Search results

In recent years, changes in the library environment have led to increased emphases on improving or restructuring the organizational structures of academic libraries. Technology, trends toward access over ownership, customer focus, and restructuring in higher education are some of the major factors contributing to these changes. This paper also describes the ways in which the traditional hierarchical structure can be modified so that the library will be more responsive to changes in the external environment. A particular emphasis on the case of the Kuwait University libraries provides an applied perspective. The paper also describes the strategies employed to conceptualize change in the organizational structure. Problems in the implementation of a revised organizational structure are also highlighted.

In the trend of mergers and growth of housing associations in the UK for providing more efficient and diversified services, the purpose of this paper is to develop an effective management model for planning and implementation of drastic, transformational changes to their organisational structures and operations, through two international organisational contexts in the social housing sector.

Multiple‐case study methodology was used to examine the change policies and approaches in five major housing organisations experiencing rapid growth, including four housing associations in the UK and the Hong Kong Housing Authority, in order to verify the theoretical total change management framework, which are developed from organisational change management and project management theories.

Organisational change management measures alone cannot fully explain all the successful cases. They should be applied along with project management approaches to plan and implement governance changes to ensure successful growth of housing associations. A total change management approach should be adopted, with changes focused on organisational competencies, a clear relationship of the main board and its regional members, a wider resident involvement and a variety of partnerships, as well as implementation measures focused on allocation of sufficient resources for project management steering, monitoring of organisational performance, and bottom‐up staff involvement.

The total change management framework is developed based on five major cases. It forms the baseline on which further research can build to develop effective change management measures in many other social housing organisation settings.

A total change management approach should be adopted to plan and steer changes to governance structures and operations in large housing associations.

This study contributes to change management for successful growth of housing organisations through development of a unique total change management model to facilitate mergers and growth.

This paper presents a theoretical framework that extends the benefits of some core elements of operations strategy to the field of entrepreneurship. We show that the field of operations strategy, with its predominant focus on fit among configuration, competencies, and logistics, offers valuable insights into many strategic and tactical challenges that entrepreneurs face as they try to create business models and enter new markets or establish footholds in existing, but well‐defended markets. It is our aim to highlight the need for future endeavors linking the two fields.

The purpose of this research is to describe a theory of management strategy for libraries based on library core values. This research also determines the fundamental rules that cause libraries’ innovative changes.

This research focuses on 16 detailed management cases involving US and Japanese academic and public libraries from the 1960s to the 2010s. It analyses documents related to strategic management, organisation and operations, collected through surveys and interviews with library directors and managers. Based on those case analyses, the researcher identified the strategic patterns of libraries; a strong relationship of services, organisations, core skills and knowledge and environments. Finally, a strategic management theory for libraries emerged as a result of this research.

This research constructed a theory of management strategies for libraries. It consists of four general strategies and eight specific strategies. In addition, this research also determines fundamental elements that cause strategic and innovative changes of libraries, and describes a rule for those innovative changes that dictates that library services and organisational structures follow strategy, and strategy follows media format.

The originality of this research is in successfully constructing the theory of management strategy for libraries based on library core values. In the library world, most librarians and researchers tend to describe library strategies based on business management theories.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the value of K-12 indirect facility maintenance and operation expense spending in Arizona and how the prioritization of work enables academic performance.

Data were collected from more than 200 academic districts over a five-year period to measure the correlation between plant maintenance and operations and academic outcomes. A qualitative analysis provided an in-depth understanding of how routine work is prioritized.

Results of the correlative model indicate that no positive relationship exists between academic performance and facility expense spending within the sample population. The lack of a positive correlation may be a result, in whole or in part, of many variables. The qualitative analysis, however, provided a more in-depth understanding of how academic districts manage educational facilities and how the prioritization of work may factor into a correlation.

This paper addresses the link between academic performance, expressed in terms of a return-on-assets, and facility management. The contribution of this paper is the documentation of facility maintenance and operations organizational structures to include the method of prioritizing routine work and the process of indirect expense spending in support of K-12 public education in the state of Arizona.

Flexibility is essential for healthcare organizations to anticipate the increasing internal and external dynamics. Mental healthcare organizations in the Netherlands face major policy reforms made by the government, increasing involvement from municipalities and gradual replacement of clinical care with outpatient care. Top management plays an important strategic role in creating this flexibility because they make important choices, give direction and structure the organization. To create flexibility, managers have to deal with complexity and paradoxes. In this study, the authors aim to contribute to the knowledge on how healthcare managers can create flexibility in their organizations.

This is a qualitative empirical field study. In total, 21 managers of mental healthcare organizations participated in open in-depth interviews. The authors explored flexibility on three perspectives: organizational direction, structure and operations. The COVID-19 pandemic has provided an opportunity to explore flexibility. The authors asked participants to reflect on their organization's response to the pandemic.

Most mental healthcare organizations create flexibility in an implicit way. Flexibility and resilience are closely linked mechanisms. Flexibility ensures a quick response while resilience provides the counterforce and rebound needed to adapt. Adaption ensures that healthcare professionals learn from their experiences and do not return completely to the way things were done before. The primary urge to survive ensured rapid and adequate responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. Whether this is a manifestation of flexibility remains difficult to conclude.

The complexity theory offers some guidance in creating a flexible organization without losing consistency. Flexibility and resilience are closely linked mechanisms that antagonize and protect each other. With this insight, managers in mental healthcare can utilize the qualities and balance them without falling into the various pitfalls.

In this research, the authors are concerned with flexibility as a proactive attitude and capacity of organizations. By looking at the response of organizations to the COVID-19 crisis, the authors find out that responding to a disaster out of survival instinct is something else than flexibility. There is an interesting relationship between flexibility, resilience and adaptability, and they can balance each other.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the knowledge gaps in the extant literature on the role of ambidexterity and coopetition in designing resilient fashion supply chains (RFSCs), and to develop a contextual framework for effective decision-making to enable practitioners to enhance their supply chain resilience.

The study adopts a novel multi-evidence-based approach comprising Denyer and Tranfield's (2009) systematic literature review (SLR) with context, intervention, mechanism and outcome (CIMO) logic, text mining and network analysis. The approach constitutes a rigorous methodology that cross-validates results and ensures the reliability and validity of findings.

The authors identified key knowledge gaps in the literature and explored the main contribution categories (e.g. conceptual understandings, operational impacts, use of theories and frameworks). Subsequently, we developed a contextual framework of ambidextrous coopetition to design RFSCs. Finally, an empirical research agenda is proposed with the five research directions to address the gap and take forward the notion of ambidextrous coopetition and RFSCs.

The multi-evidence-based approach is a structured and triangulated SLR approach and thus lacks empirical study.

This research proposes a contextual framework of ambidextrous coopetition that can be used by fashion companies to embed resilience into their structures and operations. This research also presents an agenda for the future empirical research.

This paper contributes by providing a combinatory synthesis on the role of ambidexterity and coopetition in designing RFSCs. This paper introduces a novel methodological triangulation for improving the quality and validity of SLRs. It identifies significant knowledge gaps and defines directions for future research.

The purpose of this study is to see how a more developed discipline – corporate real estate management (CREM) – can add value to a less developed discipline – municipal real estate management (MREM) – to contribute to their professionalisation.

Every year since 2008 (except for 2013), municipalities have been asked to complete a questionnaire on how they manage their real estate. With these results, it is possible to perform quantitative analyses on both trends and the current situation. In addition, municipalities’ descriptions of their real estate management have been analysed in a qualitative way.

Municipalities are concentrating their real estate tasks in the municipal organisation to link their real estate, their policies and the citizens/tenants. Remarkable is the diversity of the functions and the broad definition of “the real estate employee” (organisational structure). Municipalities make strategic and organisational changes that aim to improve both the real estate portfolio and the municipal organisation (operations). The next years, municipalities will focus in particular on vacancy rates, organisation design, collaboration, ownership and the sustainability of the portfolio (direction).

Qualitative and quantitative research are combined to compare theory with practice on CREM and MREM. The results contribute to the professionalisation of Dutch municipalities.

In this chapter, we have presented four case studies of the firms which are operating in the medium complete adapting countries. The four cases are Arvidsson Textile Share Company in Estonia, Partec Rockwool in Lithuania, Accel Share Company in Lithuania and Ragn-Sells in Estonia. The case studies are prepared following the structure of the theoretical framework applied in this book. We have found out that the performance of Arvidsson Textile Share Company is successful as it matches the expectations if the partners and it has remained to be more or less the same since its establishment. The performance of Partec Rockwool was also successful from the very beginning until it was replaced by the fully owned firm. Accel Share Company's operations in Lithuania was successful from the very beginning as it found the right people with the right competence in the local market. In the case of Ragn-Sells in Estonia, the alliance was successful but not up to the full expectation.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a methodology to integrate the construction Supply Chain (SC) through the application of Building Information Modeling (BIM) and Supply Chain Management (SCM). It features a renovation case as a proof-of-concept.

After analyzing the relevant gaps in the literature, the research followed a modeling approach. The proposed model merged product-, process- and organizational models in a graph-based model to represent and analyze a BIM-based SCM project.

Presently, the information flows of the construction SC are vague. BIM is an aspiring integrator of information flows for construction. The proposed model for SC integration with BIM, offers an approach to identify the project complexities in relation to organizational structures, roles and interactions and integrate the industry.

Currently BIM-enabled SCM is not very widely applied in the industry. However, the authors report the increasing interest of most construction stakeholders to engage in the application of the two, after acknowledging the benefits from the individual approaches. Since this combination is quite rare, the research uses a retrospective real-world case study of a SC project with an imaginary application of BIM.

Thus far, there is no formal model to represent the interactions of the SC actors along with BIM. The unique combination of a product and a process model, i.e. BIM, with an organizational model aims at integrating the information flows of the SC. The proposed model aims at analyzing and supporting the BIM-enabled SCM in Architecture Engineering and Construction.