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The study aims to provide a critical review of the extent to which digital technologies are likely to replace human labour, the exponential rise in the amount of work to be done and how far distinctively human skills are future-proofed and therefore likely to be in short supply. It reviews the evidence for a permanent switch to home and remote working enabled by emerging technologies. It assesses the business, digital and labour strategies of work organisations and the promise and challenges from a dominant trend towards a digitally enabled flexible labour model.

A critical review of 1020 plus case studies and the extant literature was carried out.

The relationship between emerging technologies and work is widely misunderstood, and there are major qualifiers to the idea of an overwhelming tsunami of technology drastically reducing headcounts globally. Distinctive human skills remain valuable, the amount of work to be done is increasing exponentially and automation is becoming more a coping than a labour replacement mechanism. Moves to a hybrid digitalised flexible labour model are promising but not if short-term, and if the challenges they represent are not managed well.

The main limitation is that we are making projections into the future, though we are drawing on a lot of different sources and evidence and past data projected into the future.

The problem is not labour displacement but large skills shortages that will slow down the speed of technology adoption. Skills development is vital, as is the taking of long-term perspectives towards the management of hybrid, flexible working based on human-machine interactions.

Organisations need to revitalise their training and development and labour management models. Governments and intermediary institutions need to manage transition states if the skills required to gain economic growth are to be available, and to ensure that large labour pools do not get bypassed from not having requisite skills.

The study offers a more subtle and complex perspective on the emerging evidence about the future of technology and work.

This paper offers a novel approach for conducting impactful research on emerging topics or practices. This method is particularly relevant in the face of emerging phenomena and new dynamics, such as the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on supply chain risks. Because these new phenomena and dynamics are relatively unexplored, little prior knowledge exists in literature and industry, and they represent a large opportunity and/or challenge to practitioners.

The action principles research (APR) approach, as a newer version of critically engaged research (CER), offers comparison against more traditional empirical or intervention-based research. The authors illustrate the approach with a pandemic risk-management study.

The APR approach originated in the information technology field. It is highly applicable for researchers who are seeking to more expeditiously support decision making and actioning on new dynamics and emerging topics and practice in supply chain management than is allowed by traditional methods and longitudinal CER.

In the context of ongoing calls for relevance, impact and actionable findings on pandemic risk management, this paper describes an approach to developing timely findings that are actionable for practitioners and that advance science around dynamic and emerging topics or practices. We hope this will grow societal value of research, particularly in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic and the new dynamics and uncertainties that managers face in modern supply chains.

This paper aims to answer the question: how do clients and BPO service providers work together to foster dynamic innovation? Dynamic innovation is a process by which clients incent providers to deliver many innovations each year that improve the client's performance in terms of operational efficiency, process effectiveness and/or strategic impact.

The paper is based on research conducted in 2011 and 2012 and includes 202 survey responses and 48 in-depth interviews in 24 client organizations.

The most effective innovation incentives are mandatory productivity targets, innovation days, and gain-sharing at the project level. Threat of competition and special governance arrangements for innovation also positively influence innovation. The least successful incentives for innovations were found to be innovation funds, gainsharing at the relationship level, what has been called “pain-sharing”, and benchmarking.

The 24 BPO relationships do not represent a random sample, but rather a convenience sample. The authors aimed to understand emerging best practices from high-performing BPO relationships, thus the paired interview samples are purposefully biased towards higher-performing relationships.

Delivering innovations requires a process the authors call AIFI – acculturating, inspiring, funding, and injecting. The research finds that leadership pairs are key drivers of the dynamic innovation process. Leadership pairs jumpstart the dynamic innovation process by starting with innovation incentives. Even so, just having one right leader makes a positive difference. The positive difference is stronger if that leader is on the client side rather than the provider side. With no right leaders, the practices that the authors describe are less efficacious but still have positive impacts on the levels of innovation experienced.

In the ITO and BPO literatures, researchers have under-examined the more strategic drivers of outsourcing, including innovation. This research examines the process and practices that deliver dynamic innovation in client organizations.

This paper aims to distill research findings that will influence CEO and top team behaviour.

The findings are based on case study research into 650 plus organisations and their outsourcing arrangements in Europe, Asia Pacific and USA.

CEOs have five reasons for ensuring IT‐based services outsourcing is included in their strategy discussions. IT outsourcing impacts upon a firm's market value. The sheer size of outsourcing expenditure merits senior management attention. Getting outsourcing wrong can seriously damage corporate health. At the same time, the evidence shows examples of outsourcing playing a strategic role for many businesses, and only the CEO has the real bargaining power to make outsourcing deliver this strategic dividend.

The research was carried out by the LSE's Outsourcing Unit and uses in‐depth longitudinal case studies to identify outsourcing practices that work, in terms of achieving superior business results.

The paper spells out the reasons why CEO and top teams should be engaged in their outsourcing decision making and management.

The paper establishes well researched grounds for why CEOs and top teams need to act differently if more effective outsourcing is to be achieved.

The major problems experienced in implementing IT systems in the public sector are reviewed. Detailed UK research, carried out in the Department of Social Security and the National Health Service, is then considered. Many projects sub‐optimise due to neglect of the human aspects of computerisation, broadly conceived. It is concluded that establishing 16 success criteria still need to be imported into many IT projects if effective systems are to result.

To identify key lessons, trends and enduring challenges with global outsourcing of back office services.

The authors extract lessons, project trends, and discuss enduring challenges from a 20 year research program conducted by these authors and their extended network of co‐authors and colleagues.

The authors identify seven important lessons for successfully exploiting the maturing Information Technology Outsourcing (ITO) and Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) markets. The lessons require back office executives to build significant internal capabilities and processes to manage global outsourcing. The authors predict 13 trends about the size and growth of ITO and BPO markets, about suppliers located around the world, and about particular sourcing models including application service provision, insourcing, nearshoring, rural sourcing, knowledge process outsourcing, freelance outsourcing, and captive centers. The authors identify five persistent, prickly issues on global outsourcing pertaining to back office alignment, client and supplier incentives, knowledge transfer, knowledge retention, and sustainability of outsourcing relationships.

The authors present some experimental innovations to address these issues.

The purpose of this paper is to find how mature the Polish commercial production companies are in their information technology (IT) sourcing practices, what they do, the practices that are successful, the challenges experienced and the outcomes.The paper presents and critically evaluates the results of a study of IT outsourcing management processes in selected industrial enterprises operating in Poland. Dynamic business contexts, globalisation and advances in IT make the development of IT sourcing models challenging in both theory and practice. This paper examines the principles and practice of sourcing IT and business processes in Poland, a country much under-represented in the literature. Little research has been conducted on the strategic rationale behind IT sourcing decisions, the resulting challenges and the potential or actual consequences of such decisions. This paper addresses these gaps in the understanding of IT sourcing processes by way of examining the types of sourcing models and solutions among manufacturing companies operating in Poland, and by identifying the most problematic and critical factors in effective IT sourcing collaborations. The outcomes are assessed against findings from the broader empirical outsourcing literature, and lessons are drawn for Polish client firms and those in similar economies.

A survey methodology of a limited number of organisations in Poland was used. The study was designed to address the process of managing IT sourcing relations in production companies operating in Poland. The main objective of the study was to formulate working hypotheses to be used in further research on the sourcing models used in the IT sphere. Additionally, the study was designed to provide information on: the potential respondent reactions to the research problem, the understanding of the notions and terms used in the survey questionnaire and the evaluation of the research instrument itself.

Organisations (and their employees) are generally well aware of their IT needs, and that they select quite well providers that suit their particular requirements. In their selection processes, organisations carefully consider not only the providers’ experience and the range of services on offer but also their flexibility in response to the client’s demands, the location and the trust formed in the course of previous cooperation. Communication between the parties typically takes the form of telephone conversations and e-mails. The majority of respondents reported more than one type of problems faced in the course of outsourcing. Problems concentrated in the areas of communication (52 per cent) and organisation (48 per cent), followed by difficulties in enforcing the terms of the contract.

It is a selective sample, focuses only on production companies and does not look at the offshore outsourcing market that has grown up in Poland, but rather what domestic polish organisations do in their sourcing practices.

The organisations still struggle with the organisation and management of relations with their external service providers while getting reasonable results. They have much to learn from the published literature on managing the outsourcing life cycle.

There is a need for better inter-organisational cooperation.

Poland is very underrepresented in the outsourcing literature – there are no examples of surveys like this in the English literature.

How have managers handled the industrial relations ramifications of information technology? There is a diversity of approaches within an overall framework of employee acceptance of the need for technological change. However, the introduction of new technology is rarely handled strategically in the industrial relations area, and there is much to be learnt from approaches adopted by a small minority of mostly foreign‐owned organisations. The authors conclude by asking whether or not patterns will change in the 1990s.

This exploratory case study research aims to apply a processual analysis to the implementation of a customer relationship management (CRM) system from a knowledge management perspective to a contemporary (1999‐2004) situation within a UK city council. The paper seeks to place a specific focus on areas neglected in previous CRM studies – sub‐cultures, psychological contracts, how tacit knowledge is surfaced and transferred, and with what effects on implementation.

The paper investigates how the system stakeholders and the information system (IS) itself evolved through encountering barriers, sharing knowledge, finding new uses, inventing work‐arounds.

A rich picture emerges of sub‐cultural silos of knowledge linked with psychological contracts and power‐based relationships influencing and inhibiting adoption and acceptance of the CRM system.

This case study research provides useful information on the implementation of a CRM system from a knowledge management perspective with a specific focus on sub‐cultures, psychological contracts, how tacit knowledge is surfaced and transferred, and with what effects on implementation, which are areas neglected in previous CRM studies.

Although cloud computing has been heralded as driving the innovation agenda, there is growing evidence that cloud computing is actually a “slow train coming”. The purpose of this paper is to seek to understand the factors that drive and inhibit the adoption of cloud computing, particularly in relation to its use for innovative practices.

The paper draws on a composite research base including two detailed surveys and interviews with 56 participants in the cloud supply chain undertaken between 2010 and 2013. The insights from this data are presented in relation to set of antecedents to innovation and a cloud sourcing model of collaborative innovation.

The paper finds that while some features of cloud computing will hasten the adoption of cloud, and its use for innovative purposes by the enterprise, there are also clear challenges that need to be addressed before cloud can be adopted successfully. Interestingly, the analysis highlights that many of these challenges arise from the technological nature of cloud computing itself.

The research highlights a series of factors that need to be better understood for the maximum benefit from cloud computing to be achieved. Further research is needed to assess the best responses to these challenges.

The research suggests that enterprises need to undertake a number of steps for the full benefits of cloud computing to be achieved. It suggests that collaborative innovation is not necessarily an immediate consequence of adopting cloud computing.

The paper draws on an extensive research base to provide empirically informed analysis of the complexities of adopting cloud computing for innovation.