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Ambient-assisted living (AAL) is one solution to the challenges of healthcare systems in an aging population. Using the “ecosystem adoption of practices over time” (EAPT) as a theoretical lens, this study explores and describes three elements of AAL adoption: (1) the AAL practices in which the technology is embedded (i.e. object of adoption), (2) the older adult's adoption ecosystem (i.e. subject of adoption) and (3) the change of adoption practices over time (i.e. temporality of adoption).

Qualitative interviews with three actor groups in the ecosystem: clients, relatives and home nurses.

The study identifies six categories of AAL practices. Clients, relatives and nurses interact and integrate their resources in carrying out these practices. Some of the practices have developed, or are expected to develop, over time.

The study applies a novel theoretical perspective on how AAL technology is embedded in practices performed by different actors in the adoption ecosystem. This broadens the conceptualization of what is being adopted compared to traditional adoption research.

This study examines the relationship between supply chain stakeholder pressure from customers and suppliers for the adoption of social and environmental sustainable supply chain management (SSCM) practices given the simultaneous conditional effects of both entrepreneurial orientation (EO) and sustainability orientation (SO).

The authors conducted a survey of US firms focused on their relationship with their top supplier or buyer by spend. This study used conditional process analysis to measure the relationship between stakeholder pressure and adoption of SSCM practices as well as the double moderation effects of EO and SO on this relationship.

The results show that both EO and SO simultaneously function as moderators of the effect of supply chain stakeholder pressure on the adoption of social and environmental SSCM practices. However, EO will only get firms so far in the adoption of SSCM practices. Once a strong SO takes effect, higher practice adoption ensues but the effect of stakeholder pressure weakens.

For those firms that have lower levels of SO, EO and supply chain stakeholder pressure are still essential drivers for the adoption of SSCM practice. The results of this study suggest that focal firms should work closely with suppliers to increase their levels of SO while also maintaining pressure for the adoption of SSCM practices.

This study shows the concurrent effect of two organizational level drivers on the adoption of SSCM practices, indicating that efforts in developing a strong SO are more likely to prepare firms for the adoption of SSCM practices.

Using a soft-hard continuum of drivers and barriers, this research seeks to explain wood companies' adoption of circular economy (CE) practices.

Multiple interviews, complemented by secondary documents and site observations were used to investigate three wood-based companies that have adopted CE practices. The 10R framework and soft-hard continuum are used to guide data analysis.

The adoption of 10R practices were explained by soft-factor incentives of leaders' values and vision and openness for innovation, all within a regulatory void, and eventually overcome hard-factor barriers of process development, supply chain capability and customer behaviours at product end-of-life.

Crucial for CE model adoption are leaders' positive attitudes, subsequently grown across the companies. The 10Rs are a prompt for CE practice adoption to capture and retain value and generate revenue. Collaboration across the supply chain, including customers and other value capture companies (e.g. repurposing companies), is essential to maximise value retention. Government should play an increased soft-factor incentive regulatory role and support CE practices to overcome hard-factor barriers.

This study contributes an explanation of CE adoption within a relatively unsupported context. Despite the regulatory void, CE practice adoption was driven by leader values. To achieve their vision and overcome the numerous barriers, suppliers and customers required a large investment in education. Indeed, customer behaviour, previously thought to be an incentive for CE adoption, is also identified as a barrier.

The purpose of this paper is to identify the factors that promote the successful adoption of lean practices in manufacturing firms operating in developing economies in South America.

Based on the results obtained from using structural equation modeling to analyze the collected data, the authors argue that manufacturing organizations need to identify the factors that assist in successfully adopting lean practices in manufacturing firms operating in developing economies in South America. A dataset of 1,809 responses, gathered from manufacturing firms as part of the World Management Survey, was used to find support for the proposed hypotheses.

Several hypotheses were tested finding that lean practice success factors such as organizational targets proved to have a significant and positive relationship with the mediating factor, performance management. Likewise, performance management was also found to have a significant and positive relationship with lean practices adoption. Human capital management (HCM) has a significant but negative predictive relationship with lean practices.

The empirical results of this study provide valuable managerial insights. The results are therefore limited to the economies analyzed and to the variables surveyed as part of the World Manufacturing Survey research.

The results of this research provide a starting point for researchers to continue studying the key lean practice factors and relationships in the achievement of improved performance management, thereby helping managers in developing strategies to improve the lean capabilities of their practices. This, in turn, will increase the organization's competitive advantage sustainably.

This paper identifies and tests the impact of key factors on successful lean practices adoption in South American organizations in the manufacturing sector.

Institutional theory assumes practice adoption and subsequent decoupling. However, there is a range of alternative organizational theories that challenge this view and offer instead their reinterpretation, extension and modification of institutional predictions with regard to the adoption and possible range of various responses and processes that follow the decision to adopt. This paper aims to review this spectrum of theories and suggest how they clarify, supplement, correct, restrict and/or abandon some institutional explanations and predictions.

Extensions and alternatives to institutional theory are mainly motivated by the need to have a theory of practice adoption and variation, and a plethora of alternative practice adoption theories currently exists in the literature. The authors review these theories and compare them against institutional theory and against each other.

The analysis revealed shortcomings and advantages of alternative theories compared to institutional theory and against each other. It is suggested which theory is most useful in each domain of application. The authors review and compare institutional theory, Scandinavian institutionalism, management fashion theory, virus theory and institutional inertia theory and analyze how and whether they are able to reproduce the success of institutional theory and successfully address and resolve its shortcomings and gaps. The authors conclude by discussing whether regular emergences of new theories that account for the idea-handling stage of diffusion signals institutional theory’s limit of validity in this domain.

The problem of idea emergence/diffusion/disappearance and adoption/variation/use are fundamentally different, but both of them motivated researchers to go beyond institutional theory. Despite being the dominant theory of organizations internally consistent and explaining a wide range of empirical observations, it is evident that institutional theory is not a complete theory. This paper contributes to this problem by exploring and comparing existing candidates for practice variation theory.

This study aims to analyze the determinants influencing Chinese manufacturing companies in implementing lean manufacturing (LM).

The determinants to be explored in this study consist of technological, organizational and environmental (TOE) dimensions. A questionnaire survey was conducted on Chinese manufacturing companies, and 208 samples were analyzed.

The findings show that the relative advantage of LM and organizational support have significantly positive effects on Chinese manufacturing firms’ adoption of LM. The complexity of LM, quality of human resources, organizational readiness, customer pressure, international situation, governmental support and environmental uncertainty do not have significant effects.

This paper contributes to the literature by using the TOE model to explore the factors influencing LM adoption in the Chinese manufacturing industry.

Consumers, governments and regulatory agencies are concerned about the social and environmental aspect that pushes firms to move towards the circular economy. The transformation of the existing linear model into a circular model depends on several circular economy practices. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to identify and analyse the critical factors that are responsible for the adoption of circular practices.

In total, 15 critical factors are identified through the literature review and 12 are finalised with the grey Delphi method. Further, these critical factors are prioritised using the weighted aggregated sum/product assessment (WASPAS) method. A sensitivity analysis is also conducted to test the robustness of the ranking of critical factors obtained from WASPAS.

The finding of this study show that “top management participation,” “market for recovered products” and “circular economy oriented R&D activities promotion” are the most significant factors for circular practice adoption. These factors need to address on the highest priority by the stakeholders.

This study is beneficial for the managers to formulate their strategies for the adoption of circular practices. The prioritisation of critical factors supports the managers and professionals to optimise their effort and resources to adopt the circular practice.

This study explores and analyses the critical factor for circular economy practice adoption in the supply chain in the context of emerging economies.

The paper tests if and to what extent lean management system adoption generates abnormal profitability, and how it accrues over time. Configurational approaches to lean management systems and “S-curve” effects in lean implementation are used to ground the paper's hypotheses and interpret its findings.

Using the emerging view of lean as enterprise-wide management systems, this quasi-experimental study uses a difference-in-differences approach to estimate the abnormal profitability (ROIC) attributable to lean management system adoption. The paper leverages a unique data set of lean adopters nested in a panel data set (19 years) of 2,088 industrial firms matched by industry and firm size. It applies a variety of regression methods (two-way fixed effect panel estimator, propensity score matching, instrumental variable two-stage-least squares) to estimate the size of the abnormal profitability attributable to lean management systems, addressing endogeneity issues related to non-random sampling, omitted variable bias and reverse causation. It also analyzes the cross-firm variability of such abnormal profitability and how it accrues over time.

For the average non-adopter in the sample (44.3 million euro revenues), lean adoption generates abnormal ROIC ranging from 1.4% to 3.9%. These results come into effect approximately three years after starting lean adoption and peak after eight years. While the average abnormal profitability attributable to lean adoption is sizable, it varies significantly across firms and over time. This significant variation is compatible with firms' diverse ability to understand the complex inner workings of lean systems, and to design and implement them so that they improve profitability.

The conceptualization of lean as enterprise-wide management system can be further refined to more effectively categorize the components of lean systems and investigate the nature of their relationships. Lean system adoption measurement can be fine-tuned to better capture cross-firm and longitudinal heterogeneity. Future work can explore other dependent variables of interest to different stakeholders including shareholders' value, employment and environmental and social sustainability.

The financial benefits of adopting lean can be reaped to the extent to which managers embrace lean as a philosophy and implement it pervasively in the organization. A firm can use the study's estimates as a basis for making calculations about the returns of investment in lean adoption. The paper also shows that “getting the lean system right” makes a significant difference in terms of abnormal profitability, which is twice as large for the best lean adopters..

Compared with the promises of many lean proponents and supporters, the paper provides a more realistic view of what to expect from lean adoption in terms of profitability. Adopting lean as a comprehensive, enterprise-wide management system is not a universal panacea, but a complex endeavor, characterized by multiple complex decisions that require considerable capabilities, coordinated efforts and consistency of action.

Differently from extant research, this study does not study the correlation between the adoption of lean operation practices and financial performance but focuses on the abnormal profitability generated by the adoption of lean as a pervasive, enterprise-wide management system. Its research design allows to identify the differential profitability attributable to lean adoption and documents that it accrues non-linearly.

This study aims to assess the factors influencing the adoption of circular bioeconomy practices by crop farmers.

Data collected from 303 farmers in the region of Western Macedonia (WM) were used to identify the adoption factors of the circular bioeconomy. Principal component analysis (PCA) and exploratory factor analysis (EFA) techniques were applied through a custom-designed and specially structured questionnaire.

The results reveal four main motivations that lead farmers to adopt circular bioeconomy practices in their farming activities: interest in physical-economic resources and factors related to production and consumption; technology and renewable energy and the environment.

This study is based solely on farmers in WM. Furthermore, this study assumes that there will be a strategy to promote a circular bioeconomy under the auspices of the government.

Few studies have focused on the perspectives of crop farmers and what encourages them to adopt circular bioeconomy practices in their crops. Existing barriers are related to economic incentives and constraints. The more circular bioeconomy practices farmers adopt, the greater the positive impact on the environment and rural development, and the factors influencing the adoption of these practices are investigated here.

A reconfigurable manufacturing system (RMS) can provide manufacturing flexibility, meet changing market demands and deliver high performance, among other benefits. However, adoption and performance improvement are critical activities in it. The current study aims to identify the important factors influencing RMS adoption and validate a conceptual model as well as develop a structural model for the identified factors.

An extensive review of RMS articles was conducted to identify the eight factors and 47 sub-factors that are relevant to RMS adoption and performance improvement. For these factors, a conceptual framework was developed as well as research hypotheses were framed. A questionnaire was developed, and 117 responses from national and international domain experts were collected. To validate the developed framework and test the research hypothesis, structural equation modeling was used, with software tools SPSS and AMOS.

The findings support six hypotheses: “advanced technologies,” “quality and safety practice,” “strategy and policy practice,” “organizational practices,” “process management practices,” and “soft computing practices.” All of the supported hypotheses have a positive impact on RMS adoption. However, the two more positive hypotheses, namely, “sustainability practices” and “human resource policies,” were not supported in the analysis, highlighting the need for greater awareness of them in the manufacturing community.

The current study is limited to the 47 identified factors; however, these factors can be further explored and more sub-factors identified, which are not taken into account in this study.

Managers and practitioners can use the current work’s findings to develop effective RMS implementation strategies. The results can also be used to improve the manufacturing system’s performance and identify the source of poor performance.

This paper identifies critical RMS adoption factors and demonstrates an effective structural-based modeling method. This can be used in a variety of fields to assist policymakers and practitioners in selecting and implementing the best manufacturing system.