Search results

This research aims to understand how organizational workplace meetings surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic impacted logistics Airmen across the United States Air Force and how these meetings impacted their risk seeking behavior on social media.

This survey research tested an extended Planned Risk Information Risk Seeking Model (PRISM) with organizational meetings as an antecedent to determine if current meetings influenced an Airman's perceived behavioral control, attitude toward seeking, subjective norms, knowledge sufficiency and intention to seek information regarding COVID-19.

Results of the CFA showed that the expanded PRISM model had good model fit. Additionally, using a custom dialog PROCESS macro in SPSS, it was found that perceptions of existing meetings were directly, positively related to attitude toward seeking, subjective norms and perceived behavioral control, and indirectly related to knowledge sufficiency threshold and information seeking. Theoretical and managerial implications are discussed.

This research adds to the limited body of knowledge of crisis communication and effectively expands the PRISM model to include an antecedent that helps explain information seeking during times of uncertainty.

Performance Based Logistics (PBL) is an acquisition reform that is intended to improve weapon systems logistics by reducing cost, improving reliability, and reducing footprint. PBL is an extension of a broad process of rationalizing and, in many cases, outsourcing government services. As with other examples of governmental service outsourcing, measurement issues arise in the gap between governmental objectives and service measurement, and in the contrast between clear profit-centered vendor metrics, and more complex mission-oriented governmental metrics. Beyond this, however, PBL presents new challenges to the relationship between governmental agencies and their service vendors. In many cases, weapons systems logistical support involves levels of operational risk that are more difficult to measure and more difficult to value than other government services. We discuss the implications of operational risk and other measurement issues on PBL implementation.

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the effect of logistics collaboration, meetings, relationship history, and supplier selection on the logistics performance of shippers, carriers, and logistics services providers. Rather than focusing on collaboration and performance, the research provides a wide analysis of how logistics collaboration and performance interact with other organizational practices.

To investigate the interaction among the constructs, the authors proposed a structural equation model to understand the influence of meetings, relationship history, supplier selection, and collaboration on logistics performance. The data were obtained through a survey of 199 managers of Brazilian companies in the retail sector.

Supplier selection has the strongest effect on logistics collaboration, and relationship history has the strongest effect on logistics performance. Rather than meetings and operational features, the elements of interpersonal skills, organizational culture, and communication appear to be the most important contributors to logistics performance achievements; relationship history leads to better performance.

This study contributes to our understanding of how and with whom to collaborate by highlighting the relationships among supplier selection, relationship history, meetings, and logistics collaboration and logistics performance.

Many city logistics projects in Europe have failed. A better understanding of the complex organizational change processes in city logistics projects with many stakeholders may expand city logistics capabilities and thereby help prevent future failures. The purpose of this paper is therefore to increase understanding of how city logistics emerge, and secondarily, to investigate whether such processes can be managed at all.

A paradigm shift in urban planning creates new ways of involving stakeholders in new sustainability measures such as city logistics. Organizational change theory is applied to capture the social processes leading to emergence of city logistics. The methodology is a qualitative processual analysis of a single longitudinal case.

The change process took different forms over time. At the time of concluding the analysis, positive dialectic forces were at play. City logistics schemes are still in an innovation phase. The biggest challenge in managing a process toward city logistics is to convince the many public and private stakeholders of their mutual interest and goals.

Urban goods transport sustainability schemes take many forms, and city logistics is but one such form. Furthermore, the methodology of a single context specific case study does not make prediction possible.

Fewer city logistics projects may fail due to stakeholder participation.

Fewer city logistics projects may fail. Thereby, cities become more environmentally and socially sustainable.

Insights into a city logistics project from a change management perspective has not previously been reported in literature.

Discusses the growth of inter‐firm logistics networks. Inter‐firm network denotes a complex arrangement of reciprocal, cooperative rather than competitive, relationships between legally independent but economically interdependent firms. Asserts that the organisation of the inter‐firm logistics network is influenced by the organisation of the network itself. Analyses the respective requirements of the inter‐organisational logistics system. Focuses on the question of which specific logistics‐related capabilities firms operating in production networks have to develop depending on the respective network type. Presents a qualitative study of a production network of a German car manufacturer to identify organisational capabilities and describe possible systemic development.

This study aims to explain how learning occurs in collaborative retailer–logistics service provider (LSP) relationships. The research is guided by two research questions, addressing absorptive and desorptive capacities and the interaction between these capacities.

The study is based on a case study of a Swedish, collaborative retailer–LSP dyad. The empirical data are structured around five specific learning situations within the retailer–LSP dyad.

The findings provide an explanation for how learning occurs within a collaborative retailer–LSP relationship based on subprocesses of absorptive and desorptive capacities. The interaction between these processes is found to rely on two types of support: one-directional and bidirectional. The findings also indicate positive outcomes of learning, such as improved cost efficiencies in warehouse operations, better customer services and improved long-term strategic planning.

This study shows how retailers and LSPs can learn from each other and together create an improved logistics system for end customers.

This research takes into account absorptive and desorptive capacities in a collaborative retailer–LSP relationship. This study enhances the understanding of inter-organisational learning processes in a retail logistics context.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the microfoundations of customer knowledge acquisition during logistics innovation development. Specifically, the authors explore the activities and behaviors of employees with customer contact (i.e. boundary-spanning employees (BSEs)) to deepen and broaden their knowledge about customers for the development of innovations.

Qualitative research based on multiple semi-structured interviews with BSEs of six logistics service providers was conducted to explore the deepening and broadening of customer knowledge during innovation development. Data were analyzed for similarities and differences in BSEs’ knowledge acquisition and their interactions with customers across six innovations.

Results show that BSEs engage sequentially in deepening and broadening customer knowledge throughout the logistics innovation development process. Yet, the specific sequence depends on the type of innovation developed (customized vs standardized). Customer knowledge tends to be deepened in one-on-one interactions, while knowledge tends to be broadened in interactions with numerous and diverse customer firm members.

In general, this paper contributes to the understanding of the individuals’ behaviors underlying organization-level phenomena, such as logistics service providers’ customer knowledge acquisition.

Findings illustrate that BSEs are well advised to concentrate on either deepening or broadening their customer knowledge in a single stage of the logistics innovation development process but switch between these two knowledge acquisition approaches from stage-to-stage to leverage customer interaction.

By investigating firms’ customer knowledge acquisition at the individual level, this paper addresses the calls in the literature for more research into the microfoundations of organizational phenomena.

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.

This paper aims to better understand how an accounting information system (AIS), working as a multidimensional knowledge object, engages users in a new round of knowledge development which allows them to explore new managerial directions. Drawing on the concept of the knowledge object and the knowing in practice perspective, this study considers the relationships between subjects and objects in the explication of accounting practice, underlining how AIS could become a knowledge object that can assume a variety of forms, starting from such contradictions emerging from practice.

Theoretical argumentations are applied to a case study at a global logistics provider in the South of Italy, which manages the supply chain from origin to destination, offering a multitude of services in the transport and distribution sector.

The case study shows that the process of knowledge accumulation promotes the mutation of AIS into a knowledge object that, in its variety of forms, allows managers to explore new managerial directions such as the reorganization of warehouse activities.

The paper seeks to enrich the interpretation of AIS as a multidimensional knowledge object becoming a catalyst of new managerial directions through knowing. That helps to understand the role of accounting tools as a social practice supporting decision-making and how accounting systems’ openness and questioning nature makes them objects of enquiry able to support the identification of new managerial directions and lead the AIS to continually explode and mutate into something else.

This paper aims to analyze the application of Lean Six Sigma (LSS) framework for supporting continuous improvement (CI) in logistics services. Both the lean philosophy and the Six Sigma methodology have become two of the most important initiatives for CI in organizations. The combination of both alternatives – LSS – brings significant benefits for companies applying this method, and its influence in logistics services can be relevant.

A case study on the logistics services of a large consumer electronics company is performed. In this sector, high quality in logistics services is crucial. Using within-case and cross-case analyses, the paper discusses the implementation of LSS in two internal logistics processes.

The paper identifies important implementation aspects when applying LSS to logistics services, such as CI structure, strategic analysis, cross-functional teams and process management. Furthermore, the paper discusses the potential in logistics services of the DMAIC (define, measure, analyze, improve and control) approach and tools such as value stream mapping, SIPOC (supplier, input, process, output, and customer) and process mapping.

The paper analyzes two logistics processes where LSS has been applied – a payment process and a request-to-ship process. The analysis of both processes offers relevant information about organizational implementation in a logistics services environment about process improvement and about the use of LSS tools.

First, this paper addresses the gap in literature about LSS and logistics’ activities. Furthermore, the case company, with more than 9,000 employees and distributing its products to more than 100 countries, constitutes a valuable source of information to obtain insights into the implications of implementing LSS in logistics services.