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This paper investigates how symmetrical learning activity is, between the public client and the private contractor in the contracting and operation of complex, long-term infrastructure projects. Drawing on empirical material from two United Kingdom (UK) private finance initiative (PFI) cases, the paper analyses differences in the absorptive capacity and learning capability between parties. It suggests the private contractor appears to be better equipped to acquire, embed and renew their learning. These findings reflect less than 5 years of a 30-year contract, suggesting a skewed (imbalanced) relationship, where the contractor gains more learning capabilities than the client. The paper concludes with implications for management practice and suggestions for future research directions.

The objective of this paper is to gain a better understanding of the impact of context on the adoption of e‐commerce in supply chains.

A literature review, 45 semi‐structured interviews in four different supply chains in the UK healthcare sector, involving 16 different organisations, and additional documentation is used in this study.

The adoption of e‐commerce in supply chains is simultaneously affected by two contextual meta‐variables: external pressure, which is influenced by supply chain structure, demand and industry characteristics; and internal readiness, which is influenced by IT, organisational and buying need characteristics. Different combinations of these two main variables lead to four different trade‐off situations affecting adoption or non‐adoption.

The empirical research has been undertaken in the specific context of the UK healthcare supply chains. It would be useful to test our findings in other sectors and countries.

The paper helps to understand the contextual factors that affect e‐commerce adoption and concludes with a framework that differentiates four situations that can improve managers' and researchers' understanding of e‐commerce adoption in the future.

The contribution of this paper is the recognition that the adoption of e‐commerce is affected by factors in both an organisational and a supply chain context, which simultaneously lead to trade‐off decisions. Also, unlike most other studies which refer to supply chains and are limited to an organisational perspective or at most a dyadic perspective, this paper builds up a supply chain picture of context by including perspectives from multiple actors in a chain.

The purpose of this paper is to understand the risks managers and individual supply chains perceive from e-business.

This research takes a long-term, staged view of the risks managers and individual supply chains perceive from e-business. By taking a two-stage approach, investigating four supply chains at a three year interval, the research considers perceived risks from e-business and the extent to which these risks obtained.

E-business has the potential to deliver substantial benefits, but it also involves new and different risks. This research finds that small firms (SMEs) adopted a “watching brief” rather than implemented e-business. Between the two studies it emerges that e-business can support rather than detract from inter-organisational relationships. Global forces are in evidence in terms of low cost competition, but low cost competitors are not e-enabled.

Limitations, pragmatism and opportunism in the sampling is acknowledged. For example, the work and concepts that led to the expectation of e-business dominating and decimating industrial supply chains may have been based in chains more open to external forces than the ones examined here. Further research is required that identifies the minimum critical mass necessary to retain national manufacturing capacity at a chain or sector level, and empirical work is needed on the suggested link between supply chain stability and certainty of payment. The cases here are based on four UK supply chains, so various chain forms are likely to have been excluded.

This research, by taking a staged approach and going back to the same chain and reviewing perceived risks, identifies how the build up of numerous – but small – events, for example factory closures, can aggregate over time to be just as significant as high profile, headline-worthy risks. Methods that produce a snapshot such as a one-off survey may be inadequate for fully exploring an area such as risk. Especially if the risks are hard to assess and are biased toward high profile events – catastrophic risks rather than accumulations of smaller, less noticeable risks.

The articulation of supply networks, as an extension of supply chains, seeks to accommodate and explain the commercial complexity associated with the creation and delivery of goods and services from the source of raw materials to their destination in end‐customer markets. In place of the simplistic, linear and unidirectional model sometimes presented for supply chains, the supply network concept describes lateral links, reverse loops, two‐way exchanges and so on, encompassing the upstream and downstream activity, with a focal firm as the point of reference. A review of classifications of supply networks reveals that none of the existing approaches appears adequate for managers facing the practical problems of creating and operating them on a day‐to‐day basis. This research identifies differing emphases that may be required for managing within supply networks, according to the nature of the products for which they are created. Taking an established categorisation of supply chains as its starting point, the research first develops the conceptual basis, using strategy literature, and then tests the resultant initial model in 16 case studies. Finally, a new categorisation for supply networks is presented, using the type of product as a differentiator.

Public participation is essential for mitigating local resistance faced by the environmentally stigmatized facilities. The purpose of this study is to investigate public participation intention in the decision-making of waste incineration power (WIP) projects by examining the role of perceived corporate social responsibility (PCSR) and public knowledge (PK) based on the theory of planned behavior (TPB).

A theoretical model correlating PCSR with public participation intention was developed by using the constructs of TPB as the mediators and PK as the moderator. Drawing on structural equation modeling (SEM), the data collected from 485 local residents of the WIP projects in Jiangsu, China were analyzed to test the model.

Companies' CSR practice went through public attitude, subjective norm and personal norm as mediating steps towards promoting participation intention. PK positively moderated the indirect relationships between PCSR and participation intention. Moreover, attitude, subjective norm and personal norm were found to have a positive effect on participation intention.

This study advances the understanding of public participation intention and enriches the literature relating to CSR and TPB involved in infrastructure development. In order to improve public participation intention, companies should take strategic social responsibility actions and present the benefits and moral values of the activities to the public, and as well make effort to diffuse WIP-related knowledge through interactive activities with the public. Authorities should establish social and personal value systems that praise public participation and improve their expectations of participation outcomes.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the level of theory building in public procurement by reviewing and classifying manuscripts published in the Journal of Public Procurement (JoPP) from 2001 to 2016.

The articles are divided into four important periods: discovery, agenda setting, embracing and expansion and consolidation. The articles are classified according to a hierarchical level of theory building composed of six levels: rapporteurs, reporters, testers, qualifiers, builders and expanders.

Key findings indicate that public procurement, in light of JoPP publications from 2001 to 2016, is at the tester level. There is also increase in the classification of articles with high level of theoretical contribution over time.

To access new markets and improve sourcing practices small to medium sized manufacturing companies (SMEs) increasingly seek suppliers and customers in distant countries. Yet these new relationships with global partners often pose problems of an agency nature. The purpose of this paper is to directly address these challenges through the proposal of an information and communication technology (ICT)-based framework.

There has been very little research into how lead SMEs manage their global supply chains and the challenges they face. This paper uses a case study investigation to analyze how four French SMEs – final assemblers of machinery in the farming and agri-business sector – manage their international supply chains.

It was observed that the relationships and interactions between the SMEs and their immediate upstream and downstream partners were dominated by the agency problem and fell into six distinct categories (termed “barriers” to effective supply integration), namely; asymmetries, contractual design, supplier dependence, product specifications, supply chain complexity and performance monitoring.

The contribution of this paper is that a conceptual frame work was developed in which ICT solutions are offered to help address the barriers to supply chain integration, thus reducing the overall risk exposure due to externalities and problems of agency.