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The purpose of this paper is to analyze the conceptual framework about human resources downsizing and restructuring and how organizations of the public sector can do that effectively and efficiently. These facts drive to the conclusion that the implementation of early retirement incentives requires the most elaborate planning and execution to be effective, predictable and safe in the long term.

This paper adopts an analytical, descriptive methodology approach to describe the basic features of the data by using the descriptive research design. Data have been collected through different sources, which include secondary data, to introduce the theoretical literature of the subject as books, journals, articles, published working papers and referred previous studies related to the same subject.

Downsizing process is a deliberate administrative process that includes, but is not limited to, workforce reduction and is primarily aimed at achieving efficiency in public organizations. The definition of workforce downsizing may be narrowed to reducing the number of workers, or more likely to refer to general efforts to restructuring human resources in public organizations, Early Retirement Incentive Programs (ERIP) represents a viable alternative for organizations seeking to reduce staff. For the ERIP to be successful, the program coordinator must understand the business objectives and goals that the organization is trying to obtain.

Human resources strategies concerning downsizing public administration workforce should be more appropriate to those who leave the organization and those who stay at work, reducing the negative psychological, administrative and economical effects. This could be achieved through a strategy called early retirement incentive programs.

This paper aims to examine how a social entrepreneurial organisation in Sweden collectively learned to adapt itself to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Using an abductive approach, this study conducted single case fieldwork on a social entrepreneurial organisation called SFE. The following research questions were asked: What are the changes in collective learning conditions that SFE has to face during the pandemic? What are the outcomes of collective learning during the pandemic in SFE?

This study results indicate that collective learning conditions were changed by restructuring the organisation’s design and teamwork during the pandemic, which facilitated sharing of knowledge and experiences. This collective learning helped the organisation develop new virtual projects during the pandemic. Another result of this collective learning was the members’ new shared understanding of the organisation’s vision.

This study hopes to broaden the understanding of the relationship between collective learning in organisations and organisational adaptation in times of crisis.

This study can help leaders of social entrepreneurial organisations understand what changes are necessary to create a team that collectively learns.

The data had the advantage of being gathered as a real-time process, and the researcher witnessed how the organisation achieved adaptation as it happened and not just through its members’ reflection of it as a past phenomenon.

The economic success of East Asia was due to an export-led growth strategy, which was heavily dependent on the global trading system underpinned by the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and the World Trade Organization (WTO). In recent years, however; East Asian countries have shifted their trade policy focus to regional agreements and made Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) among themselves arid with other regions. Government organization has been restructured to increase FTA activities. Generally, the current literature predicts that FTA activities of East Asia would help to increase the welfare of the region. In this paper; we offer a critical assessment of East Asia FTAs. We note that East Asia FTAs provide incomplete coverage of sectors and are likely to lead to an inefficient resource allocation. FTA movements are not matched with actual trade flows. The benefits of East Asia FTAs are fairly limited and potential benefits, if any, would not likely be materialized in the near future. Our overall assessment is that the recent policy shift in East Asian countries from multilateral trade orientation or unilateral action to regionalism or a parallel multilateral and regional trade approach will not produce much gain. The governments should increase their efforts at economic reform and reduce barriers to trade and investment, rather than to allocate more resource and manpower to FTA activities.

Enterprise systems are commonly implemented by firms through outsourcing arrangements with software vendors. However, deriving benefits from these implementations has proved to be a challenge, and a great deal of variation has been observed in the extent of value generated for client and vendor firms. This research examines the role of co-specialization as a strategy to make the most out of outsourced enterprise systems. The authors develop hypotheses relating resource co-specialization with two indicators of success for implementation of enterprise software: (1) exchange success and (2) firm growth.

The hypotheses are tested using a unique panel data set of 175 firms adopting Advanced Planning and Scheduling (APS) software, a type of enterprise system used for managing manufacturing and logistics. The authors identify organizational factors that support co-specialization and then examine how co-specialization is associated with enterprise software implementation success, controlling for the endogenous choice to co-specialize.

The empirical results suggest that resource co-specialization is positively associated with implementation success and that the two resource co-specialization pathways that are examined complement each other in providing performance benefits.

This paper contributes to the research literature on outsourcing. The study also provides a new empirical test using a unique data set of 175 firms adopting APS Software.

The macroeconomic changes as well as the challenges facing universities nowadays result in the transfer and adaptation of various concepts and organizational methods from enterprises to universities. One of such solutions is mergers. Even though there are a very large number of practical examples of university mergers in the world, at the same time there is a shortage of frameworks that would help manage mergers. The purpose of this paper is to present key areas of focus in HEIs’ consolidation processes and the creation of the conceptual model of the universities’ mergers.

In this paper synthesis, the inductive approach for model development and case study description were used. The analysis and findings were based on the systematic literature review taken out from management and public policy areas. The new public management and public value governance approaches as well as strategic and process theories of mergers were applied. The descriptive approach to management was used as well.

Formulation of a Conceptual Model of Universities’ Mergers and ten principles of effective management of universities’ mergers that cover the entire process, from planning, through implementation, to integration.

There is a need to verify the proposed inductive model of universities’ mergers through further qualitative and mixed-methods research studies.

The paper offers a significant opportunity for practical application of the presented content, because it indicates how the know-how from one (business) sector can be valuable for the future of another sector (the over-fragmented sector of higher education).

This study presents the key areas of focus in HEIs’ consolidation processes and proposes a novel Conceptual Model of Universities’ Mergers. It concludes with the principles of effective management of universities’ mergers.

This study aims to explore how corporate discourses enact legitimation strategies aimed at repairing pragmatic, moral and cognitive legitimacy types (Suchman, 1995) after a scandal involving sustainability, namely, the Volkswagen’s 2015 diesel scandal.

By drawing on the discursive nature of legitimacy, this study conducts a critical discourse analysis to identify how the scandal is depicted and which semantic, grammatical and lexical features characterise discourses. It then relates discourses and their features to legitimation strategies that help repair diverse types of legitimacy.

To repair pragmatic legitimacy, discourses on a few actors and processes enact strategies of creating monitors and avoiding panic. Such discourses include grammatical features only. Discourses on the event, actors, processes and topics of apology, trust and integrity aim to repair moral legitimacy. Enriched with grammatical and lexical features, they mobilise disassociation, excuse, justify and restructure strategies. Discourses on the event, actors, processes and topics of corporate qualities, history and future strategy help repair cognitive legitimacy by enacting an avoiding panic strategy. Grammatical, lexical and semantic features characterise such discourses.

The study reveals the potentials of critical discourse analysis to bring out from texts practical modes of communicating, and specifically those discourses and features of discourses that serve legitimacy purposes.

This study offers insights into the connection among discourses, relegitimation strategies and legitimacy types by combining the discursive nature of legitimacy with critical discourse analysis. It also contributes to the growing literature on how organisations face the legitimacy challenges raised by scandals involving sustainability.

This study aims to explain the effects of different types of innovations on organizational performance in terms of firms’ external effectiveness and internal efficiency. The study examines the interrelationship of technical and nontechnical innovations in complex services and the mediating effect of customer participation on the relationship between innovation type and organizational performance.

The study draws on a neo-Schumpeterian model for innovation to examine the complex service setting of healthcare provision. Data from Statistics Sweden, containing 38 hospitals and 242 primary care units in Sweden, provided the study's results.

The findings show the importance of combining different types of innovations in complex services, demonstrating a mediating effect of nontechnical innovation on both the relationship between technical innovations and external effectiveness and internal efficiency. Moreover, the results show that customer participation has a positive mediating effect for technical innovation and nontechnical innovation on external effectiveness. However, there is no such significant effect on internal efficiency.

The findings are based on self-assessment data, which has inherent limitations. The innovation data used were cross-sectional, which may lack reliability (although self-assessed data counter this risk to some extent).

Managers should pursue both technical and nontechnical innovations for gains in external effectiveness and internal efficiency. However, complex services call for technical innovations to be accompanied by nontechnical innovations to support positive effects. The results cause a dilemma for managing customer participation in complex services. As the results show customer participation resulting in external effectiveness, they also fail to establish an effect on internal efficiency.

The primary contribution is to add to the knowledge of different types of innovation in complex services by demonstrating their interdependent effects on both external effectiveness and internal efficiency. Furthermore, the study tests and advances the mediating effect of customer participation in complex services on organizational performance.

The purpose of this research is to develop a better understanding of the hurdles in implementing Lean Six Sigma (LSS) for operational excellence in digital emerging technology companies.

We have conducted case studies of LSS implementations in six US-based companies in the digital emerging technology industry.

Critical success factors (CSF) for LSS implementations in digital emerging technology companies are: (1) organizational leadership that is engaged to the implementation, (2) LSS methodology that is rebranded to fit existing shared values in the organization, (3) restructuring of the traditional LSS training program to include a more incremental, prioritized, on-the-job training approach and (4) a modified LSS project execution methodology that includes (a) condensing the phases and tools applied in LSS projects and (b) adopting more iterative project management methods compared to the standard phased LSS project approach.

The qualitative nature of our analysis and the geographic coverage of our sample limit the generalizability of our findings.

Implications comprise the awareness and knowledge of critical success factors and LSS methodology modifications specifically relevant for digital emerging technology companies or companies that share similarities in terms of focus on product development, innovation and growth, such as R&D departments in high-tech manufacturing companies.

Research on industry-specific enablers for successful LSS implementation in the digital emerging technology industry is virtually absent. Our research informs practitioners on how to implement LSS in this and alike industries, and points to aspects of such implementations that are worthy of further attention from the academic community.

In the US, a growing number of organizations and industries are seeking to affirm their commitment to and efforts around diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) as recent events have increased attention to social inequities. As health care organizations are considering new ways to incorporate DEI initiatives within their workforce, the anticipated result of these efforts is a reduction in health inequities that have plagued our country for centuries. Unfortunately, there are few frameworks to guide these efforts because few successfully link organizational DEI initiatives with health equity outcomes. The purpose of this chapter is to review existing scholarship and evidence using an organizational lens to examine how health care organizations can advance DEI initiatives in the pursuit of reducing or eliminating health inequities. First, this chapter defines important terms of DEI and health equity in health care. Next, we describe the methods for our narrative review. We propose a model for understanding health care organizational activity and its impact on health inequities based in organizational learning that includes four interrelated parts: intention, action, outcomes, and learning. We summarize the existing scholarship in each of these areas and provide recommendations for enhancing future research. Across the body of knowledge in these areas, disciplinary and other silos may be the biggest barrier to knowledge creation and knowledge transfer. Moving forward, scholars and practitioners should seek to collaborate further in their respective efforts to achieve health equity by creating formalized initiatives with linkages between practice and research communities.

The purpose of this paper is to increase the understanding of organizational challenges when decision-makers try to comply with technological developments and increasing demands for a more rational distribution of health care services. This paper explores two decision-making processes from 2007–2019 in the area of vascular surgery at a regional and a local level in Norway.

The study draws upon extensive document analyses, semi-structured interviews and field conversations. The empirical material was analyzed in several steps through an inductive approach and described and explained through a theoretical framework based on rational choice (i.e. bounded rationality), political behavior and institutionalism. These perspectives were used in a complementary way.

Both decision-making processes were resource-intensive, long-lasting and produced few organizational changes for the provision of vascular services. Stakeholders at both levels outmaneuvered the health care planners, though by different means. Regionally, the decision-making ended up in a political process, while locally the decision-making proceeded as a strategic game between different departments and professional fields.

Decision-makers need to prepare thoroughly for convincing others of the benefits of new ways of organizing clinical care. By providing meaningful opportunities for public involvement, by identifying and anticipating political agendas and by building alliances between stakeholders with divergent values and aims decision-makers may extend the realm of feasible solutions.

This paper contributes to the understanding of why decision-making processes can be particularly challenging in a field characterized by rapid technological development, new treatment options and increasing demands for more rational distribution of services.