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The purpose of this paper is to contribute toward a better understanding of the impact of social capital on knowledge exchange within supply chains. An exploratory case study approach is used to identify the effects of social capital across multiple organizational levels and to consider how these effects relate to the mode of supply chain governance.

A comparative case study investigation was undertaken of two Indonesian automotive component suppliers. Qualitative research methods were used with data collection involving semi-structured interviews with 64 participants at three different levels within each company (senior managers, middle managers and shop floor staff).

Comparisons between the cases highlight the major consequences that internal differentiation within organizations had in moderating the effect of social capital upon knowledge exchange in supply chains. Social capital had both enabling and inhibiting effects and these were dependent upon how social capital was constituted within and between organizations. Interaction effects between levels and with the mode of governance adopted were also important.

Future research would benefit from a multidimensional analysis of social capital in supply chains which considers potentially disparate and contradictory effects which may be apparent when social capital is examined at different levels of analysis and in relation to different modes of governance.

The paper uses in-depth exploratory case research to complement existing survey-based work and contributes to the further conceptualization of relationships between social capital, knowledge exchange and modes of governance in supply chains.

Developing technological innovations in healthcare is made complex and difficult due to effects upon the practices of professional, managerial and other stakeholders. Drawing upon the concept of boundary object, this paper explores the challenges of achieving effective collaboration in the development and use of a novel healthcare innovation in the English healthcare system.

A case study is presented of the development and implementation of a smart phone application (app) for use by rheumatoid arthritis patients. Over a two-year period (2015–2017), qualitative data from recorded clinical consultations (n = 17), semi-structured interviews (n = 63) and two focus groups (n = 13) were obtained from participants involved in the app's development and use (clinicians, patients, researchers, practitioners, IT specialists and managers).

The case focuses on the use of the app and its outputs as a system of inter-connected boundary objects. The analysis highlights the challenges overcome in the innovation's development and how knowledge sharing between patients and clinicians was enhanced, altering the nature of the clinical consultation. It also shows how conditions surrounding the innovation both enabled its development and inhibited its wider scale-up.

By recognizing that technological artefacts can simultaneously enable and inhibit collaboration, this paper highlights the need to overcome tensions between the transformative capability of such healthcare innovations and the inhibiting effects simultaneously created on change at a wider system level.

Recent interest in the UK construction sector in innovative management practices such as partnering, continuous improvement and benchmarking have raised long‐standing questions about the transferability of new management ideas from other industrial sectors into construction. Informed in part by the author's own research into partnering in the UK, this paper sets out to explore the problems of transferring and applying new management ideas to the construction industry. However, rather than simply restricting the discussion to the perennial (and perhaps unanswerable) question of whether or not the construction industry actually is different, this paper goes much further by examining the nature of knowledge diffusion and application processes. Three main themes are highlighted and their implications assessed. First, the many inherent problems and limitations associated with relying on models of ‘best practice’ drawn from other industrial sectors. Second, the highly socialized and politicized nature of supposedly rational processes of knowledge diffusion and implementation. Third, the impact that institutional factors have on the diffusion and application of knowledge via the creation of particular industry agendas and frames of reference.

The question of whether or not we are witnessing a profound transformation in the nature of relations between industrial buyers and their suppliers towards more collaborative ways of working lies at the heart of more general debates about the nature and direction of organisational change in late twentieth century capitalism. The emergence of, and growing interest in, new network forms of organisation ‐ as distinct from internal bureaucratic and external market‐based forms of transaction governance (e.g. Powell, 1990) ‐ appears to suggest that, in some sectors at least, new forms of relationship are developing between capitalist producers and their suppliers which, moreover, have implications for long term business success. Japanese just‐in‐time production systems, in particular, have had an important influence upon contemporary manufacturing thinking and practice and in many respects are said to provide key elements of a model of ‘best practice’ in the organisation and management of buyer‐supplier relations. The theme of close inter‐organisational collaboration is also apparent in the analysis of, and debates surrounding, new or emergent modes of organisation ‐ for example, the networks of local small firms identified in the ‘flexible specialisation’ literature.

Traditional contracting often leads to claims during construction by contractors, increasing transaction costs for both parties in the form of policing and enforcement costs. Partnering is widely advocated as a governance form to more cooperative relationships between client and contractor. However, partnering requires a significant investment in elaborating a specific procurement approach, and is regarded as inappropriate for small, one-off, less complex projects. Dutch municipal governments are searching for alternative solutions to increase cooperation with contractors and reduce transaction costs by applying immediate post contractual negotiations in traditionally procured projects. We studied four such municipal projects which have shown that immediate post contractual negotiations achieve the effects of partnering despite the initial traditional procurement procedures. These negotiations seem to reduce the transaction costs of traditional procurement making them particularly applicable in smaller projects where high set up costs would not be justifiable due to their limited size, complexity, or cost.

The purpose of this paper is to review the formation and evolution of the “Making Projects Critical” movement in project management research.

Retrospective and discursive paper.

Reflections on tensions and challenges faced by the MPC movement.

The paper establishes the historical trajectory of this movement and clarifies the tensions and challenges faced by MPC.

The lack of collaborative working within the UK construction industry is a long-standing issue that has often been highlighted. As a result, the construction industry in the UK is encouraged to use novel procurement methods to create a collaborative working environment. This study aims to explore the collaborative features of the three new models of construction procurement introduced by the UK Government Construction Strategy in 2012.

Existing research/literature was reviewed to establish the key collaborative features of the new procurement models, and a questionnaire survey was adopted to obtain views of industry practitioners. A Relative Importance Index was used to analyse the collected data.

The sample of construction practitioners surveyed largely agrees with the effectiveness of collaborative features integrated within the models, with the benefits offered by early contractor involvement being seen as the most effective feature allowing collaboration. Contractual incentives, improved communication procedures and constant reflection and feedback can be used as effective strategies to enable greater collaboration in projects that use these new procurement models.

Findings reported in the paper could help achieve greater collaboration in construction projects executed using the new models of construction procurement.

This study sheds light on the scepticism and/or conviction of industry practitioners regarding the collaborative benefits offered by the new procurement models, which have not yet been subjected to significant academic scrutiny.

This study aims to examine reciprocal exchanges in knowledge networks using temporal differentiation of knowledge exchanges. To date, research on horizontal knowledge networks rather overlooks the temporal perspective, which could explain the dynamics of exchange in those networks.

The paper reports on a study of four horizontal knowledge networks in the UK over a period of 18 months.

The findings integrate three temporal dimensions of timescale, timeliness and time modalities. The dimensions have implications for the way knowledge is exchanged (or not), which can in turn sustain or stymie productive knowledge exchange in horizontal knowledge networks.

The study encourages researchers to attend to the micro-processes of knowledge exchanges through the integrative framework of temporalities. While this study examined horizontal networks, future research can be extended to analysing temporalities in other types of networks.

It seeks to inspire practitioners to appreciate how the impacts of knowledge networks play out in/over time, and how more effective coopetitive knowledge-sharing environments can be created and sustained by taking differentiated time structures into account.

This study contributes to the knowledge management literature by providing a temporal perspective to understand reciprocal knowledge exchanges in horizontal knowledge networks.

Existing research evaluating the effect of performance measurement (PM) on performance produces conflicting results, indicating that the effect is poorly understood. This paper aims to address this problem by proposing a theoretical model of the effects of PM on performance.

The paper reviews the PM and MCS literature, extracting the factors that help to explain the effect of PM on performance. Then it applies the organizational routines perspective as an analytical lens to tie these factors into a coherent explanatory model.

A theoretical model shows that PM has three distinct effects on the organizational processes that deliver performance – the trigger, guidance, and intensification effects.

The paper employs the organizational routines perspective, moving beyond the description of the effects of PM on performance to offer a theoretical model explaining these effects. As such, it responds to a number of contemporary challenges in the PM field – most importantly, the broad need for a solid organizational foundation for the studies of PM and the explanation of the mechanism through which PM affects organizational performance.