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Social relationships play an important role in organizational entrepreneurship. They are crucial to entrepreneurs’ decisions because, despite the bleeding-edge technological advancements observed nowadays, entrepreneurs as human beings will always strive to be social. During the COVID-19 pandemic many companies moved activities into the virtual world and as a result offline Social relationships became rarer, but as it turns out, even more valuable, likewise, the inter-organizational cooperation enabling many companies to survive.

This chapter aims to develop knowledge about entrepreneurs’ SR and their links with inter-organizational cooperation. The results of an integrative systematic literature review show that the concept of Social relationships, although often investigated, lacks a clear definition, conceptualization, and operationalization. This chapter revealed a great diversity of definitions for Social relationships, including different scopes of meaning and levels of analysis. The authors identify 10 building blocks and nine sources of entrepreneurs’ Social relationships. The authors offer an original typology of Social relationships using 12 criteria. Interestingly, with regard to building blocks, besides those frequently considered such as trust, reciprocity and commitment, the authors also point to others more rarely and narrowly discussed, such as gratitude, satisfaction and affection. Similarly, the authors discuss the varied scope of sources, including workplace, family/friendship, past relationships, and ethnic or religious bonds. The findings of this study point to a variety of links between Social relationships and inter-organizational cooperation, including their positive and negative influences on one another. These links appear to be extremely dynamic, bi-directional and highly complex.

The purpose of this study was to use relational vision as a theoretical support for an investigation of how operational competencies are developed from the interaction of shared relational resources in the supply chain and to verify how these competencies allow the resources to be able to function, unity, integration and direction.

This multihull study was based on semi-structured interviews with 13 representatives of four dyads from companies in the steel, automotive and industrial applications, pulp processing and manufacturing and application of flexible tubes.

The results indicate that information, knowledge and learning are significant constructs to influence the development of operational skills in the supply chain because they represent the ability of the company to promote skills to efficiently use resources and create a barrier to imitation.

There are limitations in the use of four companies from different industrial segments because it is possible to generalize the results. However, given the cross-sectional nature of the research, new studies may adopt a longitudinal approach to verify the evolution in the area of operations. Future studies may also expand the unit of analysis to understand the role of the relationship between the focus business and its strategic suppliers from the viewpoint of the suppliers. Thus, new research can be expanded to dyads, triads and business networks by investigating the various stages in the supply chain.

This study contributes to the literature and adds the dimension of relational operational skills, which is hitherto little explored in previous studies.

This study contributes to the literature in the area of operations management, in collaborative relationships between buyers and sellers, focusing on the relational view of competitiveness.

The growing importance of organizations and the role of collaboration, based on mutual benefits and grouping of skills, tend to increase the competitive benefits of companies operating in this context. The management of this type of arrangement becomes a challenge for researchers, reinforcing the originality of this study.

This paper examines whether and when improvement routines are critical for implementing lean practices in small- and medium-sized manufacturing enterprises (SMEs). Improvement routines such as “employees initiate and carry through improvement activities” are generally seen as an important means to achieve the full benefit of structural lean interventions. Womack and Jones (2003) suggest that these improvement routines should be developed as the company becomes more experienced in lean. The purpose of this paper is to explore the relative importance of individual improvement routines at various degrees of lean practice implementation.

A Between-Case Comparison Analysis (Dul and Hak, 2012) and a Necessary Condition Analysis (Dul, 2016) were performed on self-assessment data from 241 respondents at 38 Dutch manufacturing SMEs.

The importance of improvement routines depended on the degree of lean practice implementation. Lean practices could be implemented to some extend without developing specific improvement routines, yet certain routines were necessary for more advanced implementations of lean. These routines relate to employees conducting shared improvement activities and in the most advanced cases to aligning different improvement activities.

These findings question existing lean implementation models that neglect improvement routines and indicate the need to integrate improvement routines into every lean transformation for it to be sustainable.

Strategic flexibility (SF) has become increasingly important for firms because of the fast changes in the external environment. In line with the practical importance of SF, an emerging research field has developed around it that has attempted to understand the nature of SF and the key relationships. The aim of this study is to unveil the semantic structure of the recent literature on SF and to suggest new promising areas for future research.

The authors conduct a systematic literature review with a bibliographic analysis technique, which allows authors to identify the main recent streams in the literature, as well as offer reflections and suggestions for future research.

The authors uncover three main emerging areas in the research on SF, namely SF as a dynamic capability, the role of knowledge management for SF and the relationship between a firm SF and the external environment. The authors put forward three avenues for future research on SF: Avenue 1. SF, business model innovation (BMI) and other dynamic capabilities (DC), Avenue 2. Digital technologies and SF/organizational agility and Avenue 3. SF and sustainability. Articles included in the special issue entitled “A strategic perspective on flexibility, agility and adaptability in the digital era” contribute to Avenue 2, thus paving the way for filling some of the identified gaps regarding the relationship between SF and digitalization.

To the best of authors’ knowledge, this is the first literature review on SF that uses a bibliometric approach to draw conclusions on the findings in the literature. The review contributes to the theoretical understanding of SF by illustrating and explicating core topics that have persisted over time, as well as by presenting three main avenues for further developing authors’ knowledge around SF.

Quality management practitioners have yet to cease the potential of digitalisation. Furthermore, there is a lack of tools such as frameworks guiding practitioners in the digital transformation of their organisations. The purpose of this study is to provide a framework to guide quality practitioners with the implementation of digitalisation in their existing practices.

A review of literature assessed how quality management and digitalisation have been integrated. Findings from the literature review highlighted the success of the integration of Lean manufacturing with digitalisation. A comprehensive list of Lean Six Sigma tools were then reviewed in terms of their effectiveness and relevance for the hybrid digitisation approach to process improvement (HyDAPI) framework.

The implementation of the proposed HyDAPI framework in an industrial case study led to increased efficiency, reduction of waste, standardised work, mistake proofing and the ability to root cause non-conformance products.

The activities and tools in the HyDAPI framework are not inclusive of all techniques from Lean Six Sigma.

The HyDAPI framework is a flexible guide for quality practitioners to digitalise key information from manufacturing processes. The framework allows organisations to select the appropriate tools as needed. This is required because of the varying and complex nature of organisation processes and the challenge of adapting to the continually evolving Industry 4.0.

This research proposes the HyDAPI framework as a flexible and adaptable approach for quality management practitioners to implement digitalisation. This was developed because of the gap in research regarding the lack of procedures guiding organisations in their digital transition to Industry 4.0.

A port plays a crucial role in total logistics chain by conducting its function as a gateway for inbound (import) and outbound (export) cargo operations. The port has traditionally been regarded as a connecting place where handles ships on one side and cargoes on the other side. These interactive functions to be carried out by the port imply that a port organization should be established, maintained and altered in a way that generates a value-adding activity to the whole logistics chain. This paper aims to suggest an alternative direction for a port organization in context of changing global logistics environment so as to be better prepared for the ever-changing business horizon. Such an attempt will provide global logistics and port management with a strategic insight into innovative and responsive port organizational strategies.

The study aims to explore the argument of implementing the lean method to part or whole of an operation by examining the moderating impact of varying levels of the extent of implementation of four different lean methods, along with their functionalities, in predicting productivity improvement (PI).

As the focus of understanding the efficacy of lean principles is shifting from process to industry level, this study tried to generalize the approach by gathering data from 132 large Indian auto component manufacturers. This involves an assessing/monitoring approach rather than measurement.

Results highlighted the interdependence or individuality of the extent of implementation of lean methods and their functionalities. Findings revealed a significant moderating effect in improving productivity to a greater extent of 50%.

Adopting an assessment approach to a measurement study provides a noteworthy contribution to bridging theory and practical consequences. The findings can be appropriately extrapolated to medium and small enterprises forming a critical connection in the entire automobile manufacturing ecosystem.

The study showed that even if a lean method is applied to a certain extent of operations the chances of PI are significant. This is important for decision makers as they confront problems of optimum resource allocation.

PI, reduced cost and generalization of results would enable the auto component industry to become more competitive.

The examination of the moderation effect of a lean principle implementation extent, along with that of its functionalities to predict the improvement in productivity from its existing level, is a major outcome of this study.

This study aims to assess the biodiversity of the study area and estimate the carbon stock of two dry deciduous forest ranges of Banka Forest Division, Bihar, India.

The phytosociological analysis was performed and C stock estimation based on volume determination through nondestructive methods was done.

Phytosociological analysis found total 18,888 [14,893 < 10 cm (diameter at breast height) dbh] and 2,855 (1,783 < 10 cm dbh) individuals at Banka and Bounsi range with basal area of 181,035.00 cm² and 32,743.76 cm², respectively. Importance value index was highest for Shorea robusta in both the ranges. Species diversity index and dominance index, 1.89 and 1.017 at Banka and 1.99 and 5.600 at Bounsi indicated the prevalence of biotic pressure. Decreased dbh and tree height resulted in a lowered growing stock volume as 59,140.40 cm³ ha⁻¹ (Banka) and 71,306.37 cm³ ha⁻¹ (Bounsi). Total C stock at Banka and Bounsi range was 51.8 t ha^-1 and 12.56 t ha⁻¹, respectively where the highest C stock is recorded for Shorea robusta in both the ranges (9.8 t ha⁻¹ and 2.54 t ha^-1, respectively). A positive correlation between volume, total biomass and basal area of tree species with C stock was observed. R² value for Banka range was 0.9269 (volume-C stock), 1 (total biomass-C stock) and 0.647 (basal area-C stock). Strong positive correlation was also established at Bounsi range with R² value of 1. Considering the total forest area enumerated, C sequestration potential was about 194.25 t CO₂ (Banka) and 45.9 t CO₂ (Bounsi). The valuation of C stock was therefore US$2,525.25 (Banka) and US$596.70 (Bounsi).

The research found the potentiality of the study area to sequester carbon. However, for future, the degraded areas would require intervention of management strategies for restoration of degraded lands and protection of planted trees to increase the carbon sequestration potential of the area.

Present study is the first attempt to assess the phytosociology and estimate the regulatory services of forest with respect to biomass and carbon stock estimation for the Banka forest division of Bihar.

This study aims to investigate the effects of open innovation (OI) and big data analytics (BDA) on reflective knowledge exchange (RKE) within the context of complex collaborative networks. Specifically, it considers the relationships between sourcing knowledge from an external environment, transferring knowledge to an external environment and adopting solutions that are useful to appropriate returns from innovation.

This study analyzes the connection between the number of patent applications and the amount of OI, as well as the association between the number of patent applications and the use of BDA. Data from firms in the 27 European Union countries were retrieved from the Eurostat database for the period 2014–2019 and were investigated using an ordinary least squares regression analysis.

Because of its twofold lens based on both knowledge management and OI, this study sheds light on OI collaboration modes and highlights the crucial role they could play in innovation. In particular, the results suggest that OI collaboration modes have a strong effect on innovation performance, stimulating the search for RKE.

This study furthers a deeper understanding of RKE, which is shown to be an important mechanism that incentivizes firms to increase their efforts in the innovation process. Further, RKE supports firms in taking full advantage of the innovative knowledge they generate within their inter-organizational network.

This paper aims to examine employee perceptions of the labor market in the employee turnover intention model and explores how different situations outside work (labor market conditions) play a role in employee-organizational membership. In addition, it also examines the mediating role of commitment in the relationship between stress and the turnover model.

Data were collected from 628 private school teachers working in the economically depressed state of J&K (India), which were randomly selected. Confirmatory factor analysis was used for validation of a scale. Structural equation modeling and PROCESS by Hayes was used to test the hypothesized relationships between the study variables.

The antecedents of occupational stressors contribute negatively toward employees’ psychological state resulting in undesirable employee-organizational relationships such as high turnover intentions and low organizational commitment. Nevertheless, lack of external job opportunities compels employees to maintain organizational membership, even though against the stressful working environment.

This study while acknowledging the inherent limitations, questionnaires are susceptible to and single sectional nature of the study poses limitations.

The practical implication explains that the employee and organization relationship is governed more by external economic conditions than by the psychological feelings of the employees toward the organization (organizational commitment). As also, the moral system of employees, as well as their feelings toward the noble profession makes them feel morally exalted and this binds them to the membership of the organization.

This study mainly focuses on, to understand if and how the conditions of the labor market relate to the employees’ attitudes. This would enable us to gain more insights to the systematic relations of employees’ attitudinal variables such as occupational stress, organizational commitment and employee turnover intentions.