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The purpose of this paper is to investigate key causal linkages of proactive environmental practices of small and medium enterprises (SMEs). Specifically, this paper studies the ways that the interactions between different stakeholders such as suppliers and customers could intensify the widespread diffusion and implementation of green technologies. Understanding these linkages provide an opportunity to develop a framework that integrates stakeholders’ involvement, environmental practices and environmental/operational performances.

This paper adopts the quantitative methodology. It uses the survey data collected from 232 Malaysian SMEs. The structural equation modelling (SEM) via AMOS 19 was employed to test the hypotheses.

The empirical results suggest that decisions on environmental practices are influenced significantly by interactions between stakeholders but notably in different ways. While customers and employees involvements are targeted at process based changes, senior managers are interested in internal management improvements. Suppliers’ interactions, on the other hand, influence SMEs to improve on operations for product and process based changes at the same time. Interestingly, we did not observe any significant achievement on government partnership programmes aimed at improving SMEs’ environmental practices.

The finding in this paper adds to the literature on corporate environmental practices (CEPs), by applying two stages SEM analysis to a survey data for a single industry (electronic and electric industry). The gap of the mainstream CEP literature is bridged by focusing on different types of CEP, namely, internal management systems, process-based changes and product-based changes.

The paper aims to address the question of how and how often companies change their manufacturing strategy in the medium and long run, thus addressing a lack of evidence in the literature.

This paper explores the movements made by companies among four manufacturing strategy configurations drawn from the literature (market‐based, product‐based, capability‐based and price‐based configuration). Analyses are based on three longitudinal samples from the International Manufacturing Strategy Survey (IMSS) database.

Results show that while strategic configurations are rather stable, many companies do indeed change strategy and identifies which patterns of change prevail. Product‐based strategy is the most‐widely spread and most stable strategy. Capability‐based competition is the rising star. The market‐based strategy is struggling and price‐based competition is on its way out.

The main limitation is the small size of longitudinal samples, leading to tentative propositions for further testing.

No strategic configuration appears to be the final “maturity” target for manufacturers. Companies select their configurations according to life cycle of the organization and market competition.

The paper contributes to fill a lack of longitudinal evidence of strategic change and flexibility of manufacturing companies.

The purpose of this paper is to bring new insight into the barriers of service business development in installed base manufacturing companies by studying the transformation from an organisational culture perspective. It proposes a new framework that can be used both in studying the transition and in supporting the change within an organisation.

A case study‐based approach was applied together with conceptual work based on literature in order to construct the framework. The study was carried out in two manufacturing companies and the framework was tested on four other occasions. The data collection methods included interviews, organisational culture surveys and workshops.

The paper provides a service culture and capability framework with tentative descriptions of transformations in the basic elements needed to facilitate the significant progress of a service business. It also gives empirical examples of how the transformation can manifest itself in organisational culture.

The framework is promising, but further research is needed in terms of theoretical and empirical validation.

The paper contributes to supporting the transformation from a product‐oriented culture towards a more customer‐oriented and service‐oriented culture. It suggests that the transformation can be facilitated by exploring and communicating new core task demands and synchronised development of customer relations, management, service development practices and service business understanding. It argues that this is also a possibility for renewing an entire organisation and improving its readiness for the future.

This paper offers an essential, but little known organisation culture perspective to the theoretical discussion on industrial service business development.

As part of a retrospective study of effects of organizational change on interpersonal relations, this paper discusses change talk among Australian employees of an American multinational manufacturing enterprise. Interviewees tended to feel pushed into change, discussing its effects in terms of the difficulties of adolescence and earlier experiences of sudden independence. Over time, what had been a simple and firm us and them division in intergroup relations between management and unions/workers had become more fluid and subtle, and perhaps more mature. Interview data are interpreted and then re‐interpreted in terms of theories of team development, nostalgia, and paternalism. It is argued that each interpretation makes differing, but complementary, assumptions about the nature of time. If developmental, progressive assumptions of organizational change are relaxed, further attention can be given to theorizing and researching subtleties in talk of the past.

New ways of working challenge workplace management: increasing mobility and diminishing organizational boundaries require re-evaluation of both workplace design and service delivery. However, structures and processes of workplace management are still traditional, and managers, together with outsourced facility service providers, often do not succeed at fulfilling the needs of mobile employees. The aforementioned changes stimulate discussions in many areas in both industry and academy. Nevertheless, workplace literature from business perspective seems to be scarce. In this paper, the focus is on workplace service offering for mobile knowledge workers. This paper aims to study the current state of workplace servitization. To answer this, the authors identify value offering elements that are used in office business market to deliver workplace as a service.

This study follows multiple case study methodology including five case studies. Primary data were collected through interviews with workplace service providers. Secondary data included observations and publicly available data. The authors took business model design approach to study selected business offerings.

The results indicate that workplace business models include elements of servitization on various levels. Physical space is no longer the central offering in the office business; instead, it acts as a component on which the service portfolio is built. The highest value from workplace comes from experience-related service offerings.

Academically, research contributes to the workplace management studies by providing servitization perspective to a topic previously approached with a more technical and psychological point of view. This study can also support service providers and customer organizations in their quest to make service provision more flexible and experience-oriented.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the effects of online recommender systems (RS) on three types of diversity: algorithmic recommendation diversity, perceived recommendation diversity and sales diversity. The analysis distinguishes different recommendation algorithms and shows whether user perceptions match the actual effects of RS on sales.

An online experiment was conducted using a realistic shop design, various recommendation algorithms and a representative consumer sample to ensure the generalizability of the findings.

Recommendation algorithms show a differential impact on sales diversity, but only collaborative filtering can lead to higher sales diversity. However, some of these effects are subject to how much information firms have about users’ preferences. The level of recommendation diversity perceived by users does not always reflect the factual diversity effects.

Recommendation and consumption patterns might differ for other types of products; future studies should replicate the study with search or credence goods. The authors also recommend that future research should move from taking a unidimensional measure for the assessment of diversity and employ multidimensional measures instead.

Online shops need to conduct a more comprehensive assessment of their RS’ effect on diversity, taking into account not only the effects on their sales distribution, but also on users’ perceptions and faith in the recommendation algorithm.

This study offers a framework for assessing different forms of diversity in online RS. It employs various recommendation algorithms and compares their impact using not just one but three different types of diversity measures. This helps explaining some of the contradictious findings from the previous literature.

Faced with reduced budgets and rising service expectations, public authorities are increasingly cooperating with private businesses. This paper examines an alternative procurement- and service delivery concept, Performance-based Logistics (PBL). It has been introduced by the US and UK armed forces. However, other nations, such as Germany, are still reluctant to follow. This article has two aims: First, to identify the conceptual characteristics of PBL, and second, to analyze potential reasons why although PBL is popular in some nations, others are so reluctant to introduce it. This will be done using a mixed method approach. The concept of PBL will be introduced by deductively developing a conceptual model of PBL using a business model framework. The analysis of PBL application will be performed using an in-depth case study from the German defense sector. This will be framed by a literature review and concluded by managerial recommendations.

The purpose of this paper is to determine supply chain practices that contribute most to the success of agile manufacturing (AM), and to examine their effects on its implementation levels in the Jordanian manufacturing sector. It also investigates the effect of AM on operational performance (OP).

The study is based on survey data collected from 294 manufacturing companies from different industry types in Jordan. Validity and reliability analyses were performed using SPSS and AMOS, and the study hypotheses were tested using structural equation modeling.

The results revealed that supplier involvement, internal integration, and modularization of products positively and significantly affect AM. Customer involvement and postponement were insignificantly related to AM. Further, the results demonstrated that AM positively and significantly affect OP.

A limited number of previous studies investigated supply chain antecedents of AM. Further, there is no consensus among researchers on these practices. In addition, this area is underinvestigated in the developing countries in general and in Jordan in particular. The current study contributes to the literature by determining the most commonly linked supply chain practices to AM and examining their effects on its implementation levels in the context of a developing country, Jordan.

This article seeks to uncover if the definition of terroir is the same between the users (producers, vendors, high and low involvement consumers) of the term in the French wine industry. The objective is to uncover if the definition of terroir is homogenous between the user groups.

An online questionnaire was distributed to an industry sample and then to a consumer panel, and asked respondents to outline in their own words how they would define a terroir product. Lexical analyses using SATO software were conducted and uncovered word frequency, distances, and contexts.

The results show that each user group has its own taxonomy of terroir terms and uses an exclusive vocabulary. User group distinctions and commonalities are outlined. Globally it appears that the user groups seem to define terroir based on their level of involvement with wine as well as their role in the wine industry.

French wine marketers can use these results to better understand how types of consumers perceive terroir and consider these perceptions when contemplating using terroir in a product description such as on wine labels or when developing marketing communications.

Prior to this research there were no empirical results regarding how terroir is defined in the marketplace as well as the relationships between the descriptives used to define terroir. This research is a first step in understanding the value of terroir as a marketing attribute as well as the signals it represents for all user groups in the French wine industry.

We have been working together as husband and wife, as management professor and management consultant, and as coauthors for over 30 years. During that time, we have tailored an operations research–based approach to represent the functional infrastructure of organizations as networks of agreements for the transfer of deliverables, e.g., products, services, and communications, which connect internal organizational units and also their external relations. The network model is useful to understand organizations, support organization change, and develop management practices that improve efficiency, teamwork, and effectiveness. Throughout the application of this approach, we have observed often that “management is missing,” in organizations in general and in organization change management in particular, where managers and change agents may underestimate or fail to recognize the productive relationships at the foundation of performance in organizations, that these relationships are different from authority or social/affinity relationships, and that they require management. In this chapter, we distinguish the network approach that is fundamental to our work and the “missing” elements of management that are recognizable by using that approach. We then examine how “management is missing” in change management and how it might be restored.