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This paper aims to describe the development of WorkOut, an Internet-based program designed to help young men overcome the barriers towards help-seeking and to build the skills they need to understand and manage their own mental health. Information and communication technologies (ICT) hold great potential to significantly improve mental health outcomes for hard-to-reach and traditionally underserved groups. Internet-based programs and mobile phone applications may be particularly appealing to young men due to their convenience, accessibility and privacy and they also address the strong desire for independence and autonomy held by most men.

In this paper, we describe the design process itself, and the strategies used for multi-disciplinary collaboration. The initial evaluation process and results are also described which consisted of three distinct phases: website statistics; one-on-one user testing; and pilot interviews.

The results suggest that WorkOut has the potential to attract young men. However, further work is needed to ensure that users remain engaged with the program.

The difficulties encountered and lessons learned provide an insight into the factors that should be considered in the design and evaluation of future ICT-based strategies within the mental health domain, as well as their potential applicability to clinical and educational settings.

The purpose of this paper is to examine human resource management (HRM) practices of the top 25 companies identified as “best” in India in 2011. This paper provides insights into HRM practices of a leading country in Asia that is playing a very important role in the global economy.

This conceptual paper will use for its research analysis the business reports of the Outlook Business Magazine and AON Hewitt. AON Hewitt is a global human resource consulting company and is an established authority in identifying “best” companies in India since 2004. A qualitative content analysis was done of the business report to identify predominant themes.

The analysis identified how the “best” 25 Indian companies offer progressive HRM practices that required careful investment and collaboration. This research showcases seven specific HRM themes that include elaborate staffing, investment in learning, work–life balance, egalitarian practices, developmental performance culture, generous benefits and engagement initiatives.

This paper provides preliminary guidelines for global practitioners who may be interested in doing business in India. It also provides a model of “best” HRM practices adopted by 25 companies that could help other organizations identify successful HRM practices in India. Among the 25 companies, 16 are Indian companies and 9 are subsidiaries of multinationals.

This paper outlines HRM “best” practices of organizations in an emerging Asian economy that has not been addressed before. This paper hopes to bridge this paucity in the extant literature by showcasing the “best” HRM practices from 25 “best” companies in India. It also provides an Indian model of “best” HRM practices that can be tested by other scholars for future studies.

Top management support is recognized as the most critical factor for the success of large information system (IS) projects. However, getting this support is often difficult, because top management has multiple priorities and one has to compete with others to obtain such support. Political maneuvering is thus an integral and necessary part of the process of obtaining top management support. In this chapter the authors review current research on this topic and organize and synthesize our findings into a framework. The authors then propose four specific strategies which can be used to obtain top management support, including the following: (1) social capital, (2) social engagement, (3) rational persuasion, and (4) exchange strategies. While the authors argue that all four strategies should be applied, the specific circumstances in which they should be applied vary. A two-stage process is proposed that identifies the appropriate criteria for determining the most appropriate strategy. The criteria are: (1) the type of top management support needed (i.e., durable vs immediate) and (2) the level of top management-project team trust (i.e., high vs low).

Enterprise resource planning (ERP) is intended to integrate all facets of a company’s business operations encompassing production planning, material purchasing, inventory control, logistics, accounting, finance, marketing, and human resource management by creating a single depository of the database that can be shared by the entire organization and its trading partners. Through an empirical study, the purpose of this paper is to identify a multitude of drivers that facilitate or hinder the implementation of ERP in business environments. Also, this paper determines its role in supply chain operations and assesses its impact on supply chain performances.

To examine which factors drive the ERP adoption and gauge the level of the ERP success, the authors develop a research framework based on two well-known theories in the strategy literature: a contingency theory; and a resource-based view of the firm. This research framework allowed us to develop a series of hypotheses regarding the use of ERP for strategic sourcing. To test hypotheses, the authors carried out the study in three phases: a pre-pilot; a pilot; and a large-scale questionnaire survey. In the pre-pilot phase, the authors generated potential survey items through theory development and a literature review. In the pilot phase, the authors develop a structural equation model along with the identification of valid constructs based on structural interviews and the Q-sort method. At the last stage, the authors conducted a large-scale survey via mail questionnaires primarily targeting the Korean industry comprised of manufacturers and their suppliers and customers.

The firm’s ERP adoption and implementation decision is mainly affected by its internal environment. Defying the conventional wisdom, the firm’s external environment has little influence on its decision to adopt and implement ERP. However, through the mediating role of an internal environment, an external environment still indirectly influences the ERP adoption and ERP implementation decision. Also, the authors found that ERP could enhance the ERP adopter’s organizational capability and supplier capability.

This study is one of a few attempts to investigate the role of ERP in the supply chain and identify important determinants influencing the ERP adoption and implementation decisions. Especially, in contrast with the previous literature which often gauged the benefits of ERP from an ERP adopter’s standpoint, this paper is one of the few to assess the benefits of ERP from the ERP adopter’s supply chain partners standpoints. Also, it is one of the first to assess the impact of ERP on supplier capability, organizational capability, and customer value.

Literature describes the transformation process of employees’ individual competences into firm-specific competences as a great challenge in the performance management and management field. Recently, to favor the transformation of competences, some companies have adopted enterprise social networking (ESN). However, not enough studies support the understanding of its role in performance management and measurement and scant attention is given to the inclusion of competences in a holistic performance measurement and management system (PMMS). To help close this gap, the purpose of this paper is to develop knowledge on the role of ESN in measurement and management of competences to favor the development of a holistic PMMS.

The research adopts a multiple case study methodology using a qualitative meta-analysis. It investigates 32 multinational companies by case studies available in the scientific literature.

The results highlight the use of ESN as a relevant support for the development of a holistic PMMS based on a high maturity in performance measurement and a democratic and participative approach in performance management. ESN provides real-time data collection, analysis and reports that encourage a democratic and participative performance management. It facilitates relationships, knowledge sharing and favors a high maturity performance measurement.

The paper provides implications for theory, practice and society. First, the paper rationalizes the impact of ESN usage on performance measurement and management. Second, it offers new knowledge supporting practitioners in the development of holistic PMMS. Third, it highlights that ESN favors people in self-expression of own capacity, sharing artwork and knowledge on specific topics.

The importance of supply chain alignment has been discussed since the birth of supply chain management (SCM). Yet it remains a major challenge for supply chains. This paper aims to systematically review the cross disciplinary literature on supply chain alignment in order to identify, and develop constructs for enablers to alignment, and an associated set of hypotheses.

A systematic approach has been taken to the literature review, which ensures it is auditable and repeatable. The selection criteria are clearly aligned with the review question ensuring all literature pertinent to the question is identified and reviewed. Relevant information is extracted from the selected papers and synthesised into a set of hypotheses.

Six main constructs for the enablers of alignment are identified and defined: organisational structure, internal relational behaviour, customer relational behaviour, top management support, information sharing and business performance measurement system. While the literature is disparate, across different disciplines there is good support for these enablers. The relationships between supply chain alignment and shareholder and customer value are also argued with the support of the literature. Although each of the enablers is argued to positively affect shareholder and customer value, their interactions with one another are not well supported in the literature, either theoretically or empirically, and therefore this could be an area for further research.

While the hypotheses remain theoretical, it is now possible to test them and understand the relative significance of the various enablers to alignment.

The significance of shareholder and customer alignment on the delivery of shareholder and customer value can be examined, thus moving towards a theory of supply chain alignment. This is needed since in practice companies are struggling with supply chain alignment.

The existing literature on supply chain alignment is disparate and multi‐disciplinary as this descriptive analysis shows, with 72 papers published in 43 different journals. Moreover, most of the papers focus on particular enablers, while this paper brings together six key enablers from the literature to produce a set of hypotheses.

There have been major efforts to develop the technology for integrated construction environments and the mechanisms needed to improve the collaboration between construction professionals. Evidently, the development and usage of such an environment is a complicated task. The two issues that can be among the main contributors to this are: the development of the technology and its effective implementation. These two issues are addressed separately in this paper. The paper first explains the approaches of sharing project information, followed by a review of a recent project in this area, the result of which is a distributed integrated construction environment based on the industry foundation class (IFC), capable of supporting a number of construction applications. This environment is capable of supporting a construction team to work collaboratively over the internet. It then discusses the difficulties facing the successful implementation of such environments in construction organisations. This is addressed within the context of two management models for effective implementation of IT: the resource‐based model and the Nolan model.

The purpose of this brief introductory editorial is to introduce the background and rationale to the special issue, “Intellectual capital: becoming critical”. This is based on a selection of papers presented at the 1st Intellectual Capital (IC) Stream at the 4th International Critical Management Studies Conference at Cambridge University, UK, in July 2005.

Critical management studies (CMS) is not just about theory but demands action; its purpose is to make a difference for the better. Following an introduction to the idea of what “critical management studies” (CMS) entails the main ideas of the seven papers selected are then presented. Each paper is accompanied by a commentary from leading authors in the IC and knowledge management (KM) fields.

Key themes emergent in this “critical” issue include a decisive turn to language, uncertainty and risk, not‐knowing, ambiguity and complexity, scepticism towards simplistic mechanistic models, ownership rights, and the dynamics of situated IC practice. The conclusion reached is that there is much that further work from a CMS perspective can contribute to the IC field.

This special issue is one of the first applications of critical management thinking to the intellectual capital field.

The purpose of this article is to empirically test the impact of supply‐chain management (SCM) capabilities on business performance so as to determine to what degree customer‐oriented SCM issues influence competitive position and organizational performance.

A rigorous methodology is employed to generate a reliable and valid measurement instrument. Responses from 474 manufacturing managers are then utilized to test a causal model using LISREL^®.

The results indicate significant positive relationships exist among three types of SCM capabilities (outside‐in, inside‐out, and spanning) and business performance (perceived customer value, customer loyalty, market performance, and financial performance).

The article demonstrates that strategically developing SCM capabilities such as efficient inbound and outbound transportation, warehousing, and inventory control, production support, packaging, purchasing, order processing, and information dissemination enable a manufacturing firm to identify and take advantage of opportunities in the global marketplace.

The sample was drawn from manufacturing firms in the USA across four SIC codes. Future studies could collect more extensive data to confirm, refine, and expand upon the model presented and the associated construct measures utilizing confirmatory factor analysis. Extending the research to include additional industries and firms from outside of the USA would enhance the generalizability and usefulness of the findings.

The paper statistically validates that managers should regard the cultivation of SCM capabilities as a proprietary resource that facilitates competitive advantage. It also contributes a concise instrument that may be used by academics interested in the areas of supply‐chain management processes and firm performance.