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Building on the routine dynamics literature, this paper aims to expand our philosophical, practical and infrastructural understanding of implementing lean production. The authors provide a process view on the interplay between lean operating routines and continuous improvement (CI) routines and the roles of different actors in initiating and establishing these routines.

Using data from interviews, observations and document analysis, retrospective comparative analyses of three embedded case studies on lean implementations provide a process understanding of enacting and patterning lean operating and CI routines in manufacturing SMEs.

Incorporating the “who” and “how” next to the “what” of practices and routines helps explain that rather than being implemented in isolation or even in conjunction with each other, sustainable lean practices and routines come about through team leader and employee enactment of the CI practices and routines. Neglecting these patterns aligned with unsustainable implementations.

The proposed process model provides a valuable way to integrate variance and process streams of literature to better understand lean production implementations.

The process model helps manufacturing managers, policy makers, consultants and educators to reconsider their approach to implementing lean production or teaching how to do so.

Nuancing the existing lean implementation literature, the proposed process model shows that CI routines do not stem from implementing lean operating routines. Rather, the model highlights the importance of active engagement of actors at multiple organizational levels and strong connections between and across levels to change routines and work practices for implementing lean production.

The purpose of this paper is to explain how and why HR practitioners perceive the need to develop international HRM practices to support short-term assignments, international business travel and virtual assignments for internationally operating organizations.

The authors interviewed 29 HR practitioners from multinationals located in the Netherlands.

Alternative international assignments seem not to belong to the traditional expatriate jobs, nor to regular domestic jobs and show a liminal character. However, over the last few years we have gradually seen a more mature classification of the Short-term Assignment, International Business Traveler and Virtual Assignment categories and more active use of these categories in policymaking by organizations; this reflects a transition of these three categories from a liminal position to a more institutionalized position.

For this research, only international HRM practitioners were interviewed. Future studies should include a broader group of stakeholders.

International HRM departments should take a more proactive role regarding alternative forms of international assignees. Furthermore, HR professionals may develop training and coaching and consider rewards and benefits that could provide allowances for specific working conditions that are part of international work.

This study is among the first to relate the framework of institutional logic and liminality to explain the why of HR support for alternative international assignees.

This paper examines whether and when improvement routines are critical for implementing lean practices in small- and medium-sized manufacturing enterprises (SMEs). Improvement routines such as “employees initiate and carry through improvement activities” are generally seen as an important means to achieve the full benefit of structural lean interventions. Womack and Jones (2003) suggest that these improvement routines should be developed as the company becomes more experienced in lean. The purpose of this paper is to explore the relative importance of individual improvement routines at various degrees of lean practice implementation.

A Between-Case Comparison Analysis (Dul and Hak, 2012) and a Necessary Condition Analysis (Dul, 2016) were performed on self-assessment data from 241 respondents at 38 Dutch manufacturing SMEs.

The importance of improvement routines depended on the degree of lean practice implementation. Lean practices could be implemented to some extend without developing specific improvement routines, yet certain routines were necessary for more advanced implementations of lean. These routines relate to employees conducting shared improvement activities and in the most advanced cases to aligning different improvement activities.

These findings question existing lean implementation models that neglect improvement routines and indicate the need to integrate improvement routines into every lean transformation for it to be sustainable.

The purpose of this paper is to gain insights into the effects of an enterprise resource planning (ERP)‐implementation on job content.

Data are collected using a qualitative expert instrument (WEBA) and a questionnaire (NOVA‐WEBA) among HR‐assistants in a case study in the Dutch hospitality industry.

Contrary to what one might expect, the introduction of an ERP‐system does not automatically result in a more centralized organization: in granting local authorizations user/employee job decision latitude is affected c.q. realized. However, even when a decentralization policy is pursued as is the case in our study, job decision latitude is not necessarily enhanced. This is partly caused by ERP‐related changes such as increasing standardization of operational procedures and data entry requirements, and partly by organization‐specific developments in how tasks get assigned to jobs.

The configuration of ERP‐systems varies by organization, and is largely a matter of organizational choice. The case is unique, as is indeed any case.

Insights into ERP's effects can help organizations achieve better designed jobs. Pre‐implementation simulations of effects can help steering towards desired outcomes.

The paper provides useful insights into the effects of an ERP‐implementation on job content through a case study of HR‐assistants.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an update of the Special Issue's field of research, give the structure of the Special Issue and introduce the papers in the collection, including management issues.

A review of the Call for Papers and further research and a presentation of papers in the Special Issue paying attention to original contribution, research and management recommendations.

This Special Issue is making a solid contribution to the field in not only addressing ageing and the ageing generation, but focusing strongly on the way both the ageing generation and other generations such as Gen Y and Gen X affect organisational dynamics, structure and career management.

Original research brought together in a multi-faceted way outlining the challenges as well as management agendas for the organisation.

This study examines the role of anxiety in kaizen behaviour and performance by empirically testing the influence of personal anxiety (state and trait) on individual kaizen behaviours (rule adherence, initiative and perseverance of effort), which, in turn, affect individual kaizen performance.

The data were obtained from a survey of 552 employees of four companies in Japan and analysed using structural equation modelling.

The results show that state anxiety has a significantly positive effect on rule adherence and kaizen performance. Trait anxiety positively influences employees' initiative and perseverance but has a significant negative effect on kaizen performance.

This study contributes to kaizen and continuous improvement theory by focussing on individual kaizen, which is considered to be as important as organisation-level kaizen and investigating the relevance of personal anxiety in individual kaizen behaviours and kaizen performance.

By exploring the process of concept revitalization, this paper contributes to a better understanding of the intraorganizational retention of organization concepts. Concept revitalization occurs when an organization refocuses attention and resources toward a previously adopted organization concept. This paper investigates why and how organization concepts are revitalized.

The findings are based on a case study of a Norwegian energy company's revitalization of the organization concept “lean”, whose initial implementation had been unsuccessful. The data were analyzed inductively by identifying how the concept was reframed during the second attempt and how the revitalization was justified.

In the case company, the revitalization was driven by (1) replacing the original label, (2) maintaining the original content in a slightly modified form and (3) altering the implementation mode. The changes were supported by a narrative of past shortcomings, lessons learned and a plan for future success, authored by internal experts in lean with a strong interest in ensuring positive results.

Concept revitalization implies that there is more continuity in the application of ideas than is suggested in the literature on management fashions.

So far, the retention of organization concepts has only been studied at the field level. This study is the first to offer an empirically grounded understanding of intraorganizational concept revitalization.

Organisation concepts consist of prescriptive ideas concerning how to manage or organise. The simultaneous use of multiple concepts in an organisation may create synergies but also confusion and conflicts. This paper aims to explore how change agents deal with the simultaneous use of multiple organisation concepts within a single organisation.

A qualitative case study of a Norwegian energy company using lean, agile and design thinking.

The findings show that change agents compare the concepts with each other and recognise commonalities and differences. They also match individual concepts and tools to the nature of tasks, the different phases of projects/initiatives based on their perceived maturity or internal communities. Most agents emphasise similarities between concepts and complementarities between tools. This approach creates a versatile toolbox for improvement.

Companies making use of multiple organisation concepts should continuously discuss and actively manage the tensions that exist between concepts while establishing a unified approach and common culture for improvement.

This study offers a novel understanding of how change agents make sense of different approaches to improvement within a single organisation.