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In marketing research, it is widely acknowledged that customer engagement leads to higher reputation, lower costs and increased revenues for firms. However, there are still open questions on how sport sponsorship can drive customer engagement. It is hypothesized that sponsors' activations correlate with customer engagement toward the sponsor. Specifically, the roles of sponsorship authenticity and attitudes toward the sponsor have received little attention in this context. Accordingly, this study aims to test the effects of sponsors' activations on customer engagement disposition (CED) and customer engagement behavior (CEB) by considering the roles of sponsorship authenticity and attitudes toward the sponsor.

An online experiment with a factorial between-subjects design with 529 total participants was conducted. Data were analyzed through analysis of covariance (ANCOVA) and binary regression analysis.

Sponsors' activations can lead to positive or negative CEB, depending on how sport consumers evaluate the activation. Sponsorship authenticity reduces or enhances CEB following a sponsor's activation. Moreover, consumers' prior attitudes toward the sponsor influence the relationship between sponsors' activations and CED. The findings further showed that CED leads to CEB.

This research contributes to the sport sponsorship literature by empirically proving that sponsors' activations increase customer engagement toward the sponsors. Moreover, this is the first study testing consequences of sponsors' activations in relation to sponsorship authenticity and consumers' attitudes. Furthermore, the authors enrich the customer engagement literature by discussing the sponsors' activations as a marketing strategy to increase customer engagement and consequently firms' performance.

This study aims to evaluate a promising community-oriented policing strategy called “front porch roll call” (FPRC), which involves conducting roll calls in public forums.

A mixed methods approach was used by drawing on survey data, field observations and qualitative interviews to describe how FPRCs were implemented in Saginaw, MI from 2019 to 2022, and how they can be successfully implemented to operate in accordance with the theoretical foundations of community-oriented policing.

Survey data from FPRC attendees reported improvements in their perceptions of police legitimacy, trust in the police and procedural fairness—each of which are vital pathways to developing collaborative crime prevention initiatives in community-oriented policing. Qualitative interviews and field observations provided unique insights into areas of improvement and ways to enhance sustainability for future use.

Community-oriented policing offers a philosophical approach to addressing crime problems through the formation of localized, collaborative solutions that come from police-community partnerships. A key implementation challenge is that such programs can fail to align their initiatives with the theoretical principles of community policing. FPRCs offer an innovative solution that operates closely with the spirit of community-oriented policing. Data from a mixed-methods evaluation provide further insights into their challenges with implementation and ways to improve upon them.

This study explores how Lean was deployed in several hospitals in the Apulia region in Italy over 3.5 years.

An exploratory qualitative design was drawn up based on semi-structured interviews.

The drivers of Lean in hospitals were to increase patient satisfaction and improve workplace well-being by eliminating non-value-add waste. The participants highlighted three key elements of the pivotal implementation stages of Lean: introduction, spontaneous and informal dissemination and strategic level implementation and highlighted critical success and failure factors that emerged for each of these stages. During the introduction, training and coaching from an external consultant were among the most impactful factors in the success of pilot projects, while time constraints and the adoption of process analysis tools were the main barriers to implementation. The experiences of the Lean teams strongly influence the process of spontaneous dissemination aided by the celebration of project results and the commitment of the departmental hospital heads.

Lean culture can spread to allow many projects be conducted spontaneously, but the Lean paradigm can struggle to be adopted strategically. Lean in healthcare can fail because of the lack of alignment of Lean with leadership in healthcare and with their strategic vision, a lack of employees' project management skills and crucially the absence of a Lean steering committee.

The absence of managerial expertise and a will to support Lean implementation do not allow for systemic adoption of Lean. This is one of the first and largest long-term case studies on a Lean cross-regional multi-hospital application in healthcare.

The study aims to access, monitor and visualize the scientific progress of Twitter-based research through a bibliometric analysis of scientific publications.

The data was retrieved from 2006 to February 23, 2022 using the Web of Science, a leading indexing and abstracting database. In response to the authors’ query, 6,193 items with 101,037 citations, an average citation of 16.31 and an h index of 126 were received. The “Biblioshiny” extension of the “Bibliometrics” package (www.bibliometrix.org) of R software was used to evaluate and visualize the data.

The present study highlighted the scientific progress of the field evolved over a period of time. The obtained results uncovered the publication trends, productive countries and their collaboration pattern, active authors who nurture the field by making their contribution, prolific source titles adopted by authors to publish the literature on the topic, most productive language in which literature was written, productive institutions, funding agencies that sponsor the research, influential articles, prominent keywords used in publications were also identified which will aid scientists in identifying research gaps in a particular area.

This study comprehensively illustrates the research status of Twitter-related research by conducting a bibliometric analysis. The study’s findings can assist relevant researchers in understanding the research trend, seeking scientific collaborators and funding for their research. Further, the study will act as a ready reference tool for the scientific community to identify research gaps, select research topics and appropriate platforms for submitting their scholarly endeavors.

Undoubtedly, coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic has released unprecedented disruptions and health crisis on people and activities everywhere. The impacts extend to public–private partnership (PPP) arrangements in the construction industry. Concomitantly, PPP pacts are contributing to combat the pandemic. However, literature on the PPP concept in the COVID-19 era remain under-researched. This study aims to review the current literature on PPPs in the COVID-19 pandemic and present the key themes, research gaps and future research directions.

In this study, 29 highly relevant literature were sourced from Web of Science, Scopus and PubMed search engines within the systematic literature review (SLR) methodology. With the aid of qualitative content analysis, the 29 articles were critically analysed leading to the extraction of hot research themes on PPPs in the coronavirus pandemic.

The results of the SLR produced eight themes such as major changes in PPP contracts, development of the COVID-19 vaccines, economic recession, facemasks and testing kits, governance and sustainability of PPPs. In addition, the study reveals seven research gaps that need further investigations among the scientific research community on mental health and post-pandemic recovery plans.

The articles selected for this review were limited to only peer-reviewed journal papers written in English excluding conference papers. This restriction may have taken out some relevant literature but they had insignificant impact on the overall outcome of this research.

To improve the understanding of practitioners in the construction industry on key issues on PPPs in the COVID-19 pandemic, the study provides them a checklist of relevant themes.

As a novel literature review relating PPPs to the coronavirus, it sets the foundation for further research and contributes to practical measures to control the virus.

This study demonstrates a practical use of Actor-Network Theory (ANT), showing methodological, predictive and unforeseen issues that emerged during the data collection and analysis phases and how they were addressed during the development of this research.

Based on the research of reapplication of a “tecnologia social” (TS) of entrepreneurial education, this article explores the author’s reflections on the adoption of ANT as a theoretical-methodological approach, highlighting the practical implications of a social material theory during fieldwork.

The adoption of ANT places the researcher in front of methodological issues not always foreseen in the research design. Four moments to a practical path through the engagement of ANT agency are highlighted: the network of actors, monitoring of actors, interpretation of data collected and writing results. These moments correspond to methodological issues that the authors faced during the practical journey of the research. At each moment, the challenge aroused is discussed and the methodological choice chosen to address the issue is presented.

The engagement with ANT has enormous potential in the study of management and organizations phenomenon, but its methodological implications in practice are still challenging. The authors seek to share this investigation and engagement in ANT so that other researchers have a reference and a starting point to employ and engage in this theoretical-methodological lens. Thus, it may be possible to anticipate certain difficulties in future research designs and to glimpse at potential developments and paths that the research may lead.

This chapter outlines the structure of research management and administration (RMA) in Vietnam, which is a part of the science and technology management sector. The chapter will present the decentralisation of RMA in Vietnam at many levels: the macro level (state), the medium level (local/province), and the micro level (organisations); describe its characteristics, and identify the conditions for the establishment of the RMA community in Vietnam shortly.

The UAE only officially formed in December 1971, now has seven Emirates joined together as a nation under one President. Since its establishment as a sovereign, independent country around just 50 years ago, the UAE has accelerated advancement across numerous sectors at notable speed, and science, technology, and Research & Development (R&D) sectors are no exception. Research Management and Administration (RMA) as a profession is in the relatively early stages of being recognised as a distinct and niche skill set; at present, the UAE largely imports experienced international talent to fill RMA roles. However, the country’s strides in progressing R&D infrastructure and goals of elevating ranks from regional to global R&D leader is beginning to generate a legitimate career ladder for RMA professionals across the country. This, paired with the UAE’s commitment to engage more Emirati nationals in the workforce, is cultivating a viable environment for the RMA profession to emerge more significantly from general administration and begin generating a skilled talent pipeline of RMA professionals within the UAE.

The aim of this chapter is to describe a four-type model of organisational structures and to discuss two cases, Embrapa and the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation, as well as additional cases at SAM-Research and the centre for shared medical support services established at the University of Bologna.

These cases should help readers understand the importance of designing distinctive, tailored-made support services while keeping these structures flexible for further adaptation under unforeseen changes.

The chapter concludes by stressing the role of institutions to steadily invest in the design of these tailored support structures and in personalised training for their support staff.

This study aims to provide a holistic review of social media influencers (SMIs) research based on a unique approach of bibliometric analysis and content analysis between 2011 and 2020. The review examines the main influential aspects, themes and research streams to identify research directions for the future.

The sample selection and data collection were done from the Scopus database. The sample dataset was refined based on the inclusion and exclusion criteria to determine the final dataset of 183 articles. The dataset was exported in the BibTeX format and then imported into the BiblioShiny app for bibliometric analysis. The content analysis was done following the theory-context-methodology framework.

The several findings of this study include (1) Co-word analysis of most used keywords; (2) Longitudinal thematic evolution; (3) The focus of the research papers as per the theory-context-methodology review protocol are persuasion knowledge model, fashion and beauty industries, Instagram and content analysis, respectively; and (4) The network analysis of the research studies is known as the co-citation analysis and depicts the intellectual structure in the domain. This analysis resulted in four clusters of the research streams from the literature and two emergent themes (Chen et al., 2010)

In general, the previous reviews in the area are either domain, method or theory-based. Thus, this study aims to complement and extend the existing literature by presenting the overall picture of the SMI research with the help of a unique combined approach and further highlighting the trends and future research directions based on the findings of this study.