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This paper seeks to improve the understanding of implementation processes that achieve corporate sustainability by providing explanatory knowledge about the role of change agents from a sensemaking perspective. The paper also aims to focus on the sustainability efforts of change agents in a multinational carpet tile manufacturer.

The theoretical perspective of the paper is based on the concepts of sensemaking and emergent change. The paper examines sustainability sensemaking in the Dutch subsidiary of the US‐based carpet tile manufacturer Interface over a period of ten years (2000‐2010).

The findings show that embedding sustainability by change agents is typically an emergent change process that consists of small steps and is not predictable.

This paper focuses on the emergent, unpredictable aspects of change. More research is needed on processes of adapting the general concept of sustainability to local organisational contexts.

The paper examines sustainability sensemaking by change agents in one organisation.

The purpose of this study is to adopt a functional perspective to integrate and extend three streams of research, the first distinguishing between global affect and discrete emotional episodes, the second highlighting the capability of places to elicit emotions and the third demonstrating the differential impact of discrete emotions on consumer response. Doing so shows that four positive place emotions have a significant and variable influence on consumer purchase intentions for brands originating there.

A focus group pilot corroborates that places relate to contentment, enchantment, happiness and pride, which impact consumer response. Study 1 uses landscape photographs to show the four place emotions influence purchase intention for bottled water. Study 2 retests the impact of place emotions, using short vignettes and establishes the moderating role of product hedonic nature. Study 3 replicates emotion effects, corroborating their non-conscious nature and establishing their impact in the presence of place cognitions.

Together, the empirical studies provide evidence for effects of four discrete place emotions, especially with hedonic products and under conditions of cognitive load. Effects are robust when a person’s mood, buying volume, category knowledge, impulse buying tendencies and place cognitions are included as controls.

The study contributes to a better understanding of the emotional dimension of origin effects by adopting a novel, theory-based perspective on discrete positive place emotions impacting consumer response.

Managers invest substantially in places to elicit positive feelings, gravitating toward the view that all they need to do is create a global positive effect with consumers. The study informs this perspective by demonstrating how discrete emotions influence consumer response.

This study is among the first to examine discrete positive place emotions as possible drivers of consumers’ purchase intention.

The coronavirus-19 (COVID-19) pandemic mobilized the international scientific community in the search for its cure and containment. The purpose of this paper is to examine the nature of the rapid response to the COVID-19 of the scientific community in selected Latin American countries (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia and Mexico) in the period running from January to August 2020. Rapid response is reconceptualized from its original meaning in health policy, as the swift mobilization of existing scientific resources to address an emergency (DeVita et al., 2017).

The paper explores the rapid response of the Argentinian, Brazilian, Chilean, Colombian and Mexican scientific communities from the perspective of bibliometric and altmetric data. The authors will examine scientific publications indexed to the Web of Science (WoS) dealing with COVID-19. Besides patterns of scientific output and impact as measured by citations, the authors complement the analysis with altmetric analysis. The aim is to verify whether or not factors that explain the extent of scientific impact can also be identified with respect to the wider impact made evident by altmetric indicators (Haustein, 2016).

The authors identified a somewhat limited response of the Argentinian, Brazilian, Chilean, Colombian and Mexican scientific communities to COVID-19 in terms of quantity of publications. The authorship of publications in the topic of COVID-19 was associated with authorship of publications dealing with locally relevant diseases. Some factors appear to contribute to visibility of scientific outputs. Papers that involved wider international collaborations and authors with previous publications in arboviruses were associated with higher levels of citations. Previous work on arbovirus was also associated with higher altmetric attention. The country of origin of authors exerted a positive effect on altmetric indicators.

A limitation in the analysis is that, due to the nature of the data source (WoS), the authors were unable to verify the career status and the productivity of the authors in the sample. Nonetheless, the results appear to suggest that there is some overlapping in authors conducting research in Arboviruses and COVID-19. Career status and productivity should be the focus of future research.

In the context of countries with limited scientific resources, like the ones investigated in our Latin American sample, previous efforts in the study of locally relevant diseases may contribute to the creation of an expertise that can be applied when a health emergency brings about a novel disease.

The originality of the paper rests on the fact that the authors identified that previous work on arbovirus contributed to the scientific visibility of publications on COVID-19.

The purpose of this paper is to explore different units of analysis applicable to the analysis of healthcare service supply chains.

The paper is based on a literature review, conceptual analysis and two case studies based on process mapping and longitudinal analysis of patient episodes.

Process management is appropriate in situations where there is a structured flow with a sufficient volume of similar repetitions. In the case where there are significant amounts of exceptions, a process can be decomposed into service events that can be defined and managed as part of a supply chain.

The cases are based on data sets that do not allow empirical generalization.

The use of longitudinal patient episode data elicits problems in the process flow, such as delays and variable sequences. The use of events as a unit of analysis enables routinization in situations with exceptions and irregular sequences.

The service event is an original concept that links healthcare operations management to service‐oriented architectures and the service‐dominant logic.

The purpose of this paper is to explore different levels of place‐based marketing in the form of region of origin strategies used by wineries in their branding efforts. The overall aim is to obtain insights into wine consumer dynamics such as product involvement level, consumption frequency and differences between segments on the basis of gender and age from a regional branding perspective.

Data collection took place by means of a highly‐structured online survey of wine consumers across the USA. The request to participate was directed to legal wine drinking age people of 21 years and older to 9,922 e‐mail boxes that yielded a response rate of 5.7 percent, finally resulting in 570 usable surveys.

Consumers used regional branding cues, information and images in their assessment and valuation of comparative wine labels. Almost without exception, the addition of regional information on a wine label increased consumer confidence in the quality of the product.

Any follow‐on work to the study should also include a broader sampling of consumer types throughout the USA and comparisons made with the study to assess the validity of generalising the results here.

Regional branding efforts should be targeted at high wine product involvement consumers rather than their low involvement counterparts, as high involvement consumers are likely to be more influenced by brand‐based cues.

The paper is of value to academic readers, wine industry practitioners and regional trade and tourism associations and other commercial entities that market their products with regional branding cues.

The purpose of this paper is to empirically identify different types of sourcing strategies applied in the apparel industry, and to explain how various sourcing strategies are related to the apparel firm's characteristics, prerequisites and supplier performance.

This paper is based on a survey that was sent out to Swedish apparel firms. Commonly applied sourcing strategies, in terms of supply markets and supply channels, are first derived using cluster analysis. These strategies are then linked to relevant firm characteristics, prerequisites and supplier performance measures, where significant differences between groups of firms applying various sourcing strategies are targeted.

Five commonly applied sourcing strategies are identified. Further, several significant differences – with respect to product issues, organizational issues and supplier performance – are found between the firm groups.

Several future research areas in conjunction with this study can be derived by widening or changing the scope. For instance, other industries as well as apparel industries in other countries can be targeted and thus provide valuable comparisons.

Assessing the contextual appropriateness of sourcing strategies provides a strategic sourcing benchmark for firms across industries. Notably, apparel firms' experience in exploiting low‐cost supply markets may provide valuable insights for firms that just recently have recognized the potential of these markets.

This paper provides a contextual understanding of how various sourcing strategies are utilized in the Swedish apparel industry, and thereby contributes to the general conception of sourcing strategies.

Major maintenance projects are often regarded as maintenance activities regardless of the projects' complexity and scale. Consequently, very scarce research attention has hitherto been paid to the critical skills required when undertaking these projects. More specifically, the body of relevant knowledge is deprived of a study focusing on maintenance projects within the energy sector. In view of this shortcoming, this research aims to examine the critical project management (PM) skills required to deliver major maintenance projects within the energy sector.

Based on a quantitative research strategy, this study addressed the knowledge gap through a cross-sectional survey of professionals involved in the delivery of major maintenance projects in the United Kingdom's (UK) energy sector. Data obtained were analyzed via descriptive (e.g. frequencies, mean and standard deviation [SD]) and inferential statistical analyses (One sample t-test and exploratory factor analysis (EFA)).

Out of the 45 PM skills identified in the literature and examined by the respondents, the results obtained from the One sample t-test (based on p (1-tailed) = 0.05) showed that 37 were considered to be at least “important,” accounting for 80.4% of all the skills identified. EFA revealed a clustering of the PM skills items into seven components: “skills related to work scheduling and coordination”; “communication, risk, safety and stakeholder management skills”; “quality assurance skills”; “people management skills”; “skills related to forecasting scope and duration of outage”; “implementation of processes and time management skills” and “technical/engineering skills and experience pertaining to the outage and local site knowledge.”

This study has identified and contributed to the limited state-of-the-art skills project managers must possess to manage major maintenance projects in the energy sector successfully. The findings would be useful to organizations within the energy sector in ensuring that the organizations have suitable personnel in place to deliver major maintenance projects on the organizations' assets.

The purpose of this paper is to show that organizational change depends on societal narratives – narratives about the character, history, or envisioned future of societies.

A case study of a Swedish municipal waste management company serves as an illustration.

Swedish waste governance is powered by two main narratives: “less landfilling” and “wasting less”. Less landfilling has been the dominant narrative for several decades, but wasting less is gaining momentum, and a new narrative order is establishing itself. This new narrative order significantly redefines the socio‐material status of waste and imposes major changes on waste management organizations.

Based on the case of waste governance in Sweden, the authors conclude that organizations should be aware that societal narrative affects the legitimacy and nature of their operations; therefore, they must integrate a watch for narrative change in their strategic reflections.

This paper establishes the relevance of the notion of societal narrative to understand organizational change.

The purpose of this paper is to assess whether greater participation of venture capital/private equity (VC/PE) funds in the companies’ capital structure at the moment of initial public offering (IPO) contributes to the reduction in the underpricing of their shares.

Descriptive statistics, correlation analysis, mean difference test and cross-sectional regression were used. The final sample consisted of 89 companies making IPO in Brasil Bolsa Balcão between 2007 and 2017.

The participation of VC/PE funds was shown to mitigate the effect of information asymmetry on managers and shareholders, thus reducing the underpricing of companies at the moment of IPO (H1). However, the expectation that a greater participation of these funds promotes further reduction in a potential underpricing (H2) was not confirmed.

One can highlight the small amount of IPOs during the sampling period due to the occurrence of international and national economic crises, as well as the difficulty in obtaining information on the participation of VC/PE funds in the companies’ capital structure.

It was observed that information asymmetry had a mitigating effect from the presence of these funds in the companies, which can improve the pricing of their shares, decrease the costs and make volume captions viable for investments, in addition to giving credibility to the market information effectiveness.

This study differs from others in that it assesses not only the influence of VC/PE funds on the reduction of the underpricing of IPO shares, but also the participation of these funds in the capital of these companies.

This study aims to identify the price determinants of fine wines in a small and competitive market. These characteristics are found in many lesser-known wine-producing countries and are often difficult to analyse because of lack of data.

This study hand-collects and transcribes wine-related data for 149 Swiss wineries and 2,454 individual wines over the period 2014–2018 directly from wine lists provided by wineries. This study uses multivariate ordinary least squares regressions to analyse the relation between wine attributes and prices and to assess the effect of a currency shock caused by the sudden appreciation of the Swiss franc in 2015 as well as a reduction in information asymmetries induced by the novel coverage of Swiss wines by The Wine Advocate.

Prices mainly depend on collective reputation, production techniques and product positioning. Surprisingly, following a sharp appreciation of the Swiss franc, producers did not reduce prices. The arrival of a highly influential wine expert on the market also had a positive price effect on rated wines and producers. Both hint at wineries attempting to position themselves relative to competitors.

Few studies examine the price drivers in lesser-known wine markets, where competition is fierce. This study’s results show that wine pricing differs from other more famous and larger wine regions. In addition, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is also the first to analyse the impact of a currency shock and a reduction in information asymmetries on wine prices.