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This study focuses on the key success factors (KSFs) for strategy implementation in the fisheries industry in Iceland identified by chief executive officers within the industry. The purpose is to provide a comprehensive categorization of KSFs that influence how strategy is mobilized. The secondary aim is to uncover the level of priority that companies place on the dimensions of the United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

The methodology involves qualitative case studies based on in-depth elite interviews with nine chief executive officers of Icelandic fishing companies.

The research indicates strategy implementation can be improved in four main areas. First, by engaging and involving all employees in the implementation process. Second, by enhancing bottom-up innovation and communication. Third, through alignment of the corporate strategy and the UN SDGs, and fourth, by following rigorous action plans with clear, measurable and prioritized objectives and timeframes for the managers to follow. These improvements have both theoretical and practical implications for the fishing industry. Consequently, a conceptual framework for integrated strategy implementation in the fisheries industry is proposed.

A limited number of in-depth elite interviews were conducted since access to the chief executive officers of the country’s largest fishing companies proved challenging. However, the nine companies collectively hold nearly 50% of the country’s total quota, thereby proving a deep understanding of the topic relevant to the industry. The research uncovered a substantial cross-section of viewpoints, and as such, the results are relevant for both academia and practitioners alike.

This study contributes to the debate on KSFs relevant to strategy implementation within a specific industry but also aligns with the UN SDGs by proposing a dedicated framework for implementing strategies in the fisheries industry. Overall, this study can help managers achieve strategy implementation.

Despite the well-recognized importance of recycled water, the study of industry-peer pressure on recycled water is relatively new. This study investigates how organizations experience and react to industry-peer pressure to set recycled water targets. Additionally, this study investigates the role of board chairs involved in sustainability committees in contributing to responses to industry-peer pressure.

Using Eviews 12, this study employed a pooled logistic regression model to analyze data from 1,346 firms on Taiwan and Taipei exchanges (2017–2020).

The findings revealed that frequency-based imitation drives recycled water target-setting diffusion. However, there is no direct relationship between outcome-based imitation and recycled water target-setting. Notably, outcome-based imitation drives the adoption of recycled water target-setting of firms with board-chair membership in sustainability committees.

This study faces certain data limitations. First, this study primarily focuses on water recycling. Future research could explore other ways to reduce water usage, such as using water-efficient equipment. Second, this study gathered information solely on the presence or absence of a board chairperson on the sustainability committee. Future researchers could explore the impact of the composition of sustainability committee on recycled water target-setting. Lastly, the sample used in this study is restricted to Taiwan's corporations that existed during 2017–2020. Future researchers may consider adopting a longitudinal design in other economies to address this limitation.

The findings of this study offer several guidelines and implications for recycled water target-setting and the composition of sustainability committees. It responds to an urgent call for solutions to water shortages when pressure from governments and nongovernmental organizations is relatively absent. The number of industry peers that have already set recycled water targets is indispensable for motivating firms to set their own recycled water targets. In terms of insufficient water-related regulatory pressure and normative pressure, this study found evidence suggesting that the direct motivation for setting recycled water targets stems from mimetic pressures via frequency-based imitation. The evidence in this study suggests that policymakers should require companies to disclose their peers’ recycled water target information, as doing so serves as an alternative means to achieving SDG 6.3.

Recycled water target-setting might be challenging. Water recycling practices may face strong resistance and require substantial additional resources (Zhang and Tang, 2019; Gao et al., 2019; Gu et al., 2023). Therefore, this study suggests that firms should ensure the mindfulness of board members in promoting the welfare of the natural environment when making recycled water target-setting decisions. To reap the second-mover advantage, firms must consider the conditions in which board members can more effectively play their role. Corporations may help their chairpersons in setting recycled water targets by recruiting them as members of sustainability committees. Meanwhile, chairpersons tend to activate accurate mental models when the water conservation performance of pioneering industry peers is strong enough to indicate the potential benefits of adopting recycled water target-setting. Investors’ and stakeholders’ understanding of how the composition of sustainability committees is related to recycled water target-setting may help to identify the potential drivers of firms’ water responsibility. Investors and stakeholders should distinguish firms in terms of the board chair’s membership of their sustainability committee and focus on water-use reduction outcomes in the industry. This study provides insights into circumstances whereby chairpersons help to restore the water ecosystem.

This study explains how frequency-based and outcome-based imitation are two prominent mechanisms underlying the industry-peer pressure concerning recycled water target-setting. Moreover, this study fills literature gaps related to the moderating roles of board-chair membership in sustainability committees concerning industry-peer pressure on recycled water target-setting.

This study aims to investigate socioeconomic diversity in the hospitality industry by examining the relationship between social class background, family expectations and career outcomes of Generation Z employees. The relationship was further tested by investigating job titles and perceived prestige.

Two studies were developed to test the research questions – first, the social prestige of hospitality jobs compared to other industries with similar skill sets. Second, a between-subjects experimental design was used to examine the moderating effect of job title on the relationship between social class background, family expectations and career decisions.

The findings of the first study confirm the negative perceptions of the hospitality industry. Study 2 demonstrated a negative relationship between social class background and intentions to choose hospitality through family expectations among Generation Z. The negative effect was attenuated when a manager position was offered. However, college students majoring in hospitality reported positive intentions to accept a job in the hospitality industry for both frontline and managerial positions.

The findings emphasize the importance of extending organizational diversity beyond traditional demographics like race, gender and age by examining socioeconomic factors that influence career decisions among Generation Z employees. By considering social class background as a dimension of organizational diversity, the hospitality industry can cultivate a more inclusive culture and enhance recruitment and attraction efforts.

Examining the relationship between social class background and career decisions through the lens of social cognitive career theory provides insight into the social cognitive process of career development among Generation Z. The unique contribution of this study extends beyond observable dimensions of diversity to challenge the socioeconomic composition of the hospitality industry.

This study explores whether the peer effects of internationalization exist within the subdivision industry of enterprises in the engineering field and assesses the imitation paths for the peer engineering enterprises within the industry when implementing internationalization strategies under the peer effects.

This study collected secondary and objective data on 38 Chinese engineering enterprises from the Engineering News-Record's list of the top 250 international contractors between 2013 and 2021. It employed a regression analysis to test the research hypotheses.

The findings reveal that in the process of internationalization: (1) peer effects exist within the subdivision industry of internationalization of engineering enterprises; (2) engineering enterprises within the same industry and region imitate each other; (3) non-state-owned engineering enterprises imitate state-owned engineering enterprises within the same industry; and (4) in the industry follower–leader imitation process, industry followers imitate leaders according to enterprise size and return on assets.

The results contribute to a better understanding of how peer effects influence engineering enterprises' internationalization process. This study also proposes imitation paths based on the law of imitation to provide recommendations for engineering enterprises' better development in the international market.

The nature of construction works has a negative impact on physical, mental and emotional well-being and makes it difficult for the construction industry to attack and retain its workforce. The current study seeks to integrate the current knowledge focused on work–life balance (WLB) in the industry into an understandable whole.

An interpretivist philosophical approach was adopted using a bibliometric review and a narrative review of existing studies from both Scopus and Google databases. The Visualisation of Similarities viewer (VOSviewer) was used to prepare co-occurrence maps from the bibliographic data garnered.

The study reveals that the prominent factors influencing the WLB of the construction workforce are organizational culture, salary earned, heavy workload, long working hours and inflexible working time. The recent WLB discourse is on organisational commitment, job satisfaction and workplace dynamics. While WLB areas for further exploration are job stress, safety performance, employee attrition and an ageing workforce. Meanwhile, Africa and South America are still lagging in WLB research.

The findings reported here will assist stakeholders in identifying appropriate WLB initiatives that can be used to improve the well-being of the construction workforce. Also, the gaps in knowledge for further research were highlighted.

The findings reveal current trends and a road map for future studies on WLB in construction. It also reveals prominent factors influencing the WLB of workers in the construction industry.

Existing conceptual, empirical and case studies evidence suggests that manufacturing industries find the joint implementation of Kaizen philosophy initiatives. However, the existing practices rarely demonstrated in a single framework and implementation procedure in a structure nature. This paper, therefore, aims to develop, validate and practically test a framework and implementation procedure for the implementation of integrated Kaizen in manufacturing industries to attain long-term improvement of operational, innovation, business (financial and marketing) processes, performance and competitiveness.

The study primarily described the problem, extensively reviewed the current state-of-the-art literature and then identified a gap. Based on it, generic and comprehensive integrated framework and implementation procedure is developed. Besides, the study used managers, consultants and academics from various fields to validate a framework and implementation procedure for addressing business concerns. In this case, the primary data was collected through self-administered questionnaire, and 244 valid questionnaires were received and were analyzed. Furthermore, the research verified the practicability of the framework by empirically exploring the current scenario of selected manufacturing companies.

The research discovered innovative framework and six-phase implementation procedure to fill the existing conceptual gap. Furthermore, the survey-based and exploratory empirical analysis of the research demonstrated that the practice of the proposed framework based on structured procedure is valued and companies attain the middling improvements of productivity, delivery time, quality, 5S practice, waste and accident rate by 61.03, 44, 52.53, 95.19, 80.12, and 70.55% respectively. Additionally, the companies saved a total of 14933446 ETH Birr and 5,658 M² free spaces. Even though, the practices and improvements vary from company to company, and even companies unable to practice some of the unique techniques of the identified CI initiatives considered in the proposed framework.

All data collected in the survey came from professionals working for Ethiopian manufacturing companies, universities and government. It is important to highlight that n = 244 is high sample size, which is adequate for a preliminary survey but reinforcing still needs further survey in terms of generalization of the results since there are hundreds of manufacturing companies, consultants and academicians implementing and consulting Kaizen. Therefore, a further study on a wider Ethiopian manufacturing companies, consultants and academic scale would be informative.

This work is very important for Kaizen professionals in the manufacturing industry, academic and government but in particular for senior management and leadership teams. Aside from the main findings on framework development, there is some strong evidence that practice of Kaizen resulted in achieving quantitative (monetary and non-monetary) and qualitative results. Thus, senior management teams should use this research out to practice and analyze the effect of Kaizen on their own organizations. Within the academic community, this study is one of the first focusing on development, validating and practically testing and should aid further study, research and understanding of Kaizen in manufacturing industries.

So far, it is rare to find preceding studies proposed, validated and practically test an integrated Kaizen framework with the context of manufacturing industries. Thus, authors understand that this is the very first research focused on the development of the framework for manufacturing industries continuously to be competitive and could help managers, institutions, practitioners and academicians in Kaizen practice.

The technological and digital revolution has introduced important changes in the tourism industry. However, capturing the extent of the new tourism 4.0 paradigm is still difficult. This study aims to assess the dimensions related to the concepts of industry 4.0 in tourism and hospitality, tourism innovation and tourism ecosystem when considered simultaneously, and their role in promoting a new wave of competitiveness in the tourism industry.

A bibliometric study was conducted based on tourism 4.0, hotel 4.0, tourism innovation and tourism ecosystem using 120 eligible articles published between 2008 and 2021 from the Web of Science database.

This study demonstrated the advances in industry 4.0 in tourism and hospitality publications over 13 years and identified five interconnected dimensions: (1) knowledge transfer in tourism; (2) networking tourism innovation; (3) sources of tourism innovation; (4) smart tourism ecosystem and (5) innovation research in tourism. It was also concluded that tourism development should be a regional competence based on strategic networking and externalisation of regional knowledge flows.

This bibliometric review provides important implications and recommendations for several players of industry 4.0 in tourism and hospitality and policymakers. Not only did it make it possible to create a state of art, but also to categorise the existing interconnections between the dimensions of Tourism 4.0, Hotel 4.0, Tourism innovation and Tourism ecosystem to optimise its implementation and generate greater value. In addition, practical implications were inferred that improve the tourism sector’s competitiveness, helping strategic decision-making at the level of policymakers and actors in this sector.

Apart from state of the art, this bibliometric review made it possible to categorise the existing interconnections between the dimensions of tourism 4.0, hotel 4.0, tourism innovation and tourism ecosystem to optimise its implementation and generate greater value. Practical implications were inferred that improve the tourism sector’s competitiveness, helping strategic decision-making at the level of policymakers and several players in this sector.

This study addresses the existing literature gap in the interconnection of industry 4.0 with tourism and hospitality by describing the most relevant conceptual interconnections and setting practical implications for improving the competitiveness of the tourism industry. Furthermore, it integrates previous studies and outlines future lines of investigation.

The continued relevance of technologies in halal industries requires managers to understand the factors contributing to such technologies’ acceptance. The technology acceptance model (TAM) is dominant in the literature that predicts user acceptance and behaviour towards technology. Despite the model’s significance, there has yet to be a systematic review of studies featuring halal sectors that use TAM. The purpose of this study is to systematically review the existing literature on TAM in halal industries to understand the research trends as well as TAM modifications and research opportunities in halal industries.

Guided by the preferred reporting items for systematic review and meta-analysis protocol, a framework-based review using the theories, contexts, characteristics and methods (TCCM) framework was conducted. The Scopus and Web of Science databases were used to retrieve English journal articles that investigated TAM in the context of halal markets. In total, 44 eligible articles were reviewed in terms of the developments and extensions of TAM in their studies across the halal industries.

The first study related to the use of TAM in the context of halal industries was published in 2014. The most prominent halal industry in the review, which used TAM, was Islamic finance. Indonesia was the leading economy in halal studies using TAM. Perceived usefulness was found to be a more significant factor than perceived ease of use for technology acceptance in TAM studies on halal industries. The significance of religiosity on TAM was inconsistent. Most research was done using quantitative surveys with consumers as the target sample.

The studies in this review are based on the Scopus and Web of Science databases, which may be perceived as a study limitation. This study also only considered English journal articles and research in which the focus was on the use of TAM in halal industries rather than general industries with Muslim consumers.

Halal industries will continue to rely on technology for the provision of goods and services. With the rise of emerging technological innovations, this review will provide managers with an appreciation of technology acceptance across different contexts. Researchers can use the results of this review to guide future studies and contribute toward the development of this research area.

This review contributes to the Islamic marketing literature by being the first to comprehensively review the TAM model in the context of halal industries using the TCCM framework-based review approach. A research agenda is proposed to advance research on technology acceptance and TAM in halal industries.

While firms in developing countries are increasingly adopting lean practices of inventory management, there is limited evidence showing the impact of lean practices on firm performance in countries such as India. Lean practices improve the financial performance of the firms through superior cost-reduction measures and operational efficiencies. This paper examines the impact of inventory leanness in Indian manufacturing firms on their financial performance.

The authors measure inventory leanness based on stochastic frontier analysis (SLA), apart from using conventional measures available in the literature. The authors analyze the impact of inventory leanness on the financial performance of firms by examining data for 12,334 unique Indian manufacturing firms for the period 2009–2018. The authors present a comparative analysis using different methods of inventory leanness and study the effects on firm performance.

First, the authors find that only 68 industries out of 411 industries follow lean practices, i.e. most industries do not follow lean practices. Second, the estimation results show that there exists a positive relationship between inventory leanness and firm performance. The results suggest that an inverted U-shaped relationship exists between inventory leanness and firm performance for the entire sample. In particular, 17% of the industries in the sample exhibit such a relationship, and it is sufficiently strong to show up in the average regression results for the entire sample.

The authors introduce a novel measure of inventory leanness named stochastic frontier leanness based on the SFA method used in production economics. It measures leanness by benchmarking the inventory levels against the industry “frontier”. Furthermore, the authors conduct an empirical study of the lean-financial performance relationship with a large panel dataset of Indian firms instead of the survey-based methods that were previously used in the literature.

This study aims to investigate the variation in overvaluation proxies and volatility across industry sectors and time.

Using industry sector data from the S&P Capital IQ database, this study applies traditional cross-sectional regressions to investigate the relationship between overvaluation and volatility over the 2001–2020 time period.

This study finds that the most volatile industry sectors generally do not coincide with overvalued industry sectors in the cross-section, implying that there are limitations to price-multiple methods for forecasting future volatility. Rather, this study finds that historical volatility significantly increases the goodness-of-fit when modeling volatility in the cross section of industry sectors. The findings of this study imply that firms should increase disclosures and transparency about corporate practices to decrease downside risk that stems from bad news. In addition, the findings underline the consistency between market efficiency and high levels of volatility in periods of significant uncertainty.

This study proposes a novel approach to examining the cross section of volatility across time for industry sectors.