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The purpose of this paper is to analyze the inhibiting factors of partnership creation between social entrepreneurs in the business, government, public and non‐profit sector.

This paper examines four cases of social entrepreneurship in the start‐up phase. Each case is studied in real time, for a period of two years.

The empirical research reveals that partnership creation for social enterprises between a social enterprise and organizations in various sectors is inhibited by conflicting interests and diverging speed of on one hand and by the conflicts that originate from the opportunity‐seeking behavior of the social entrepreneur and the risk avoiding behavior of the organizations. While the social start‐ups that managed to neutralize such inhibitors succeeded, the start‐up enterprises that did not manage to do so failed.

While, there is a sound body of knowledge of the factors that inhibit the more traditional single and cross‐sector partnerships, relatively little is known about the factors that inhibit the partnerships between social enterprises and organizations in the business, public, government, and non‐profit sectors in society.

This study aims to analyze the inhibiting factors of small and medium enterprises (SMEs’) technology innovation, supporting institutions for SMEs technology innovation development, SMEs’ technology innovation development model and strategies for developing SMEs in technology innovation.

This is a mixed-method research project conducted through a survey of SMEs in Riau Province, Sumatera Indonesia (primarily in the districts of Siak, Kampar and Pelalawan) from April to July 2019. SMEs that have been operating for at least five years were chosen purposively as samples. Based on the requirement, there are 277 entities used in this study. A focus group discussion (FGD) was also conducted to formulate SME models and development strategies in technological innovation. In addition, in-depth interviews and observations were also carried out on technological innovations undertaken by respondents.

It was found that there are five inhibiting factors of SMEs’ technology innovation: government support, quality of human resources, funding of technological innovation, economic conditions and business partners. The biggest inhibiting factor remains to be the funding of technological innovation. Therefore SMEs provide independent technological innovation costs to develop technological innovations for business sustainability. Supporting institutions for developing SME technology innovation consist of government institutions, private institutions, financial institutions (banks) and nonbank financial institutions. To survive and excel amid competition, SMEs need to pay attention to technological innovation. The business strategy that needs to be done is to improve services to consumers and improve their attitude toward innovation in the implementation and development of SMEs’ businesses.

This research is limited to research on the inhibiting factors for SME technology innovation from the aspect of the production sector. This research has not studied various business fields in the trade, service and digital SME sectors. Future studies can reveal factors inhibiting SME technological innovation, except production aspects and various SME business fields. In addition, this study has not analyzed the cost of technological innovation provided by SMEs. Therefore, future studies could also reveal the large costs of technological innovation provided by SMEs.

This research investigates barriers hindering the SMEs’ technological innovations in Southeast Asia, including Indonesia as a maritime country. It also formulates strategies to reduce the barriers to SME’s technological innovation and contributes to the development of knowledge of technological innovations in SMEs. Moreover, this paper involves investigating government support from a nonfinancial aspect. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this aspect has not been much discussed by studies on innovation at SMEs till now.

ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered chatbot, has gained substantial attention in the academic world for its potential to transform the education industry. While ChatGPT offers numerous benefits, concerns have also been raised regarding its impact on the quality of education. This study aims to bridge the gap in research by exploring teachers' perspectives on the adoption of ChatGPT, with a focus on identifying factors that motivate and inhibit them to adopt ChatGPT for educational purposes.

This research has employed a interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) qualitative approach. Through in-depth interviews among the teachers, data will be collected to identify the motivating and inhibiting factors that impact teachers' willingness to adopt ChatGPT. The data was collected from 34 teachers working across 10 branches of the University of Technology and Applied Sciences (UTAS) in Oman.

The analysis revealed four themes under motivating factors that encourage teachers to adopt ChatGPT for their educational purpose. These include Theme 1: Exploration of innovative education technologies, Theme 2: Personalization teaching and learning, Theme 3: Time-saving and Theme 4: Professional development. On the other hand, inhibiting factors includes five themes which includes Theme 1: Reliability and accuracy concerns, Theme 2: Reduced human interaction, Theme 3: Privacy and data security, Theme 4: lack of institutional support and Theme 5: Overreliance on ChatGPT.

This study contributes to the understanding of teachers' perspectives on the adoption of ChatGPT in education. By understanding teachers' perspectives, policymakers can design appropriate policies and service providers can customize their offerings to meet teachers' requirements. The study's findings will be valuable for higher education institutions (HEIs) in formulating policies to ensure the appropriate and effective utilization of ChatGPT. The study will provide suggestions to ChatGPT service providers, enabling them to focus on motivating factors and address inhibiting factors, thereby facilitating the seamless adoption of ChatGPT among teachers.

In comparison to previous studies, this study goes beyond merely discussing the possible benefits and limitations of ChatGPT in education. This research significantly contributes to the understanding of ChatGPT adoption among teachers by identifying specific motivating and inhibiting factors that influence teachers to adopt ChatGPT for educational purposes. The research enables to gain important new insights that were not previously found, giving a fresh dimension to the existing literature.

This paper aims to examine the relationships between macro-, meso- and micro-level contextual factors that enable or inhibit the contribution of product service systems (PSS) to circularity. It is informed by the natural resource-based view (NRBV) and the multi-level perspective as theoretical lenses.

A theory elaboration approach is used through three in-depth case studies of UK and German manufacturers. Case studies provide use- and result-oriented PSS for personal computers, power tools and wind turbines. Multiple sources of evidence, including 20 semi-structured interviews, company documents and quantitative data, are triangulated to improve the validity of the results.

Empirical evidence for relationships between macro-, meso- and micro-level contextual factors show significant barriers to the extending and cycling of resource loops, primarily through maintenance, repairs and refurbishment. A firm’s environmental awareness has a determining role in the contribution of PSS to circularity. The evidence from two use-oriented PSS reveals different circularity maturity levels.

This research makes three key contributions. Firstly, it elaborates on NRBV by showing that a firm’s environmental awareness determines product stewardship. The type of product stewardship practices depends on the enabling and inhibiting effects of macro- and meso-level factors. Secondly, it shows that use-oriented PSS have different circularity profiles and proposes three circularity maturity levels. Finally, it provides an empirically validated framework of macro-, meso- and micro-level enablers and barriers and how they interact to enable or inhibit circularity in PSS.

This paper reports on one aspect of a European Union‐funded research project, focusing in exploring factors that influence lifelong learning. Influencing factors were categorised as those that inhibit and those that support a learning orientation. Research findings suggest that the same factors could have both supportive and inhibiting influence, highlighting the complexity and subjectivity of investigating the influence of HRD practices and other organisational features on perceptions of learning. The paper also identifies key issues for management – that is, how to manage these factors to further encourage, promote, capture and act on the wide range of learning opportunities apparent in work organisations. It is argued that identifying such factors within an organisation is an important step in enabling managers and other HRD practitioners to recognise how learning might be hindered or helped within that context, before considering strategies and practices to better manage and cope with these influences.

The purpose of this study was to explore rapid role shifts at work and to describe the factors that facilitate or inhibit such role shifts, and how these factors affect the employee.

A qualitative study was conducted with 12 participants from four public sector organizations. The participants systematically documented their work role shifts over the course of three days. Based on these data, they were interviewed about their shifts in work roles. All data were analyzed thematically.

Rapid role shifts do not work without extensive mental preparation and commitment. The role changes were perceived as stimulating if there was clarity about purpose, context and the significance of one’s own role, and if there was time both to switch between different roles and to reflect.

This study was only performed in public sector organizations, and with a relatively small sample of interviewees. To generalize the results a more comprehensive collection of data would be required, including independence between researchers and subjects.

Adequate work structures, well-thought-out plans, time set aside for adjustment and reflection, and, not least, well-functioning information technologies are essential to teamwork commitment and satisfaction. As occasional teams, virtual teams and remote work become more common in the future, attention must be paid to rapid work role shifts by governments, policymakers and employers.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first systematic study of the challenges involved in rapid shifts in work roles.

This paper aims to focus on systematically analysing and synthesising the extant research published on supply chain integration (SCI) area, given the significance of SCI research area. More specifically, the authors aim to answer three questions: “Q1 – What are the factors (e.g. both driving and inhibiting) that influence SCI?”, “Q2 – What are the key developments (e.g. both in research and industry) in SCI area?” and “Q3 – What are the approaches employed/discussed to integrate supply chains?”. Over the past decade, SCI has gained increasing attention in the supply chain management (SCM) context, both from the practitioners’ perspective and as a research area. In realising the global transformations and competitive business environment, a number of organisations are collaborating with their supply chain (SC) partners, to conduct seamless SC operations.

A systematic and structured literature review is carried out to observe and understand the past trends and extant patterns/themes in the SCI research area, evaluate contributions and summarise knowledge, thereby identifying limitations, implications and potential directions of further research. Thus, to trace the implementation of SCI practices, a profiling approach is used to analyse 293 articles (published in English-speaking peer-reviewed journals between 2000 and 2013) extracted from the Scopus database. The Systematic Review Approach proposed by Tranfield et al. (2003) was followed to analyse and synthesise the extant literature on SCI area.

The analysis presented in this paper has identified relevant SCI research studies that have contributed to the development and accumulation of intellectual wealth to the SCI and SCM area. Each of the 293 papers was examined for achieving the aim and objectives of the research, the method of data collection, the data analysis method and quality measures. While some of the papers provided information on all of these categories, most of them failed to provide all the information, especially for Q2 and Q3 that resulted in 23 and 21 papers, respectively.

This study would have benefited from the analysis of further journals; however, the analysis of 293 articles from leading journals in the field of operations and SCM was deemed sufficient in scope. Moreover, this research has implications for researchers, journal editors, practitioners, universities and research institutions. It is likely to form the basis and motivation for profiling other database resources and specific operations and SCM-type journals in this area.

This systematic literature review highlights a taxonomy of contextual factors driving and inhibiting SCI for researchers and SC practitioners to refer to while researching or implementing SCI. It also exemplifies some areas for future research, along with the need for researchers to focus on developing more practical techniques for implementing SCI and improving organisational performance.

The prime value and uniqueness of this paper lies in analysing and compiling the existing published material in relation to Q1, Q2 and Q3, including examining other variables (such as yearly publications, geographic location of each publication, type of publication, type of research methods used), which lacks in the recent published five SCI literature review-based articles (by Kim, 2013; Leuschner et al., 2013; Alfalla-Luque et al., 2013; Parente et al., 2008; Fabbe-Costes and Jahre, 2007). This has been achieved by extracting and synthesising existing publications using “Supply Chain Integration” keyword. This paper provides a critique of the conceptual and empirical works in SCI discipline and offers research agendas that can stimulate future researchers to carefully explore the topic.

The purpose of this study is to empirically quantify the factors that are perceived to drive or inhibit performance of information technology (IT) outsourced employees from a range of information technology outsourcing (ITO) stakeholders in South Africa.

The first phase was a qualitative study on 19 stakeholders focussed on the development of the constructs. The second phase was quantitative, with a sample of 116 ITO stakeholders of the largest IT company in South Africa.

The study revealed that the ITO stakeholders had misaligned perceptions on inhibitors and somewhat congruent perceptions with regards to drivers of performance. Managers and poor performers’ perceptions of inhibiting factors of performance were significantly different. The empirical evidence showed that the key drivers of performance were intrinsic factors and leadership, whilst the inhibiting factors were mainly related to poor leadership.

The major limitation was that the population was represented by one large organisation in the South African IT industry and its clients, thereby excluding the rest of the IT industry participants, specifically the medium and small IT companies. The quota sample resulted in a non-probability study, and thus, the results of this study may not necessarily be generalised to other populations. This study’s findings on differences between good and poor performers must be investigated in other industries.

For outsourced employees to perform optimally, some key intrinsic factors must be fulfilled. Passion and pride, aligned to a meaningful job role, will unleash outstanding performance. Organisations need to ensure that there is regular feedback to managers on their performance and subsequent leadership development. Alignment of managers and poor performers’ perceptions on drivers and inhibitors could improve performance.

These findings demonstrate the large gap in perceptions about the key drivers and inhibiters of performance.

The study reveals that top performers tend to have higher order and intrinsic motivators, compared to poor performers, who have a mixture of extrinsic and intrinsic needs, and managers have a misaligned expectation of extrinsic motivators.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the factors that discourage construction workers from undergoing skill development training, and to suggest steps for making the training programmes more attractive to them.

The research used an exploratory approach of unstructured interviews with construction workers (bottom-up approach), and the guided group brainstorming technique with the help of experienced industry professionals (top-down approach).

From the unstructured interviews, five inhibiting factors were identified which discourage construction workers from undergoing training. Furthermore, to recognise the causes of the inhibiting factors, 13 possible causal attributes (PCAs) were identified from the brainstorming approach. Subsequently, these PCAs were classified into five possible causal factors (PCFs) on the basis of those concerned stakeholder(s) that are most closely involved and most responsible for fixing them.

The research provides recommendations to practitioners for pragmatic and permanent resolution of each of the PCFs, which serves as a framework for the construction industry to reduce the scarcity of trained workers in the industry. Also, the results may serve as a model for the planning and successful implementation of any new skill-training programme for the construction workers in any developing economy, such as India.

This research contributes to the literature by highlighting the views of construction workers on the training establishments, which very few studies have considered in the past. Also, the research provides a detailed process of brainstorming approach, which will help the research community to appreciate its use in studies related to the construction industry.

The auto ancillary industry in India has witnessed huge capacity expansion and modernization due to entry of foreign automobile manufacturers in the post liberalization era. In spite of potential benefits, the adoption of advanced IT among small to medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs) is low in India. There are several technological, economical and organizational factors that enable or inhibit the adoption of advanced IT. The primary objective of this research is to identify and evaluate the key factors that are enabling or inhibiting adoption of advanced IT in the Indian auto ancillary SMEs.

In order to identify and evaluate the enablers and inhibitors, a detailed survey was carried out among registered Indian auto ancillary SMEs during 2010. Out of 584 registered SMEs, 110 owners/top managers of the SMEs responded to the survey. The data collected through the survey were analyzed using confirmatory factor analysis and multivariate regression to evaluate the influence of enablers and inhibitors of advanced IT adoption by the auto ancillary SMEs.

The survey findings show that the level of advanced IT adoption in auto ancillaries is low with only 17 per cent of SMEs having adopted technologies. This study reveals that “perceived benefits” and “perceived competitive pressure” enable advanced IT adoption among auto ancillary SMEs in India. However, “lack of financial capacity”, “small scale operation and “lack of in‐house IT manpower” inhibit the adoption. It is also found that enablers such as “changes in business environment”, “IT experience of CEO/owner” and “increased information linkage with OEM/customer” do not have any influence on the adoption. Similarly in the case of inhibitors, “lack of IT Infrastructure” and “lack of information security” do not have significant association with IT adoption. Despite the positive external IT environment and recognition of benefits, advanced IT adoption by SMEs in the auto ancillaries is limited by lack of financial capabilities and in‐house IT human resources.

This is one of the early papers that brings out the enablers and inhibitors of advanced IT adoption by auto ancillaries in India. Further, these factors are systematically analyzed to assess the relative importance with reference to the SMEs. The findings contribute to theory of IT adoption among SMEs, but more importantly to the SMEs in the auto ancillary, and policy makers and IT service providers who are likely to facilitate increased adoption.