Search results

The concept of “routines” is used to classify diverse enterprise application systems (EAS) into a framework. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the theoretical underpinnings and EAS falling into each of the framework quadrants. The framework provides a guideline for firms to meet their EAS‐organizational alignment challenges.

The EAS‐organizational alignment framework in this paper is developed through a synthesis of literature. The framework links EAS and organizational routines according to intra‐ and inter‐levels of organizational analysis and inflexible and flexible governance mechanisms.

The findings suggest that a fit between EAS routines and organizational routines leads to successful EAS deployments and hence improved business performance.

The findings provide researchers with reasons to incorporate routines into existing research models to better explain EAS‐organizational alignment. The next step is to empirically validate the EAS‐organizational alignment framework.

Firms can gain an understanding of how EAS routines and organizational routines can be manipulated to positively influence EAS‐organizational alignment and hence increase business performance. Firms can use routines as strategic tools for adoption and successful deployment of EAS across their global operations.

The paper's findings provide a perspective, different from past research, on our understanding of EAS‐organizational alignment and offer valuable guidance for future research in this area.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a modular product design system and a product development roadmap (PDR), which can help to improve modular design (MD) and product innovation capabilities, respectively. Their relationships with product newness (PN) and new product performance are also assessed.

The proposed model was tested through structural equation modelling using data from a survey of 153 manufacturers in the electronic and electrical appliance industries in China.

The findings reveal that the proposed modular product design system and PDR can improve MD and product innovation capabilities. The authors also explore the conflicting relationships of MD and product innovation capability with PN.

The findings contribute to the literature by showing that MD can constrain PN while product innovation can improve it. The study provides new empirical evidence of these relationships and has strategic implications. In addition, this study identifies two product development techniques that can improve MD and innovation capability, respectively.

The authors provide new evidence of the relationship between MD and innovation capability at product level, and confirm a side effect of pursuing both in terms of new product development. Through empirical testing, the authors first verify two product development techniques for implementing modular product design and product innovation.

This study aims to systematize the acquisition phase of absorptive capacity microprocesses that contribute to project management (PM) knowledge identification.

An exploratory and descriptive qualitative research was adopted. The first stage consisted of building the conceptual framework based on four systematic-literature-reviews. The data collection process in the second phase involved in-depth interviews, which are adequate to understand the interviewee’s reality. The sample composition consisted of 15 respondents who are PM professionals with an average of 15 years of experience. Each interviewee was chosen based on their expertise and ability to transmit the entire management process of several projects. The data were analyzed using the Atlas. Tecnology information software following the grounded theory technique with three coding cycles: open, axial and selective.

Based on the results, the authors organized the microprocesses into three groups: events, social interaction and the use of tools and techniques.

The primary limitation of the study was the number of respondents. Future studies will be able to identify other microprocesses and evaluate their role in the knowledge identification process.

This study presents a systematization of microprocesses in knowledge identification, as it occurs in the context of PM. Based on the results of this study, organizations will be able to choose the microprocesses that best fit their operations and activities according to the complexity, innovation and/or criticality of their projects.

The systematic literature review revealed a gap in the knowledge identification phase of knowledge management as it pertains to PM. Thus, this study presents a systematization of how knowledge identification occurs in the context of PM.

Purpose – The main objective of the chapter is to map out some of the most significant possible political consequences of the Internet for the state, citizenship, human rights, and other areas.

Design/methodology/approach – The chapter analyzes the phenomena at the level of sociological theory. Its theoretical scope extends to political theory.

Findings – The Internet offers immense potential toward improving the nation state in terms of human rights yet in a manner that may well be foiled by several cultural, political, and economic factors. By transforming national boundaries into nongeographic borders that operate transnationally and subnationally, and by abstracting from the cybernaut's physical body, the Internet may challenge prevailing notions of state, private property, bodily autonomy, and political personhood, all of which connect discrete bodies with bounded territories. It might free citizenship rights and protections from state capture and denationalize the connection between membership in a particular political community and the enjoyment of rights. It might advance human rights by changing civil society by generating, first, a space where subjugated groups and individuals could agitate for their interests online without putting their bodies on the line and, second, critical public opinion in place of merely mass opinion. It would contribute to a post-national identity where it multiplied local practices to generate global awareness and identified normatively universal human rights in local, particular communities while still recognizing individuals’ special obligations to those local communities.

Research limitations/implications – This speculative trajectory remains all too vulnerable to nondigital settings beholden to particular values, cultures, power systems, inequality, hierarchy, and institutional orders; to market forces and controls; to governmental authority and censorship; and to the global maldistribution of wealth and technology. Liberal democratic political communities should monitor and control the cultural, political, and economic factors that threaten to undermine the Internet's potential toward improving the nation state in terms of human rights. Those committed to promoting the Internet's potential have the task of specifying these factors at the various relevant empirical micro-levels of social organization.

Originality value – Most analyses of the Internet either overestimate or underestimate its potential. Here the analysis strives for a balance uncommon in the literature. That balance may be of value primarily to other scholars working in related areas and secondarily to persons involved in public policy and other forms of politics.

Mass customization aims at satisfying individual customer needs while keeping mass production efficiency. This paper discusses the employment of concurrent engineering for realizing mass customization. Concurrent design for mass customization (CDFMC) is put forward by extending the traditional boundaries of product design to encompass a larger scope spanning from sales and marketing to distribution and services. In addition, CDFMC advocates designing product families instead of individual products. The paper develops a concept of product family architecture (PFA) to support CDFMC via assisting different functional departments within a manufacturing enterprise to work together cohesively. The rationality of CDFMC lies in synchronizing market positioning, soliciting customer requirements, increasing commonality in product designs, and enhancing manufacturing scale of economy.

The chapters in this volume are the fruit of a feminist revolution in sociology that transformed conventional ways of thinking about work in the 1990s. Prior to the feminist revolution, the most important sociological theories that accounted for gender inequality in the workplace were human capital theories and socialization theories, both of which blamed women workers for their lower status and pay in the workplace (Schilt, 2010; Williams, 1995). Human capital theories argue that men and women receive different pay-offs from employment because they invest differently in their careers (Padavic & Reskin, 2002; Blau, Ferber, & Winkler, 1998; Polachek, 1981). Men seek higher education, skills training, and overtime at work because they are family breadwinners whose major responsibility is to support their wives and dependent children. Meanwhile, women invest less in the human capital valued by workplaces because their primary commitment is to their families. This theory assumes the heterosexual nuclear family, which is no longer the typical family form (Coontz, 1997). This rational choice perspective also fails to explain recent trends in women's educational attainment and labor force participation rates, now estimated to be equal to if not greater than men's (England, 2010).

The aim of the study is to propose a classification system for best practices (BPs). The system is intended for organizations that are interested in indexing, storing and retrieving large quantities of BPs.

An extensive literature survey to identify relevant articles by searching e-resource databases, including international journals and conferences related to the use of BP was conducted. A content analysis was conducted on selected articles to identify how BPs can be indexed.

The authors are concerned with identifying what BP frameworks exist in literature and how BPs can be classified based on the features of these BP frameworks. Subsequently, they reviewed the identified frameworks within the literature and built a BP classification system. This classification system consists of a number of features, referred to as variables, where each variable is associated with a set of possible values.

The proposed BP classification system is intended to provide a guideline for recognizing general characteristics for all BPs in any domain or organization to aid stakeholders in classifying BPs.

The purpose of this paper is to provide organizations in the Chinese cultural context with a conceptual model for an integrated adoption of existing knowledge management (KM) methods and to improve the effectiveness of their KM activities.

A comparative analysis is conducted between China and the western world based on a comprehensive document analysis from key databases available. In total, four critical dimensions, which are identified through the review of the related literature including observation, methodology, systems and applications, are used in the analysis for addressing the questions of why, what, how, and where in KM.

The paper rationalizes the need for this study in conformity with the emerging trend of an integrated use of diverse KM methods and approaches for effective KM in organizations. Further, a reference model for the integrated adoption of existing KM methods is developed with respect to the characteristics of the Chinese culture for improving the effectiveness of KM activities in the organizations. Such a model can adequately address the questions of why, what, how, and where in KM in Chinese organizations to the best of Chinese collective interest, which provides more comprehensive and unified KM views, activities, processes and technologies for collaborative innovation in Chinese organizations.

This paper is the first of its kind to systematically review existing KM methods and approaches with respect to the perspectives of observations, methodologies, systems and applications for effective KM in Chinese organizations.

The concept and practice of e-services has become essential in business transactions. Yet there are still many organizations that have not developed e-services optimally. This is especially relevant in the context of Indonesian Airline companies. Therefore, many airline customers in Indonesia are still in doubt about it, or even do not use it. To fill this gap, this study attempts to develop a model for e-services adoption and empirically examines the factors influencing the airlines customers in Indonesia in using e-services offered by the Indonesian airline companies. Taking six Indonesian airline companies as a case example, the study investigated the antecedents of e-services usage of Indonesian airlines. This study further examined the impacts of motivation on customers in using e-services in the Indonesian context. Another important aim of this study was to investigate how ages, experiences and geographical areas moderate effects of e-services usage.

The study adopts a positivist research paradigm with a two-phase sequential mixed method design involving qualitative and quantitative approaches. An initial research model was first developed based on an extensive literature review, by combining acceptance and use of information technology theories, expectancy theory and the inter-organizational system motivation models. A qualitative field study via semi-structured interviews was then conducted to explore the present state among 15 respondents. The results of the interviews were analysed using content analysis yielding the final model of e-services usage. Eighteen antecedent factors hypotheses and three moderating factors hypotheses and 52-item questionnaire were developed. A focus group discussion of five respondents and a pilot study of 59 respondents resulted in final version of the questionnaire.

In the second phase, the main survey was conducted nationally to collect the research data among Indonesian airline customers who had already used Indonesian airline e-services. A total of 819 valid questionnaires were obtained. The data was then analysed using a partial least square (PLS) based structural equation modelling (SEM) technique to produce the contributions of links in the e-services model (22% of all the variances in e-services usage, 37.8% in intention to use, 46.6% in motivation, 39.2% in outcome expectancy, and 37.7% in effort expectancy). Meanwhile, path coefficients and t-values demonstrated various different influences of antecedent factors towards e-services usage. Additionally, a multi-group analysis based on PLS is employed with mixed results. In the final findings, 14 hypotheses were supported and 7 hypotheses were not supported.

The major findings of this study have confirmed that motivation has the strongest contribution in e-services usage. In addition, motivation affects e-services usage both directly and indirectly through intention-to-use. This study provides contributions to the existing knowledge of e-services models, and practical applications of IT usage. Most importantly, an understanding of antecedents of e-services adoption will provide guidelines for stakeholders in developing better e-services and strategies in order to promote and encourage more customers to use e-services. Finally, the accomplishment of this study can be expanded through possible adaptations in other industries and other geographical contexts.