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This study empirically investigates the significance of the core competencies on various economic performance indices by utilizing accounting and market-based performance in Chinese and South Korean leading manufacturing companies.

This research employs a series of hierarchical regression models to test the hypotheses concerning the significance of R&D and export strategy on firms' performance.

This study finds that R&D intensity and foreign trade activities through export are most likely to be significantly associated with firm performance, particularly market-based performance, across the Chinese and South Korea manufacturing companies. The significance of other core strategic factors such as capital intensity, leverage, inventory turnover, labor productivity, administrative cost efficiency, and collection policy on performance was also contemplated.

The relationship between R&D and firm performance has been an interesting issue concerning the performance measures employed across different country settings. Research issues addressed in this paper relate to how R&D, and foreign trade by export influence firm performance across two diverse economic environments inherent of Chinese and South Korean leading manufacturing firms. Particularly, this study explores the directions and magnitudes of the operational and strategic relationships between key strategic factors, such as R&D intensity, export by foreign trade, and the firm's economic and market-based performance.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the strategic effects of academic institutional factors including environmental, social, and economic sustainability indices on the compensation of the president of an institution of higher education (IHE). The objective is to build relationships among variables to benchmark compensation measures for IHE presidents across US universities to proliferate sustainability initiatives. Some of the variables of the study were environmental sustainability, social sustainability, cost efficiency as a measure of economic sustainability, tenure, institutional control of the university such as public or private fundraising reputation, endowment and professor’s salary.

In total, 236 universities have been included in the study. The data for various dependent variables were studied to see the relationship between the independent and select dependent variables. The OLS regression approach was used to ascertain the relationships between the president’s salary, and a selected set of independent variables that includes the measures of sustainability.

The key findings of this study is that variables such as environmental sustainability, tenure, classification, endowment, and professor salary were significantly and positively associated with the IHE president’s salary.

The current study is limited to the IHEs within the USA. Thus, the study cannot be generalized or extrapolated to other countries or contexts or cultures.

The results of the study show that the trustees rarely use proliferation of sustainability as a criterion to compensate IHE presidents. The study concludes with the plea to trustees to benchmark sustainability across IHEs in evaluating and compensating IHE presidents.

This paper extends the compensation study of IHE presidents to include environment, social, and economic dimensions of sustainability. These variables are important in this age where IHEs have been challenged to do more to make our planet sustainable.

The purpose of this paper is to adapt integrated hierarchical evaluation platform (associated with “green” performance indices) toward evaluation and selection of alternative suppliers under green supply chain (GSC) philosophy.

In this context, incompleteness, vagueness, imprecision, as well as inconsistency associated with subjective evaluation information aligned with ill-defined suppliers’ assessment indices has been tackled through logical exploration of fuzzy set theory. A fuzzy-based multi-level multi-criteria decision-making (FMLMCDM) approach as proposed by Chu and Varma (2012), has been case empirically studied in the context of green suppliers selection.

Result obtained thereof, has been compared to that of fuzzy-TOPSIS to validate application potential of the aforementioned FMLMCDM approach.

The proposed method has been found fruitful from managerial implication viewpoint.

The purpose of this paper is to identify barriers to implement green supply chain and to understand their mutual relationship. Green supply chain management (GSCM) barriers are identified using available GSCM literature and on consultations with experts from industry and academician. Interpretive structural model (ISM) was developed to identify the contextual relationship among these barriers.

A group of experts from industries and academics was consulted and ISM is used to develop the contextual relationship among various GSCMBs for each dimension of GSCM implementation. The results of ISM are used as an input to fuzzy matrix of cross-impact multiplications applied to classification (MICMAC) analysis, to identify the driving and dependence power of GSCMBs.

This paper has identified 14 key GSCMBs and developed an integrated model using ISM and the fuzzy MICMAC approach, which helps to identify and classify the important GSCMBs and reveal the direct and indirect effects of each GSCMB on the GSCM implementation. ISM model provides only binary relationship among GSCMBs, while fuzzy MICMAC analysis provides precise analysis related to driving and dependence power of GSCMB, to overcome this limitation, integrated approach is developed.

ISM model development and fuzzy MICMAC analysis were obtained through the judgment of academicians and industry experts. It is the only subjective judgment and any biasing by the person who is judging the GSCMBs might influence the final result.

This is first kind of study to identify GSCMBs and further, to deploy ISM and fuzzy MICMAC to identify and classify the key GSCMEs that influence GSCM implementation in the organization. The results will be useful for business managers to understand the GSCMBs and overcome these GSCMBs during GSCM implementation in an organization.

The purpose of this paper is to assess the sustainability reporting practices of oil and gas (O & G) companies and the integration of sustainability in the management of their supply chain.

A content analysis of sustainability report of 30 companies was conducted based on the Pacific Sustainability Index that contains 21 topics on social and environmental reporting. An analysis was also conducted on supply chain management (SCM) topics related to supplier management, product stewardship and logistics management.

There is inconsistency in the sustainability reporting practices among the O & G companies studied. While 63 percent of the companies expressed higher environmental intent compared to social intent, their reporting of environmental performance is lagging behind social performance reporting. There is also a lack of supply chain indicators in the sustainability reporting guidelines. This affects the companies ability to report their supply chain practices objectively.

The findings of this study can be used as a guideline to improve the sustainability reporting practices and to identify relevant supply chain indicators that can be incorporated in a sustainability reporting index.

There is a lack of research on sustainability reporting practices in the O & G industry context, especially in terms of SCM. Previous studies focussed on companies in specific countries and/or do not incorporate all sustainability dimensions, namely, economic, environmental and social factor. We think that this is the first comprehensive study on the sustainability reporting practices and the integration of sustainability in SCM in the O & G industry.

This paper examines the limits of pragmatism in strategy formulation in the new, knowledge‐rich economy. By tracing the history of pragmatism in social and management thought, and assessing the commonalties and complementarities between a firm’s vision and mission, we explore the possibility and consequences of an intangible resource curse for firms pursuing strategies of incessant pragmatic growth in the expanding Web‐based domain. Ultimately, we posit a combined influence of market‐based governance and strategy simplification as an effective antidote to the executive intangible resource binging, which is sustainable as long as confidence and trust continue to be shared among the firm stakeholders.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a framework integrating the Hart and Milstein (2003) strategies for organizational sustainable development (SD) with the ideas of Kleindorfer et al. (2005) on sustainable operations management (SOM), which requires guidance of green supply chain management (GSCM).

The construction of the framework was based on previous studies that discussed synergies between operations management principles with environmental bias and studies on adoption of GSCM practices.

The proposed framework guides managers to reconcile operations management practices/principles that are already being implemented in organizations with an environmental perspective because these practices sustain organizations to simultaneously reach SOM and SD.

The paper presents a framework that provides guidance on how organizations can seek sustainability in their operations, considering that articles on the topic of sustainability have not been developed with this specific focus.

It is posited that information technology (IT) outsourcing unfolds a complex relationship that has the propensity to start with a bang and end in a whimper unless the strategic parameters are identified at the outset. The paper is intended to beacon flash areas open to scholarly research in this relatively nascent area.

The key to long‐term success is the mutually beneficial partnership of the client and the provider. This paper identifies such relationships based on a framework that can lead to strategic success of the outsourcing engagements. The paper develops a set of propositions to build a deeper understanding of the processes that underlie IT outsourcing as a strategic and sustainable enterprise‐wide initiative to further an organization's performance in the competitive market place.

Outsourcing of IT is emerging as a potent business strategy. The statistics compiled by the IT industry watch‐dogs point only to one direction – outsourcing will grow unabated in the foreseeable future. However, their data also reveal a staggering failure rate of outsourcing engagements. The failure may be partly attributed to a lack of formal research available to decision makers contemplating the possibility of outsourcing. The literature review corroborates that there is very little scholarly research available to guide decisions in the pre‐outsourcing phase. This paper suggests a research framework that would fill a void in understanding the relationships among the firm's internal capabilities, the type of engagement, and strategic business values. Understanding of these strategic relationships is vital before an organization decides to outsource, as the decision domain has shifted primarily from cost cutting to engagement of a strategic nature. The outsourcing decision of IT should be considered strategic as the relationship and the knowledge gained during the engagement can be translated into tangible and intangible business values for the organization. An interesting extension of the proposed research would be to investigate the conditions that underlie acceptance of an engagement by the vendor. The proposed research also has the potential to extend to the post‐engagement phase of the outsourcing in terms of identifying the conditions for strategically focused relationship management.

The paper provides a framework and identifies propositions to delve deeper into the understanding and underpinnings of IT outsourcing as a strategic process by studying a majority of research available on the topic.

The purpose of this paper is to suggest a lean, agile, resilient, and green (LARG) index as a benchmarking tool to assess the leanness, agility, resilience and the greenness of the automotive companies and corresponding supply chain (SC).

The proposed index incorporates LARG supply chain management paradigms and corresponding practices being both weighted according to their importance for the automotive SC sustainability. The Delphi technique is used to obtain the weights for each SC paradigm and a linear aggregated method is proposed. A case study approach related to the automotive SC is chosen to illustrate the LARG index application.

The case study results confirmed the usefulness and ease of application of LARG index in a real world SC. The application of the suggested index to a set of companies, and consequently to their SC, makes possible to identify: the better and worst performer company in each paradigm, the LARG practices with higher levels of application among the companies, the LARG index for each company and also for the corresponding SC. This becomes an important benchmarking tool since comparative analysis regarding the LARG behaviours are possible to perform with the suggested index.

More LARG practices could be considered to improve the robustness of the index. Future studies should be conducted across more companies for improving the effectiveness of the approach, and more members should be included in the panel of Delphi technique for enhancing the validity of the suggested approach.

SC companies will be able to assess their performance in terms of leanness, agility, resilience and greenness. A study like this could encourage all automotive companies to benchmark their organizations as regards their competitors, the best in class, and also the industry average.

This paper contributes to the literature by introducing a new index for measuring the leanness, agility, resilience and greenness of companies and SCs. This index can be used by managers as a benchmarking tool to identify their LARG behaviour and compare it with their SC partners and seek for improvement.