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Significant transitions in firms (e.g. outsourcing) may impact the relative importance of production and inventory assets, affecting the hierarchical separation of planning decisions. The purpose of this paper is to contribute to planning literature by investigating how the production system and the planning environment influence the performance difference between hierarchical and monolithic planning. Further, it seeks to reduce the prevailing theory-practice gap in tactical planning.

Through an action research study, a monolithic model integrating tactical production planning decisions, subject to upstream supply chain constraints, with strategic investments decisions was developed, tested and implemented in a global OEM. Using the developed model and a measure of the capital cost of production assets relative to the cost of holding inventory, it is numerically examined how the production system and planning environment influence the performance of hierarchical and monolithic planning.

The research demonstrates the potential of integrating decisions and reveals significant performance differences between hierarchical and monolithic planning for firms with low capital cost relative to inventory holding cost.

The findings suggest a fit between planning processes, the production system and planning environment. Future research should empirically validate the findings and propositions.

The paper combine capital investments and production planning decisions, which usually transpire at different hierarchical levels and on different time-horizons, and investigates the consequences of hierarchical separation through a real-life validated case and numerical analysis.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how management attention and supply chain complexity affect the decision-making process and cost estimation accuracy of supply chain design (SCD) decisions.

The research follows an embedded case study design. Through the lens of the behavioural theory of the firm, the SCD decision process and realised outcomes are investigated through longitudinal data collection across ten embedded cases with varying degrees of supply chain decision-making complexity and management attention.

The findings suggest that as supply chain decision-making complexity increases, cost estimation accuracy decreases. The extent to which supply chain decision-making complexity is readily recognised influences the selection of strategies for information search and analysis and, thus, impacts resulting cost estimation errors. The paper further shows the importance of management attention for cost estimation accuracy, especially management attention based on conflicting goals induce behaviours that improve estimation ability.

A framework proposing a balance between supply chain decision-making complexity and management attention in SCD decisions is proposed. However, as an embedded case study the research would benefit from replication to externally validate results.

The method used in this study can identify how supply chain complexity is related to cost estimation errors and how management attention is associated with behaviours that improve cost estimation accuracy, indicating the importance of management attention in complex supply chain decision-making.

The purpose of this paper is to describe and categorise how current literature contributes to sales and operations planning (S&OP) research on how contextual variables affect S&OP design and to frame future areas for context-based S&OP research.

The method used was a systematic literature review. Studies for review were obtained through a keyword search of five relevant databases, manual searches of relevant journals and snowballing of citations in relevant papers. In total, 571 papers published between 2000 and 2017 were assessed, and 68 papers were included in the review.

The review found that S&OP design depends on industry, dynamic complexity, detail complexity and organisational characteristics. The findings of the literature review suggest that future research should study the roles of industry, complexity, system and process and organisational characteristics in S&OP design.

The findings revealed several gaps in the literature on context-dependent S&OP design. To address these gaps, an agenda for future S&OP contingency research is developed.

The findings revealed which contextual areas and specific S&OP design issues must be considered when designing and implementing S&OP.

This study focussed on identifying relevant research on S&OP design by analysing the contribution of literature to a research framework inspired by contingency-based research of operations and supply chain management.

Globally, Denmark stands out in terms of achieving high employment rates, containing unemployment and providing a labour market model combining flexibility, security and activation with a strong role for the social partners. The Danish labour market institutions and policies are seen as the catalyst for the transformation from industrial economy to a globalised, post-industrial and knowledge-based economy in which socio-economic equality and workforce security go hand in hand with competitiveness and the adaptability of business. In the 2000s, this mutual relationship came to be known as the Danish flexicurity model. Meanwhile, as a policy blueprint, ‘flexicurity’ has never really influenced Danish politics, and the reforms implemented since the 2000s have deviated from the premises of the model. This paper critically assesses the Danish model and its institutional components. It tracks the emergence of the Danish collective bargaining model as well as the flexicurity model. It scrutinises the challenges and performance of the current Danish labour market institutions and policies in a comparative perspective and discusses the extent to which the Danish experiences can and should be imitated abroad.

This chapter seeks to explain how societal institutions, which may exist at the national or regional levels, shape the types of organizational learning predominating at the level of the firm. It focuses on education and training systems, and labour markets as key societal institutions shaping the micro-level processes of learning and knowledge creation within and between firms. The chapter argues that tacit knowledge, which is difficult to create and transfer in the absence of social interaction and labour mobility, constitutes a most important source of learning and sustainable competitive advantage in the knowledge economy. It looks at the cases of Japan, the high-technology clusters in the USA and U.K., and Denmark as illustrative examples.

There are two key approaches in doping prevention research: (1) to investigate why athletes dope (i.e. risk factors) and (2) to investigate why athletes do not dope (i.e. protective factors). Both approaches aim to reduce the occurrence of doping. Even though there is a lot of evidence showing which factors protect athletes from doping, there is still the problem of putting research into practice. Currently, evidence-based prevention is lacking. In this chapter, we propose a roadmap of possible solutions in three areas: improving the translation of research findings into practice, increasing financial resources and training of human resources, and acknowledging the recipients' voice.

In this chapter it is shown that, in spite of the fundamental importance for economic growth of product innovation, standard economic theory – neo-classical as well as transaction cost approaches to industrial organization – tends to neglect it. It is also shown that moving the focus to product innovation leads to very different conclusions on how alternative institutional set-ups affect economic performance. Institutional set ups assumed to optimise allocation and minimise transaction costs do not support innovation and growth. That is why producer goods where innovation is a regular phenomenon are transacted neither in pure markets nor in hierarchies. The omnipresence of “organized markets” reflects the need for users as well as producers to engage in on-going information exchange and interactive learning in connection with product innovation.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the role of CEO narcissism in corporate acquisitions with a focus on frequency and size and furthermore to examine the subsequent stock market reaction.

The authors investigate 751 acquisitions made by 158 UK nonfinancial firms and 202 CEOs in the 10-year period 2007–2016. The authors use the ratio of first-person singular pronouns to total first-person pronouns in CEO speech as the main proxy for CEO narcissism but the results are robust to the use of signature size and picture as alternative measures.

The authors find that increased CEO narcissism is associated with an increase in M&A expenditures, an increase in deal size and a decrease in deal frequency. Thus, the authors find that narcissistic CEOs favor size over frequency (“go big”). Furthermore, the authors find that the stock market reacts less favorably to acquisitions announced by firms run by narcissistic CEOs.

The paper contributes to upper echelon research by investigating the association between CEO narcissism and corporate decisions in a UK setting. More specifically, the paper contributes to the existing literature by investigating how CEO narcissism is associated with corporate acquisitions in terms of the size and frequency of deals and how such irrational behavior is penalized by the stock market. Previous literature has focused on the more broad association between CEO narcissism and M&A expenditures.

The purpose of this paper is to present an experimental study which aims at assessing the potentially misleading effect of graphic elements on food packaging. The authors call these elements potentially misleading elements (PMEs) as they can give customers false expectations. They are either highlighted numerical information (30 per cent fibre, 8 per cent fat, 100 per cent natural […]) or pictorial information with no relation to the product (e.g. images of happy people).

In a combined decision task monitored by eye-tracking and a subsequence survey, the authors tested the impact of PMEs on common products. Combining different pairs of products, where one product had a PME, whereas the other did not, the authors could evaluate if preference correlated with the presence of a PME.

The authors found both types of PMEs to have analogous effects on participants’ preferences and correlate with participants’ visual attention. The authors also found evidence for a positive influence on a later explicit justification for the specific choice.

This study was conducted in a lab environment and solely related to health-related decisions. The authors still need to know if these findings are transferable to real in-store decisions and other needs such as high quality or low price. This calls for further research.

The topic is important for food companies, and it might become a priority in managing brand equity, combining consumer preferences, loyalty and communicative fairness.

Using eye-tracking and retrospective interviews brings new insights to consumer’s decision-making and how misleading potentially occurs.

The purpose of this paper is to examine, first, how social capital was crafted and transformed from a theoretical concept to an organizational tool for public sector improvement that was adopted by a Danish region and implemented in all regional hospitals. Second, the paper examines the application of social capital in one of these hospitals and, further, in a department of the hospital with the purpose of showing how it was applied by the managerial levels and responded to by the nurses of the department.

A Bourdieusian ethnographic approach was used for understanding the local and subjective understandings of social capital as well as the wider context in which the new tool was crafted.

Social capital as a tool for organizational improvement was constructed in a gray zone between science and consultancy. The paper demonstrates that the application of social capital in practice is connected with paradoxes because the concept is inherently ambiguous and Janus-faced in that its official representation is “soft” and voluntary with a working environment focus yet, it envelopes concealed steering intentions. These contrary working features of the concept produce a pressure on the department management and the nurses.

The explanatory critical framework combined with the ethnographic approach is a useful approach for theorizing and understanding social capital as an example of the emergence and consequences of new managerial tools in public organizations.