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Variation, replication and selection processes are acknowledged as key constructs in studies on how industries evolve, but no theoretical and empirical contributions have applied these key constructs to analyzing industries in specific stages of their history. This paper aims to fill this gap, taking for reference the firm and its strategic action in particular.

After delineating and discussing the three processes of interest – variation, replication and selection – this paper analyzes three very different evolutionary contexts: “red” industries, that reached maturity maintaining a polypolistic structure, and that continue to evolve in this phase; the oligopolistic transformation undergone by certain industries; and the emergence of new market spaces around new products developed by firms.

Variations are mainly reactions to the competitive environment in the evolution of red industries or environment-modifying in the case of industries evolving toward an oligopoly, and in the creation of new market spaces. Horizontal replication through employee mobility prevails in red industries, while in the other two contexts firms driving the evolution raise barriers to replication, inhibiting both horizontal and vertical replication. While selection does not come about in a new market space as long as the barriers erected by the first comer remain in place, it occurs in the form of subset selection in the other two settings.

This paper takes an entirely novel approach and proposes a pluralist framing of how industries evolve, interpreting the different evolutionary situations on the strength of the key variables of variation, replication and selection.

This study aims to utilise Six Sigma in an Irish-based red meat processor to reduce process variability and improve yields.

This is a case study within an Irish meat processor where the structured Define, Measure, Analyse, Improve and Control (DMAIC) methodology was utilised along with statistical analysis to highlight areas of the meat boning process to improve.

The project led to using Six Sigma to identify and measure areas of process variation. This resulted in eliminating over-trimming of meat cuts, improving process capabilities, increasing revenue and reducing meat wastage. In addition, key performance indicators and control charts, meat-cutting templates and smart cutting lasers were implemented.

The study is one of Irish meat processors' first Six Sigma applications. The wider food and meat processing industries can leverage the learnings to understand, measure and minimise variation to enhance revenue.

Organisations can use this study to understand the benefits of adopting Six Sigma, particularly in the food industry and how measuring process variation can affect quality.

This is the first practical case study on Six sigma deployment in an Irish meat processor, and the study can be used to benchmark how Six Sigma tools can aid in understanding variation, thus benefiting key performance metrics.

The paper examines the impact of market power on wages within the context of a developing country, focusing on Brazil.

With access to matched employer–employee data from Brazil, we first characterized the evolution of the local labor market concentration (Municipality Herfindahl–Hirschman Index [HHI]). Then, we built a fixed-effect model with instrumental variables to verify the association between the local labor market concentration and wages. Finally, a difference-in-difference (DiD) was implemented to verify whether a merger transaction impacted the workers’ earnings in the Brazilian banking sector.

The paper’s findings suggest that there may be a negative relationship between market power and workers’ earnings.

This research conducted an in-depth investigation of the labor market power in a developing country. As far as we know, our work is the first to evaluate the extension of local concentration in Brazilian formal labor markets and to illustrate its evolution over the last decades. Additionally, when going through the effects of market concentration on wages, we use a new identification strategy that explores changes in the HHI that are caused by national trends in an industry as a source of exogenous variation. Finally, the last part of the paper assesses the effects of antitrust policy on the labor market, a kind of investigation that is still scarce.

This paper aims to identify and measure the impact of the types of innovation on micro and small enterprises’ performance in the foodservice industry.

A sample of 55 micro and small enterprises located in the Recife Metropolitan Area in Pernambuco were considered for the purpose of the analysis. All the firms were registered in the Agente Local de Inovação (ALI) program during the period of 2015 and 2016. The innovations developed by the firms were identified and measured using the sectorial innovation index, and the firm’s performance was calculated by the annual revenue. The impact of the innovations on performance was measured using multiple linear regression and quantile regression.

The regressions’ findings suggest that two innovation dimensions stand out concerning firm performance, that is, brand and customer experience are thought as to contribute to firm performance significantly. However, it has also been found that the contribution of the innovations may vary in the level of firm performance.

The paper was distinguished by analyzing the relationship between innovation and firm performance in the context of micro and small enterprises. The research also allowed knowing the innovations that can contribute to the micro and small enterprises’ performance, allowing such organizations to identify and develop the innovations seen as necessary for their competitiveness.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the implications of the COVID-19 pandemic on internal auditing as the pandemic forced individual internal auditors and audit teams to conduct the work remotely.

Five in-depth semi-structured interviews of internal audit experts that work in German retail and manufacturing industry were conducted between February and April 2021.

The authors find that the importance of audit technologies did not change significantly due to the pandemic, as audit technologies were already an integral part of internal audits. Interestingly, the transition to remote audits occurred with remarkable speed and efficiency. The presence of well-functioning information and communication technologies emerges as a critical facilitator for effective remote communication, collaboration and data exchange. However, audit technologies can only partially replace physical on-site examinations and human interaction. The main challenges of remote audits are related to the auditing of non-digitalized processes and the inherent limitations of auditee interviews and interactions.

The authors' interview approach does not allow to cover variations between industries and between countries. While internal audit experts provided notably consistent responses during the interviews, acknowledging that the sample size is very small is important.

The COVID-19 pandemic serves as a catalyst for increased digitalization and technology adoption within the realm of internal auditing. A hybrid approach combining the benefits of on-site and remote audits is expected to prevail in the future.

The paper is among the first to document the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the work of internal auditing using field-based research methods.

While localized small-series production is a significant opportunity, various tensions challenge implementation in high-cost contexts. This paper explores how managers view and respond to different tensions in small-series production implementation by adopting a paradox-based perspective.

The paper presents a multiple case study addressing small-series production within EU's apparel industry, as key context to address managerial awareness, and responses to tensions regarding location and supply network configuration decisions. Seven cases were selected for variation in customization and implementation (early/established), ownership, location and company size, to identity commonalities.

The study highlights performing tensions related to sustainability, and risk, in addition to confirming traditional goal-related tensions predominantly impacting small volume production. With on-demand/custom production, tensions include costs in conflict with process scale, and several process-related tensions (flexibility, expansion/development, risk management). Identified multidimensional responses do not include location or structural decisions, instead focusing on synthesis, through product-operations efficiency, knowledge development and process innovation and supply chain collaboration. Temporal separation is found with customization, including reducing product/process complexity short-term with enhancing process development, which suggests latent learning tensions and limited awareness.

Future research should address the extent to which tensions can be resolved or remain paradoxical, as well as dynamic decision-making and latent tensions.

The paper shows how paradox theory facilitates a deeper understanding of complex network configuration decisions, including reshoring/localization. The findings identify organizing tensions/elements and elaborate upon performing/performing-organizing tensions suggested with small-series production, location decisions and supply chain management.

This study examines whether and how government fiscal pressure influences corporate charitable giving (CCG).

The authors exploit sub-national tax revenue sharing changes as exogenous variations to government’s fiscal pressure at the city level and then construct a quasi difference-in-differences (DiD) model to conduct the analysis based on a sample that consists of 14,168 firm-year observations in China during the period of 2003 to 2012.

The authors found that firms increase charitable donations when local governments face higher fiscal pressure. Such effects are more pronounced for firms that have stronger demand for political connectedness in the sample period. Furthermore, this study’s findings suggest that the timing strategy of donating helps firms to lower the effective tax rate and to build stronger political connections. In addition, donating firms outperform non-donating firms in terms of bank loan access and market reputation.

The authors contribute to at least three lines of literature: first, extend the understanding of timing strategies of corporate charitable behaviors; second, contribute to the literature studying the “crowd out” effect between government-provided charitable funds and private donations; finally, contribute to the emerging literature exploring the financial interests associated with corporate donation strategy (Claessens et al., 2008; Cull et al., 2015).

The purpose of this paper is to determine the factors that affect Industry 4.0 applications, the expected impacts of Industry 4.0 applications in companies and to analyze the importance of these factors and the importance of expected impacts correlatively.

This paper provides an empirical analysis of the factors affecting the adoption of Industry 4.0 transformation and its impacts on the companies. The paper is based on 103 valid answers to a questionnaire-survey distributed among companies in Turkey. The Pearson correlation analysis was conducted to determine the correlation between independent variables and dependent variables. Regression analyses were used to test the proposed hypotheses. A multiple regression analysis was used to investigate the causal relationship between independent and dependent variables. Linear regression method and stepwise regression method was employed for regression analyses. The factors that influence Industry 4.0 applications were determined as company size, technological level of products, budget allocation for R&D department, level of lean applications, level of agility/flexibility and level of automation; and the expected impacts of Industry 4.0 applications were determined as traceability of production processes, traceability of supply chain, flexibility of supply chains, communication between the partners of supply chain, productivity, real-time data analysis, integration between companies and integration in the company according to the literature review

The results of this research study revealed that, there is a stronger relationship between level of Industry 4.0 transformation and level of automation than there is between Industry 4.0 transformation and the other independent variables. From the analyses conducted, it can be stated that budget allocation for R&D and level of lean applications and level of automation had greater impacts on Industry 4.0 transformation than company size has. The independent variables included in the regression analysis had a positive effect on Industry 4.0 transformation of companies. However the effects of company size, technological level of products and level of agility/flexibility on Industry 4.0 transformation was weak. When the impacts of Industry 4.0 on companies were analyzed, it can be stated that there is a stronger relationship between Industry 4.0 transformation and real-time data analysis, traceability of production processes, integration in companies and productivity than there is between Industry 4.0 transformation and integration between companies, traceability of supply chains, flexibility of supply chains and communication between the partners of supply chain. It was determined that Industry 4.0 transformation generally impacts internal factors of company, while Industry 4.0 had limited impacts on the supply chains.

Although there are studies that separately investigated the factors affecting Industry 4.0 transformation and the impacts of Industry 4.0 transformation on companies, the present study provides important contributions to the literature in terms of considering the importance levels of the factors affecting Industry 4.0 transformation and the importance level of impacts of Industry 4.0 transformation on companies as a whole and in relation to each other.

How do organisations know which problems are worthy of their attention? Despite good intentions, many attempts to solve problems fail. One reason for this failure might be because of attempts to solve non-problems or to solve problems with insufficient means, a concept proposed by Deming as tampering. The purpose of this paper is to suggest a definition of tampering, outline what is currently known about possible practical implications of tampering and to suggest how to extend this knowledge by proposing an agenda for future research.

To fulfil the purpose, a narrative literature review was conducted.

Through this review, common aspects of what constitutes tampering are identified and the following definition is proposed: Tampering is a response to a perceived problem in the form of an action that is not directed at the fundamental cause of the problem, which leads to a deterioration of the process or the process output. In addition, recommendations are generated regarding how tampering manifests itself in practice and why tampering occurs. These recommendations could be studied in future research.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first paper that suggests a revitalisation of tampering. The results presented in this paper form the basis for continued studies on how tampering in organisations can be understood, managed and prevented.

This study is the maiden attempt to understand the effect of specific human resource practices (HRPs) on employee retention (ER) with the mediation of job satisfaction (JS) and moderation of work experience (WE) and job hopping (JH) in the context of the textile industry.

This study adopted a quantitative methodology and applied quota sampling to gather data from employees (n = 365) of leading textile companies in India. The conceptual model and hypotheses were tested with the help of Partial Least Squares-Structural Equation Modelling (PLS-SEM).

The findings of a path analysis revealed that compensation and performance appraisal (CPA) have the highest impact on JS followed by employee work participation (EWP). On the other hand, EWP had the highest impact on ER followed by grievance handling (GRH). The study revealed that JS significantly mediates between HRPs like CPA and ER. During Multi-group analysis (MGA) it was found that the importance of EWP and health and safety (HAS) was more in employee groups with higher WE, but it was the opposite in the case of CPA. In the case of JH behavior, the study observed that EWP leads to JS in loyal employees. Similarly, JS led to ER, and the effect was more pronounced for loyal employees.

In the context of the Indian textile industry, this work is the first attempt to comprehend how HRPs affect ER. Secondly, it confirmed that JS is not a guaranteed mediator between HRPs and ER, it could act as an insignificant, partial or full mediator. Additionally, this study establishes the moderating effects of WE and JH in the model through multigroup analysis.