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Analyses of cultural landscapes need to combine natural and social-cultural components to promote discussions on landscape planning and heritage management. This qualitative research explores the integrated case study of ten municipalities in the “Vineyard Landscape of Piedmont: Langhe-Roero and Monferrato”, Italy, a UNESCO World Heritage cultural landscape. The research aims to raise awareness of its aesthetic-perceptive features, the importance of effective identification of visual impacts and to promote mitigation strategies/actions for updating the current Management Plan.

Two rounds of interviews and focus groups with mayors were performed in 2015 and 2020 to identify trends and drivers of change affecting the territories. Potential mitigation strategies and actions were voted on and selected in response to five critical themes that emerged from the survey, mainly related to real estate and its supplies.

The results suggest tools and policies in the fields of landscape architecture and landscape design that could benefit planning and management at different levels. They support the design of sustainable scenarios, improving mayors' understanding of the significance of cultural landscapes and promoting them as heritage managers. Furthermore, they intend to preserve the authenticity of the landscape by supporting its attributes for long-term conservation.

The research makes an original contribution on the visual implications of anthropogenic landscape transformations in ten municipalities constituting this serial property, six years after its UNESCO nomination (2014).

This paper aims to investigate the role of organizational and technological enablers and their arrangement and alignment with the external environment to facilitate supply chain integration (SCI), which consequently improves operational performance.

The paper uses a structural equation modeling approach and the data from 307 manufacturing firms from the International Manufacturing Strategy Survey version VI for hypotheses testing.

The findings of the study reveal that (1) the alignment and particular arrangement of the sociotechnical organizational factors enable the SCI of a firm, (2) suitable organizational arrangements help in leveraging SCI under environmental pressures, and (3) SCI leverages the relationship between sociotechnical organizational factors and operational performance of the firm.

This paper informs managers that SCI leverages the operational performance of firms under heightened environmental pressures. Developing suitable manufacturing technologies infrastructure followed by organizational practices aligned with the manufacturing technologies make it easier to realize SCI.

This study explores the interaction of technological, organizational, and environmental factors as driving and enabling factors that help achieve SCI. Firms that develop an open and collaborative environment and use communication and integrative technologies to complement their work practices better cope with external pressures. These modern forms of working and the use of technologies facilitate SCI and leverage it effectively to positively impact firm performance.

This paper aims to study the motives that led to conflict between two groups – Employees of state-owned power distribution companies and the Government – over permitting parallel licensing to a private company for power distribution services in selected areas of the Maharashtra state in India. The study also seeks to comprehend the reconciliation process and the role of leadership in thwarting the strike that could have impacted common citizens.

The research is built on a case-based approach to analyze the pre- and poststrike environment along with the impact of the power shortage during the few hours of the strike. A semi-structured interview method wherein government and employee union representatives were interviewed to understand their version of the incident is used. Related literature, reports and news were reviewed to realize the impacts and consequences of similar situations in the past.

The strike was called off within a few hours with the intervention of state government to resolve the issue, promising the union the government’s intention not to privatize but to invest INR 500bn in the three government companies. The parallel licensing may impact government-owned power distribution companies as well as customers in the future.

It will pave the way for lessons related to such incidence where the Government and the Unions are at loggerheads over issues like privatization or ownership of the company and help the involved and other parties to seek a viable solution. The role of resilient leadership demonstrated by both parties led to a win-win solution within a few hours of the strike.

The paper is a case study on an issue that is very contemporary; the role of leadership and its swiftness in decision-making that led to a solution to a very complex situation is something that was not done earlier in the context of the State vs Union issue.

This study investigates the mediating role of wage and workforce adjustments, along with the moderating influence of collective bargaining system and employees’ localization, in elucidating the relationship between the COVID-19 shock and workplace employee relations (ER) tension.

Survey data from 1,483 enterprises across 21 prefectural cities in China’s Guangdong Province are collected. The hypotheses are tested by logistic regression.

The study reveals a positive correlation between the COVID-19 shock and workplace ER tension across crisis-hit enterprises, irrespective of their size or industrial sector. Wage reduction and mass layoffs emerge as significant mediators, while the collective bargaining system (CBS) and employees’ localization act as moderators.

The measurement of ER is limited in a single-item scale. Representation of China is also limited since the study exclusively focuses on Guangdong province. The study offers some contributions that firm-level data reveal the pathway through which COVID-19 creates ER tension.

On the one hand, the authors recommend the establishment of an effective communication system between employers and employees. On the other hand, managers should consider the role of informal institutions. Furthermore, the authors suggest implementing tailored strategies at the enterprise level.

Intense external shocks result in widespread layoffs and increased wage reductions within workplaces, and under such circumstances, formal or informal institutions may be insufficient to alleviate ER tension. In this case, the state authorities – including governments and other public agencies or bodies – are necessary to intervene in to organize tripartite dialogue.

While numerous emerging studies on COVID-19 explore how different countries manage industrial relations tension at the national level, few focus on ER at workplace level, particularly in developing countries. Understanding how workplace ER evolve during external shocks and identifying institutional measures to mitigate their negative impact is crucial for future crisis management.

In business-to-business interactions, conflicts are inevitable, and conflict-handling strategies that consider different variables improve the decision-making process of actors. This study aims to reveal the role of power and criticality in conflict-handling research in logistics service networks.

A 2 × 2 between-subject experimental design with four different scenarios was used. One hundred sixty logistics service actors completed an online questionnaire. Data were analyzed with ANOVA and paired sample t-tests using the SPSS 28.0 program.

In comparative scenarios involving high and low power dynamics, individuals with high power and high criticality situations are more inclined to favor the dominating strategy compared to low-power and low-criticality contexts. However, when faced with specific circumstances characterized by both high power and high criticality, actors tend to prioritize the integrating strategy initially, followed by the dominating and obliging strategies in that order. Notably, the statistical analysis revealed no significant interaction effect between criticality and power concerning the integrating, obliging and dominating conflict-handling strategies.

This study used an experimental approach to investigate criticality and power as contextual elements in determining conflict-handling strategies in an inter-firm environment within logistics service networks. This study is particularly groundbreaking in its knowledge of the relationship among power dynamics, conflict criticality and conflict-handling strategies.

Integrated project delivery (IPD) project that does not use multiparty agreement is identified as IPD-ish. The use of IPD-ish arrangement by incorporating integration practices in conventional contract can be viewed as the part of the adoption process of IPD. Moreover, inappropriate integration practices invite new forms of risks and the absence of multiparty agreement adds to the challenges of risk management in IPD-ish projects. This study discusses such challenges and proposes the use of joint risk management to address the potential pitfalls in IPD-ish arrangement.

A mixed research method was applied. First, the criticality of IPD-ish general and integration-specific risks was examined through a survey. Second, a real IPD-ish project was used to exemplify the use of joint risk management (JRM) to manage IPD-ish risks.

Two types of risks, namely integration risks (IRs) and general risks (GRs), are identified in IPD-ish projects. Two major findings for the IRs: (1) the most critical IRs are related to unbalanced incentivization and inefficient multidisciplinary teams; and (2) only team formation related pre-contract JRM strategies affect IRs. As for the GRs, the most critical ones are associated with design issues and can be effectively mitigated by post-contract JRM.

Using IPD-ish arrangement is an inevitable part of implementation of full IPD. This happens as many change-averse owners would like to test the integration principles using a conventional contract that they are familiar with. In fact, success in IPD-ish would pave the path for further adoption of IPD. This study offers insight into categorization of risks in IPD-ish projects. Appropriate use of post-contract and organization related pre-contract JRM would improve the chance of teasing out the values of IPD through IPD-ish arrangements. Care should be taken to introduce some contracting integration initiatives, such as risk/reward sharing incentive.

Leveraging Emerson’s theory of power and motivated reasoning, this study aims to explore how the net power of an individual and actual, instead of perceived, vulnerability results in asymmetric trust and distrust development in a dyadic relationship.

Based on extant literature and gaps in the literature, this conceptual paper hypothesises and proposes trust formation based on power dynamics and vulnerability.

This research extends the knowledge base by exploring the role of actual vulnerability over perceived vulnerability in trust formation and distrust formation.

The research propositions imply that the dyadic trust formation process is not rational, and trust itself is not symmetrical but asymmetrical. The net power possessed by one individual over the other drives trust. Net power balance determines the actual vulnerability of the focal individual, and then the individual, through motivated reasoning, trusts or distrusts another individual. Scholars, going forward, could explore how trust formation varies at group and firm levels.

Extant literature has not explored the role of power imbalance in determining actual (versus perceived) vulnerability that influences trust formation between parties. The conceptual paper fills this gap.

Understanding how firms manage multiple stakeholders is an academic and business call. This paper aims to describe a firm’s processes to implement a stakeholder value creation system, defined as the firm’s processes to create appropriate value with multiple stakeholders.

The authors based their investigation on a conceptual framework extracted from a previous literature review. From there, the authors conducted qualitative empirical research designed as a multiple-case study. In-depth interviews with 47 people from 11 different firms are the key source of this study.

This paper proposes a framework demonstrating how a firm can implement a stakeholder value creation system. Results pointed to three processes: value creation, distribution and capture. Value distribution mechanisms are drivers for both value creation and capture processes. The system is a set of multiple flow relationships between the firm and its stakeholders.

This research is limited to the Brazilian context.

The stakeholder value creation system is composed of seven elements: walk-the-talk organizational behavior, stakeholder business model, societal non-attended need, stakeholder preference matrix, stakeholder bargaining power, retention of rents and governance mechanism. Managers may design their firm’s unique processes using these elements as drivers.

The present investigation demonstrates that societal issues matter for firms to formulate strategies that positively impact their economic, social and environmental results.

The authors investigated competitive strategy concepts of value creation and appropriation from a combination of resource-based and stakeholder theories and a system perspective. The framework of this study consolidated both theories’ ideas from a complementary perspective. The authors suggest managers and academics should adopt the power of the “AND” position instead of the “OR” trade-off position.

Knowledge management (KM) capability plays an important role in the promotion of firm performance in the knowledge economy era. However, empirical evidence on how KM capability affects firm performance is still limited. The study therefore aims to explore the impacts of internal and external KM capabilities on firm performance via the parallel mediation of efficiency-centered and novelty-centered business model innovations (BMIs).

The authors empirically analyzed a survey data of 295 Chinese innovative enterprises by applying partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) and fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA).

According to the results of PLS-SEM, the relationship between internal KM capability and firm performance is not significant, instead it is fully mediated by efficiency-centered and novelty-centered BMIs. External KM capability can directly and positively affect firm performance, while the relationship is also partially mediated by BMIs. Furthermore, the authors recognized the antecedent conditions for high-level and low-level firm performance by fsQCA analysis, which substantiate the above findings.

It not only enriches the literature that links KM and innovation management but also contributes to the new theoretical perspective on firm sustainable growth. Methodologically, it combines symmetric and asymmetric analyses together. Additionally, it provides some insights for managers to understand how KM capability drives firm performance through BMI.

Little is known about gender relations in young African migrant families residing in Hong Kong (HK). This study aims to present a first-hand account of daily lived experiences of African international doctoral student couples residing in HK, with special emphases on their Africa–HK migratory motivations, perceptions of female-breadwinning status, the effects of HK Immigration policy on marital power structures and the influence of spousal relative statuses (“breadwinner” versus “dependent”) on couples gender role performances and decision-making participations.

This study used ethnographic method involving several indoor family visits, non-participant observations and 21 in-depth interviews in six African student families. Fieldnotes were taken and interviews were tape-recorded, transcribed and interpreted using thematic content analysis.

Couples, especially dependent men, had a hard time deciding to migrate to HK for family reunion, unlike dependent women who willingly resigned to join their husbands in HK. Among the male dependents, the main reasons for migrating included anticipated economic returns, while women migrated in response to neolocal cultural expectations. Overall, patriarchy persisted – while men had the final say over key household decision-making domains, women remained primary performers of household chores, but manifested little bargaining power, restraining husband’s ability to spend family income when they are the family’s sole-earners. Women’s relative breadwinning status had very minimal significant impact.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, this is the first study to examine the effects of HK’s immigration policy on married African students’ migration motivations and the effects of female-breadwinning status on spousal gender relations in HK’s African student migrant households.