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This research aims to analyse the perceptions of practitioners in three regions regarding the challenges faced by their firms during the pandemic, considered a black-swan event. It examines the strategies implemented to mitigate and recover from risks, evaluates the effectiveness of these strategies and assesses the difficulties encountered in their implementation.

In the summer of 2022, an online survey was conducted among supply chain (SC) practitioners in France, Poland and the St. Louis, Missouri region of the USA. The survey aimed to understand the impact of COVID-19 on their firms and the SC strategies employed to sustain operations. These regions were selected due to their varying levels of SC development, including infrastructure, economic resources and expertise. Moreover, they exhibited different responses in safeguarding the well-being of their citizens during the pandemic.

The study reveals consistent perceptions among practitioners from the three regions regarding the impact of COVID-19 on SCs. Their actions to enhance SC resilience primarily relied on strengthening collaborative efforts within their firms and SCs, thus validating the tenets of the relational view.

COVID-19 is (hopefully) our black-swan pandemic occurrence during our lifetime. Nevertheless, the lessons learned from it can inform future SC risk management practices, particularly in dealing with rare crises. During times of crisis, leveraging existing SC structures may prove more effective and efficient than developing new ones. These findings underscore the significance of relationships in ensuring SC resilience.

We present configurational theorising as a novel approach to developing middle-range theory in two steps: (1) we illustrate configurational theorising as a new form of supply chain inquiry by connecting its philosophical assumptions with a methodological execution, and (2) we generate new insights underpinning a middle-range theory for supply chain resilience.

We synthesise information from a range of sources and invoke ‘critical realism” to suggest a five-phase configurational theorising roadmap to develop middle-range theory. We demonstrate this roadmap to explain supply chain resilience by analysing qualitative data from 22 organisations within the Australian food supply chain.

Coopetition and supply chain collaboration are necessary causal conditions, but they need to combine with either supply chain agility or multi-sourcing strategy to build supply chain resilience. Asymmetrical analyses showed that the simultaneous absence of supply chain collaboration, supply chain agility and multi-sourcing results in low supply chain resilience, but coopetition was indifferent to low supply chain resilience. Similarly, high supply chain resilience is possible with the non-presence of supply chain agility and multi-sourcing.

The configurational middle-range theorising roadmap presented and empirically tested in this paper constitutes a substantial advancement to both theory and the methodological domain.

This is the first attempt at developing a middle-range theory for supply chains by explicitly drawing on configurational theorising.

This research tries to find the blockchain-based resilience strategies that can help the supply chains of micro, small, and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs) to recover from the disruptions and work effectively in a resource-based view perspective.

Eight broad strategies and 32 sub-strategies are identified from the literature review. Delphi study was carried out, and detailed discussion with 16 experts helped in finalizing these strategies. Further, the best-worst method (BWM) prioritized these strategies.

The findings suggests that “building social capital,” improving “coordination capabilities,” “sensitivity towards market,” “flexibility in process and production,” “reduction in process and lead time,”and “having a resource efficiency and redundancy” are the top strategies on which the top management should focus to overcome the situations of disruptions and enhance performance of MSMEs.

The blockchain-based strategies will enable the companies in tracing the products from the company to customers. Further, the customers will be able to identify their manufacturers, the raw materials used in manufacturing, and the life and quality of raw used materials. Altogether the textile industry will become more sensitive toward environmental practices.

The previous research has not identified and evaluated the blockchain-based resilience strategies, and therefore this study tries to fill this gap. This study used a smaller sample from the experts, so the results may vary if the larger data set is used and hypothesis testing can be done.

Different studies have been conducted on the relationship between technological capability and firm performance. These studies obtain different values for the relationship, known as heterogeneous results. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the relationship between technological capability and firm performance and its statistical between-study heterogeneity.

In order to analyze all the results from this relationship that were found in the literature, we adopted the literature review with a meta-analytic method. We consulted the Scopus and Web of Science databases, which returned, after the application of inclusion criteria, 23 primary studies with data from 5,882 manufacturing firms.

We observed that technological capability and performance are positively related; however, the results regarding this relationship are heterogeneous. We discovered four possible sources of statistical between-study heterogeneity: (i) the statistical between-study heterogeneity of the variables to measure technological capability and performance; (ii) orientation of the thematic approach – some illustrate the relationship between technological capability and performance using mathematical and theoretical models, while others examine the relationship between technological capability and performance and propose implications pertaining to that relationship; (iii) the source of data for primary studies and (iv) the context in which this relationship is observed.

It is necessary to standardize a set of variables through which technological capability and performance are evaluated so that results and implications can be usefully compared between countries and industrial sectors.

The contribution to knowledge is identifying the statistical between-study heterogeneity on the relationship between technological capabilities and firm performance, as well as its potential sources.

This content analysis of 62 local news stories from seven US locations published between March 1 and June 30, 2020, reveals how the migration of seasonal residents and short-term renters into leisure and nature-focused amenity-rich settings during the COVID-19 pandemic changed the social meaning of home for year-round and seasonal or part-time residents. Four themes emerge relating to (a) local economies; (b) health and safety; (c) local government; and (d) insiders and outsiders. These themes are connected to each other in the larger explanatory story of second home real estate morality projects, defined as dilemmas, deliberations, and conflicting considerations made by individual and group stakeholders in the evaluation of acquisition, use, meaning, and dispossession of properties meant for residential use beyond the primary residence. Findings reveal that moral considerations of deservedness and citizenship among local residents and short-term residents are framed as deep and incompatible concerns surrounding economic stability and public health. This COVID-19-induced moral framing of the interplay between economic, health, and social concerns is situated in a cultural-relational analysis of marketplaces, using Viviana Zelizer’s (2005) “connected lives” approach to understanding how everyday economic interactions among and within families and neighborhoods are imbued with social and cultural meaning even in a time of crisis.

This paper is one of the first studies to examine specificities, including limits of mindfulness at work in an African organisational context, whilst dealing with the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. It specifically addresses the role of organisational and managerial support systems in restoring employee wellbeing, social connectedness and attachment to their organisations, in order to overcome the exclusion caused by the ongoing pandemic.

The study uses a qualitative research methodology that includes interviews as the main data source. The sample comprises of 20 entrepreneurs (organisational leaders) from Ghana and Nigeria.

The authors found that COVID-19-induced worries restricted the practice of mindfulness, and this was prevalent at the peak of the pandemic, particularly due to very tough economic conditions caused by reduction in salaries, and intensified by pre-existing general economic and social insecurities, and institutional voids in Africa. This aspect further resulted in lack of engagement and lack of commitment, which affected overall team performance and restricted employees’ mindfulness at work. Hence, quietness by employees even though can be linked to mindfulness was linked to larger psychological stress that they were facing. The authors also found leaders/manager’s emotional intelligence, social skills and organisational support systems to be helpful in such circumstances. However, their effectiveness varied among the cases.

This paper is one of the first studies to establish a link between the COVID-19 pandemic and mindfulness limitations. Moreover, it is a pioneering study specifically highlighting the damaging impact of COVID-19-induced concerns on leader–member exchange (LMX) and team–member exchange (TMX) relationships, particularly in the African context. It further brings in a unique discussion on the mitigating mechanisms of such COVID-19-induced concerns in organisations and highlights the roles of manager’s/leader’s emotional intelligence, social skills and supportive intervention patterns. Finally, the authors offer an in-depth assessment of the effectiveness of organisational interventions and supportive relational systems in restoring social connectedness following a social exclusion caused by COVID-19-induced worries.

The main purpose of this paper is to explore whether the nature of innovation is accumulative or radical and to what extent past year accumulation of technology stock can predict future innovation. More importantly, the authors are concerned with whether a change of policy regime or a variance in the quality of technology will moderate the nature of innovation.

The authors examined a dataset of 3.6 million Chinese patents during 1985–2015 and constructed more than 5 million citation pairs across 8 sections and 128 classes to track knowledge spillover across technology fields. The authors used this citation dataset to calculate the technology innovation network. The authors constructed a measure of upstream invention, interacting the pre-existing technology innovation network with historical patent growth in each technology field, and estimated measure's impact on future innovation since 2005. The authors also constructed three sets of metrics – technology dependence, centrality and scientific value – to identify innovation quality and a policy dummy to consider the impact of policy on innovation.

Innovation growth is built upon past year accumulation and technology spillover. Innovation grows faster for technologies that are more central and grows more slowly for more valuable technologies. A pro-innovation and pro-intellectual property right (IPR) policy plays a positive and significant role in driving technical progress. The authors also found that for technologies that have faster access to new information or larger power to control knowledge flow, the upstream and downstream innovation linkage is stronger. However, this linkage is weaker for technologies that are more novel or general. On most occasions, the nature of innovation was less responsive to policy shock.

This paper contributes to the debate on the nature of innovation by determining whether upstream innovation has strong predictive power on future innovation. The authors develop the assumption used in the technology spillover literature by considering a time-variant, directional and asymmetric matrix to model technology diffusion. For the first time, the authors answer how the nature of innovation will vary depending on the technology network configurations and policy environment. In addition to contributing to the academic debate, the authors' study has important implications for economic growth and industrial or innovation management policies.

“First principles” of international business (IB) thinking should be applied systematically when assessing the functioning of internationally operating firms. The most important first principle is that entrepreneurially oriented firms seek to create, deliver and capture economic value through cross-border linkages. Such linkages invariably require complementary resources from a variety of parties with idiosyncratic vulnerabilities to be meshed. Starting from first principles allows bringing to light evidence-based insight. For instance, most companies are not global and even the world’s largest firms rarely change the location of key strategic functions. International new ventures (INVs), emerging economy multinational enterprises (MNEs) and family firms face unique vulnerabilities but also command resources that can be used to create value across borders. The quest for “optimal” international diversification appears to be a futile academic exercise, and in emerging economies with institutional voids, relational networks – and more broadly, informal institutions – are unlikely to function as scalable substitutes for formal institutions. In global value chains (GVCs), many lead firms and their partners have been able to craft governance mechanisms that reduce bounded rationality and bounded reliability challenges, and it is also critical for them to use governance as a tool to create entrepreneurial space. Finally, many of the world’s largest companies have been on successful trajectories toward reducing their climate change footprint for a few decades. But these firm-specific trajectories are fraught with challenges and cannot just be imposed via unilateral, macro-level targets decided upon by individuals and institutions lacking a clear understanding of innovation and capital expenditure processes in business.

This study explores the influence of the Top Management Team (TMT) social capital on business model innovation in business ecosystems.

This study examines the impact of internal and external TMT social capital on enterprises’ business model innovation, explores the relationship between internal and external TMT social capital, and investigates how business ecosystem health moderates the relationship between external TMT social capital and enterprises’ business model innovation. These hypotheses are proposed and tested using a hierarchical regression analysis with data from 168 Chinese firms.

First, both internal and external TMT social capital exert a significantly positive influence on an enterprise’s business model innovation. Second, internal TMT social capital positively contributes to the development of external TMT social capital, affecting business model innovation. Finally, the moderating effect of business ecosystem health on the relationship between external TMT social capital and business model innovation depends on the dimensions. Specifically, the productivity of the business ecosystem negatively moderates this relationship, whereas the niche creation capability of the business ecosystem has a positive moderating effect.

These findings enrich prior research on business model innovation within the business ecosystem, thoroughly exploring the critical role of TMT social capital. This study reveals the diverse impacts of internal and external TMT social capital on business model innovation and the intricate relationship between these elements. Furthermore, it emphasizes that the success of enterprise’s business model innovation within a business ecosystem depends on the alignment and adaptation to dynamic ecosystem conditions. By presenting these insights, this study provides valuable practical implications for enterprises aiming to cultivate social capital within business ecosystem to facilitate business model innovation.

This study aims to identify the street-level approaches of professional workers in complex public social service organisations when attending to social assistance claimants.

The study employed a multifaceted approach comprising documentary analysis, semi-structured individual interviews (17) and focus group discussions (8) with qualified frontline social workers from primary care social services in Tarragona.

Social workers embodied three specific sets of cognitive, normative and emotional dispositions when attending to people with low incomes. First, the compassionate approach conceives clients as defensive regarding social services and emotionally vulnerable because of deprivation. Second, the instructional approach frames clients as being baffled by a new, precarious, institutional and economic context. They also lack information, abilities and the proper mindset to conceive of and attain available welfare and occupational resources. Third, the enforcement approach tends to define clients as suspicious, trying to obtain an excessive and unfair advantage of the welfare system that would eventually hamper their social opportunities.

Research thus far has tended to define public social assistance programmes in Southern welfare state contexts as mostly inefficient and hardly relevant residual social policies. The street-level approach shows that social workers try to resist the mere administrative processing of benefits, which is a professionally troubling and organisationally unsustainable way to proceed. They attempt to help clients by providing inclusive content in order to implement their benefits.