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Firms pursue a number of redeployment strategies in order to achieve growth and create value for their stakeholders. While the majority of previous research focuses on how firms create synergic value by sharing resources across multiple business units, we lack a systematic analysis of the determinants of different redeployment strategies. In this paper, we develop a theoretical framework that allows us to systematically investigate how intrinsic resource characteristics affect resource redeployment strategies. Our framework identifies four critical characteristics of resources, that is, fungibility, scale-free nature, decomposability, and tradability. We develop a number of predictions that provide guidance for researchers to identify the optimal resource redeployment strategy appropriate for resources with a certain set of characteristics.

“Concurrent sourcing” is a term used by Parmigiani to describe the phenomenon where a firm simultaneously buys and makes the same good or service. The purpose of this paper is to develop propositions that suggest how concurrent sourcing affects performance.

Based on transaction cost, agency, neoclassical economic, knowledge‐based, and resource‐based theory, it is proposed to show how concurrent sourcing affects performance.

The paper argues that concurrent sourcing improves performance when firms face a combination of volume uncertainty, technological uncertainty, performance uncertainty, non‐decomposability, transaction‐specific investments, and strong internal and external capabilities.

The paper maps the relationships between concurrent sourcing and performance and discusses how these relationships can be modelled. The propositions and discussion offer researchers a starting‐point for further research.

The propositions that are developed suggest that managers should consider using concurrent sourcing when they face problems caused by volume uncertainty, technological uncertainty, performance uncertainty, non‐decomposability, and asset specificity. Concurrent sourcing can also be a way to exploit both strong internal capabilities and external suppliers' strong capabilities.

The main contribution is a number of propositions, explanations, and discussions regarding how concurrent sourcing affects performance of the market and the hierarchy.

The research on shared mental models (SMMs) focuses on the importance of all team members holding similar mental models to realize team performance. However, for a perceived decomposable task, it is not required for all team members to have similar mental models to achieve team performance. Moreover, unnecessary overlapping mental models among team members may engender information overloading, translating into suboptimal team performance. Absent from the current literature is an understanding of the factors that determine the minimal overlapping mental models required across specific members for team performance. The purpose of this study is to yield an understanding of these issues.

This study highlights that the requirement to hold similar mental models across specific team members depends on the task decomposition mechanisms used: task complexity and decomposability, subtask assigned and layer, task modularity, workflow interdependence type and tool attributes.

Unlike much prior research which measured the relationship between SMMs and team performance at the team level, our conceptualization suggests that the measurement of SMMs and team performance needs to be conducted across a team and subsets of the team or individuals depending on task complexity and decomposability. This current research offers an important viewpoint regarding when team members need to hold similar mental models to realize task performance.

By suggesting new insights into when mental models should be similar across specific team members, this research also provides understanding of why some empirical SMMs studies do not yield positive relationships between similar SMMs and team effectiveness while others do.

Crisis management entails among other things developing organizational systems that are capable of reacting to unpredictable and different types of crises. It also involves designing cohesive operational elements to deal with the local dynamics of an actual crisis situation. This challenge of responsiveness – where organizations simultaneously need to react to change demands of different task environments – has hardly been investigated in management theory. The purpose of this paper is to initiate to shed more light on this blind spot.

Modular organizing and organizational sensing are introduced as key drivers of organizational responsiveness. Based on a large-scale survey among 1,200 senior officers the study investigates how these two variables have influenced the responsiveness of the Netherlands armed forces for crisis response deployment.

The findings indicate that the level of modularization is an important facilitator of organizational responsiveness. Organizational systems that are made up of semi-autonomous work groups are in a better position to simultaneously live up to the change demands of different environmental levels than organizations that follow a fine-grained modularization approach.

It uses the military crisis response organization as an exemplary case for project-based organzations in general to take advantage of.

Most traditional navigational design techniques do not provide a good mechanism for dealing with the complexity of the navigational path of multimedia hypertext (or hypermedia) systems, such as a multimedia page on the Web. When the number of pages (or nodes) of the hypermedia system grows, the links among these pages increase factorially. This makes the navigation structure diagram of a small 20‐page Web site almost impossible to read, maintain, expand and reuse. In addition, most of these techniques do not provide formal instruction, or a step‐by‐step guideline, for users to support their development of hypermedia systems. This paper, therefore, aims to introduce, step‐by‐step, a new graph‐based navigational design technique, the Navigational Graph, together with a new set of notation. It provides systems developers to visualise and manipulate the navigational structures of Web sites. This technique improves the reusability, maintainability, decomposability, readability and expandability of the development of Web sites in terms of navigational design. This paper also attempts to address the problem of lack of guidelines for users to design and document their Web sites.

The concept of modularity has gained considerable traction in technology studies as a way to conceive, describe, and innovate complex systems, such as product design or organizational structures. In the recent literature, technological modularity has often been intertwined with business model innovation, and scholarship has started investigating how modularity in technology affects changes in business models, both at the cognitive and activity system levels. Yet we still lack a theoretical definition of what modularity is in the business model domain. Business model innovation also encompasses different possibilities of modelling businesses, which are not clearly understood nor classified. We ask when, how, and if modularity theory can be extended to business models in order to enable effective and efficient modelling. We distinguish theoretically between modularity for technology and for business models, and investigate the key processes of modularization and manipulation. We introduce the basic operations of business modelling via modular operators adapted from the technological modularity domain, using iconic examples to develop an analogical reasoning between modularity in technology and in business models. Finally, we discuss opportunities for using modularity theory to foster the understanding of business models and modelling, and develop a challenging research agenda for future investigations.

A number of multidimensional poverty measures that respect the ordinal nature of dimensions have recently been proposed within the counting approach framework. Besides ensuring a reduction in poverty, however, it is important to monitor distributional changes to ensure that poverty reduction has been inclusive in reaching the poorest. Distributional issues are typically captured by adjusting a poverty measure to be sensitive to inequality among the poor. This approach, however, has certain practical and conceptual limitations. It conflicts, for example, with some policy-relevant measurement features, such as the ability to decompose a measure into dimensions post-identification and does not create an appropriate framework for assessing disparity in poverty across population subgroups. In this chapter, we propose and justify the use of a separate decomposable inequality measure – a positive multiple of “variance” – to capture the distribution of deprivations among the poor and to assess disparity in poverty across population subgroups. We demonstrate the applicability of our approach through two contrasting inter-temporal illustrations using Demographic Health Survey data sets for Haiti and India.

In this paper the aim is to focus on the individual distribution of gender wage discrimination in Spain and Italy, relying upon the development of Jenkins' distributional approach proposed in Del Rio et al.

The authors estimate the degree of individual discrimination for each employed woman and, relying on the decomposability properties of these estimates, assess the nature and extent of discrimination across various socio‐economic groupings.

Some mechanisms inhibit the access of highly educated women to highly rewarding occupations in Italy, especially in the public sector, but not in Spain.

The treatment of occupation and sector of activity has some impact on the results, shedding doubt on the robustness of some previous analyses of discrimination in these countries.

While no doubt the appraisal of the glass ceiling in the Italian labour market will gain extensively from further research, some prima facie evidence is found highlighting the role of appointment and promotion procedures.

A remarkable institutional divide characterises Spain and Italy in the domain of gender wage discrimination. Powerful political pressure along the lines of gender quotas for public employment has long been in place in Spain, while nothing of the kind has existed in Italy.

Recently, 181 CEOs of notable corporations signed a joint statement at the Business Roundtable (2019) on the “Purpose of a Corporation” – declaring its aim as the creation of benefits for “all stakeholders.” This will likely accelerate the circular economy transition process. Harmonizing the interests of various stakeholders is essential for managing successful organizations and supply chains, which is similar to the first principle of using natural ecosystem thinking. According to that principle, it is essential to strike a balance between the producers, consumers, scavengers, and decomposers. We draw on stakeholder theory to identify various challenges and risks that restrict businesses from building sustainable circular systems. We turn our attention toward increasing the numbers of “scavengers” and “decomposers” in the system for attaining sustainable growth. Our emphasis is on (1) empowering organizational life cycle stages, (2) designing for “decomposability” and “scavengers,” and (3) suggesting the use of advanced optimization models for harmonizing stakeholder relationships.

Theil's approach to the measurement of inequality is set in the context of subsequent developments over recent decades. It is shown that Theil's initial insight leads naturally to a very general class of decomposable inequality measures. It is thus closely related to a number of other commonly used families of inequality measures.