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A large variety of robots are used in the forge and foundry industries. As yet no clear pattern of application has emerged but this is likely to change in the years ahead.

The work places in the forging factories are known to be particularly tiresome for the operators who have to work there. The noise, the heat, the weight of the parts to be handled, the place unctuosity are all elements which make the work hard and uncomfortable with a bad environment for the operators; and all this results in low productivity.

Following the ‘Sarkozy’ era (2007–2012), France has engaged in ‘zero-tolerance’ policies, which have brought an increasing number of people into the criminal justice system (CJS). In an already extremely impoverished CJS, these policies have led to serious financial problems and have made an already existing prison overcrowding problem worse. Consequently, the CJS has gradually opted for a McDonald (Ritzer, 2019; Robinson, 2019) type of offender processing, whether in prosecutor-led procedures (representing roughly half of all penal procedures: Ministry of Justice, 2019) or in the sentencing phase (Danet, 2013). A similar trend has been found in probation and in prisoner release (in French: ‘sentences’ management).

The prison and probation services, which merged in 1999, have since then been in a position to benefit from the 1958 French Republic Constitution, which places the executive in a dominant position and notably allows it to draft the bills presented to a rather passive legislative power (Rousseau, 2007) and even to enjoy its own set of normative powers (‘autonomous decrees’ – Hamon & Troper, 2019). By way of law reforming (2009, 2014, and 2019 laws), the prison and probation services have thus embraced the McDonaldisation ethos. Their main obsession has been to early release as many prisoners as possible in order to free space and to accommodate more sentenced people. To do so, the prison services have created a series of so-called ‘simplified’ early release procedures, where prisoners are neither prepared for nor supported through release, where they are deprived of agency and where due process and attorney advice are removed. Behind a pretend rehabilitative discourse, the executive is only interested in efficiently flushing people out of prison; not about re-entry efficacy. As Ritzer (2019) points out, McDonaldisation often leads to counter-productive or absurd consequences. In the case of early release, the stubborn reality is that one cannot bypass actually doing the rehabilitative and re-entry work. I shall additionally argue that not everything truly qualifies as an early release measure (Ostermann, 2013). Only measures which respect prisoners’ agency prepare them for their release, which support them once they are in the community, which address their socio-psychological and criminogenic needs, and which are pronounced in the context of due process and defence rights truly qualify as such. As it is, French ‘simplified’ release procedures amount to McRe-entry and mass nothingness.

This paper is concerned with the organizational, technical and economic impact of Industrial Robots. Some general remarks concerning the main reasons for the robot developments in big Italian manufacturing companies is thoroughly discussed using case‐study results of an Industrial Robot application. The socio‐technical approach is adopted to analyse organizational and technical effects of Industrial Robots at the work place. Finally the role that Industrial Robots can play together with new methods of job design is examined.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a model of financial communication to investigate the process of communicating risk signals between listed companies and their individual retail investors in initial public offerings (IPOs).

A survey study on individual IPO investors (n=212) in the Hong Kong Stock Exchange was conducted to examine how risk estimates of individual retail investors were affected by three factors of financial communication, namely organizational trust, organizational reputation and investors’ trust in the media specialists. Structural equation modeling analysis was conducted.

Respondents’ perceived risks of below-target returns and perceived risks of losses of principals were significantly affected by their perceived market risks. Respondents relied significantly on organizational trust to estimate their amounts of target returns and mitigate their perceived risks of losses of principals. Organizational reputation, which could be possibly reinforced by respondents’ trust in the media specialists, could enhance organizational trust.

Corporate communications practitioners should pay attention to the effect of perceived market risk on risk estimate. As organizational trust is a significant precondition of risk taking in IPOs, practitioners should rethink the effectiveness of financial communication in which organizational trust, organizational reputation and investors’ trust in the media specialists are interrelated.

There is a lack of research in financial communication from the organization-stakeholders perspective. This paper conceptualizes financial communication and provides insights to both scholars and practitioners in corporate communications on how significant factors of financial communication affect risk estimate in the financial market.

As an emerging socio-technical paradigm, high-speed railways profoundly change individuals' lifestyle and allow for the shift toward a green transportation. Digital technologies open an opportunity window for the development of enterprises. This study aims to clarify the impact of firm digitalization on the innovation efficiency of the Chinese high-speed rail industry. In addition, human capital is the important non-physical capital of enterprises. The authors also elucidate the moderating role of human capital on the above relationship.

Based on the data of Chinese high-speed railway listed companies from 2015 to 2021, this study explores the impact of digital transformation on the innovation efficiency, and further clarifies the boundary role of human capital with two-way fixed effect regression models.

The empirical results indicate that digital transformation has a positive impact on the innovation efficiency of the Chinese high-speed railway enterprises. Furthermore, human capital significantly enhances the above relationship. In addition, digital transformation fosters the innovation efficiency of small- and medium-sized enterprises and private-owned enterprises, but the correlation coefficients between digital transformation and the innovation efficiency of large enterprises and state-owned enterprises are not significant.

This is one of the earliest studies to explore how digital technologies shape R&D activities. From the perspective of relative efficiency, this study evaluates the effectiveness of digital transformation and provides empirical evidence for the formulation and implementation of corporate digital strategies. Moreover, this study links human capital with digital transformation and identifies condition factors that affect the effectiveness of digital transformation, thereby supplementing existing knowledge.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the effects of ethical climate types on two components of organizational trust, i.e. trust in supervisor and trust in organization.

A sample of 178 managerial employees from seven hospitals in Poland was used to investigate the specific relationships between ethical climates (i.e. egoistic, benevolent, and principled) and trust in supervisor and trust in organization. Structural equation modeling was used to explore the relationship between ethical climates and the two trust components.

It was found that egoistic climates were negatively associated with trust in organization and trust in supervisor, whereas benevolent climates were positively associated with trust in supervisor and trust in organization. No support was obtained for any sort of association between principled climates and either of the two trust components.

Future research should examine the role of trust as a mediating variable in the relationship between ethical climates and variables such as commitment or productivity or satisfaction. Future research should also examine different national and work contexts to test out these relationships.

Managers and organizations should try and establish benevolent ethical climates as opposed to egoistic ones, in order to bolster levels of trust among their employees.

The findings of this paper are unique and original because this is the first study to suggest a relationship between ethical climate types and the two trust components. The value of this study is that it provides managers and organizations with a way by which they could potentially increase levels of trust among their employees.

The purpose of this study is to examine the role of trust to managers on the relationship between corporate reputation practices and employees’ course of actions to customers in airline sector.

A research questionnaire which measures corporate reputation, trust to managers and employees’ course of actions to customers was designed by the researchers. Three hundred forty-three employees who are working in nine different companies in an airline sector have participated in the research.

According to the results of the study, corporate reputation practices and trust to managers have an effect on employees’ course of actions to customers; also trust to managers does not have any mediating role between these variables.

As this study is conducted in airline companies, we cannot generalize the results to the companies in other sectors. In addition, during the application of questionnaires, some participants found the questionnaire too long and they withdrew. This yielded to a lower participation rate.

The findings of the study may get the board of directors’ or managers’ attention to the point that they should become aware of the importance of corporate reputation, corporate social responsibility, employees’ behaviors and trust in their organizations.

This study aims to make several contributions to the marketing and management literature. Firstly, it extends the recent marketing and management literature on corporate reputation by examining trust to managers and employees’ behaviors.

In contrast to existing studies, this paper aims to propose that digital transformation does not depend on a single condition; rather, it depends on the interaction between internal and external factors of a firm. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to examine the effect of a combination of internal and external factors on a firm's digital transformation intention.

An empirical analysis on a sample of 112 Chinese small- and medium-sized firms was conducted by applying smart-PLS and fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA).

The results of smart PLS show that external pressures (institutional and market pressures) and human capital have a positive impact on corporate digital transformation intentions. From a combination perspective, the results of the fsQCA show that there are five causal conditions that lead to high digital transformation intention. In contrast to the net effect, the results of fsQCA show that different combinations of states of internal (human capital, organizational culture and technological capital) and external elements (institutional and market pressures) of the firm are likely to stimulate digital transformation intention.

This study provides empirically based insights into firms' digital transformation intentions and advances the current understanding of the drivers and inhibitors of digital transformation. Unlike most current research, which tends to focus on the net effect of factors influencing the digital transformation of enterprises, this study focuses on identifying the core elements influencing enterprises' digital transformation intention, especially the joint effect of different factors, both internal and external to the enterprise. The combined SEM and fsQCA findings of this paper not only enrich the existing theories on digital transformation but also have high value in guiding the digital transformation of firms.

The purpose is to verify the OTC of Taiwan coast guard organizations and to explore whether the views of coast guard personnel on the trust of supervisors, colleagues and subordinates are consistent based on vertical or horizontal relationship in the organization.

This is an empirical study conducted with 412 participants from Taiwan coast guard organizations.

The main finding of this study was that, in Taiwan coast guard organizations, there are differences in the perceptions of organizational trust contents (OTC) in different measuring subjects that are nonexistent in previous studies on other cultures. In particular, the recognition of organizational trust (OT) in subordinates was higher than that in colleagues, while the recognition of OT in colleagues was higher than that in supervisors. Furthermore, measuring the same object with different dimensions, it was found that the OT of colleagues' honest negotiation was significantly higher than those of “not to take excessive advantage (NTEA)” and “keep commitments.” There was no difference in recognition of the three dimensions for subordinates and supervisors.

The result confirms the structure of the Organizational Trust Inventory model of Taiwan coast guard organizations. In addition, Chinese culture evidently influences the weight on each of the contracting behaviors expected of different referents; particularly, trustworthy subordinates are more expected to exhibit good contracting behaviors than supervisors and coworkers. This study contributes to the understanding of how to foster trust in terms of good contracting behaviors in Taiwan coast guard organizations.