the challenges that security practitioners face.

A total of 18 challenges that can affect IT security management within organizations are indentified and described. This analysis is grounded in related work to build an integrated framework of security challenges. The framework illustrates the interplay among human, organizational, and technological factors.

The framework can help organizations identify potential challenges when implementing security standards, and determine if they are using their security resources effectively to address the challenges. It also provides a way to understand the interplay of the different factors, for example, how the culture of the organization and decentralization of IT security trigger security issues that make security management more difficult. Several opportunities for researchers and developers to improve the technology and processes used to support adoption of security policies and standards within organizations are provided.

A comprehensive list of human, organizational, and technological challenges that security experts have to face within their organizations is presented. In addition, these challenges within a framework that illustrates the interplay between factors and the consequences of this interplay for organizations are integrated.

The literature on volition indicates that the only dichotomous measure that differentiates voluntary from involuntary temporary workers is unable to fully explain temporary workers’ attitudes. There are more detailed explanations of why workers choose temporary work. The purpose of this paper is to develop and validate a scale of reasons for choosing temporary employment.

The study is divided into two parts. In the first part, 32 items were selected based on the literature. They were administered to a sample of 337 Italian temporary agency workers. Then, an exploratory factor analysis was used. In the second part of the study, previous findings were subjected to a confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) considering a sample of 325 Italian temporary agency workers.

A two-factor solution (i.e. integrated regulation and identified regulation) emerged from the CFA. The authors present the scale with means and standard deviations for the measurement of the constructs. The integrated regulation subscale appears sensitive enough to differentiate the contract preference.

The two samples were from a single temporary work agency, thus they did not represent the entire heterogeneous population of temporary workers.

This study proposes a first attempt to construct a questionnaire about the reasons for choosing temporary employment in Italy that raises questions about how institutional factors within various labor markets influence issues of volition and employment contract choice.

Sustainable construction deficits are common in developing economies, and resolutions are constrained by the failure to prioritise the plethora of available indicators. This study aims to report on overlapping indicators for benchmarking sustainable construction for construction organisations.

Online survey data were collected from construction professionals, academics and senior managers in government bodies. Pearson chi-squared tests and overlapping analysis were used to determine significant indicators. Kruskal–Wallis tests were used to determine statistically significant differences among the dimensions.

Overlapping analysis determined indicators significant for economic, environmental and social performance. Environmental protection and reporting (pollution and emissions) were significant for all three performance dimensions. The most significant indicators are economic performance (adequate competence of key project staff), environmental performance (environmental protection and reporting – pollution and emissions) and social performance (adequate sustainability expenditure by construction organisations). Significant differences due to dimensions existed for adequate competence of key project staff, sustainable construction and eco-design, adequate governance and organisational excellence of construction projects and satisfactory workers’ morale.

Determining overlapping indicators enables prioritised implementation that ensures sustainable construction. Excluding construction workers was a significant limitation for a holistic interrogation.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to determine overlapping indicators for sustainable construction performance in Zimbabwe.

Entrepreneurial Ecosystems (EES) is among the fastest growing entrepreneurship research topics. With even greater vigour, the non-scientific world of economic development agencies, administrations and policymakers has adopted the construct and applies it widely “in the field”, often lacking a solid empirical foundation and pursuing sub-optimal approaches. Improving policy instruments for EES development requires a data driven approach to first understand an EES of a specific region before making any attempts to change it. The paper showcases an empirical approach to create empirically rooted EES policy implications, contributing to closing the gap for insight in regional EES data of sub-national regions.

Exploring a mixed method design, utilising quantitative Global Entrepreneurship Monitor data and combining it with EES stakeholder interviews, focusing on dysfunctions, redundancies, power asymmetries and cut off elements as well as in-layer division and public organisation behaviour.

One finding is, that regional economic development agencies (EDA), as a main public instrument to foster regional entrepreneurial activity, seem to bring the potential of a negative impact on Entrepreneurial Ecosystems bottom-up development and the ability to become self-sustained if they assume the role of competitors towards private organisations and businesses.

As other work on EES, the approach used in this paper only sub-optimally covers temporal system dynamics.

This paper contributes to future EES support policies being rooted in an empirical foundation.

This paper not only progresses the empirical basis for research on regional EES but also lays the foundation for specific policy implications for a sub-national level entrepreneurial ecosystem.

The purpose of this paper is to identify and explain the role of individual learning and development in acquiring tacit knowledge in the context of the inexorable and intense continuous change (technological and otherwise) that characterizes our society today, and also to investigate the software (SW) sector, which is at the core of contemporary continuous change and is a paradigm of effective and intrinsic knowledge sharing (KS). This makes the SW sector unique and different from others where KS is so hard to implement.

The study employed an inductive qualitative approach based on a multi-case study approach, composed of three successful SW companies in China. These companies are representative of the fabric of the sector, namely a small- and medium-sized enterprise, a large private company and a large state-owned enterprise. The fieldwork included 44 participants who were interviewed using a semi-structured script. The interview data were coded and interpreted following the Straussian grounded theory pattern of open coding, axial coding and selective coding. The process of interviewing was stopped when theoretical saturation was achieved after a careful process of theoretical sampling.

The findings of this research suggest that individual learning and development are deemed to be the fundamental feature for professional success and survival in the continuously changing environment of the SW industry today. However, individual learning was described by the participants as much more than a mere individual process. It involves a collective and participatory effort within the organization and the sector as a whole, and a KS process that transcends organizational, cultural and national borders. Individuals in particular are mostly motivated by the pressing need to face and adapt to the dynamic and changeable environments of today’s digital society that is led by the sector. Software practitioners are continuously in need of learning, refreshing and accumulating tacit knowledge, partly because it is required by their companies, but also due to a sound awareness of continuous technical and technological changes that seem only to increase with the advances of information technology. This led to a clear theoretical understanding that the continuous change that faces the sector has led to individual acquisition of culture and somatic knowledge that in turn lay the foundation for not only the awareness of the need for continuous individual professional development but also for the creation of habitus related to KS and continuous learning.

The study reported in this paper shows that there is a theoretical link between the existence of conducive organizational and sector-wide somatic and cultural knowledge, and the success of KS practices that lead to individual learning and development. Therefore, the theory proposed suggests that somatic and cultural knowledge are crucial drivers for the creation of habitus of individual tacit knowledge acquisition. The paper further proposes a habitus-driven individual development (HDID) Theoretical Model that can be of use to both academics and practitioners interested in fostering and developing processes of KS and individual development in knowledge-intensive organizations.

Libraries need to develop information processing systems for evaluation, budgeting, planning, and operations. Electronic spreadsheets lend themselves to a variety of applications, but are time‐consuming to create. A model template and macros that can be used in many different types of library data analysis have been developed here. The procedures demonstrated here can build an essential set of tools for meeting fundamental goals of administrative efficiency, effective use of library resources, staff motivation, and rational policy making.

When health is measured by a bounded variable, differences in health can be presented as levels of attainment or shortfall. Measurement of heath inequality then usually involves the choice of either the attainment or the shortfall distribution, and this choice may affect comparisons of inequality across populations. A number of indices have been introduced to overcome this problem. This chapter proposes a framework in which attainment and shortfall distributions can be jointly analyzed. Joint distributions of attainments and shortfalls are defined from points of view consistent with concerns for relative, absolute or intermediate inequality. Inequality measures invariant according to the corresponding ethical criterion are then applied. A dominance criterion that guarantees unanimous rankings of the joint distributions is also proposed.

In this paper, we use the distributions of order statistics to define functions with the appropriate properties to represent social preferences regarding income distributions. Following the approach of Yaari (1987, 1988), this allows constructing a set of social welfare functions from which the corresponding inequality indices are derived. The obtained measures incorporate diverse normative criteria, with different degrees of preference for equality. The generalized Gini coefficients and the family of indices proposed by Aaberge (2000) are obtained as particular cases. This approach allows interpreting each inequality measure in terms of the statistics computed from a randomly selected sample and the identification of unbiased estimators of the Social Welfare Functions. It also shows that each of the families of inequality indices are obtained from the moments of the order statistics and, therefore, each of the families characterizes any income distribution with finite mean. This characterization is very useful in the case of distributions with heavy tail and pronounced positive skew that shows only a few potential moments.