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The Volkswagen (VW) emissions scandal was one of the largest examples of organizational wrongdoing in corporate history, costing the firm immense damage to its reputation and over $33 billion in fines, penalties, financial settlements, and buyback costs. In this paper, we draw on the concept of boundary work to provide insight into the causes of wrongdoing at VW. Supplementing other work on the scandal, we show how the ways in which boundaries became established in the organization resulted in an internal context that defined “in” and “out” groups, normalized certain behaviors, and limited communication across intraorganizational boundaries. This allowed wrongdoing to not only become established but also to go unchallenged. We provide contributions to broader understandings of organizational wrongdoing and to the temporal unfolding of boundary work by theorizing how a combination of cognitive, horizontal, and vertical boundaries can create an infrastructure of organizational design that permits organizational wrongdoing, prevents it being challenged, and ultimately normalizes it in everyday activities.

Academic research has intensively analyzed the relationship between market concentration or market power and banking stability but provides ambiguous results, which are summarized under the concentration-stability/fragility view. We provide empirical evidence that the mixed results are due to the difficulty of identifying reliable variables to measure concentration and market power.

Using data from 3,943 banks operating in the European Union (EU)-15 between 2013 and 2020, we employ linear regression models on panel data. Banking market concentration is measured by the Herfindahl–Hirschman Index (HHI), and market power is estimated by the product-specific Lerner Indices for the loan and deposit market, respectively.

Our analysis reveals a significantly stability-decreasing impact of market concentration (HHI) and a significantly stability-increasing effect of market power (Lerner Indices). In addition, we provide evidence for a weak (or even absent) empirical relationship between the (non)structural measures, challenging the validity of the structure-conduct-performance (SCP) paradigm. Our baseline findings remain robust, especially when controlling for a likely reverse causality.

Our results suggest that the HHI may reflect other factors beyond market power that influence banking stability. Thus, banking supervisors and competition authorities should investigate market concentration and market power simultaneously while considering their joint impact on banking stability.

Supply chains must rebuild for resilience to respond to challenges posed by systemwide disruptions. Unlike past disruptions that were narrow in impact and short-term in duration, the Covid pandemic presented a systemic disruption and revealed shortcomings in responses. This study outlines an approach to rebuilding supply chains for resilience, integrating innovation in areas critical to supply chain management.

The study is based on extensive debates among the authors and their peers. The authors focus on three areas deemed fundamental to supply chain resilience: (1) forecasting, the starting point of supply chain planning, (2) the practices of supply chain risk management and (3) product design, the starting point of supply chain design. The authors’ debated and pooled their viewpoints to outline key changes to these areas in response to systemwide disruptions, supported by a narrative literature review of the evolving research, to identify research opportunities.

All three areas have evolved in response to the changed perspective on supply chain risk instigated by the pandemic and resulting in systemwide disruptions. Forecasting, or prediction generally, is evolving from statistical and time-series methods to human-augmented forecasting supplemented with visual analytics. Risk management has transitioned from enterprise to supply chain risk management to tackling systemic risk. Finally, product design principles have evolved from design-for-manufacturability to design-for-adaptability. All three approaches must work together.

The authors outline the evolution in research directions for forecasting, risk management and product design and present innovative research opportunities for building supply chain resilience against systemwide disruptions.

Increasing personnel costs and labour shortages have pushed retailers to give increasing attention to their intralogistics operations. We study hybrid order picking systems, in which humans and robots share work time, workspace and objectives and are in permanent contact. This necessitates a collaboration of humans and their mechanical coworkers (cobots).

Through a longitudinal case study on individual-level technology adaption, we accompanied a pilot testing of an industrial truck that automatically follows order pickers in their travel direction. Grounded on empirical field research and a unique large-scale data set comprising N = 2,086,260 storage location visits, where N = 57,239 storage location visits were performed in a hybrid setting and N = 2,029,021 in a manual setting, we applied a multilevel model to estimate the impact of this cobot settings on task performance.

We show that cobot settings can reduce the time required for picking tasks by as much as 33.57%. Furthermore, practical factors such as product weight, pick density and travel distance mitigate this effect, suggesting that cobots are especially beneficial for short-distance orders.

Given that the literature on hybrid order picking systems has primarily applied simulation approaches, the study is among the first to provide empirical evidence from a real-world setting. The results are discussed from the perspective of Industry 5.0 and can prevent managers from making investment decisions into ineffective robotic technology.

This chapter takes a closer look at the integration process of the Western Balkan states. At first we will look at the procedures to join the EU, followed by some general information about the countries of the Western Balkans. Building on this, the path and the current results of the individual countries towards EU membership are reviewed. At the end, a closer look at the Berlin Process shows a concrete example how the individual Western Balkan states work with the EU. This allows an outlook how the enlargement process might continue in the coming years.

There is a growing need for methodological plurality in advancing operations management (OM), especially with the emergence of machine learning (ML) techniques for analysing extensive textual data. To bridge this knowledge gap, this paper introduces a new methodology that combines ML techniques with traditional qualitative approaches, aiming to reconstruct knowledge from existing publications.

In this pragmatist-rooted abductive method where human-machine interactions analyse big data, the authors employ topic modelling (TM), an ML technique, to enable constructivist grounded theory (CGT). A four-step coding process (Raw coding, expert coding, focused coding and theory building) is deployed to strive for procedural and interpretive rigour. To demonstrate the approach, the authors collected data from an open-source professional project management (PM) website and illustrated their research design and data analysis leading to theory development.

The results show that TM significantly improves the ability of researchers to systematically investigate and interpret codes generated from large textual data, thus contributing to theory building.

This paper presents a novel approach that integrates an ML-based technique with human hermeneutic methods for empirical studies in OM. Using grounded theory, this method reconstructs latent knowledge from massive textual data and uncovers management phenomena hidden from published data, offering a new way for academics to develop potential theories for business and management studies.

This study focuses on (re-)introducing computer simulation as a part of the research paradigm. Simulation is a widely applied research method in supply chain and operations management. However, leading journals, such as the International Journal of Operations and Production Management, have often been reluctant to accept simulation studies. This study provides guidelines on how to conduct simulation research that advances theory, is relevant, and matters.

This study pooled the viewpoints of the editorial team of the International Journal of Operations and Production Management and authors of simulation studies. The authors debated their views and outlined why simulation is important and what a compelling simulation should look like.

There is an increasing importance of considering uncertainty, an increasing interest in dynamic phenomena, such as the transient response(s) to disruptions, and an increasing need to consider complementary outcomes, such as sustainability, which many researchers believe can be tackled by big data and modern analytical tools. But building, elaborating, and testing theory by purposeful experimentation is the strength of computer simulation. The authors therefore argue that simulation should play an important role in supply chain and operations management research, but for this, it also has to evolve away from simply generating and analyzing data. Four types of simulation research with much promise are outlined: empirical grounded simulation, simulation that establishes causality, simulation that supplements machine learning, artificial intelligence and analytics and simulation for sensitive environments.

This study identifies reasons why simulation is important for understanding and responding to today's business and societal challenges, it provides some guidance on how to design good simulation studies in this context and it links simulation to empirical research and theory going beyond multimethod studies.

This introduction from Andrea Óhidy and Katalin R. Forray provides a brief overview of the social and educational situation of Roma in the Western Balkan region and the structure of this book. Like in the books Lifelong Learning and the Roma Minority in Central and Eastern Europe (2019) and Lifelong Learning and the Roma Minority in Western and Southern Europe (2020), Roma are here described as a ‘hidden minority’ (Cavioni, 2020, p. 68), because despite the great number and the century-long history of Roma people on the European continent, there is still only limited information and knowledge about them, both in public awareness and scientific research. Although most members of the Roma minority have been living for centuries in their European home countries, their situation is still different from the non-Roma populations: They often suffer from socio-economic disadvantages and hate-motivated harassment and discrimination (EU-FRA, 2020a). This is not only the case in the member-states of the European Union but also in the Western Balkan region. All across Europe, there are Roma groups, which are considered to be the most disadvantaged minority, regarding their health, employment and housing and also in education. To increase their situation, European Union member states have developed common strategies, which play a part in negotiations for an EU-membership status. The so-called Western Balkan states – Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Montenegro, North Macedonia and Serbia – might join the European Union in the coming years. The social inclusion of the Roma minority and the protection of their minority rights in these countries were formulated as a precondition for their application for EU membership. Therefore, several goals, policies and measures were implemented there to break the ‘vicious circle of poverty and discrimination’ (EU-FRA, 2020b). Participation in education and lifelong learning have become central elements of these political measures for Roma Inclusion. This book examines the education situation of Roma across the so-called Western Balkan region.

This conceptual paper aims to explore the current state of sustainability communication research, focusing on the challenges of communicating inconvenient truths in an era of scientific mistrust. Therefore, this study aims to (1) examine the existing research landscape in sustainability communication, (2) identify unresolved problems and challenges, and (3) propose strategies for counteract misinformation through targeted communication.

For this, the authors conducted a critical literature review and analyzed the resulting sample (n = 473 journal articles) by means of qualitative content analysis to (1) evaluate existing communication approaches dealing with the communication of sustainability's inconvenient truth, (2) identify stakeholder groups involved in sustainability communication, (3) discuss limitations of current communication approaches and (4) present recommendations on (more) effective communication strategies to address the unresolved issues in sustainability communication.

The analysis reveals that when it comes to sustainability communication and its unresolved problems, literature refers to four key stakeholder groups: (1) science deniers; (2) adaptation skeptics; (3) whitewashers and (4) world saviors. Furthermore, the analysis provides valuable insights into the complex dynamics involved in communicating sustainability, emphasizes the need for tailored approaches to engage and address the concerns of each stakeholder group, and exposes limitations in current communication methods and approaches. Accordingly, the analysis highlights the necessity of developing new theories, models and methods specific to sustainability communication to tackle its unique challenges effectively.

Like our society, communication sciences need a fundamental transformation to meet sustainability communication's new challenges induced by the necessary shift toward sustainable development.

This paper provides a comprehensive overview of the current state of sustainability communication in research, specifically addressing the challenges of effectively communicating unpleasant news in the context of scientific mistrust. It fills a gap in existing literature by examining the progress made in addressing these issues and identifying the emerging challenges that need to be addressed.