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The recently developed resource orchestration theory studies the processes by which managers handle resources to create competitive advantages. According to this theory, it is the way that resources interact with each other that results in such advantages. Resource integration, i.e. the alignment, or fit between resources, is one important outcome of resource orchestration processes. This paper aims to develop a scale and outline approaches to measuring such resource integration.

Using a typology of five types of resources derived from value theory, the authors develop a scale for measuring the fit between resource types, i.e. the degree of resource integration. The authors illustrate the method using a case example of an IT company and demonstrate how a variety of statistical methods including hierarchical cluster analysis, structural equation modeling, social network analysis and methods from biostatistics can provide measures of resource integration.

The authors develop a scale and associated measures that can help scholars systematically measure and identify firms with a high or low level of resource integration capability. This makes it possible to investigate further these companies and reconstruct how they support dynamic capabilities, as well as commonalities across firms with high and low levels of this capability.

Existing studies on resource orchestration have failed to provide us with a reliable measurement instrument that can be used both in cross-sectional work, and in repeated or time-series studies, allowing us to assess the degree to which a wider range of resources in an organization are integrated. The authors develop and demonstrate such an instrument.

Loneliness is known to adversely impact employee health, performance and affective commitment. This study involves a quantitative cross-sectional analysis of online survey data reported by adults employed in the United States (n = 5,927) to explore how loneliness and other related factors may influence avoidable absenteeism and turnover intention.

Worker loneliness was assessed using the UCLA Loneliness Scale (Version 3). Composite variables were constructed as proxy measures of worker job and personal resources. Structural equation modeling (SEM) was used to examine independent variable effects on dependent outcomes of (a) work days missed in the last month due to stress (stress-related absenteeism) and (b) likelihood to quit within the next year (turnover intention).

The job resources of social companionship, work-life balance and satisfaction with communication had significant negative relationships to loneliness in the SEM, as did the personal resources of resilience and less perceived alienation. Results further show lonely workers have significantly greater stress-related absenteeism (p = 0.000) and higher turnover intention ratings (p = 0.000) compared to workers who are not lonely. Respondent demographics (age, race and gender) and other occupational characteristics also produced significant outcomes.

Study findings underscore the importance of proactively addressing loneliness among workers and facilitating job and personal resource development as an employee engagement and retention strategy.

Loneliness substantially contributes to worker job withdrawal and has negative implications for organizational effectiveness and costs.

Background: Evidence from a range of major public health incidents shows that neighbour-based action can have a critical role in emergency response, assistance and recovery. However, there is little research to date on neighbour-based action during the 2020 coronavirus pandemic. This article reports on a survey of people engaged in supporting their neighbours in weeks three and four of the UK COVID-19 lockdown.

Methods: Members of area-based and community of interest COVID-19 support groups in the Bristol conurbation were invited to complete an online survey. Of 1,255 people who clicked on the survey link, 862 responded; of these, 539 responses were eligible for analysis.

Results: Respondents reported providing a wide range of support that went beyond health information, food and medical prescription assistance, to include raising morale through humour, creativity and acts of kindness and solidarity. A substantial proportion felt that they had become more involved in neighbourhood life following the lockdown and had an interest in becoming more involved in future. Neighbour support spanned all adult age groups, including older people categorised as being at-risk to the virus. With respect to most measures, there were no differences in the characteristics of support between respondents in areas of higher and lower deprivation. However, respondents from more deprived areas were more likely to state that they were involved in supporting certain vulnerable groups.

Conclusions: As with previous research on major social upheavals, our findings suggest that responses to the viral pandemic and associated social restrictions may increase existing social and health inequalities, and further research should explore this issue in more depth.

The first objective of this study is to review the mechanism of conducting extra-curricular activities (ECAs) in the open and distance learning (ODL) setting. To achieve this objective, the procedure of ECAs at the Virtual University of Pakistan has been studied. The second objective of this study is to find the impact of ECAs on student engagement.

This is a cross-sectional quantitative study. The questionnaire has been used to collect the data. The purposive sampling technique has been used, while this study's sample size is 970. An independent sample t-test has been used to find the difference between the groups.

This study shows a significant difference between the engagement levels of students who have been part of any ECA at university compared to the students who never participated in any ECA.

The results have been derived from the data gathered from one university only that might hinder the generalizability of the findings. The same study can be conducted in other ODL institutions to authenticate the findings.

This study will help in realizing the policymakers of ODL about the importance of ECCAs. This study has also discussed an existing system of conducting ECCAs in an ODL setting that can be generalized and implemented across all the ODL universities to enhance student engagement.

This study has highlighted the importance of ECAs in ODL institutions that have been neglected since forever. This study is novel because it has highlighted the importance of social interaction of students in ODL and its relation with student engagement that has not been highlighted by any study so far.

This research aims to identify and organise the conditions of organisational readiness for digital transformation.

This qualitative study comprises three case studies within manufacturing companies from different sizes and industries located in Sweden. Plant visits and in-depth interviews bring to light companies' experiences with initial steps towards digital transformation. A set of conditions for digital organisational readiness was translated into a questionnaire and tested with one of the studied companies.

This paper organises and tests digital organisational readiness conditions to support companies' initial steps on digital transformation. The results are put in perspective of established change management theory and previous studies about digital transformation. The findings will conclude in a questionnaire to support dialogue and digital organisational readiness assessments.

Additional conditions for the initial phase of digital transformation could possibly be found if more cases had been included in the study.

The article identifies a set of conditions translated into a questionnaire that should be used as a dialogue tool to create strategic alignment and support companies in their initial discussions. If this process can be faster and more efficient, the company can achieve a competitive advantage against competitors.

This research's relevance relies on the fact that companies are advancing in adopting digital technologies without being ready from an organisational perspective. This gap creates barriers for companies' digital maturing processes, stopping them from having full access to digital technologies' benefits.

This chapter presents the many premises of this book. It first discusses the book’s central questions and lays out the design of the large multi-national and multi-method study, carried out across Northern Europe. It also places the book at the interdisciplinary space between contemporary innovation economics and cultural and social theory. It then discusses the complex set of social processes that have conditioned the phenomena that the book studies – how and why are the contemporary audiovisual media industries co-innovating and converging with other sectors including education, tourism and health care? Within this framework, it discusses the effects of the broader individualisation and mediatisation processes, of media convergence, of the emergence of cross-media or transmedia strategies, of the evolution of the service and experience economies and of the emergence of creative industries policy frameworks.

Listening to the customers has long been a key phrase and success element in product branding. This paper aims to highlight the importance of listening to residents during the branding of a place. The study explores ways of listening to residents to ensure they are heard and also discusses the challenges and benefits related to place branding flowing from having residents participate in decision-making processes.

Listening to residents and offering opportunities to participate requires place branders to fully attend to, comprehend and respond to residents’ comments, requests, ideas and feedback. This study reports on how two Nordic cities – Turku and Helsinki – listen to their residents. The data used comprise face-to-face interviews, telephone and e-mail conversations and documentary material.

Residents should not be considered as one homogeneous target; participation options and channels should be adapted to the demographics and geographic issues of the different regions and resident groups.

The role of residents and the importance of listening are crucial features in the emerging concept of inclusive place branding (Kavaratzis et al., 2017); its future conceptual development could benefit from the case examples at hand.

City authorities should listen to residents and provide them with opportunities to actively contribute to decision-making. Other cities could learn from the examples introduced in the paper.

This paper documents two Nordic examples of cities putting into practice a policy of listening to the residents, a previously neglected research area.

This paper aims to present findings from an EU-funded international student-led energy saving competition (SAVES) on a scale previously unseen. There are multiple accounts of short-term projects and energy saving competitions encouraging pro-environmental behaviour change amongst students in university dormitories, but the purpose of this research is to provide evidence of consistent and sustained energy savings from student-led energy savings competitions, underpinned by practical action.

A mixed-methods approach (pre- and post-intervention surveys, focus groups and analysis of energy meter data) was used to determine the level of energy savings and quantifiable behaviour change delivered by students across participating university dormitories.

This research has provided further insight into the potential for savings and behaviour change in university dormitories through relatively simple actions. Whilst other interventions have shown greater savings, this project provided consistent savings over two years of 7 per cent across a large number of university dormitories in five countries through simple behaviour changes.

An energy dashboard displaying near a real-time leaderboard was added to the engagement in the second year of the project. Whilst students were optimistic about the role that energy dashboards could play, the evidence is not here to quantify the impact of dashboards. Further research is required to understand the potential of dashboards to contribute to behavioural change savings and in constructing competitions between people and dormitories that are known to each other.

SAVES provided engagement with students, enabling, empowering and motivating them to save energy – focusing specifically on the last stage of the “Awareness, Interest, Desire, Action” framework. Automated meter reading data was used in the majority of participating dormitories to run near real-time energy challenges through an energy dashboard that informed students how much energy they saved compared to a target, and encouraged peer-to-peer learning and international cooperation through a virtual twinning scheme.

Findings from energy saving competitions in universities are typically from small-scale and short-term interventions. SAVES was an energy-saving competition in university dormitories facilitated by the UK National Union of Students in five countries reaching over 50,000 students over two academic years (incorporating dormitories at 17 universities). As such it provides clear and important evidence of the real-world long-term potential efficiency savings of such interventions.

The purpose of this paper is to review and compare the implementation of “arts inclusion” policies (AIPs) by 14 different public administrative systems around the world. It aims to provide a consolidated source which informs further studies in this field, and to develop a framework to compare AIPs at a global level.

Using “arts inclusion policy” as the search term, academic journals from a wide spectrum of fields were reviewed. A data set was extracted from the Compendium of Cultural Policies and Trends’ online database which provided real-time information of national cultural policies. Another data set is from the United Nations’ Inequality-adjusted Human Development Index, as the geographic scope of the review – largely focussing on UK, US, Australian, Scandinavian and Asian contexts. Using existing policy-making literature as benchmark, the authors designed and applied a comparative framework dedicated to AIPs which focussed on “policy-making structures” as the main ground of comparison.

An important finding is that the policy development and implementation of AIPs often underscore inter-sectoral involvement in many public administrations in this study. With policy leadership and financial incentives pivotal to effective AIPs, central governments should take a more concerted leadership role to include AIPs in national inter-sectoral policies, encourage evidence-based research, expand funding and advocate the recognition of the impacts of arts inclusion. It is concluded that AIPs in western countries remain more developed in targeted scopes and programme diversity compared to those of Asian countries and regions. Continued studies in this field are encouraged.

This review is the first of its kind to include a number of Asian and western countries within its research scope, allowing it to offer a more holistic outlook on the development and implementation of AIPs in different countries and regions. A common critique with all relevant existing literature was usually their lack of concrete comparative grounds, and the present study’s all-encompassing review of literature from across different levels and sectors of respective public administrative systems contribute to a unique and comprehensive perspective in the arts and health discourse.

The purpose of this paper is to explore different types of packaging paradoxes and the reasons for their existence in food supply chains.

The research uses a multiple case study approach with rich empirical data from seven leading companies in Swedish food supply chains. The research uses coding and a paradox theory lens to analyse packaging paradoxes, both within and between companies in a supply chain.

The paper provides a novel theoretical lens which uses comprehensive empirical data to identify and categorise four types of packaging paradoxes on two system levels in food supply chains. It presents detailed descriptions of, and underlying reasons for, the paradoxes. It also discusses strategies required to manage packaging paradoxes.

Future research should confirm and extend the findings in this study by incorporating data from companies in other countries. It should cover the importance of paradoxes, their impact on company performance and innovation, and how different paradoxes are related to each other. It should also investigate strategies to manage paradoxes further.

The findings should help companies acknowledge and identify management principles for packaging paradoxes in food supply chains.

It is the first study which systematically explores packaging paradoxes in food supply chains. The study offers a new approach to understand the complexity of packaging decisions in food supply chains. It contributes to the packaging logistics literature by extending theoretical knowledge about conflicts of interest related to packaging. The management discussion offers initial insights into management of packaging paradoxes and directions for future research.