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The purpose of this study is to review and analyze the status of word-of-mouth (WOM) research in the business-to-business (B2B) context and discuss and identify new possible future directions.

A systematic review was conducted and 36 articles on B2B WOM were collected to evaluate the current state of the literature and clarify possible future research directions.

This thematic analysis categorize these articles into three themes: WOM generation, WOM usage and reference marketing. Under each theme, the authors reveal research findings unique to B2B research and different from business-to-consumer (B2C) WOM research. This study identifies several research questions that should be addressed by future research.

Both academic researchers and business practitioners recognize that WOM plays an essential role in B2B marketing. However, no review paper focuses on WOM in the B2B context. Findings in the B2C WOM literature suggest that WOM substantially influences firms’ performance, but that managers cannot simply attempt to extrapolate B2C findings to the B2B arena. By synthesizing and assessing prior research on WOM in the B2B context, this study contributes to a better understanding of the B2B WOM phenomenon and facilitates future research on this topic.

This study investigates how food safety trust works as a critical moderator in the Chinese online fresh agricultural market based on an extended technology acceptance model.

The authors propose a research model that integrates attributes from the technology acceptance model, perceived product quality, logistics service quality, risk, and food safety trust. Structural equation modeling was applied to estimate the causal relationships using data from 851 Chinese customers.

The results indicated that perceived usefulness, product quality, and logistics service quality significantly enhance Chinese customers' intention to shop online for fresh agricultural products. Further, the positive effects increase when customer trust in food safety changes from low to high. In contrast, perceived risk reduces Chinese customers' willingness to engage in online shopping, but the negative influence is weaker for customers with high trust in food safety than for those with low trust. However, perceived ease of use plays an insignificant role in predicting online purchase intention and the impact does not vary depending on food safety trust.

This study suggests managers should consider the important moderating role of food safety trust to make effective strategies for fresh agricultural e-commerce development in China.

The research aims to qualitatively explore e-marketplace service quality (EMSQ) from the perspective of an industrial buyer as a sole decision-maker. It further intends to quantitatively examine its impact on the industrial buyer's perceived value (PV), overall satisfaction (SAT), and e-loyalty (ELOY) in the context of business-to-government (B2G) e-commerce.

The research used an exploratory sequential mixed-method design. A qualitative exploratory study of EMSQ was conducted using a Straussian grounded theory (GT) technique, followed by an explanatory quantitative study using PLS-SEM to evaluate causal links between various research variables.

In the area of e-services, the investigation found that the hierarchical structure of EMSQ encompasses six broadly applicable dimensions and one B2G context-specific dimension of the e-governance process quality. The study also reinforced previous research findings in the B2C and B2B e-commerce domains, highlighting that e-service quality positively impacts online buyer's PV, SAT and ELOY.

This research contributed to the area of e-service operations by developing and validating the EMSQ model in the B2G e-commerce settings. Further, it has opened up new research avenues in B2G e-commerce.

The findings from this research highlighted that e-service operations managers should focus on usability, technological concerns, product/vendor quality concerns, customer support reliability, along with effective e-governance, ordering and logistics processes for e-business success. It also provides policymakers with guidelines for making B2G e-marketplaces sustainable.

To the best of the author's knowledge, this is the first study employing the GT and PLS-SEM techniques to explore EMSQ from the viewpoint of industrial buyers in B2G e-commerce. The study contributed to prior literature by proposing and validating the hierarchical EMSQ model.

The promulgation of group purchasing organizations (GPOs) into the healthcare (HC) sector is an invaluable procurement strategy to manage the suppliers effectively. This study aims to identify and prioritize the factors of integrating GPOs into the HC sector on the perspectives of the developing countries such as India.

The factors are identified from current literature exploration, experts’ support and experience surveys. The factors are scrutinized and shortlisted using the Delphi technique and analysed further using the best-worst model method.

The findings of the study highlight the cost reduction, fair distribution of savings and healthcare supply chain (HCSC) data standardization among others to be the most prioritized drivers. The consulting services provided by GPOs including training and development as a result of high competitiveness in the HC market has been prioritized the least.

The study bears some important implications for decision and policymakers. The managers should consider factors, namely, cost reduction, fair distribution of savings and HCSC data standardization on a priority basis that acts as motivation for the HC providers to join the GPOs.

The study provides valuable insights for HC providers to participate in the GPOs for cost savings and enhance the performances.

The purpose of this study is to develop and validate the business streamlining (BS) model proposed in 2017.

This study/paper develops and validates the qualitatively generated BS model, a conceptual model of service sourcing relationships, by testing it quantitatively. A survey was sent to chief exective officers, chief purchasing officers or facility managers in 764 private or public companies in Sweden with an annual turnover exceeding € 10m. The categories were tested and analyzed by means of factor analysis.

The BS model for managing service sourcing processes was confirmed to be significant overall, meaning that it is applicable irrespective of service sourcing context. The efficiency pursuing (EP) was found to have an interlinking role that calls for a revision of the BS model. Furthermore, the four categories tended to load pairwise.

Although this cross-sectional study confirms the relevance of the BS model for managing service-sourcing processes, further studies should examine both the relative significance of its categories in different service-sourcing contexts and why the four main categories tend to pair.

The results support that the model is flexible and adaptable to a wide range of service-sourcing circumstances. Irrespective of the relative complexity of facility management (FM) sourcing processes, the categories can be adapted to fit the service sourcing context. Thus, it can be used as a tool to analyze and facilitate strategic decision-making.

The paper validates that the BS model can represent the dynamics of different service-sourcing processes, regardless of the complexity of the context.

This research aims to specialise in the investigation of risk management for service-oriented manufacturing supply chains via two stages, highlighting its differences from manufacturing. The research article is commenced by executing an encyclopedic review of earlier research to ascertain the distinctive traits of service-oriented manufacturing supply chains and identify prevalent risks. Secondly, an empirical study in the construction field, amongst the industry hardest struck in the mist of the COVID-19 epidemic, is conducted to thoroughly inspect the resonant effect of these risks on service-oriented manufacturing supply chain performance.

In this study, to validate the resonant effect mechanism, a thorough assessment is undertaken by juxtaposing theoretical model to a newly constructed comparative model that encompasses the single effects of risks on supply chain performance.

63% variance of service-oriented manufacturing supply chain performance was showcased by the resonant effect model, compared with 46.3% in the comparative model. Moreover, each risk exerts a more glaringly significant impact on supply chain performance, asserting the mechanism of the resonant influence. Another noteworthy result involves the demand risk possessing a low effect on supply chain performance, thus emphasising the superiority of service-oriented manufacturing supply chains.

Future research endeavours should hinge on the optimal “resonant” model explosion, thereby foreseeing and alleviating worst-case scenarios to guarantee the robustness and resilience of supply chain networks.

Indubitably, reducing the intensity of the resonant effect revolves around lowering the coefficient of “a,” thereby restricting/eliminating the link among risks. Therefore, the suggested resonant impact model might thus serve as “a road map”. In light of the aforementioned considerations, it is advisable that supply chain executives employ supply chain management tactics namely avoidance, prediction, and postponement, but only after meticulous consideration the costs and benefits of adopting such strategies.

The service-oriented manufacturing supply chain features and advantages have been analysed and explained throughout the article. The data gathered during the COVID-19 pandemic is a captivating and topical point of this paper.

With the rapid development of the sharing economy in manufacturing industries, manufacturers and the equipment suppliers frequently share capacity through the third-party platform. This paper aims to study influences of manufacturers sharing capacity on the supplier and to analyze whether the supplier shares capacity as well as its influences.

This paper deals with conditions that the supplier and manufacturers share capacity through the third-party platform, and the third-party platform competes with the supplier in equipment sales. Considering the heterogeneity of the manufacturer's earning of unit capacity usage and the production efficiency of manufacturer's usage strategies, this paper constructs capacity sharing game models. Then, model equilibrium results under different sharing scenarios are compared.

The results show that when the production or maintenance cost is high, manufacturers sharing capacity simultaneously benefits the supplier, the third-party platform and manufacturers with high earnings of unit capacity usage. When both the rental efficiency and the production cost are low, or both the rental efficiency and the production cost are high, the supplier simultaneously sells equipment and shares capacity. The supplier only sells equipment in other cases. When both the rental efficiency and the production cost are low, the supplier’s sharing capacity realizes the win-win-win situation for the supplier, the third-party platform and manufacturers with moderate earnings of unit capacity usage.

This paper innovatively examines supplier's selling and sharing decisions considering manufacturers sharing capacity. It extends the research on capacity sharing and is important to supplier's operational decisions.

This paper aims to investigate the influential aspects of industrial branding in building customer brand engagement from the buyer’s and the seller’s points of view. Collecting buyer and seller information is essential to understand business-to-business interaction better. Buyer’s and seller’s perspective integration is significant for stakeholders to develop proper strategies to achieve customer brand engagement.

This study uses a structural equation model to examine the antecedents of customer brand engagement from the buyer’s perspective; then, the result is compared with the seller’s view by conducting an analytical hierarchy process. The authors exercise 140 valid data from the buyer’s industry and 9 experts from the seller’s industry.

This study finds that in developing customer brand engagement, rational brand quality is the most influential from the buyer’s view and top priority from the seller’s view. Surprisingly, both parties have different perspectives about the second and third priorities. The buyers put emotional brand associations as a second priority; perceived value is meaningless and insignificant. On the contrary, the sellers set the perceived value as the second priority and emotional brand associations as the last.

The respondents from the buyer industry cover various industries, and the research is limited to the buyer and the seller in the chemical polymer emulsion market, a market where product quality and application quality on the buyers’ side are essential and where the buyer–seller interaction is intense. Replicating the study in other industries and cultural backgrounds is recommended for generalization.

The paper’s novelty is that there are different priorities and perspectives from the buyer’s and the seller’s views. This study contributes to industrial brand engagement research studies. Investigation of the buyer’s and the seller’s perspectives in industrial brand engagement research studies is still limited.

This study aims to integrate the theory of planned behavior (TPB) and the value-belief-norm (VBN) theory into a meta-analytic framework to synthesize green consumption literature.

By integrating the findings from 173 studies, a meta-analysis was performed adopting several analytical methods: bivariate analysis, moderation analysis and path analysis.

VBN- and TPB-based psychological factors (adverse consequences, ascribed responsibility, personal norms, subjective norms, attitude and perceived behavioral control) mediate the effects of altruistic, biospheric and egoistic values on green purchase intention. Further, inconsistencies in the proposed relationships are due to cultural factors (i.e. individualism-collectivism, power distance, uncertainty avoidance, masculinity–femininity, short- vs long-term orientation and indulgence-restraint) and countries’ human development status.

The authors selected papers published in English; hence, other relevant papers in this domain published in other languages might have been missed.

The findings are useful to marketers of green offerings in designing strategies, i.e. specific messages, targeting different customers based on countries’ cultural score and human development index, to harvest positive customer responses.

This study is the pioneering attempt to synthesize the TPB- and VBN-based quantitative literature on green consumer behavior to resolve the reported inconsistent findings.

This study aims to contribute to the social media agility literature by examining the impact of perceived social media agility on customer purchases. More specifically, this study seeks to reveal whether perceived social media agility positively affects customer purchases. Furthermore, this study examines the moderating roles of social media self-efficacy and social anxiety to increase the model's explanatory power. That is, this study investigates whether social media self-efficacy positively moderates the impact of perceived social media agility on customer purchases. Similarly, this study examines whether social anxiety negatively moderates the impact of perceived social media agility on customer purchases.

An online survey was conducted on Qualtrics platforms to test the research hypotheses. To test the main effect, a linear regression was used. To test moderating relationships, PROCESS Macro Model 1 was used. Finally, the moderating effects were probed with the Johnson–Neyman technique to gain further insights into the interaction effects.

The study results show that when customers perceive a brand as agile on social media platforms, they are more willing to buy the goods/services of the brand. Notably, individuals who are high on social media self-efficacy (relative to low on it) display more willingness to purchase the brand's products/services. However, customers who are high on social anxiety (relative to low on it) are less willing to purchase the brand's products/services.

This study examines the effect of perceived social media agility on customer purchases while accounting for the moderating role of perceived social media self-efficacy and social anxiety. The results provide noteworthy theoretical and managerial contributions.