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Critical infrastructure (CI) sectors and their resilience are vital for societies to function. In many countries, vital societal functions (VSFs) and CIs depend on inter-organizational and international supply chains (SCs) which combine public and private actors with often competing interests and unclear responsibilities that create discontents. While collaborative supply chain risk management (SCRM) can increase the robustness and resilience of VSF&CIs, their inherent characteristics complicate SCRM. To understand this, supply chain risk governance (SCRG) has conceptually been introduced, suggesting collaborative mechanisms that facilitate inter-organizational SCRM. The purpose of this study is to elaborate on and substantiate the theoretical and practical relevance of an existing SCRG framework, by empirically exploring governance of collaborative SCRM and suggesting future research.

An abductive case study was performed in a VSF&CI, the Swedish food system, to contextualize top-level governance of collaborative SCRM and elaborate on the conceptual SCRG framework. Archival data supplemented expert interviews with public and private actors representing direct and indirect SC actors.

Current discourse and interventions in the Swedish food system’s SCRM confirmed discontent in governance and the importance of SCRG mechanisms and supported further conceptualization, e.g. of legal mechanisms vs economic incentives, the importance of government inquiries and the understanding of the influence of indirect public SC actors.

Considering the geographical scope of the study, transferability is limited but invites comparisons with both other countries and the SCRG of other VSF&CIs. Proposed research avenues guide future conceptualization and contextualization of SCRG.

The framework can support CI actors to jointly find and reduce discontents related to inter-organizational SCRM and support policymakers to increase public–private collaboration.

The novelty lies in empirically studying SCRG in critical infrastructures by combining SCRM and risk governance lenses.

In this case study, we examine how a citrus peel valorising company based in the Netherlands was able to adopt a circular business model while navigating regulatory, managerial, and supply chain-related barriers.

In-depth, semi-structured interviews with key personnel in the company, notes from field observations, photographs of the production process, and documents from a legal judgement served as data for this single, qualitative case study. Data were coded inductively using the in vivo technique and were further developed into four themes and a case description.

Results from our study indicate that the regulatory and political contexts in the Netherlands were critical to the company’s success. Like in the case of most fruitful industrial symbioses, partnerships founded on mutual trust and economically appealing value propositions played a crucial role in ensuring commercial viability. Collaborating with larger corporations and maintaining transparent communication with stakeholders were also significant contributing factors. Lastly, employees’ outlook towards circularity combined with their willingness to learn new skills were important driving factors as well.

In addition to expanding the scholarship on the adoption of circular business models, this research offers novel insights to policymakers and practitioners. It provides empirical evidence regarding the importance of public awareness, adaptable legislation, and harmonised policy goals for supporting sustainable entrepreneurship in the circular economy.

It has been 50 years since the publication of Studs Terkel’s groundbreaking book, Working, which consists of a compilation of interviews carried out with over 130 workers in the United States. In this chapter, the author revisits this masterpiece, which offers a penetrating analysis of the dehumanization and degradation of work. The author argues that Working is an ode to, and guide for, ethnographic scholarship on work and that it remains as powerful and relevant today as when it was originally published a half of a century ago.

Organizations are affected top-down by the overarching societies and bottom-up by foundational face-to-face encounters: societies provide norms, values, laws, institutions, beliefs, markets, political structures, and knowledge bases. What happens within organizations is done by people interacting with other people, arguing, discussing, convincing each other when preparing and making decisions. Organizations operate within social environments that leave their – however indirect – imprint on what is going on within organizations. This article argues that organizational sociology can benefit from an integrated theoretical framework that accounts for the embeddedness of organizations within the micro- and macro-levels of social order. The argument is developed in two main points: First, this article introduces the multilevel framework provided by Niklas Luhmann’s systems theory to demonstrate how organizations are shaped by the functionally differentiated macro-structure of society. Organizations follow and reproduce the operational logics of societal domains such as the political system, the economy, science, law, religion, etc. Second, this paper demonstrates how organizations are shaped by micro-level dynamics of face-to-face interactions. Face-to-face encounters form a social reality of its own kind that restricts and resists the formalization of organizational processes. Here, this article draws on Erving Goffman’s and Randall Collins’ work on interaction rituals, emotions, and solidarity, which is inspired by Durkheimian micro-sociology. At the end, this article brings together all the elements into one general account of organizations within the context of their macro- and micro-structural social environments. This account can yield a deeper and more sociological understanding of organizational behavior.

Circular supply chain management (CSCM) is considered a promising solution to attain sustainability in the current industrial system. Despite the exigency of this approach, its application in the food industry is a challenge because of the nature of the industry and CSCM being a novel approach. The purpose of this study is to develop an industry-based systematic analysis of CSCM by examining the challenges for its application, exploring the effects of recognised challenges on various food supply chain (FSC) stages and investigating the business processes as drivers.

Stakeholder theory guided the need to consider stakeholders’ views in this research and key stakeholders directly from the food circular supply chain were identified and interviewed (n = 36) following qualitative methods.

Overall, the study reveals that knowledge, perception towards environmental initiatives and economic viability are the major barriers to circular supply chain transition in the UK FSC.

This research provides a holistic perspective analysing the loopholes in different stages of the supply chain and investigating the way a particular circular supply chain stage is affected by recognised challenges through stakeholder theory, which will be a contribution to designing management-level strategies. Reconceptualising this practice would be beneficial in bringing three-tier (economic, environmental and social) benefits and will be supportive to engage stakeholders in the sustainability agenda.

This research explores how contextual elements and significant events influence the changing storylines within a company's directors' reports spanning a period of six decades. These elements and events encompass the internal dynamics of the family that owns the company, industry-specific advancements, political and socioeconomic climates, and explicit guidelines related to corporate reporting.

This research employs a case study methodology to analyse the directors' reports of Barilla, a prominent Italian food manufacturer, within the theoretical framework of historical institutionalism. A systematic content analysis is conducted on sixty directors' reports published between 1961 and 2021. The study also identifies and examines significant contextual events within this six-decade period, which are linked to four key institutional factors.

Based on the research findings, the directors' reports exhibited notable fluctuations throughout the studied timeframe in reaction to shifts in the institutional setting. Our investigation highlights that each institutional element experienced crucial pivotal moments, and given their interconnected nature, modifications in one factor impacted the others. It was noted that these pivotal moments resulted in alterations in the directors' reports' content across various thematic areas. Additionally, despite Barilla being a multinational company, it was found that national events within Italy had a more pronounced influence on the evolving narratives than global events.

Previous research on directors' reports or chairman's statements has primarily focused on the influence of macro-level institutional factors on the narratives. In contrast, our study considers both macro-level and micro-level institutions, specifically examining the internal events within a family business and how they shape the content of directors' reports. Our study is also distinctive in its analysis of specific critical junctures and their interactions with the investigated institutional factors. Additionally, to the best of our knowledge, few existing studies span a timeframe of sixty years, particularly concerning an Italian company.

This study takes an “entrepreneurship as emancipation” perspective to study entrepreneurs defined as “others” on multiple categories: women entrepreneurs whose ventures are necessity-based, bootstrapped and located in economically impoverished areas (neighborhoods) in two Latin-American countries: Chile and Peru.

The study takes an interpretivist research approach and analyses inductively interviews with women entrepreneurs.

The findings reveal how everyday practices in pursuit of emancipation – while conducted within the existing patriarchal social structure – push the boundaries and contribute to changes in the social system via a variety of outcomes such as intergenerational social mobility, personal fulfilment and strengthening the communities in which the women entrepreneurs operate. Furthermore, while the authors find that in the particular Latin-American context under study, entrepreneuring activities become an emancipatory possibility for the everyday women entrepreneurs, they also highlight a “dark side” of their emancipatory projects.

The study contributes to recent critical studies in entrepreneurship by demonstrating the diversity and importance of the “mundane” activities undertaken by “necessity-based” entrepreneurs, and the significant – yet underappreciated – reach of their ventures’ impact on issues well beyond economic considerations.

This paper aims to introduce the experience-dominant (Ex-D) logic model, which synthesizes the creation, perceptions and outcomes of Ex-D logic. It is designed to offer valuable insights for strategic managerial applications and future research directions.

Employing a qualitative approach by using eight selected product launch events from reviewed 100 event videos and 55 in-depth interviews with industrial managers to develop an Ex-D logic model, and data were coded and analysed via NVivo.

Results show that the firm’s Ex-D logic is operationalized as the mentalizing of the three types of customer needs (service competence, hedonic excitations and meaning making), the materializing of three types of customer experiences and customer journeys (service experience, hedonic experience and brand experience) and the moderating of three types of customer values (service values, hedonic values and brand values).

This study has implications for adding new insights into existing theory on dominant logic and customer experience management and also offers actionable recommendations for managerial applications.

This study sheds light on the importance of Ex-D logic from a strategic point of view and provides an organic view of the firm. It distinguishes firm perspective from customer perspective, firm experience from customer experience and firm journey from consumer journey.

This paper examines how different configurations of societal impact are pursued by purpose-driven organizations (PDOs) and how these configurations align with the application of varying supply chain design (SCD) practices.

This multi-method study uses quantitative data from 1588 B Corps and qualitative data from 316 B Corps to examine how PDOs align SCD with the pursuit of diverse types of societal impact. The authors first conduct a cluster analysis to group organizations based on the impact they create. Second, qualitative content analysis connects impact with enabling SCD elements.

The analysis of the five identified clusters provides detailed empirical insights on influencers, design decisions and building blocks adopted by PDOs to drive a range of societal impacts. Specifically, the nature of the impact pursued affects (1) whether a PDO will be more influenced by a need in the political environment or an opportunity in the industry environment, (2) the relative importance of the design of social flows versus material flows and (3) the need to develop new relational resources with beneficiaries versus leveraging existing capabilities to manage inter-firm processes.

This study responds to calls to disaggregate different dimensions of societal impact and examines the relationship between SCD and a breadth of sustainability impacts for different stakeholders. In doing so, the authors identify four SCD pathways organizations can follow to achieve specific societal impacts. This study is also the first to employ a supply chain perspective in the study of certified B Corps.