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This paper aims to discuss the firm productivity premium for servitized firms. It discusses servitization across the product value chain and estimates the effects of the range and extent of servitization on productivity premium in manufacturing firms.

This paper develops a conceptual framework and tests the hypotheses on the effects of servitization on productivity premium using linear regression models with a sample of 20,837 Russian manufacturing firms gathered from the Ruslana Bureau van Dijk database and the Russian customs service.

Servitized firms exhibit higher total factor productivity and labor productivity. The labor productivity premium increases with the number of services offered. However, the impact of services on productivity varies along the product value chain: postmanufacturing and postsales services enhance productivity premium, while manufacturing and back-office services diminish them. The effect of establishment services remains ambiguous.

This paper offers an analytical framework for firms to assess their servitization strategies. These strategies should be gradual, focused on enhancing firm efficiency rather than being an end goal. Firms should initiate the process by introducing services at the postproduction and postsales stages of the product creation chain to achieve productivity premium.

The paper extends the evidence on firm-level productivity drivers and contributes to the servitization theory. A servitization strategy should be portfolio-based, considering both the potential gains and losses in productivity resulting from the implementation of specific services.

The use of quality management (QM) to achieve the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UNSDGs) is a topic of growing interest in academia and industry. The IAQ (International Academy for Quality) established Quality Sustainability Award in 2020, a testament to this growing interest. This study aims to investigate how QM philosophies, methodologies and tools can be used to achieve sustainable development in organizations.

Five large manufacturing organizations – three from India and two from China – who reported their achievements about using QM in achieving Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) were studied using multiple sources of data collection. A detailed within-case and cross-case analysis were conducted to unearth this linkage's practical and theoretical aspects.

The study finds that QM methodologies effectively met the five organizations' UNSDGs. These organizations successfully used OPEX (Operational Excellence) methodologies such as Lean, Kaizen and Six Sigma to meet UNSDGs 7, 11, 12 and 13. Moreover, UNSG 12 (Responsible Consumption and Production) is the most targeted goal across the case studies. A cross-case analysis revealed that the most frequently used quality tools were Design of Experiments (DoE), Measurement Systems Analysis (MSA), C&E analysis and Inferential statistics, among other essential tools.

The study's sample size was limited to large-scale manufacturing organizations in the two most populous countries in the world. This may limit the study's generalizability to other countries, continents, or micro-, small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Additionally, the study's conclusions would be strengthened if tested as hypotheses in a follow-up survey.

This practical paper provides case studies on how to use QM to impact SDGs. It offers both descriptive and prescriptive solutions for practitioners. The study highlights the importance of using essential QM tools in a structured and systematic manner, with effective teams, to meet the SDGs of organizations.

The study shows how QM can be used to impact UNSDGs, and this is very important because the UNSDGs are a set of global objectives that aim to address a wide range of social and environmental issues. This study could motivate organizations to achieve the UNSDGs using essential QM tools and make the world a better place for the present and future generations.

This case study is the first to investigate at a micro-level how QM can impact UNSDGs using live examples. It uses data from the IAQ to demonstrate how QM can be integrated into UNSDGs to ensure sustainable manufacturing.

This paper aims to explore the relationship between owner-manager or leader’s ambidextrous leadership style and its effect on human resource management (HRM) practices, contextual ambidexterity and knowledge-intensive small- and medium-enterprises (SMEs) strategic agility.

This study presents an in-depth qualitative case study analysis of two knowledge-intensive SMEs from India’s information technology and health-care products industry serving a range of global clients. Using the theoretical lenses of empowerment-focused HRM practices, ambidextrous leaders, contextual ambidexterity and strategic agility, semi-structured interview data of leaders, managers and employees of the case organizations were analysed. Through a two-staged analytical process, we abductively developed a novel conceptual framework at the intersection of the above theoretical lenses.

The findings suggest that the knowledge-intensive SME’s strategic agility, ambidexterity and empowerment-focussed HRM approach was influenced by the owner-manager or leader’s ambidextrous leadership style and their philosophy towards managing people and had a positive impact in creating a culture of trust, participation, risk-taking and openness, and led to delivering innovative products and services as well as several positive employee-level outcomes.

Recent literature reviews on HRM In SMEs highlight several gaps, including the impact of owner-manager or leader’s philosophy of managing people in shaping HRM practices and employee outcomes. This paper thus adds to the existing literature on HRM and knowledge-intensive SMEs.

This paper aims to offer a new history of management by tracing a religious dimension of scientific management. The thesis is that the good was foundational for bringing scientific management to success in Taylor’s native Quaker Philadelphia in the 1880s. The paper’s main contribution is to contrast the philosophical origins of Taylor’s ideas in scientific management to his native Quaker roots, and how Taylor, over time, into the 1910s, wrestled with this issue.

The paper is situated in historical interpretivism and subjectivism, leaning on contextual and narrative research on religious morality.

Quaker morality prevented managerial opportunism at Taylor’s Midvale Steel in the 1880s. Conversely, by the 1900s and 1910s, interest conflicts between workers and managers escalated when scientific management moved out of its traditional cultural contexts of Quaker Philadelphia and spread across the USA. The historical implication is, already for Taylor’s time, that scientific management never was the “one-best way” of management.

Future research needs to deepen and broaden research on scientific management when tracing the significance of religion and culture in management thought.

The paper has implications for modern studies of business morality by uncovering the practical relevance of religious business ethics at the outset of management studies.

The historic emergence of scientific management points to a theory of institutional evolution and economic growth, when religiously grounded governance of the firm deinstitutionalized, and institutional economic governance, with different but superior economic advantages, progressed by the 1900s.

The paper suggests an alternative version of the intellectual heritage of management studies by tracing the legacy of Taylor’s Quakerism and how religious and cultural ideas contributed to the formation of science in management.

This study aims to examine the literature from the Web of Science database published on board committees between 2002 and 2023 and outline the quantitative summary, journey of board committees’ research and suggest future research directions.

This study examines bibliometric-content analysis combined with a systematic literature review of articles on board committees to document the summary of the field. The authors used co-citation, co-occurrence and cluster analysis under bibliometric-content analysis to present the field summary.

Board committee composition, such as their gender, independence and expertise, as well as factors affecting corporate governance, such as reporting quality, earnings management and board monitoring, all have a significant impact on board committee literature. The field is getting growing attention from authors, journals and countries. Nevertheless, there is a need for further exploration in areas like expertise, member age and tenure, the economic crisis and the nomination and remuneration committee, which have not yet received sufficient attention.

This paper has both theoretical and practical contributions. From a theoretical perspective, this study substantiates the prevalence of agency theory within board committee literature, reinforcing the foundational role of agency theory in shaping discussions about board committees. On practical ground, the comprehensive overview of board committee literature offers scholars a road map for navigating this field and directing their future research journey. The identification of research gaps in certain areas serves as a catalyst for scholars to explore untapped dimensions, enabling them to strengthen the essence of the committees’ performance.

The building sector is vital to a nation’s economy, as it has a major influence on economic activity and growth, job creations and the advancement of infrastructure. Intricate challenges that are inherent in crises such as the COVID-19 outbreak lead to material scarcities, project delays, labor shortages, escalated expenses, funding challenges, regulatory obstacles and dwindling investment funds, all of which culminate in costs that are in excess of those budgeted. While numerous studies have explored the ramifications of COVID-19 on project budgets, there is little, if any, data available on forecasting the magnitude of this impact.

This investigation seeks to bridge this knowledge deficiency by devising a predictive tool grounded in an ordinal logistic regression method. An online survey was designed and disseminated to gauge the views of construction field experts about the diverse contributors to excessive costs during the viral outbreak, and a predictive tool, crafted from the survey participants’ feedback.

Findings showed that smaller-scale enterprises and contractor-centric establishments faced greater adversities than medium-to-large ones and consultancy-or-owner-type entities.

The insights from this research shed light on the amplified risk of higher project costs amid health crises or analogous events, underlining the imperative need for fortified risk management approaches to bolster project outcomes. By factoring in demographics, this research offers policymakers a refined lens through which to customize interventions and promote balanced and enduring advancement in the construction industry.

Previous studies have established to a great extent that regulatory frameworks and, in particular, procurement approaches – that are common in a particular context – have a major impact on the success of building information modelling (BIM) implementation in construction projects. Despite the close links between these two concepts, research on the effect of procurement approaches on BIM implementation is scarce. To address this gap, this paper aims to investigate the barriers that affect BIM implementation through the lens of procurement approaches.

A mixed-method approach was adopted using a questionnaire survey (n = 116) and interviews with key stakeholders (n = 12) in Jordan. The outcomes of the quantitative parts were augmented with findings from interviews.

It was revealed that the deployment of unfavourable construction procurement approaches represents a major hurdle towards BIM implementation. Though essential for enhancing BIM implementation, it is revealed that a fundamental change from the common design-bid-build (DBB) to more collaborative procurement approaches remains infeasible in view of the realities that govern the construction industry.

It was revealed the deployment of unfavourable construction procurement approaches represents a major hurdle towards BIM implementation. Though essential for enhancing BIM implementation, it is revealed that a fundamental change from the common DBB to more collaborative procurement approaches remains infeasible given the realities that govern the construction industry.

As the first of its kind, a set of recommendations for establishing supportive, workable procurement that does not deviate significantly from common procedures and practices is presented. Rather than advocating a shift to procurement approaches that are aligned with BIM, the findings offer novel insight into the necessity of developing a framework within the boundaries of the current and widely adopted procurement approaches to address the identified construction procurement issues and facilitate BIM implementation.

Prior studies suggest that, in an industry in which several public firms operate (i.e. greater public firm presence), uncertainty about business operations within the industry is reduced due to greater analyst coverage and quality of information disclosure. In this study, the authors examine how UK private firms respond to investment opportunities in fixed intangible assets (FIAs) in an environment characterised by greater public firm presence (PFP).

Using data from 61,278 (1,358) private (public) UK firms operating in ten sectors spanning from 2006 to 2016, the authors conduct this analysis by using panel econometric techniques.

The authors observe that private firms are more responsive to their FIA investment opportunities when they operate in industries with more PFP. Also, the authors find that firms in industries with better information quality use more debt and have longer debt maturity security but less internal cash flow. Overall, the findings indicate that PFP generates positive externalities for private firms by lessening industry uncertainty and enhancing more efficient FIA investment. The results are robust to endogeneity concerns.

A key limitation of the study is that it focuses on a single country (the UK) and therefore there is a likelihood that the results found are specific to this setting but not others, particularly developing and emerging economies. Thus, future studies could explore these ideas from the viewpoint of multiple countries.

Overall, the study demonstrates the importance of information disclosure in driving investment decisions of firms.

While this paper builds on the information disclosure and corporate investment literature, it is one of the first attempts, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, to explore how private UK firms respond to investment in FIAs in an environment characterised by greater PFP.

This study investigates the impact of large-scale teaching in higher education on students’ preparedness for the workforce within the context of evolving labour market demands, the expansion of higher education and the application of high-impact teaching strategies. It synthesizes perspectives on employer work readiness, the challenges and opportunities of large-scale teaching and strategies for fostering a dynamic academia-industry feedback loop. This multifaceted approach ensures the relevance of curricula and graduates’ preparedness while addressing the skills gap through practical recommendations for aligning teaching methodologies with employer expectations.

The research methodically examines the multifaceted challenges and opportunities inherent in large-scale teaching. It focuses on sustaining student engagement, maintaining educational quality, personalizing learning experiences and cultivating essential soft skills in extensive student cohorts.

This study highlights the critical role of transversal skills in work readiness. It also uncovers that despite its challenges, large-scale teaching presents unique opportunities. The diversity of large student groups mirrors modern workplace complexities, and technological tools aid in personalizing learning experiences. Approaches like peer networking, innovative teaching methods, real-world simulations and collaborative resource utilization enrich education. The importance of experiential learning for augmenting large-scale teaching in honing soft skills is emphasized.

This manuscript contributes to the discourse on large-scale teaching, aligning it with employer expectations and the dynamic requirements of the job market. It offers a nuanced perspective on the challenges and opportunities this educational approach presents, providing insights for crafting engaging and effective learning experiences in large cohorts. The study uniquely integrates experiential learning, co-creation in education and industry-academia feedback loops, underscoring their importance in enhancing student work readiness in large-scale teaching.

This article explores whether six broad categories of activities undertaken by Canadian business scholars’ academics: publications record, citations record, teaching load, administrative load, consulting activities, and knowledge spillovers transfer, are complementary, substitute, or independent, as well as the conditions under which complementarities, substitution and independence among these activities are likely to occur.

A multivariate probit model is estimated to take into account that business scholars have to consider simultaneously whether or not to undertake many different academic activities. Metrics from Google Scholar of scholars from 35 Canadian business schools, augmented by a survey data on factors explaining the productivity and impact performances of these faculty members, are used to explain the heterogeneities between the determinants of these activities.

Overall, the results reveal that there are complementarities between publications and citations, publications and knowledge spillovers transfer, citations and consulting, and between consulting and knowledge spillovers transfer. The results also suggest that there are substitution effects between publications and teaching, publications and administrative load, citations and teaching load, and teaching load and administrative load. Moreover, results show that public and private funding, business schools’ reputation, scholar’s relational resources, and business school size are among the most influential variables on the scholar’s portfolio of activities.

This study considers simultaneously the scholar’s whole portfolio of activities. Moreover, the determinants considered in this study to explain scholars’ engagement in different activities reconcile two conflicting perspectives: (1) the traditional self-managed approach of academics, and (2) the outcomes-focused approach of university management.