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Organizing entrepreneurship policy efforts is not an easy task. There are often several different actors involved, and their efforts towards improving conditions for entrepreneurs may be more or less organized. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the organizational archetypes of local entrepreneurship policy, across a number of factors relating to coordination mechanisms and outsourcing.

The study is based on a survey of 77 Danish municipalities, covering 79 per cent of the total population, and their entrepreneurship policy structures. A two-step cluster analysis has been performed to identify taxonomies of entrepreneurship policy organizations.

The findings reveal four different clusters: arm’s length coordination; arm’s length decoupling; internal centralization; and arm’s length centralization. Moreover the study reveals a link between these archetypes and the effectiveness of the local entrepreneurship policy delivery structure, suggesting that some structures may be more effective than other.

The paper shifts the focus from policy formulation to organization, showing the importance of organizational structure for better performance. Specifically, the paper illustrates how lack of reaction to the environment leads to underperformance. Moreover, the paper draws the attention towards these new taxonomies, which are of value not only to academia but also to the political world.

The purpose of this paper is to develop, and explicate the significance of the need for a systemic conceptual framework for understanding IT business value.

Embracing a systems perspective, this paper examines the interrelationship between IT and other organisational factors at the organisational level and its impact on the business value of IT. As a result, a systemic conceptual framework for understanding IT business value is developed. An example of enhancing IT business value through developing systemic capabilities is then used to test and demonstrate the value of this framework.

The findings suggest that IT business value would be significantly enhanced when systemic capabilities are generated from the synergistic interrelations among IT and other organisational factors at the systems level, while the system’s human agents play a critical role in developing systemic capabilities by purposely configuring and reconfiguring organisational factors.

The conceptual framework advanced provides the means to recognise the significance of the need for understanding IT business value systemically and dynamically. It encourages an organisation to focus on developing systemic capabilities by ensuring that IT and other organisational factors work together as a synergistic whole, better managing the role its human agents play in shaping the systems interrelations, and developing and redeveloping systemic capabilities by configuring its subsystems purposely with the changing business environment.

This paper reveals the nature of systemic capabilities underpinned by a systems perspective. The resultant systemic conceptual framework for understanding IT business value can help us move away from pairwise resource complementarity to focusing on the whole system and its interrelations while responding to the changing business environment. It is hoped that the framework can help organisations delineate important IT investment considerations and the priorities that they must adopt to create superior IT business value.

Adults with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) experience significant health-care disparities across physical and mental health domains resulting in poorer health and quality of life. Poor transitions to adult care negatively impact the health of adults with ASD. Current research focuses on personal factors in research samples that lack diversity. The purpose of this study is to examine the lived health-care experiences of geographically and ethnically diverse young adults with ASD in adult care settings in the USA to understand provider and system-level factors affecting their health.

Nine caregivers of young adults with ASD participated in key informant interviews describing their experiences in navigating the health-care system. Data were analyzed using a grounded theory approach.

The data indicated that limited quantity of services, poor quality of services, and high cost of services had a negative effect on the health of adults with ASD. Issues cascaded to become more complex.

Practical implications for payors, providers, persons with ASD and their families are discussed in this paper.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study answers the call to better understand system-level factors affecting the health of geographically and ethnically diverse people with ASD.

This paper presents a model of teacher and school executive satisfaction derived from a study involving 892 respondents in 71 government schools in Western Sydney, Australia. Factor analysis of survey items was utilised to develop an eight factor model of teacher satisfaction. The eight factors were named: school leadership, climate, decision making; merit promotion and local hiring; school infrastructure; school reputation; status and image of teachers; student achievement; workload and the impact of change; and professional self‐growth. Scores on the scales fell into three domains: “core business of teaching” factors (student achievement; professional self‐growth); school level factors (school leadership, climate, decision making; school infrastructure; school reputation); and system level/societal factors (workload and impact of change; status and image of teachers; merit promotion). Respondents were most satisfied with “core business” aspects and least satisfied with system level/societal factors, while school level factors showed the most variation, reflecting the influence of teachers’ specific and varying within‐school experiences. Leadership, communication and decision making styles were found to be important contributing factors to satisfaction with school based aspects of respondents’ roles. It is argued that within the important, school level domain, action to improve teacher satisfaction is most likely to be effective.

To represent the effect of ‘human factors in total quality management (TQM) environment’ in terms of a single numerical index by considering their inheritances and interactions.

Various human factors affecting the TQM culture in an organization are identified and discussed for the sub factors affecting them. These factors are interacting with each other and their overall effect helps an organization in attaining TQM enabled needs. The paper attempts to represent the overall effect of human factors quantitatively by developing a mathematical model using graph theoretic approach. In this approach, interaction among identified human factors is represented through digraph, matrix model and a multinomial.

The extent of human aspects present in an organization, conducive to TQM culture is represented in terms of the “human index”. It provides an insight into the human factors at system and subsystem level. The developed procedure may be useful for self‐analysis and comparison among organizations.

Since, human behaviour is difficult to predict, so are the human factors. The paper considers general factors, which may vary depending on type of organization, size of organization and geographical location. There is a scope of research in factor specific organizations.

It provides a useful methodology for organizations to assess human aspects and improve upon therein. Procedure for stepwise application of methodology is given with example that may help an industry to implement it.

The paper attempts to quantify the intangibles through systematic approach and is of value to industries to improve upon their work environment.

Audits are an essential part of supply chain management, whether they be of a single supplier's facilities or the whole supply chain. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, auditors mainly conducted supplier audits in-person and on-site. Subsequent travel restrictions have meant that auditors have had to perform these audits remotely. The purpose of this paper is to conceptually describe the emerging phenomenon of remote audits and explore the implications of this change for the future.

This exploratory research used qualitative interviews with key stakeholders (firms, auditors and regulators) to provide an empirical basis for the study. A total of 60 interviews were conducted in two rounds with 40 respondents from 26 organizations. A process perspective lens was used to explore the fundamental changes in supplier audits.

The study provides an interpretative conceptual framework of remote supplier audits grounded in key factors (audit process, use of technologies, document and record sharing) and identifies a set of contingency factors (technological sophistication, reputation for integrity, maturity of internal audit processes, and level of complexities and risk involved) that affect the effectiveness of remote audits.

Remote supplier audits have radically changed how supply chains operate. This paper presents the first empirically-grounded study on remote auditing. It provides a springboard for future research in this domain and practical implications for managers to assist them with the development of remote auditing in their firms and supply chains.

Electromagnetic interference (EMI) on communication systems of unban rail transit can hardly be clarified because of complicated factors around railways. This paper aims to target this issue and extend experimental and theoretical analysis.

This paper take the Nanjing Dashengguan Bridge as an example, because it carries the most tracks in the world and bears three kinds of trains running through, providing a perfect complex environment. First, it investigates the three communication systems, terrestrial trunked radio, communications-based train control (CBTC) and passenger information system (PIS) that Nanjing Metro uses, and select appropriate devices accordingly. Second, it establishes a system level platform and conduct three tests to analyze their respective operating principles and performance difference under common electromagnetic environments. Third, it adopts theoretical formula to verify test results.

The experiment results and theoretical analysis mutually corroborate each other and present practical recommendations: an 8 m or more distance between two tracks will ensure no obvious EMI created by a passing train on communication systems; two certain communication systems should not share the same frequency band; interference level is more related to field strength than weathers and building materials; and CBTC DSSS waveguide mode as well as PIS LTE mode are preferred.

This research also provides a practical method of investigating EMI for other complex situations.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how decisions of managers and administrators of online communities on norms and rules affect the sense of virtual community (SOVC), which is an important factor of the quality of online information.

The study followed a two-level research design based on 970 online community members, nested within 36 online communities. Data collection consisted of two stages: first a web survey of a sample of online community members was conducted, followed by a web survey of administrators of the same online communities. A two-level hierarchical regression analysis was used to test the hypotheses.

The empirical results suggest that prominence of rules under the condition of members’ participation in their creation, presence of reputation mechanisms, and content moderation contribute significantly to the SOVC , while presence of lighter sanctions and interactive moderation do not.

Since this study is based on web forums, the validity of the proposed hypotheses for other types of online communities cannot be firmly established. Additional elements of online community management could be considered for a stronger system-level explanation of the SOVC.

The study demonstrates that online community administrators need to be considerate in creating and enforcing norms, as their decisions have an impact on the SOVC and consequently on the quality of online information.

The literature considers many factors of the SOVC but none of the previous studies have considered how community management is associated with this phenomenon.

A remarkable amount of theory‐based research is beginning to suggest that, even in organisations that pride themselves on having a quality orientation, the approach driving current policies and practices for human resource (HR) performance appraisal might be in fundamental conflict with essential requirements of total quality management (TQM). Seen in this light, this article aims to explore such (in)consistency between HRM theory and TQM precepts and assumptions.

Given that there is relatively little evidence regarding the nature of HR performance appraisal in quality‐driven organisations, this research used a combination of quantitative and qualitative investigation of performance appraisal and TQM assumptions.

The research highlights that while some of the quality management gurus, followed by other TQM scholars, advise organisations to relinquish and eliminate performance appraisal practices, this is not a unanimous view in both the literature and practice.

The research has the potential to aid researchers in comprehending the broad and complex mix of performance appraisal practices with those criteria underlying TQM. Therefore, the fundamental need is for more empirical research and analysis in order to test various theoretical assumptions about the impact of HR‐related practices on organisational performance in quality‐driven organisations.

The results of the research should enable practicing managers to determine which HR performance characteristics are more consistent with TQM initiatives. In particular, the research findings should also facilitate more valid diagnosis of TQM failures.

The paper highlights that the effectiveness of TQM can be enhanced by designing a performance management system that fits the culture and strategy of the organisation and also strongly supports a quality‐driven management strategy.

A literature review revealed that in recent times, many companies have attempted organization‐wide change management through the philosophy and principles of Lean Thinking (LT). Although some organizations have transformed and reaped significant benefits in this endeavour, many organizations have failed in this attempt. One of the reasons can be attributed to the fact that not many organizations are attempting to “assess the organizational readiness” before implementing/adapting LT. This paper aims to address this issue.

Hence in this paper, an attempt has made to address this problem by presenting a hypothetical case study of an Indian organization to comprehensively assess organizational readiness of the case organisation using a graph theoretic approach (GTA), which has the ability to integrate and model multiple inter‐related factors.

From the obtained results, it was found that the case organization is not fully ready to embrace LT. It needs to work on different factors under the categories of suppliers, customers, etc. in addition to employees, organisation and top management for smooth and successful adaptation.

According to the authors' knowledge, no paper exists either in the literature of organizational analysis or in the field of LT literature that demonstrates the application of GTA, specifically for assessing the readiness of an organization in adapting LT. Furthermore, various factors which need to be considered were identified apart from modelling them by incorporating the relationship/dependency that exists between these factors, which is unique.