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This paper reflects on the evolution of China's drug distribution industry from the planned economy era to the most recent dramatic shift, with a major focus on the analysis of the government's efforts of centralizing the drug distribution channel through adoption of e‐bidding platforms. In a broader sense, the Chinese government's effort is a showcase of the so‐called “Chinese model” of implementing institutional change: the government initiates a project and counts on its fiat to gain compliance and support from the involved stakeholders. The purpose of this paper is to analyse the limitations and problems of this mode of implementing institutional change.

The analytical framework draws upon Williamson's theory of the mechanism of governance and insights from new institutional economics on institutional changes. The information used in this study is based on the authors' more than 40 interviews with a variety of pharmaceutical industry stakeholders, including government agencies, hospitals, pharmaceutical manufacturers, distributors, and electronic bidding platforms providers.

The failure of implementing third party electronic platforms based drug procurement practices shows the importance of aligning the mode of governing transactions with the macro level institutional environment and the micro level individual behavioral traits, and the government's decision of taking over the ownership of transaction platforms has further corroborated this logic.

This paper is an effort to analyze the logic behind the Chinese model of implementing institutional change: the government initiates a project and counts on its fiat to gain compliance and support from the involved stakeholders. From the academic perspective, this paper contributes to literature on the analysis of the interaction of technology adoption and institutional change.

This paper aims to identify the sources of innovation in the current business environment of China. With the set target of transforming China into an innovative society by 2020, the Chinese government has taken dramatic measures to foster the nation’s innovation capability. Whether this Chinese model of promoting innovation has been successful and can be sustainable are controversial issues which need to be analyzed from an academic perspective. In recent years, there have been successful cases of innovation driven by grassroots entrepreneurs, especially in the information and communications technology (ICT) industry. Therefore, it is time to analyze their success factors from the perspectives of both corporate strategy and government policy.

The methodology used in this research is a comparative case analysis, and several high-profile cases in China’s ICT industry have been selected for this comparative study. Information used in the analysis comes from publicly available sources such as business school case studies and industry and news media reports. The authors have been following the evolution of China’s ICT industry for more than a decade; insights from their prior research and knowledge gained through industry contacts are also used in the analysis.

Generally speaking, the types of innovation in China’s ICT industry can be categorized into a top-down or a bottom-up approach. For the top-down approach of innovation driven by the government, the authors analyzed the case of the Chinese government’s effort to build an industry value chain through fostering the Chinese indigenous third-generation mobile communications standard time division–synchronous code division multiple access. In comparison, the authors use several success cases, including the ecosystem built around the highly successful XiaoMi mobile phone and Tencent’s mobile portal WeChat, as it showcases of the bottom-up approach of innovation driven by grassroots entrepreneurship. The comparison of these two approaches suggests that massive government-sponsored projects are unlikely to generate genuine innovation in the highly competitive and dynamic ICT sector. The government’s role should be to foster entrepreneurship and to create a fair business environment.

This research uses the method of comparative case studies to identify the source of innovation in a highly dynamic and uncertain business environment. Findings of this study shed light on the government policy toward innovation in the ICT industry and on the business firms’ strategy on innovation.

The purpose of this paper is to develop a risk identification checklist for facilitating user companies to surface, organise and manage potential risks associated with the post‐adoption of enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems.

A desktop study, based on the process of a critical literature review, is conducted by the researchers. The critical review focuses on information systems and business research papers, books, case studies and theoretical articles, etc.

By systematically and critically analysing and synthesising the literature review, the researchers identify and propose a total of 40 ERP post‐implementation risks related to diverse operational, analytical, organisation‐wide and technical aspects. A risk ontology is subsequently established to highlight these ERP risks, as well as to present their potential causal relationships.

For researchers, the established ERP risk ontology represents a starting point for further research, and provides early insights into a research field that will become increasingly important as more and more companies progress from implementation to exploitation of ERPs.

For practitioners, the risk ontology is an important tool and checklist to support risk identification, prevention, management and control, as well as to facilitate strategic planning and decision making.

There is a scarcity of studies focusing on ERP post‐implementation in contrast with an over abundance of studies focusing on system implementation and project management aspects. This paper aims to fill this significant research gap by presenting a risk ontology of ERP post‐adoption. It represents a first attempt in producing a comprehensive model in its area. No other such models can be found from the literature review.

On the basis of the justice, attachment, social support, self-determination theories, this research paper examines the impact of the student–instructor relationship construct on the customer-centric measures of overall student satisfaction, and perceived value for money and their impact of the behavioral intentions as an endogenous construct. We considered universities as providers of complex services focusing on students' service quality and students as the customers of the higher education institutions.

A survey instrument was used to collect data among undergraduate and graduate business students in a medium-sized Canadian university (N = 178). Partial least squares structural equation modeling was used to analyze the strength, significance, and effect sizes of the relationships between the key constructs.

The results indicate that the student–instructor relationship is significantly related to student satisfaction and value for money perceptions. Also, the student satisfaction and behavioral intentions, value for money and student satisfaction, and value for money and behavioral intentions relationship were significant.

The perceived quality of student–instructor relationship and its relationship to customer-centric measures like satisfaction, value for money and behavioral intentions has received relatively little attention in previous research and was discovered to be an important contributor to the perceived student satisfaction and value for money. The importance of the student–instructor relationship is further emphasized indirectly via the perceived value for money construct to student satisfaction.

This study aims to identify sociocognitive determinants of managers' adherence to the expense report approval control. A behavioral view of control was adopted, drawing on the theory of planned behavior.

Managers authorized to approve subordinates' expense reports in three large organizations were surveyed.

Results indicate that managers' perception of overall consequences (for the organization or for themselves) resulting from their adherence to the expense report approval control (attitude) and their perception of control over the approval (perceived behavioral control) are positively related to their intention to adhere to the expense report approval control, while their perceived pressures from important referents in that matter (subjective norm) are not.

By adopting a behavioral view of control to examine individual-level adherence, this study contributes to the accounting literature. By focusing on a positive response to control (adherence), it contributes specifically to the literature on control effectiveness and acts as a counterpoint to the abundant literature on negative control responses such as fraud.

Results could help organizations identify motivations and barriers to managers' adherence to expense report approval control. This could help reduce losses, improve asset safeguarding and provide insights into the understanding of behavioral/individual factors that can influence the application of other control policies and procedures.

The study defines and measures the “adherence” construct in a control context.

This paper aims to compare residential fixed-line telephone surveys with cell phone surveys for assessing the extent of the potential undercoverage issue evaluating the necessity and feasibility of conducting cell phone surveys or dual-frame telephone surveys in Hong Kong.

The research team simultaneously carried out a conventional fixed-line telephone survey and a cell phone survey in 2015 with similar features on survey design, sampling and data collection procedures. Two samples with sample size of 801 and 1,203 were achieved separately. Data collected were analysed to see to what extent survey findings will be biased if the sampling frame of telephone surveys is solely based on residential fixed-line numbers in Hong Kong, and if such a bias does exist, whether a survey conducted through cell phones or by adding a cell phone-only (CO) group would be an ideal solution for it.

The findings show that the cooperation rates for the cell phone survey were much lower than those of the fixed-line telephone survey. The respondents from two surveys were fairly different. However, estimates of most commonly used socio-demographic characteristics from the latter group had the least bias compared with population statistics. Supplanting the traditional fixed-line survey with a cell phone survey or supplementing it with a CO group will not make the resulting sample a better representative of the population but it will amplify the sample bias on the major social socio-demographic characteristics.

This paper empirically compares the two types of telephone surveys in a well-designed scientific study.

The purpose of this paper is to examine consumer behavior towards Greek convenience stores chains and to determine the criteria on which store selection is based. The paper also analyses the stores’ position in the retail sector.

A random sample of 360 convenience store consumers was surveyed across four major cities. Data were collected through personal interviews, using a structured questionnaire. Statistical analysis was applied to further evaluate the information.

Consumers choose convenience stores mainly to cover their daily needs and save time on shopping, despite their dissatisfaction with the provided services. The survey also identified the characteristics of convenience store customers and their preferences.

The principal contribution of the present research is its focus on consumer behavior towards convenience stores in Greece.

Recently, reverse logistics (RL) has become more prominent due to growing environmental concerns, social responsibility, competitive advantage and high efficiency by customers because of the expansion of product selection and shorter product life cycle. However, effective implementation of RL results in some direct advantages, the most important of which is winning customer satisfaction that is vital to a firm’s success. Therefore, paying attention to customer feedback in supply chain and logistics processes has recently increased so that manufacturers have decided to transform their RL into customer-centric RL. Hence, this paper aims to identify the features of a mobile phone which affect consumer purchasing behaviour and to analyse the interrelationship among them to develop a framework for customer-centric RL. These features are studied based on website analysis of several mobile phone manufacturers. The special focus of this paper is on social media data (Twitter) in an attempt to help the decision-making process in RL through a big data analysis approach.

A portfolio of mobile phone features that affect consumer’s mobile phone purchasing decisions has been taken from website analysis by several mobile phone manufacturers to achieve this objective. Then, interrelationships between the identified features have been established by using big data supplemented with interpretive structural modelling (ISM). Apart from that, cross-impact matrix multiplication, applied to classification analysis, was carried out to graphically represent these features based on their driving power and dependence.

During the study, it has been observed from the ISM that the chip (F5) is the most significant feature that affects customer’s buying behaviour; therefore, mobile phone manufacturers realize that this is to be addressed first.

The focus of this paper is on social media data (Twitter) so that experts can understand the interaction between mobile phone features that affect consumer’s decisions on mobile phone purchasing by using the results.

The study's goal was to identify the factors contributing to the practical completion of Kaizen events (KEs). The effect of the work-study man's characteristics, the supervisor's conduct and the autonomy of the Kaizen team are analysed in this study.

Data were collected from 249 respondents working in the manufacturing sector in India, mainly those who had been involved in Kaizen projects. Three-step procedures, namely, exploratory factor analysis, confirmatory factor analysis and partial least squares, have been applied to test the research hypotheses through structural equational modelling.

The exploratory factor analysis extracted in-role performance, creative performance and human aspect as latent variables explaining work-study man's performance (eigenvalue = 1). The study's findings indicate that the performance of work-study man (in-role, creative and human) and supervisors' conduct is directly related to the success of KEs. It was shown that supervisors might influence the outcomes of KEs only by moderating the human aspects. Additionally, the degree of autonomy of the Kaizen team was found having a significant positive relationship with the success of KEs.

The current study suggests that in-role and creative performance are prime assets of a work-study man. At the same time, the human aspect is a delicate issue that can affect the supervisor's behaviour. Therefore, the study implies that work-study men have the tactics and abilities to work with other co-workers to make a Kaizen project successful.

Although the significance of Kaizen projects has been widely emphasised, past research has failed to establish what factors contribute to the success of Kaizen efforts. Similarly, the supervisor's critical role has been highlighted several times. However, it is unclear how their conduct influences the relationship between work-study man's performance and the effectiveness of Kaizen projects. This study contributes significantly to organisational culture and human resource management by answering these questions.