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This paper aims to explore practice innovation and organizational resiliency during exogenous service ecosystem disruptions. This inquiry focuses on the extreme disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, which required service firms to recodify long-established service scripts, adapt digital and physical material elements of the service encounter and ultimately reconfigure a system of practices. The specific context is forced practice innovation in Starbucks servicescape (kiosks and coffeehouses). Starbucks is best known for its custom beverages and third-place strategy. Their strict adherence to a complex service script and unique ordering practices altered during pandemic stay-home disease prevention mandates.

Thematic coding consistent with prior research on practice innovation and diffusion and a grounded theory methodology was conducted. Data were triangulated and analyzed within and across a variety of sources. These include field notes from direct observation, interviews, focus groups, firm-authored collateral in the form of marketing communications and third-party authored secondary sources such as news, social media, blogs and forums.

Data reveal how practice innovation occurs through the reconfiguration of a system of practices, which support organizational resiliency and can force brand evolution, in prolonged exogenous service ecosystem disruptions. The COVID-19 pandemic required service industries to adapt and recodify service scripts and alter physical and digital elements of service encounters. While the pandemic affected all firms in the sector, we argue that Starbucks' established scripts and third-place strategies, which characterized the brand experience, were particularly vulnerable. We find that practice innovation occurs through the reconfiguration of practice elements – competences, meanings and materiality – and restructures the service encounter. Practice codification, transposition, adaptation and stabilization support organizational resiliency and brand evolution. We find that Starbucks' brand experience emphasis on the third place is reconceptualized from an in-person community-based retailscape to a platform-based strategy necessitating script recodification and practice adaptation. Our analysis of Starbucks' kiosks and coffeehouses illuminates how a distinctly branded service encounter is constituted by a system of practices that can be reconfigured and diffused anew in the face of disruption.

The conceptualization of practice innovation as systems reconfiguration establishes a novel approach to understanding innovation in service ecosystems. The COVID-19 pandemic is a unique context to study a sector-wide exogenous extended service disruption. We focus on a firm with an elaborate pre-pandemic service script and commitment to a third-place brand experience guiding its system of practices. We reveal unique insights on practice innovation within service ecosystems during exogenous prolonged disruptions in which brands evolve through the recodification of service scripts and sustained reconfiguration of systems of practice.

This research extends self-congruity theory and assesses the predictive validity of the triad personality congruence among brand, brand-related sustainability initiatives (BSI) and self-concept (BSSC: brand-sustainability-self-congruence) on consumers’ brand evaluation.

Three studies assessed BSSC using the brand personality scale (BPS) and the direct congruence measure (DCM). Through moderated mediation analyses, BSSC effects were examined on consumers’ behavioral intention, behavior and subjective well-being (SWB). The mediating role of brand trust and the moderating role of brand/BSI types and consumer characteristics were also assessed.

BSSC increased consumers’ brand trust, behavioral intention, behavior and SWB. Data based on BPS revealed impactful attributes that increase/decrease BSSC levels across brand-BSI combinations and the moderating role of sustainability involvement and income to enhance BSSC effects. BSSC was particularly effective, according to DCM.

For BSI planning, strategic consideration of BSSC based on both BPS and DCM is recommended. Thus, managers may predict the psychological impact of BSI and align its attributes to increase consumers’ brand evaluation.

In the sustainable marketing context, this research discusses BSSC – triad personality congruence – based on BPS and DCM and its predictive effects on consumers’ short-term brand evaluation, their actual behavior and SWB, a long-term life evaluation. The results imply a possible variation in consumers’ information processing according to the congruence measurement approach. Thus, it is relevant to the research on self-congruity, sustainability, marketing, consumer psychology/behavior and well-being.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the phenomenon of organizational unlearning with a focus on challenging path dependence and its implications on the organizational change field. By generating a taxonomy of unlearning definitions and examining the dimensions, actors and processes involved, the authors aim to offer a holistic understanding of organizational unlearning and its potential applications for organizations facing ambiguity and uncertainty.

This conceptual paper draws the literature on organizational unlearning to map existing definitions and categorize them into a comprehensive taxonomy to propose a model focused on the outcomes.

The findings highlight that organizational unlearning involves the three main organizational dimensions (micro: individuals; meso: groups; macro: organizations) and that the macro-organizational perspective represents the best fit for the concept. Furthermore, the authors’ argue that the most appropriate process for understanding the unlearning phenomenon is through challenge, as it allows the questioning of the present and facilitates critical reflection. Finally, applying organizational unlearning to path dependence concept, the authors’ posit that organizations can overcome negative transfer effects and build new awareness to reinterpret their dependencies in light of environmental changes.

This study contributes to the literature on organizational unlearning by providing a comprehensive taxonomy of definitions, clarifying the dimensions, constructs and processes involved. The integration of challenging path dependence with organizational unlearning offers a novel perspective on the potential for organizational change field. The paper’s findings have practical implications for organizations striving to survive and develop in uncertain environments.

Drawing upon the service-dominant logic (S-D logic) and elaboration likelihood model (ELM), this paper provides an integrative model to investigate how argument quality and source credibility of CSR communication affects customer value co-creation behavior, resulting in increased brand trust. Additionally, it unveils how brand trust and the perception of COVID-19 risk influence both brand love and subjective well-being.

The data of this study were collected through survey questionnaire from 304 coffee shop customers using convenience sampling and tested using the partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) technique to validate its model.

The research findings confirm the positive association between source credibility and customer value co-creation (i.e. customer participation and citizenship behavior). By contrast, argument quality is revealed to have a significantly positive effect on customer citizenship behavior (CCB) but a non-significant effect on customer participation behavior (CPB). Additionally, the study identifies that customer value co-creation behavior significantly promotes brand trust. Finally, findings indicate that brand trust and the perception of COVID-19 risk significantly influence brand love and subjective well-being.

This study contributes to the literature on CSR communication and S-D logic and provides new insights for marketers and advertisers to manage brands in the post-pandemic scenario through CSR communications. Furthermore, this study theoretically extends the ELM model to the CSR communication research. Finally, this study expands the relevant literature by clarifying the relationships between the perception of COVID-19 risk, brand love and subjective well-being.

This study investigates the underlying mechanism through which perceived local iconness increases customers’ purchase intentions for culturally mixed products.

It utilizes an online survey with purposive sampling to gather data. Structural equation modeling is applied to examine data gathered from 471 Chinese customers.

Consumers’ perceived local iconness of culturally mixed products positively influences their purchase intentions, and this connection is mediated by perceptions of quality, social and emotional values.

Incorporating Chinese cultural elements that can evoke local iconness perceptions among Chinese consumers is necessary for global brands. Moreover, when creating or promoting culturally mixed products, global brands should carefully consider consumers’ perceived quality, social and emotional values.

Drawing on the signaling theory, this study advances knowledge on how local iconness increases the value of and customers’ desire to purchase culturally mixed products. It provides practical suggestions on how global brands can succeed when launching culturally mixed products in emerging markets.

This paper aims to identify the key issues that healthcare knowledge-intensive organizations (KIPOs) should focus on to define themselves as socioenvironmentally and governance responsible for integrating environmental, social, and governance (ESG) logic into their business strategy. At the same time, this provides an understanding of how healthcare KIPOs contribute to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals of the 2030 Agenda.

Taking a cue from the model developed by the World Economic Forum, an “ESG Processing Map” was constructed to identify qualitative disclosures that a healthcare company should consider when implementing sustainability logic. The aspects investigated were processed, considering national and international standards, frameworks and disclosures. The social network analysis technique was used to systemize and combine the outcomes of these processes and analyze their consistency with sustainable development.

Through the “ESG Processing Map,” 13 areas of action and 27 topics specific to the health sector were defined on which to intervene in sustainability in order to concretely help HCOs to place specific corrective and improvement actions over time concerning socioenvironmental and governance aspects.

The paper provides contribute, on the one hand, to enriching and updating the academic literature on ESG logic in a still underexplored field and, on the other hand, to provide these types of organizations with a “compass” to guide and orient their business strategies towards sustainability.

Franchising contributes significantly to national economies but is overlooked in supply chain literature. This study aims to contribute to the franchising and supply chain literature by examining how the digitisation of the franchising supply chain improves firm performance.

A single longitudinal case study approach was selected to investigate how a leading coffee brand digitised its franchising supply chain. Resource constraints theory and agency theory provide the theoretical framework. Data collection included both qualitative and quantitative data. Over two years, chronological, supply chain and thematic analyses and interpretation uncovered important findings and developed four research propositions.

Findings show that digitisation can impact performance in eight areas: Resource management, Resource constraints, Efficiency, Business-to-Business (B2B)/Business-To-Customer (B2C) links, Rapid expansion, Risk mitigation, Information asymmetries and Faster supply chain responses. Four digital technologies (advanced analytics, Internet of Things, Autonomous Mobile Robots and B2B e-shop) impacted three franchisor functions (Machine maintenance, Inventory management, Franchisee and end-customer relations). The study develops four research propositions on how digitisation impacts performance in terms of (1) resource monitoring and control, (2) learning and knowledge creation, (3) coordination and collaboration and (4) competition.

Franchising supply chains have been overlooked in the literature; this study provides insights into using resource constraints theory and agency theory complementarily to explain supply chain digitisation and provides actionable practical implications for selecting, implementing and continuously improving Industry 4.0 technologies in franchising supply chains.

Working conditions, pay rates and the rights of workers to collectively negotiate have become important points of discussions in recent years, with support for unions and union applications rising to levels long unseen in America. In many instances, though, companies have responded aggressively. This is not the first time such a dynamic has played out in American business. This study aims to take a fresh look at one of America’s most prominent historical disputes between labor and ownership – the Homestead Massacre of 1892 – to glean lessons from that conflict that remain relevant to today’s business environment.

This study adopts game theory and the principles of repeated interaction to assess how differing discount factors led to differences in time orientations between the workers and the Carnegie company. These differing time orientations affected both the strategy each side deployed in the negotiations and the payoffs received by the parties. Letters, contemporary news reports and histories of the events leading up to and immediately following the 1892 Homestead Massacre are qualitatively analyzed with a genealogical pragmatic approach.

Differences in temporal orientation between management and workers exacerbated the conflict, with the workers adopting a more cooperative stance and distal time orientation, while the Carnegie company negotiated with a proximal time orientation and played to “win” a game that, in fact, could not be fully won or lost given its infinitely repeating nature. The result was a short-term victory for the Carnegie company but with long-term negative consequences that highlight the suboptimal outcome the company achieved by playing a proximal strategy in an infinite game.

Although the incident at Homestead is a well-studied labor dispute, many of the themes that preceded the incident have resurfaced in the modern work context. This work, by adopting game theory as an analytical framework, provides new insights into management mistakes that led to the labor conflict and lessons for what present-day managers can do to avoid exacerbating labor strife.

The different dimensions of the online engagement behaviors exhibited by omnichannel shoppers, who mainly rely on the online channel for information search, are still understudied. This study aims to investigate how service journey quality (SJQ) has an impact on the overall omnichannel customer experience leading to customer identification (CI) with the store, subsequently leading to their exhibition of online engagement behaviors (writing online reviews, blogging, rating products and service online and indulging in customer-to-customer online interactions.

The research is cross-sectional, quantitative and descriptive. Purposive sampling was used to choose the research's participants. Data were collected from 591 Indian omnichannel customers who had previously made an omnichannel purchase that included the concurrent usage of various channels of a retailer using a verified self-administered survey. Using the Smart PLS 4.0 software, the proposed conceptual model has been evaluated.

The results indicate that omnichannel customer experience mediates the relationship between SJQ and CI with the store, subsequently leading to their exhibition of online engagement behaviors (writing online reviews, blogging, rating products and service online and indulging in customer-to-customer online interactions). The perceived customer gratitude toward the store significantly and positively moderated the direct relationship between SJQ and different online engagement behaviors (writing online reviews, blogging, rating products and service online and indulging in customer-to-customer online interactions).

The study relied upon the omnichannel shoppers of only Indian population and relied on a cross-sectional data collection procedure for this research.

Post-pandemic, with highly dynamic shifts in customer preferences, the need for channel-agnostic shopping leading to the unpredictability of purchase patterns has made SJQ the only dimension to achieve sustainable loyalty intentions through value co-creation in an omnichannel retail context. Emphasizing post-purchase behaviors like different online engagement behaviors (writing online reviews, blogging, rating products and services online and indulging in customer-to-customer online interactions), this study is the first to show that SJQ might affect four different online customer engagement behaviors through omnichannel shopping experience and CI with the store. The moderating effect of customer-perceived gratitude toward the retailer on a few proposed hypotheses was also tested to give managerial recommendations. The study also answers the call to investigate the moderating role of customer gratitude in determining service quality-driven engagement behaviors.

This paper primarily aims to identify the multilevel learning processes emerging from abrupt telework implementation in a public knowledge-intensive organization (KIO) amid the COVID-19 crisis.

This single-case process research was guided by interpretivist epistemology. Empirical data from documentary research and 41 interviewed managers were processed by inductive qualitative analysis using the multilevel learning theoretical model.

Eight types and three modes of learning processes during the COVID-19 pandemic were identified in a public KIO, iteratively emerging in multilevel learning dynamics during the compulsory adoption of telework and replacing the face-to-face work mode conducted since its foundation.

As insider researchers, while daily and privileged access to the field was obtained, it also demanded their continuous effort to maintain transparency and scientific distancing; conceptual results are restricted to process theorisation studies, specifically the 4Is theoretical model in the scope of crisis learning process studies concerning KIOs.

This study provides evidence for managers to adopt interactive dynamics among eight multilevel types and three learning modes of emergent learning, developed during the COVID-19 pandemic, and support learning practices’ implementation and routinisation across three organizational levels in crisis situations. In addition, evidencing emergent types of learning enables organizational learning (OL) researchers to examine how organizational structures and work practices either promote or inhibit different learning types and impact multilevel learning when adopting teleworking during a crisis.

This research has theoretical value in two ways: (i) Providing empirically supported knowledge: This involves understanding multilevel learning processes resulting from emergent learning in a public KIO that abruptly adopted teleworking during a crisis context; (ii) deepening process theorization studies on OL: To achieve this, we enhance the 4I model by incorporating eight types and two modes of learning processes. These processes iteratively emerge from the individual and group levels towards the institutional level in a public KIO.