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This paper aims to introduce a new integrated strategic framework entitled, “The corporate identity, total corporate communications, stakeholders’ attributed identities, identifications and behaviours continuum” and elucidates the central and strategic importance of corporate identity apropos corporate communications, corporate image, attributed stakeholder identifications and resultant behaviours. The strategic importance of corporate identity is noted. The continuum incorporates a variety of disciplinary/theoretical perspectives.

The paper/framework is informed by corporate marketing and strategic perspectives; legal theory of the firm; social identity branch theories; and stakeholder theory. The effects and management of corporate identity are seen as a continuum. The framework accommodates Tagiuri’s (1982) scholarship on corporate identity.

This paper formally introduces and explicates “The corporate identity, total corporate communications, stakeholders’ attributed identities, identifications and behaviours continuum”. Corporate identity management is an on-going strategic senior management/strategic requisite. Notably, the legal theory of company law – routinely overlooked – and its impact on corporate identity management is accepted, acknowledged and accommodated. The importance of stakeholders and stakeholder identification (a derivative of social identity theory) is underscored.

Via the explication of the continuum, managers can comprehend the nature and importance of corporate identity; appreciate that corporate identity adaptation/change is on-going; comprehend its interface/s with corporate communications, stakeholder attributed identities, identifications and the business environment; understand the need for on-going fidelity to an institution’s legally based core purposes and corporate identity traits (juridical identity); cognise the efficacy of constant stakeholder and environmental analysis. Corporate identity sustainability requires corporate identity to be advantageous, beneficial, critical, differentiating and effectual. Stakeholder prioritisation is not solely dependent on power, legitimacy and urgency but on legality, efficacy, ethicality and temporality.

The resultant framework/approach, therefore, aims to make a meaningful advance on the territory and, moreover, seeks to be of utility to scholars and practitioners of corporate marketing, strategy and company law. Arguably, therefore, the framework is more ambitious than extant framework on the domain. The resultant framework/approach, therefore, aims to make a meaningful advance on the territory and seeks to be of utility to scholars and practitioners of corporate identity, communications, images, identification, stakeholder theory, company law and, importantly, corporate strategy.

The study aims to explore customer satisfaction towards the celebrated Tong Ren Tang (TRT) Chinese corporate heritage brand (established in 1669). This paper examines the multiple role identities of the corporate brand and, in particular, the enduring imperial identity (role identity) of the corporate brand. The study examines whether the corporate heritage brand’s imperial associations are still meaningful.

A indicative, survey-based case study methodology undertaken with Chinese customers informs this research.

TRT’s corporate heritage brand identity and, moreover, its imperial role identity were salient in terms of customer satisfaction. TRT’s augmented imperial role identity not only was highly salient but also, moreover, meaningfully enhanced the organisation’s corporate reputation in terms of customer satisfaction.

This study lends further support for the utility of the notion of corporate heritage/corporate heritage brands and in particular the saliency of the theoretical notion of augmented role identity within the corporate heritage marketing field.

Corporate heritage brand managers should be appraised of which corporate role identities are meaningful for customers. At a practical level, senior corporate marketing managers of corporate heritage organisations should accorded importance to the additional P of Provenance apropos the corporate marketing mix.

At a time, when China is reappraising its relationship with its past – including its imperial past (of which much has been destroyed) – this paper’s focus on TRT’s unsurpassed augmented role identity is pertinent and propitious. Seemingly, this corporate heritage brand’s imperial association provides a living and tangible link with China’s long and momentous imperial provenance and erstwhile imperial polity. In short, the corporate heritage brand is part of China’s patrimony and enjoys a unique place in this regard.

This paper is one of the first empirical studies examining a Chinese corporate heritage brand entity. The study marks new ground in examining customer satisfaction from the theoretical perspectives of corporate heritage brand and augmented role identity. It is believed that this is the first study to consider corporate heritage in the pharmaceutical sector and marks new ground in considering the saliency of China’s imperial legacy on an extant, highly successful and high profile-Chinese corporate heritage brand.

Employability is a key concept in higher education. Graduate employment rate is often used to assess the quality of university provision, despite that employability and employment are two different concepts. This paper will increase the understandings of graduate employability through interpreting its meaning and whose responsibility for graduate employability from the perspectives of four key stakeholders: higher education institutions, students, government and employers.

There are two stages to this literature review which was undertaken across bibliographic databases. The first stage builds a conceptual understanding of employability, relating to definition and how employability can be achieved and enhanced from the perspective of stakeholders. A structured search employing Boolean searches was conducted using a range of terms associated with key stakeholders. The second round of review drew on documentary analysis of official statements, declarations, documents, reports and position papers issued by key stakeholders in the UK, available online.

It reveals that responsibility for employability has been transferred by the UK government to higher education institutions, despite clear evidence that it needs to be shared by all the key stakeholders to be effective. In addition, there is a gap between employers' expectation for employability and the government's employability agenda.

This article highlights that solely using employment rate statistics as a key indicator for employability will encourage the practice of putting employers' needs above knowledge creation and the development of academic disciplines, with the consequence that higher education will become increasingly vocation driven.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the use, applicability and relevance of strategic planning as a process and tool when applied to exploring food security challenges, in the context of existing research on food security and food waste in the food supply chain. The issues associated with robust and resilient food supply chains within a circular economy are increasingly being seen as supportive of creating enhanced levels of food security but the authors argue that this is only sustainable when strategically planned as part of a cross-enterprise, information-rich and complex supply chain. The relevance of the Political, Economic, Social, Technological, Legal and Environmental (PESTLE) strategic planning tool is explored to establish whether it can play a role tacking the complexity of food insecurity (i.e. a lack of food security).

This is a viewpoint piece therefore as a result, thought, normative literature and supposition are used as a means to ground and orientate the views of the authors.

The authors identify and conclude that strategic planning tools like PESTLE across enterprises may not be relevant in supporting the reduction of food insecurity. This conclusion is predicated on the heightened level of complexity surrounding the pursuit of food security and the simplistic categorisation of PESTLE factors in a linear fashion that underpin this tool. Rather, the authors’ call for the use of strategic planning tools that are able to capture a large number of inter-related factors holistically.

This insight to the inter-related factors that contribute to food insecurity will allow policy developers, decision makers and others to develop their understanding of how strategic planning can support increased levels of food security within a circular economy and across cross-enterprises.

The authors contribute to the literature through a new insight of how normative strategic planning tools need to evolve in a complex, inter-connected world of international business and geo-politics. In doing so, it is expected that this research will motivate others to develop their line of enquiry around uncovering and exploring those inter-relationships connecting PESTLE factors.

In recent years, much has been discussed about new consumer practices based on the sharing economy. In this context, the purpose of this paper is to map out the international scientific production on sharing economy.

The research adopted a descriptive qualitative approach. Based on a sample of 95 documents collected in the Scopus database, analyses of bibliometric and sociometric indicators were carried out, as well as content analyses were conducted to identify the main thematic categories in the field.

The results show that sharing economy is an emerging topic, and of late, the research in this field has grown rapidly. The study provides a mapping of top journals and authors, works of greatest impact and of co-authorship, co-citation and bibliographic coupling networks, which evidence the low intensity of researcher’s interactions and scientific production dispersion in the field. The main subjects found in the sharing economy literature are determinants, motivations and barriers, sharing economy impacts, regulation, models and frameworks, critical approach and entrepreneurship and sharing-based new businesses.

The analyses did not take into account the timing perspective. Further research could undertake a timeline-based approach in order to present direct citation networks and to relate works according to the year when they were published.

The study innovates by identifying the main subjects in the sharing economy literature, as well as by presenting network analysis for some bibliometric indicators, complementing previous research in the field.

The present study seeks to answer the following research question: what is the profile of the academic production related to the interorganizational networks in the period between 2006 and 2016? Thus, this study aims to characterize the academic production about the subject interorganizational networks available in national journals with Concept “A” (Qualis Capes), in the period between 2006 and 2016.

This paper uses national journals with Concept “A” of the Qualis classification (2016) for journal selection. In total, 12 “A” concept journals were identified. However, it was decided to analyze ten of them. The procedures suggested by Crossan and Apaydin (2010) for conducting bibliometric studies were adopted. It has been identified that 77 articles were published in eight journals. The R 3.3.2 and R Studio 1.0.136 software were used. The IGRAPH 0.5.5-2 extension (package) was used to analyze graphs and co-authorship networks (Csárdi and Nepusz, 2006). This extension is able to manipulate networks with millions of vertices and edges and provides a series of functions to analyze the properties of social networks, such as subnetworks, intermediation, centrality, among other characteristics (Csárdi and Nepusz, 2006). Correspondence analysis (CA) was also performed. CA is a multivariate exploratory technique that converts a data matrix into a graphical representation, so that rows and columns are represented by points in a graph (Greenacre and Hastie, 1987). This extension is dedicated to the multivariate analysis of data and allows the manipulation of different types of variables (quantitative or categorical). In the present research, multiple CA (MCA) was applied – indicated when the elements are described as categorical variables (Lê et al., 2008). The characteristics considered for carrying out MCA were the “main term”, “research approach”, “type of research”, “constructs” and “research strategies”. By using the FactoMineR 1.34 extension, the hierarchical clustering on principal components (HCPC) function was used (Husson et al., 2007; Lê et al., 2008). This function allows creating clusters from the characteristics of the articles analyzed and highlights the justifications for the groupings created. The function allows forming as many clusters the researcher wishes, being of its attribution to analyze a division that best represents the characteristics of the data (Husson, Josse, and Pagès, 2010). Husson et al. (2010) suggest that an analysis should be performed from the hierarchical tree, thus the number of clusters can be defined considering the overall appearance (or shape) of the tree formed. At last, a word cloud was created using the Wordcloud 2.5 extension (Fellows, 2013). The noticed advantage of using this extension is that it does not separate the terms that form a keyword when generating the cloud. It has been used for the keywords of the 77 articles analyzed; however, it has been decided to keep those that presented frequency greater than or equal to two. By avoiding occasional terms, a more intelligible cloud was obtained.

The present study was not able to verify if the journals analyzed by Andrighi et al. (2011) have influenced others to publish on the subject, as suggested by the Bradford’s Law. The standard “success breeds success”, suggested by the Bradford’s Law, was not confirmed. The so-called nuclear zone (Brookes, 1969; Novaretti et al., 2015) is composed of the journals Brazilian Administration Review (BAR), Revista de Administração Contemporânea (RAC), Revista de Administração Pública (RAP) and Revista Brasileira de Gestão de Negócios (RBGN). The journal RAC stands out for having been the one that has increased its annual average of publication in relation to the theme, when compared with the findings of Andrighi et al. (2011). The journals BAR and RBGN stand out because they are in the nuclear zone, even though they were not considered in the work of Andrighi et al. (2011). It should be noted that all the analyzed journals have in common the fact of addressing the themes of management and administration and, more specifically, making room for the “competitiveness” and “cooperation” constructs. These constructs are related to the theme of networks and were the most recurrent in the articles analyzed. “Cooperation” (29), “competitiveness” (27), “knowledge” (12), “learning” (6) and “trust” (3) were the “constructs” used to compose the 77 articles analyzed. In turn, “network” (49), “alliance” (18) and “cluster” (9) were the “main term” most used in the articles. This implies that the topic of cooperation is more linked to a vision of strategy. As occurred in the research of Andrighi et al. (2011), the term “network” is the most recurrent; in addition, the growth of space obtained by the term “alliance” stands out. The terms “network” and “alliance” were the most used by the articles, being predominant in 87 per cent of the research. In the present research, the predominance of the term “network” may have occurred because its concept is broader and it is used in the literature in different ways, even in contradictory ways (Andrighi et al., 2011; Schommer, 2001). In turn, the term “alliance” may have been recurrent because it has a wide dispersion of published issues, such as governance structure, cooperation, knowledge transfer and trust (Lima and Campos Filho, 2009). By using the HCPC function of the FactoMineR extension, the articles were grouped according to their characteristics, and then three clusters were formed. By analyzing the generated results, it is assumed that the division into three clusters was the one that best represented the data. Cluster 1 is characterized by descriptive, quantitative, half documentary and half survey research studies, being “cluster” the main term. Cluster 2 is characterized by exploratory case studies with qualitative–quantitative analyzes. Cluster 3 is characterized by theoretical tests. The Zipf’s law points out that a small group of words occurs many times; however, when considering the most recurrent words Networks (9), Strategic Alliances (8), Cooperation (8), Interorganizational Networks (8) and Alliances (6) show that they were present in only about 10 per cent of the works. Lotka’s Law, which states that few authors publish much and many authors publish little, was not confirmed. The authors who presented the highest number of publications, T. Diana L. v. A. de Macedo-Soares (6); Jorge Renato Verschoore (6); Alsones Balestrin (5); Douglas Wegner (4); Humberto Elias Garcia Lopes (4), participated in less than 10 per cent of the works. Thus, the authorship was characterized by many researchers publishing few works, what can be an effect of the behavior of these authors, who prefer to publish in network. The centrality of the relations between the authors was analyzed and, in addition, the intermediation points of the network were identified. The present study also analyzed all the references used by the 77 articles that compose the study. The main author of each of the references used was identified. Among the 30 identified authors, Yin and Hair Jr. stand out for books related to fundamentals and research methodologies. Borgatti and Eisenhardt developed research on the topic of interorganizational networks and also created works for methodological foundations. Powell was the most frequently mentioned author (28) and had more different works referenced (9). Powell stands out for the production of articles published in periodicals, not books. Porter’s situation is the opposite. Most of the quotations made to the author come from his books, especially the work “Competitive strategy” (Porter, 1980). All authors identified are foreigners, with the exception of Balestrin. Marshall, Polanyi, Granovetter and Williamson are authors of works considered seminal, being them, respectively, “Principles of economics” (Marshall, 1890), “Personal knowledge: towards a post critical philosophy” (Polanyi, 1958) and “The strength of weak ties” (Granovetter, 1973) and “Markets and hierarchies, analysis and antitrust implications” (Williamson, 1975).

Like all research, it has limitations. The first one derives from the selection criteria of the periodicals to be analyzed. The cut referring to the journals of greater impact excludes most of the national articles. These studies may contain important contributions to the knowledge of the national publication profile. In addition, the choice to analyze the journals disregards other types of work, such as books, scientific events, dissertations and thesis and reports. The choice of articles published in journals is based on the fact that these are a “certified knowledge”, as the studies are peer-reviewed, and in the case of the Qualis “A” stratum, a review of exogenous quality is supposed on this production. Despite its flaws, this system can be considered reliable to evaluate scientific knowledge (Bedeian, 2004; Shugan, 2007). The analysis of the most recent articles may have been hampered by a temporal issue. In addition, the choice of keywords, a necessary step, leaves out other studies. Another limitation refers to the fact that the articles have been analyzed and classified by the authors, which presupposes the use of their value judgments, at least to some extent. Other limitations refer to the bibliometric techniques employed. The main authors referenced in the studies were demonstrated, that is, those authors who have been used as a theoretical reference for studies of interorganizational networks. However, the circumstances under which these citations occurred were not analyzed. For example, an author may be quoted to use the contribution of his/her study, to be criticized or just to be another reference in the text. The lack of this analysis can be considered a fragility of the study.

This text was started talking about the dispersion of the studies on networks in the country. Previous work has been used, theoretically and empirically demonstrating this fact. Zipf’s Law applied to bibliometrics, as described by Guedes and Borschiver (2005), Novaretti et al. (2015) and Pao (1978), was not confirmed in this study, which seems to be an indicative fact that the research on this theme in Brazil presents fragmentation as an intrinsic characteristic. That is, it must remain fragmented, as this would be its own way to evolve. This is evident especially when comparing the study of Andrighi et al. (2011) and its results. With several but continuous temporal cut-outs, and the same keywords, the maintenance of this dispersion is evident. This is also a contribution of this study.

The study contributed to updating the research profile, mainly after the triennium 2013-2015 of Qualis Capes’ evaluations. It also added to the mapping of recent Brazilian academic production related to interorganizational networks, completing studies by Alves et al. (2013), Andrighi et al. (2011), Balestrin et al. (2010), Cunha and Carrieri (2003) and Mascena et al. (2013). Thus, it is believed that the research reached the proposed objectives, despite its limitations.

The present research is also justified by helping to understand the subject being useful for researchers, educators and students, in general, in the task of demonstrating gaps and opportunities of future researches and collaborating with the elaboration of a research agenda (Baumgartner and Pieters, 2003). The work has updated bibliometrics on the subject and allows comparisons with previous bibliometric studies (Alves et al., 2013; Andrighi et al., 2011; Balestrin et al., 2010; Cunha and Carrieri, 2003; Ferreira et al., 2014; Lima and Campos Filho, 2009; Mascena et al., 2013). It is believed that the present study differs from the others because of the analysis performed, the way the data were treated, with techniques that are rarely used simultaneously, going beyond the descriptive statistics.

The purpose of this paper is to expose the playout of power dynamics when a new business intelligence (BI) system is implemented in a central pharmacy department in a National Health Service (NHS) hospital. The authors aim to explore the assumptions, experiences and actions of organisational stakeholders and ascertain how different professional groups obtain influence, power and control during this process.

In this research the authors employ structuration theory (ST), to establish how and where domination is achieved. To achieve this, the authors investigate the production and reproduction of structure as part of a longitudinal assessment using interviews and questionnaires.

Constant renewal and evolution are crucial in the implementation of a BI system. During the process of implementation and change many stakeholders resent the change. Disempowering these users leads to new power structures led by BI analysts.

The findings from this paper can help strengthen implications of BI systems implementation and better understand the impact these systems have on wider stakeholders. With coherent communication and an engaged attitude new BI systems can be implemented without alienating the key user stakeholders.

This paper differs from other papers by advocating that new systems and processes alter individual power structures in organisations, disrupting internal dynamics and introducing new aspects of control and dominance.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how business-to-business (B2B), intercultural, interpersonal salesperson–customer relationships develop using the lens of identity management theory (IMT; Imahori and Cupach, 2005).

The research uses qualitative semi-structured interviews on 18 targeted relationships with customers from another culture conducted with business-to-business salespeople.

The findings indicate that our respondents' relationships moved from trial toward enmeshment and on occasion toward the renegotiation phase, as described in IMT. In the case of low cultural diversity between salesperson and customer, the relationships reached the trial and enmeshment phase. In the case of high cultural diversity between salesperson and customer, the relationships on occasion evolved toward the renegotiation phase. Salespeople's cultural intelligence (CQ) facilitates the development of interpersonal, intercultural salesperson–customer relationships.

The authors transfer IMT from the personal relationship development arena to B2B intercultural, interpersonal relationships, address a gap in the literature in the understanding of salesperson–customer interpersonal relationships in different contexts and develop a theoretical model to understand intercultural, interpersonal salesperson–customer relationship development across different levels of cultural diversity.

The purpose of this paper is to determine what types of sustainability activities companies are reporting and whether persons external to the companies understand how those reported activities correspond to the companies’ narratives about sustainability. That is to ascertain how people interpret the meaning of the activities included in the sustainability reports.

From a sample of sustainability reports prepared by Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) guidelines, the authors identified the distinct activities reported. The authors prepared a survey comprised of these activities and asked a sample of people knowledgeable about business and investing to evaluate each activity on the extent to which they are relevant to sustainability performance. The responses were then factor analyzed to identify the most important dimensions of sustainability these persons employed to relate the activities to sustainability.

The dimensions employed by the subjects differed in some significant ways from those dimensions used to construct the GRI format. Subjects evaluated sustainability efforts as primarily efforts of being a good citizen with sustainability an end in itself rather than as constraint to be respected in achieving profitability goals.

The study is a first attempt so results are preliminary, i.e. suggestive but not definitive. Though preliminary an intriguing implication is that closure on a sustainability reporting structure would be premature. More effort needs to be devoted to provide more clarity on the concept of corporate sustainability and what its implications are for corporate behavior.

Given the results that sustainability be regarded as a corporate end, what is the role of the corporation in society seems still to be disputatious. Sustainability may not be something achievable without changes in corporate law.

The study is an early attempt to assess the potential alternative narratives about corporate sustainability. Its value lies in providing insights into the age-old question of what should be the role of the corporation in a free society.

This study aims to explore the downstream pharmaceutical supply chain (PSC) and provides insight to the delivery process of medicines and associated operational inefficiencies.

An exploratory, qualitative approach was adopted to examine PSC inefficiency within two European contexts, namely, the UK and Greece. Data was gathered through interviews and a thematic analysis conducted to analyse the data and identify challenges faced by both supply chains(SCs).

The medicines delivery system needs to be enhanced in terms of quality, visibility, speed and cost to perform effectively. The findings demonstrated that although the healthcare SCs in the two European contexts have different operational structures, the results are in concordance with each other. Financial, communication, waste and complexity issues were the major concerns.

To the knowledge this is the first study to examine aspects of the medicines SC via a cross-case analysis in the UK and Greece and extends the body of knowledge. A broader sample of responses is warranted to further validate these findings.

The study outputs can inform pharmacies’ strategic to instigate targeted improvement interventions. The implications of which may be extrapolated further to other European healthcare organisations.

This research contributes to the academic literature by adding further theoretical insights to SC strategy development, especially those that have been characterised as highly complex. The study identifies four key areas of intervention needed within this SC (in both countries) to promote higher level efficiencies and effectiveness.