Search results

This article aims to understand where industry is in terms of digitalizing their operations, what features of this transformation are essential for practitioners, and what barriers they are facing during their journey. In addition, the authors aim to provide recommendations for organization to start their digital transformation.

Through literature review, the authors summarize the emerging tools and technologies in operations and supply chains to inform the practitioners. Then, the authors use surveys conducted on 183 operations and supply chain professionals, and use statistical tools to examine the association between variables of the data set. The authors present real-life case studies to explain important steps of a digital transformation project.

The survey results indicate that real-time monitoring and data analytics are viewed as the most important and needed tools for organizations. High cost, lack of stakeholder buy-in and lack of successful business use cases are major barriers for companies when starting a digital transformation.

The authors provide recommendations for practitioners based on the survey responses, and outline that starting small, focusing on stakeholder buy-in and implementation of software are the three key steps for a successful transformation journey.

Main contributions of this article are to understand practitioner perspectives in digitalization and provide guidelines for organizations to follow when transforming their operations. This research closes the gap between academic research and practice by collaborating with operations and supply chain professionals.

Political Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), based on ideas about deliberative democracy, have been criticised for increasing corporate power and democratic deficits. Yet, deliberative ideals are flourishing in the corporate world in the form of dialogues with a broad set of stakeholders and engagement in wider societal issues. Extractive industry areas, with extensive corporate interventions in weak regulatory environments, are particularly vulnerable to asymmetrical power relations when businesses engage with society. This paper aims to illustrate in what way deliberative CSR practices in such contexts risk enhancing corporate power at the expense of community interests.

This paper is based on a retrospective qualitative study of a Canadian oil company, operating in an Albanian oilfield between 2009 and 2016. Through a study of three different deliberative CSR practices – market-based land acquisition, a grievance redress mechanism and dialogue groups – it highlights how these practices in various ways enforced corporate interests and prevented further community mobilisation.

By applying Laclau and Mouffe’s theory of hegemony, the analysis highlights how deliberative CSR activities isolated and silenced community demands, moved some community members into the corporate alliance and prevented alternative visions of the area to be articulated. In particular, the close connection between deliberative practices and monetary compensation flows is underlined in this dynamic.

The paper contributes to critical scholarship on political CSR by highlighting in what way deliberative practices, linked to monetary compensation schemes, enforce corporate hegemony by moving community members over to the corporate alliance.

According to the Project Management Institute, 70% of projects fail globally. The causes of project failure in many instances can be identified as non-technical or behavioral in nature arising from interactions between participants. These intangible risks can emerge in any project setting but especially in project settings having diversity of cultures, customs, beliefs and traditions of various companies or countries. This paper provides an objective framework to address these intangible risks.

This paper presents a structured approach to identify, assess and manage intangible risks to enhance a project team’s ability to meet its objectives. The authors propose a user-friendly framework, Intangible Risk Assessment Methodology for Projects (IRAMP), to address these risks and the factors that cause them. Meta-network (e.g., a network of networks) simulation and established social network analysis (SNA) measures provide a quantitative assessment and ranking of causal events and their influence on the intangible behavior centric risks.

The proposed IRAMP and meta-network approach were utilized to examine the project delivery process of an international energy firm. Data were gathered using structured interviews, surveys and project team workshops. The use of the IRAMP to highlight intangible risk areas underpinned by the SNA measures led to changes in the company’s organizational structure to enhance project delivery effectiveness.

This work extends the existing project risk management literature by providing a novel objective approach to identify and quantify behavior centric intangible risks and the conditions that cause them to emerge.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce a three-echelon multimodal transportation problem applied to a humanitarian logistic case study that occurred in Mexico.

This study develops a methodology combining a transshipment problem and an adaptation of the multidepot heterogeneous fleet vehicle routing problem to construct a mathematical model that incorporates the use of land-based vehicles and drones. The model was applied to the case study of the Earthquake on September 19, 2017, in Mexico, using the Gurobi optimization solver.

The results ratified the relevance of the study, showing an inverse relationship between transportation costs and delivery time; on the flip side, the model performed in a shorter CPU time with medium and small instances than with large instances.

While the size of the instances limits the use of the model for big-scale problems, this approach manages to provide a good representation of a transportation network during a natural disaster using drones in the last-mile deliveries.

The present study contributes to a model that combines a vehicle routing problem with transshipment, multiple depots and a heterogeneous fleet including land-based vehicles and drones. There are multiple models present in the literature for these types of problems that incorporate the use of these transportation modes; however, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, there are still no proposals similar to this study.

This study aims to investigate the impact of the 2013 privatization of Nigeria’s energy sector on the technical performance of the Benin Electricity Distribution Company (BEDC) and its workforce.

This study used a questionnaire-based approach, and 196 participants were randomly selected. Analytical tools included standard deviation, Spearman rank correlation and regression analysis.

Before privatization, the energy sector, managed by the power holding company of Nigeria, suffered from inefficiencies in fault detection, response and billing. However, privatization improved resource utilization, replaced outdated transformers and increased operational efficiency. However, in spite of these improvements, BEDC faces challenges, including unstable voltage generation and inadequate staff welfare. This study also highlighted a lack of experience among the trained workforce in emerging electricity technologies such as the smart grid.

This study’s focus on BEDC may limit its generalizability to other energy companies. It does not delve into energy sector privatization’s broader economic and policy implications.

The positive outcomes of privatization, such as improved resource utilization and infrastructure investment, emphasize the potential benefits of private ownership and management. However, voltage generation stability and staff welfare challenges call for targeted interventions. Recommendations include investing in voltage generation enhancement, smart grid infrastructure and implementing measures to enhance employee well-being through benefit plans.

Energy sector enhancements hold positive social implications, uplifting living standards and bolstering electricity access for households and businesses.

This study contributes unique insights into privatization’s effects on BEDC, offering perspectives on preprivatization challenges and advancements. Practical recommendations aid BEDC and policymakers in boosting electricity distribution firms’ performance within the privatization context.

Technology acceptance is a measure of that technology’s usefulness. Oil palm is one of the biggest contributors to Indonesia’s revenues, thus fueling its economy. Using remote sensing would allow a plantation to monitor and forecast its production and the amount of fertilizer used. This review aims to provide a policy recommendation in the form of a strategy to improve the added value of Indonesia’s oil palm and support the government in increasing oil palm production. This recommendation needs to be formulated by determining the users’ acceptance of remote sensing technology (state-owned plantations, private plantation companies and smallholder plantations).

This review’s methodology used sentiment analysis through text mining (bag of words model). The study’s primary data were from focus group discussions (FGDs), questionnaires, observations on participants, audio-visual documentation and focused discussions based on group category. The results of interviews and FGDs were transcribed into text and analyzed to 1) find words that can represent the content of the document; 2) classify and determine the frequency (word cloud); and finally 3) analyze the sentiment.

The result showed that private plantation companies and state-owned plantations had extremely high positive sentiments toward using remote sensing in their oil palm plantations, whereas smallholders had a 60% resistance. However, there is still a possibility for this technology’s adoption by smallholders, provided it is free and easily applied.

Basically, technology is applied to make work easier. However, not everyone is tech-savvy, especially the older generations. One dimension of technology acceptance is user/customer retention. New technology would not be immediately accepted, but there would be user perceptions about its uses and ease. At first, people might be reluctant to accept a new technology due to the perception that it is useless and difficult. Technology acceptance is the gauge of how useful technology is in making work easier compared to conventional ways.

Therefore, technology acceptance needs to be improved among smallholders by intensively socializing the policies, and through dissemination and dedication by academics and the government.

The social implications of using technology are reducing the workforce, but the company will be more profitable and efficient.

Remote sensing is one of the topics that people have not taken up in a large way, especially sentiment analysis. Acceptance of technology that utilizes remote sensing for plantations is very useful and efficient. In the end, company profits can be allocated more toward empowering the community and the environment.

This paper aims to determine causal relationships between the level of productive credit, real deposits and money demand – all of them in real terms – and Gross National Product between 2006 and 2020.

The vector autoregressive technique (VAR) was used, where data from real macroeconomic aggregates published by the Central Bank of Ecuador (BCE) are correlated, such as productive credit, gross domestic product (GDP) per capita, deposits and money demand.

The results indicate that there is no causal relationship, in the Granger sense, between GDP and financial activity, but there is between the growth rate of real money demand per capita and the growth rate of total real deposits per capita.

The study shows that bank credit mainly finances the operations of current assets and/or liabilities. In addition, economic agents use the banking system mainly to carry out transactional and precautionary activities.

This study aims to examine the impact of the beginning of the Russia–Ukraine war and the Wagner Group’s attempted military coup against Putin’s regime on the European defense sector, consisting of weapons manufacturers.

The authors use the event study methodology to quantify the impact. That is, the authors assume that markets are efficient, and abnormal stock returns around the event dates capture the magnitudes of the impacts of the two events studied on European defense sector companies. The authors use the capital asset pricing model and two different multifactor models to estimate expected stock returns, which serve as the benchmark necessary to obtain abnormal returns.

The start of the war on February 24, 2022, when the Russian forces invaded Ukraine, was followed by high positive abnormal returns of up to 12% in the next few days. The results are particularly strong if multiple factors are used to control for the risk of the defense stocks. Conversely, the authors find a negative impact of the rebellion initiated by the mercenary Wagner Group’s chief, Yevgeny Prigozhin, on June 23, 2023, on the abnormal returns of defense industry stocks on the first trading day after the event.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study of the impact of the Russia–Ukraine war on the defense sector. Furthermore, this is the first study to measure the financial implications of the military coup initiated by the Wagner Group. The findings contribute to a rapidly growing literature on the financial implications of military conflicts around the world.

The study aims to determine whether a relationship exists between the potential significance of corporate controversies for stakeholders and how organisations respond to them in their annual and sustainability reports.

This paper employs content analysis on annual and sustainability reports of 48 listed companies from the Refinitiv database. The logit regression was used to estimate the model.

The study revealed that the main factors increasing the probability of a controversial issue being addressed in a corporate report are the controversy’s potential significance, companies’ financial performance and lawsuits.

Our study has three major limitations. These are a relatively small sample of companies and reports, focusing on disclosures made in corporate reports and omitting other channels of communication, for example, social media, and a certain amount of subjectivity in the process of coding information.

Former studies show that corporations face a serious risk of their hypocritical strategies becoming too evident for stakeholder groups. Our findings suggest that the risk is already materialising and may undermine the idea of CSR and sustainability reporting.

Our research focuses on high-profile adverse incidents widely reported in the media, the omission of which from corporate reports seems to constitute a particular case of organised hypocrite. It also demonstrates that companies use an impression management strategy to defuse adverse publicity and that major controversies cause minor ones to be omitted from their reports.

Even with the Saudi Arabian Government's discretionary measures to mitigate the spread of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), the economic sectors were not spared from the damage. Thus, the paper aims to use a computable general equilibrium (CGE) model to evaluate the impact of COVID-19 on the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia's (KSA) economy, with a special focus on small and medium enterprises (SMEs) and production. These influence the level of poverty.

The paper adopted the social accounting matrix (SAM) for Saudi Arabia built in 2021 by Imtithal Althumairi from Saudi Arabia's 2017 SAM. The model represents a snapshot of the economy and different flows that exist within the tasks and institutions. Two simulations (mild and severe) were conducted because of the focus on the distributional outcomes.

Decrease in job creation and economic growth were significant evidence from the study's findings. Findings show that more families hit below the poverty line because the negative impacts of the pandemic have shifted the income allocation curve. Findings show that the weakest of the poor are mitigated by government social grants during the pandemic.

The paper is restricted to the relevant literature relating to the impact of COVID-19 on Saudi Arabia's economy and evaluated using the SAM model. Moreover, the COVID-19 is still an ongoing scenario; thus, the model should be updated as data utilised for the operationalisation are made available.

The information from the suggested model can be suitable to measure the degree of the harm, and thus, the likely extent of the desirable policy feedback. Also, the model can be updated, as data are made available and formulated policies based on the updated data implemented by the policymakers.

Apart from the recovery planning of SMEs during the pandemic, the paper intends to stir up Saudi Arabia's policymakers through the macro-micro model to recovery planning and resilience of the economy with emphasis on mitigating unemployment.