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This research aimed to conceptualize organizations as open and purposeful systems to study how organizational culture (OC) influences firms' Innovative Performance (IP). The authors proposed goal setting and internal integration/external adaptation paradox as central to explaining OC's mediating and suppressing effects on IP.

The authors collected data from 372 Costa Rican organizations and analyzed them with structural equations. This research used the Denison Model instead of the usual typology-based approaches.

The mission had a direct and high impact on IP. The mediated effect via adaptability was also elevated, as well as the suppressor effect through consistency. There was no effect on IP of involvement. According to these results, the Open and Rational Systems Framework emerge as the main theoretical explanatory concepts.

Disaggregating the OC through a performance-oriented dimensional model makes it possible to study the dynamics between the elements that compound it and facilitate integrating these findings with other research streams.

Lean Six Sigma in public and private healthcare organisations has received considerable attention over the last decade. Nevertheless, such process improvement methodologies are not generalizable, and their effective implementation relies on contextual variables. The purpose of this study is to explore the readiness of Italian hospitals for Lean Six Sigma and Quality Performance Improvement (LSS&QPI), with a focus on gender differences.

A survey comprising 441 healthcare professionals from public and private hospitals was conducted. Multivariate analysis of variance was used to determine the mean scores on the LSS&QPI dimensions based on hospital type, gender and their interaction.

The results showed that public healthcare professional are more aware of quality performance improvement initiatives than private healthcare professionals. Moreover, gender differences emerged according to the type of hospital, with higher awareness for men than women in public hospitals, whereas for private hospitals the opposite was true.

This study contributes to the Lean Six Sigma literature by focusing on the holistic assessment of LSS&QPI implementation.

This study informs healthcare managers about the revolution within healthcare organisations, especially public ones. Healthcare managers should spend time understanding Lean Six Sigma as a strategic orientation to promote the “lean hospital”, improving processes and fostering patient-centredness.

This is a preliminary study focussing on analysing inter-relationship between perceived importance of soft readiness factors such as gender dynamics as a missing jigsaw in the current literature. In addition, the research advances a holistic assessment of LSS&QPI, which sets it apart from the studies on single initiatives that have been documented to date.

This study aims to present a methodological experience using geodesign as a process and instrument that facilitates citizen awareness and the use of alternative urban parameters in a discipline of an undergraduate course in architecture and urbanism, about urban planning at a local scale.

Aiming to develop solutions more suited to the reality of the area and attentive to contemporary practices of collaborative urban planning – for and with people – the methodological approach was divided into two complementary steps. The first step was elaborated through a general plan of ideas, with the aid of the Geodesign Hub platform, and for the more detailed second step, we used the Brazilian virtual GISColab geodesign platform. Both steps were conducted in workshop format.

In this experience, by incorporating geoinformation technology resources, geodesign proved to be a potential tool for creating opinions and decision-making regarding co-creative planning and experimenting with alternative urban parameters.

In the context of a current scenario of city growth oriented from the perspective of motor vehicles, the urban sprawl and in turn, the progressive loss of the human dimension in the urban space, students were introduced and encouraged to reflect on the different functions of the street and on the possibility of measuring urban quality from alternative parameters: completeness indicators.

This study aims to investigate how sustainability and ethics are being addressed both by the literature and companies. Furthermore, it seeks to identify the specific strategies that these companies use to foster ethical behaviour and promote sustainability in their business operations.

The study entails a bibliometric analysis and a set of case studies from a sample of companies working in different industry sectors. Based on these tools, it analyses whether – and how – enterprises are placing an emphasis on sustainability and ethics as part of their businesses. In addition, the selected companies' unethical practices or socially irresponsible corporate activities were investigated and presented.

The findings suggest that using an ethics perspective can be a valuable tool in improving the accuracy and correctness of business decision-making. In addition, the paper has identified the fact that sustainability standards can be used to improve customer satisfaction as many important issues are addressed. Finally, the paper highlights the importance of ethical considerations when designing and implementing sustainability standards at enterprises and the need for regulatory guidance in this regard.

The paper addresses the need for studies on how sustainability and ethics are being discussed by both the literature and companies. The paper presents some elements that can be used as possible corporate indicators for a wider implementation of sustainability and ethics objectives in enterprises.

The recent increase in the number of infections and mortality rates in many regions has emphasized the cyclical nature of this pandemic, with new variants emerging constantly. Understanding what has been done by efficient administrations to contain the outbreak is essential while new immunization developments for the new variants are not available.

This work adapts the traditional Banker, Charnes and Cooper (BCC) Variable Returns to Scale model for including panel data on the Brazilian Federal Government spending over the first pandemic months in Pernambuco to identify efficient municipalities and conduct a benchmark on the best practices, reactions and implications that can serve as a guide for the post-Covid recurrence era.

The results provide an interesting panorama of municipal response to the pandemic and some quantitative and qualitative prospects on potentials for improvements from the perspective of efficient and inefficient cities. Only one administration (São Bento do Una) was identified as efficient for the entire period. The authors’ benchmark and discussion are focused on this municipality.

The authors believe this work has two innovative components. The first is a robust and systematic methodology integrating the advances in testing convexity and returns to scale in the construction of a production frontier based on panel data. The second is a discussion on what drives efficiency (benchmarking of best practices) in addition to how to quantitatively attain such efficiency prospects. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, both methodological and empirical implications are original to the present manuscript.

This study aims to offer the intellectual structure and dynamics of the sustainability branding field, involving the identification of influential authors and journals, current and emerging themes, theories, methods, contexts and future research directions.

The study conducted a bibliometric approach of 1,509 articles retrieved from Scopus to analyze the evolution of the knowledge of sustainability branding and suggest future research. The analysis used various methods such as performance analysis, keyword analysis, cluster analysis and bibliographic coupling.

The topics of corporate image, philanthropy and stakeholder pressures were core in the foundation phase. Then rose the topics of sustainable development goals and global supply chains. Green marketing and the new paradigms of circularity, ethical consumerism and hyperconnected societies emerged more recently. Six thematic clusters represent the field’s knowledge structure: (1) corporate branding and reputation, (2) sustainable business development, (3) sustainable branding and ethical consumption, (4) corporate social responsibility, (5) brand equity and green marketing and (6) sustainability branding in hospitality and tourism.

This paper provides readers with an overview of sustainability branding core themes, key contributions and challenges, which can be used as a toolkit for brand management studies and practice.

The study’s uniqueness lies in bibliometric analysis (combined with network analysis and science mapping techniques) of the sustainability branding field from the identification and evolution of the thematic clusters to propose future research directions.

This paper aims to identify the income and price elasticities of demand for residential electricity in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) and to verify their main determinants.

Meta-analysis and meta-regression methods were applied. After collecting and filtering journal articles, the authors obtained a sample composed of 76 studies covering 1979–2020.

The results show that the LAC's income elasticity is approximately 0.20 and 0.92 for the short and long term, respectively. The LAC's price elasticity is approximately −0.37 and −0.46 for the short and long term, respectively. Furthermore, the estimates are affected by the data structure, the estimation method used and the sampling period.

The authors close a gap in the literature by analyzing the price and income elasticities of demand through meta-analysis and meta-regression.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze how sustainability was operationalized in the Spanish universities through plans and actions that contribute actively to the achievement of the sustainable development goals (SDGs).

A systematic search and content analysis served to examine information available on websites belonging to the 76 universities listed in the Conference of Rectors of the Spanish Universities (CRUE).

The participation of Spanish universities on initiatives focused on sustainability is very limited, highlighting the negligible role of private institutions in which topics like sustainability and the 2030 Agenda/SDGs were scarcely addressed.

The study outlines the actual extent of the inclusion of sustainability in particular co-curricular actions toward the SDGs in the CRUE. The findings enable to define a long-term sustainability road map for the Spanish university system.

This study aims to explore the impact of store atmospherics on urban bottom-of-the-pyramid consumers’ behavioural intentions to purchase apparel in an emerging African market context. This study also considers purchase antecedents to attitude, perceived behavioural control and social norms as determinants of urban bottom-of-the-pyramid consumers’ apparel behavioural intentions.

Using non-probability sampling, specifically purposive and interlocking sampling, data collection was secured from 881 economically active Namibian urban bottom-of-the-pyramid respondents through interviewer-administered questionnaires. Covariance-based structural equation modelling assessed the significant relationships among all constructs in the conceptual model.

This study found that for favourable apparel behavioural intentions of urban bottom-of-the-pyramid consumers to occur, apparel retailers should emphasise trust, perceived awareness and self-identity through apparel assortment and groupings, easy-to-read visible signage, together with competent, friendly and respectful sales personnel in their store atmospherics.

The findings of this study may guide apparel retailers in other emerging African markets to develop regional integration, market-based solutions and inclusive economic growth focusing on “non-essential” products, such as apparel, among urban bottom-of-the-pyramid consumers.

This study expands the intellectual boundaries of urban bottom-of-the-pyramid consumers’ behavioural intentions towards “non-essential” products. The theoretical framework supports the integration of both the stimulus-organism-response model and the theory of planned behaviour into one single model for empirical investigation. Additionally, adopting a novel theoretical framework helped identify the impact of store atmospherics from a bottom-of-the-pyramid perspective in an emerging African market context, such as Namibia.

To understand how organizations, public or private, must increase their productivity perception (PP), independently of the sector. This article aims to analyze PP in the digital transformation (DT) process to determine how it is affected by technostress (TS) and work engagement (WE), two concepts that seem to be forces opposing PP.

The authors use data from a questionnaire addressed to personnel in two organizations (public and private). The analysis applies partial least squares technique to the 505 valid responses obtained from these organizations. This analysis is based not on representativeness but on uniqueness.

The results suggest a positive, significant relationship between DT and PP. This article integrates DT and its effects on aspects of people's health, PP and WE. The model thus includes interactions of technology with human elements. In both business and administrative environments, PP is key to optimizing resources and survival of organizations.

DT processes are different and complex because every organization is different. The authors recommend expanding this study to other sectors in both spheres, public and private. Aligning the objectives of the institutions for aid with DT is also quite complicated.

This study contributes to improving participating organizations. It also provides government institutions with a clear foundation from which to encourage actions that promote the health and WE of their workforce without reducing productivity. In addition, this study adds novelty to the research line.

The authors have deepened this line of research by developing fuller knowledge of the relationships among novel and necessary variables in organizations. The authors provide complementary, different and inspiring value in addressing this line of research.