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The purpose of this study is to map the implications and competencies for Industry 4.0 to the hard and soft aspects of total quality management (TQM).

The author/s collected data from purposively drawn samples of early-career engineering professionals (ECEPs) using a cross-sectional survey. A total of 20 ECEPs from three small-class cohorts (2014, 2016 and 2018) participated in the survey. The author/s analyzed data using the Kruskal–Wallis test and Wilcoxon–Mann–Whitney test to establish the effect of cohort and gender on the implications and competencies for Industry 4.0. The author/s then mapped the top- and bottom-ranked implications and competencies onto the hard and soft aspects of TQM using a matrix.

Based on the cohort, significant differences p < 0.05 existed in the interests and competencies for Industry 4.0. In congruence, the 2014 cohort had the highest number of “unique” top- and bottom-ranked competencies and implications spanning the hard and soft TQM. Based on gender, nonsignificant differences p < 0.05 existed in the interests and competencies for Industry 4.0. The male and female ECEPs' “common” top-ranked implications appeared under the hard and soft TQM. All their “common” top-ranked competencies appeared under the hard TQM, while all their “common” bottom-ranked competencies appeared under the soft TQM.

The sample size, context/discipline and perceptual data are limitations.

Optimizing an existing TQM framework/matrix to design Industry 4.0 TQM, advanced as TQM 4.0.

Perspectives of early-career professionals for TQM 4.0 implementation.

In conclusion, the relevance of the research implications, managerial implications, and implications for strategies in emerging markets are assessed in this chapter. The findings show that future research should apply different research designs such as a focus group discussion, collect empirical data from the various levels of the chosen organizations, be quantitative, make use of hypothesis testing, do a comparative study, etc. Various managerial implications are also recommended based on the study and the conclusions drawn. Some of the implications are that management should develop a long-term learning and adaptive perspective. Management must be able to secure a full understanding of all the partners on the subject of joint venture, strategic alliances, and other forms of collaboration. Some of the implications for strategies in emerging markets are that the spectrum of competitive strategies developed by Hout et al. (1982), Jobber and Ellis-Chadwick (2013), and Ansoff (1975) is found to be relevant and applicable in emerging markets. The other strategies that deal with emerging markets were also found to be relevant and applicable in the Eastern and Central Europe market with some minor modifications and adaptations. The reader should keep in mind that some articles are referenced repetitively in research implications, managerial implications, and implications for strategies in emerging markets when they are found to be necessary for drawing implications. For the sake of clarity, implication is defined as follows: an implication is something that is suggested, or happens indirectly. It has many different senses: usually used in the plural, implications are effects or consequences that might happen in the future. When you left the gate open and the dog escaped, you are guilty by implication.

It is argued on the basis of ideas from personal construct psychology that people feel attached, or desire strongly to become attached, to particular consumption pathways because they judge that to do otherwise would carry “implications” of a predominantly negative kind with respect to their abilities to make sense of the complex and uncertain world around them. It is noted that information‐processing problems may make it impossible for consumers to compute the overall implications of alternative strategies when market conditions change. Hence they may use simplifying decision procedures which may conflict with the principle of substitution.

The purpose of this paper is to gain knowledge on the character of managerial implications within business-to-business (B2B) marketing, in terms of type of relevance addressed in research articles on solution business and integrated solutions.

Use of Jaworski’s framework on role-relevance to classify the type of relevance addressed in 29 journal articles. A systematic literature review on solution business preceded the selection of articles and a concern to include different journal categories.

Managerial implications in the studied articles within solution business do not seem to emphasize role-relevance particularly; they rather address applicability of findings on a company level and for B2B marketing in a more general sense. The majority of implications for practice are framed to have an impact on “present actions”. Managerial knowledge needs are dominantly addressed by “empirical findings” or “frameworks”. The dominating managerial core tasks addressed are “transformer of marketing” and “marketing strategy”.

There do not seem to be studies with managerial implications addressing future actions and thinking; providing instruments, methods or models that are role- relevant; focusing on the challenges of a “coordinator”, “strategist” or “performance controller”. The focus on solution business limits the generalizability of findings.

Results suggest that implications for practice potentially would benefit from being written in the form of explicit recommendations; targeted to a particular managerial role; and increasingly developed when it comes to proposed frameworks for them to be useful for managers in industrial marketing.

This is one of the first studies to systematically examine the character of managerial implications by categorizing results in accordance with a framework specifically addressing role-relevance.

This article aims to analyze a set of features in the managerial implications of the most-cited business-to-business (B2B) marketing articles which are related to their managerial relevance. The purpose is to further identify which are the most recurrent features of managerial implications, as well as the connections between such features. Finally, the articles aim to verify if these features of managerial implications vary depending on the scientific impact of the article.

The 60 most-cited articles were selected from both generalist and specialized academic journals and a content analysis was conducted. Then the article assesses the formal features (e.g. dedicated space), the language (e.g. consulting or normative), the translation of scientific results (e.g. message efficacy) and such other features as time orientation, specificity and abstraction of the managerial implications in these high-impact articles. The article also analyses patterns and associations between the aforementioned dimensions across the 60 articles, also depending on their level of scientific impact (i.e. their number of citations).

The results point that six out of nine features contributing to managerial relevance are the most frequently present in the implications (dedicated section easy to find, balance between academic and consulting language, partly scientific approach, overlap with scientific findings, message neither too complicated nor too simplistic, and long-term orientation). However, three other features reducing managerial relevance afflict nearly half of the articles: non-normative, generic and abstract implications. The ten articles lacking completely managerial implications are slightly more frequent among highest impact ones, which also often include overly complicated implications; while speculative and overly simplistic implications typically appear more among lowest impact articles which, however, also stand for very specific messages. There seems not to be any statistical correlation between the features contributing to managerial relevance and the scientific impact (number of citations) of an article. Instead, several of these features are correlated among each other, meaning that when one is missing, it is likely that the others also are. Finally, when implications are included in a dedicated section of the article, they tend to be specific and consequently also tend to have the other features favoring relevance.

The article provides an empirically grounded assessment of features that influence the managerial relevance of scientific research in the areas of B2B marketing. Our results are, in fact, grounded in a detailed examination of the managerial implications of 60 high-impact articles in this disciplinary domain.

The purpose of this paper is to identify what managerial implications research related to inter-organizational interfaces has been produced in marketing. For this aim, the authors focus on a specific concept implemented in many firms that operate on business-to-business markets, which is key account management (KAM).

The authors used the Ebsco Database entering “account management” as a key word in the title row. The search provided 51 papers to which the authors added four MSI reports written by Moriarty and Shapiro between 1980 and 1984. The authors then identified such keywords as “managers”, “practitioners”, “marketers”, “managerial”, “business”, and their variations as well as normative words such as “should”, “must”, etc. in order to identify managerial implications.

Four main findings are provided: a clear managerial purpose is affirmed by KAM academic works whether as a central “purpose” of the works or as “implications”; these managerial implications may display different forms (dimensions to be considered, consequences to anticipate, advices); though the managerial scope of KAM works is clearly visible, the sophistication of managerial recommendations remains … limited; the identification of who is exactly “the manager” targeted by the implications remains vague.

The authors discuss the notion of managerial relevance of academic research.

The authors explore sources for practices (whether they are the ones of scholars or managers) that could help “spelling out more effectively the managerial implications.

To the knowledge this is the first work that reviews so precisely how academic articles address to the managerial audience on a precise issue. Furthermore, the authors believe that KAM is an interesting and appropriate field for such a review because it is widely implemented on business markets.

In the last four years, since Volume I of this Bibliography first appeared, there has been an explosion of literature in all the main functional areas of business. This wealth of material poses problems for the researcher in management studies — and, of course, for the librarian: uncovering what has been written in any one area is not an easy task. This volume aims to help the librarian and the researcher overcome some of the immediate problems of identification of material. It is an annotated bibliography of management, drawing on the wide variety of literature produced by MCB University Press. Over the last four years, MCB University Press has produced an extensive range of books and serial publications covering most of the established and many of the developing areas of management. This volume, in conjunction with Volume I, provides a guide to all the material published so far.