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By January 1, 2023, the German supply chain due diligence act (SCDDA) has become effective. This represents a strong governmental intervention into global operations and supply chain management (SCM). Hence, its frame conditions and implications are worth being studied.

Expert interviews with managers reveal factors of risks and opportunities as well as performance impacts and implementation issues.

A conceptual framework and research avenues are outlined.

Pathways for SCM research and interdisciplinary studies are suggested.

Practitioners may gain a deeper understanding of relevant factors for managing supply chains (SCs) that are exposed to the new act.

Understanding implications of the act may help improve social SC sustainability.

This study offers an initial empirical exploration and a first conceptualization of the expected consequences of the German SCDDA.

The COVID-19 pandemic has challenged supply chains (SCs) around the globe unprecedentedly. This study aims to gain insights on the impacts of the pandemic on SCs and their management under consideration of different regional contexts on a global scale.

A Delphi study collects the expertise of global SC academics on the SC vulnerabilities and the measures for responding to disruptions, improving resilience, and restoring operations. Data from three polls are systematically analyzed by content, frequency, and cluster analysis.

The study identifies and ranks ten major issues related to SC vulnerabilities and management strategies for specific SC processes and geographical regions. Detected differences among the considered geographical regions point towards particular challenges and call for specific measures to integrate regional contingencies into SC management. In a regional comparison, China and Iran as well as Africa clearly stand out, but also Europe/North America, India/Pakistan, and Brazil show geographical particularities.

The responses are collected against the COVID-19 pandemic, while the findings show differences among the regions thereby arguing for taking regional contingencies into account in managing SCs.

SC resilience is a core aim, which was emphasized by the COVID-19 pandemic. The findings provide insights and challenges that managers would have to meet in the different regions covered.

This paper contributes to existing knowledge on SC risks and SC resilience in context to extreme situations. Given that events, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, will become more frequent in the future due to climate change and geopolitical tensions, insights into how to manage SCs under extreme conditions and into regional differences are crucial.

Criminological, historical, and sociological research has continually underestimated women’s violent potential in the German Neo-Nazism movement. Contemplating this leads to questions about female agency in the Third Reich, a link that has not been established yet. This chapter seeks to expose this link, arguing that regardless of social environment, changing gender roles or political situation, Neo-Nazi women and women, in general, have a potential for violence in the public sphere.

The chapter looks at female perpetrators in both the Third Reich and the contemporary Neo-Nazi period and examines their involvement from the overarching theoretical viewpoint that women are not any less capable of violent crimes than men.

The scope of Neo-Nazi women’s aggression and violence is not a modern phenomenon or an exception. Their invisibility is not a result of their suggested passive involvement; it stems from the public’s and institutions’ inability to perceive them as agents of violence. Bourdieu developed the concept of symbolic violence to characterize the violence experienced by victims who accept their societal subordination. It is shown that because researchers, officials, and the public reified the concept; they overlooked the reality that women can exercise their agency beyond the limits of their roles as wife and mother and commit violent acts.

Reliable data are not available on the number of violent female Neo-Nazis. It is likely, however, that the numbers given are an underestimation.

Law enforcement agencies have long overlooked women as potential offenders. A basic change in perspective is needed to better identify female perpetrators.

The chapter is based on the murders of ten immigrants between 2000 and 2006, which puzzled investigators over a decade. Nobody suspected a woman was a key member of the group thought to be responsible for these murders.

The Covid-19 pandemic has made it essential to explore the resilience factors specific to developing regions, not only because they pose threats of extreme poverty and offer a novel context but also because they play an important role in globalisation.

A mixed-method approach was undertaken to address this novel pandemic situation. First, an open-ended structured questionnaire was developed, and data were collected from three neighbouring emerging economies: Pakistan, India and Iran. Experts' perspectives on vulnerabilities, response measures, resilience and restoration of supply chain activities, and the role of social capital were collected. Second, building upon the findings from phase one of the studies, a quantitative structured questionnaire using the supply chain operational reference (SCOR) model was used to collect data in a structured manner. This quantitative data were further analysed using frequency and contingency analysis.

The findings from the first phase of the study inductively derive 36 resilience categories. Later, the contingency findings show that supply chain (SC) disruption is a major vulnerability for emerging economies, whereas solutions offered to combat it lay in the reconfiguration of resources, such as financial, technological, human, information and material. Additionally, supply network structure and social capital play an integral part in making SCs resilient against disruption.

The respondents comprise the academics/SC researchers, which make the findings interesting though they lack the industrial experts' perspectives, directly. Nevertheless, the propositions can be tested in industrial settings to see whether the results are limited to a specific industrial setting or are rather generalised.

Similarly, practitioners and policy makers can incorporate the SCOR metrics/factors outlined in this study into their performance measurement systems and ensure continuous monitoring for firm's resilience.

The study offers a holistic understanding of the developing regions' approaches to Covid-19. The paper also takes a social capital perspective to explain firms' resilience in these emerging economies.

In an aeroplane, a control column comprising a grip member, a base member, and a cutaway member provided with slots, said base member being movably mounted in said slots.

Since early 2000s, several efforts have been initiated to market the Baltic Sea Region (BSR) globally, and the BaltMet Promo project is among them. Simultaneously, several other cases of supra‐national branding have emerged, e.g. the Greater Mekong region, Danube region, and Visegrad countries. Little attention has yet been paid in the literature to branding of supra‐national entities. The purpose of this paper is to discuss branding of BSR using the examples of supra‐national product building of the BaltMet Promo project (2010‐2011).

Branding BSR has faced criticism against its supra‐national perspective which may be seen as a direct competitor to city or nation branding. To shift from competition to cooperation BaltMet Promo acknowledged a bottom‐up approach and nine organisations from six countries created supra‐national products to promote tourism, talent attraction, and investments. Each product concept was built on intensive background research and transnational triple‐helix cooperation.

The case of BaltMet Promo shows that supra‐national branding benefits from a bottom‐up approach that uses concrete products and services as the core of the brand identity. To shift from competition to cooperation the partnership promoted BSR as a common region with a common work plan. Different scales of branding serve different markets. The more distant the market, such as Japan in the case of BaltMet Promo, the more cost effective supra‐regional branding becomes compared to more narrow scales of branding.

The paper introduces recent developments in supra‐national branding using data of the BaltMet Promo project. The analysis aims to contribute to product building, triple helix stakeholder cooperation, and policy making.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between sustainable operations practices (SOP) and performance.

This study was conducted through a systematic literature review followed by a meta-analysis of correlations.

In the results, 14 of the relationships examined showed a positive relationship and 12 the presence of moderators. The study findings indicate that contingency affects the relationship between SOPs and performance.

The research presented in this paper is mainly limited to databases that were searched. Among the quantitative articles selected from the databases, many did not have the data needed to conduct the meta-analysis, which may have limited the results of this study.

Using the results of this study, practitioners can become aware of to the occurrence of moderating factors in the relationships, which can range from interference from other practices and variables to characteristics of the organization itself or the market in which organizations operate.

This study uses a multidimensional approach for both SOP and performance. This approach allowed a more complete and comprehensive result, showing how these SOPs influence the different categories of performance, expanding the understanding of the relationship between practices and performance.

A firm's behavior is constrained by its access to resources owned or controlled by different constituencies in its environment. Mergers and acquisitions are one way to proactively manage these resource dependencies. Research on resource dependence reducing merger and acquisition patterns provides an important cornerstone of resource dependency theory and a basis of our present knowledge of the aggregate industry-level merger and acquisition patterns. However, due to the predominant focus on inter-industry merger and acquisition patterns in earlier research, much less is known as to whether the same logic could also be applied to explain intra-industry merger and acquisition patterns. In this chapter, we extend the resource dependence results to an intra-industry context. In particular, we show that mergers and acquisitions among pharmaceutical firms tend to take place among firms with technological and competitive interdependencies. To distinguish our finding from the competing resource scale and scope explanations, we show that the likelihood of a resource dependence reducing acquisition is moderated by the crowding of firms’ technological positions and prior alliance ties. Consistent with the resource dependence explanation, both weaken the effect of overlapping technological positions even though both alliance ties and crowding otherwise are positively related to merger and acquisition patterns in line with the social structural explanations.

Sustainable development involves companies on an individual, organizational and social level requiring the adoption of business models or innovations capable of privileging the co-creation of mutual value with a view to sustainability. From an organizational perspective, this paper aims to show that knowledge brokers, by making explicit their roles as mediators of interactions and acting on dynamic capabilities (DCs), can generate a proactive approach to the three dimensions of sustainability and specifically allows capabilities to positively impact the propensity toward sustainable supply chain management (SSCM) practices.

This study offers an empirical analysis of 200 companies in the agro-food sector participating in a knowledge brokerage system activated by protection consortia. It uses a multiple regression technique that allows for observing relationships between DCs and SSCM.

Absorptive, adaptive and innovative capabilities, when understood and brokered, have a positive and direct impact on the SSCM.

As there have rarely been frameworks developed that correlate knowledge brokerage, DCs and sustainability, this paper suggests that DCs, when adequately valued by the knowledge broker, allow for identifying the requirements of the various stakeholders regarding sustainability and changes in market scenarios to generate sustainability practices along the supply chain.