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Innovation has become extremely important, especially concerning manufacturing firms, as it is known to foster robust and healthy competition. The study aims to examine the effect of innovation orientation and supply chain integration on structural flexibility and strategic business performance.

Using the quantitative approach, 315 questionnaires were distributed to manufacturing firms in three cities (Accra, Kumasi and Takoradi) in Ghana out of which 305 usable responses were retrieved. The partial least square structural equation modeling technique and the statistical package for social sciences software version 27 were used for the data analysis.

The findings showed that supply chain integration and innovation orientation have a strong beneficial association. A substantial favorable association between structural flexibility and supply chain integration was found in the study once more. What is more, the research revealed a strong positive relationship between supply chain integration and strategic business performance. Furthermore, the study found a strong relation between innovation orientation and strategic business performance.

The research paper adds to the body of knowledge by examining how supply chain integration affects the relationship between innovation orientation, structural flexibility and strategic business performance.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the factors that tend to influence credit union efficiency, specifically examining cost efficiency (CE) and technical efficiency.

Using a two-stage method, the authors first estimate CE using Tones’ SBM data envelopment analysis method and technical efficiency in a variable returns to scale setting during the period 2008–2014. The authors estimate a mixed-effects and two-limit Tobit regression to examine the effect of credit union specific characteristics, banking industry and macroeconomic conditions, on efficiency.

Credit unions’ CE averaged 38.9 percent compared to 54.4 percent for technical efficiency. The authors find that technical efficiency does not translate into CE and vice versa.

The authors suggest that when targeting CE, credit union managers would have to make technical efficiency a priority. A monopolized and inefficient banking sector does not challenge efficiency improvement in the credit unions industry.

This study employs data from a frontier market.

The purpose of this chapter is to bring three recent and innovative feminist science and technology studies paradigms into dialogue on the topics of subjectivity and knowledge.

Each of the three frameworks – feminist postcolonial science and technology studies, queer ecologies, and new feminist materialisms – reconceptualizes and expands our understanding of subjectivity and knowledge. As projects invested in identifying and challenging the strategic conferral of subjectivity, they move from subjectivity located in all human life, to subjectivity as indivisible from nature, to a broader notion of subjectivity as both material and discursive. Despite some methodological differences, the three frameworks all broaden feminist conceptions of knowledge production and validation, advocating for increased consideration of scientific practices and material conditions in feminist scholarship.

This chapter examines three feminist science and technology studies paradigms by comparing and contrasting how each addresses notions of subjectivity and knowledge in ways that push us to rethink key epistemological issues.

This chapter identifies similarities and differences in the three frameworks’ discussions of subjectivity and knowledge production. By putting these frameworks into conversation, we identify methodological crossover, capture the coevolution of subjectivity and knowledge production in feminist theory, and emphasize the importance of matter in sociocultural explorations.

This paper aims to identify the unidimensionality and reliability of 84 factors that influence the performance of construction projects and develop a confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) model.

The study adopted a deductive research approach and started by identifying the positive factors that influence construction project performance. This was followed by the modification of the identified factors. After that, a questionnaire was developed out of the factors for data collection. Exploratory factor analysis was used to establish the factor structure of the positive factors, and this was verified using CFA afterwards. A model fit analysis was performed to determine the goodness of fit of the hypothesised model, followed by the development of the confirmatory model.

The study demonstrated substantial correlation in the data, sufficient unidimensionality and internal reliability. In addition, the estimated fit indices suggested that the postulated model adequately described the sample data.

The paper revealed that performance can be enhanced if stakeholders identify and leverage the positive factors influencing performance. The paper suggests that project stakeholders, particularly government, project owners, consultants and construction firms, can improve project performance by critically examining economic and financial systems (EFS), regulation and policy-making systems (RPS), effective management practices (EMP) and project implementation strategies (PIS).

The contribution of this paper to the present literature is identifying the positive factors and developing the confirmatory factor model. The model comprised 42 positive variables under four indicators: EMP, RPS, PIS and EFS.

The importance of auditors blowing the whistle when they encounter a situation of perceived wrongdoing cannot be overstated. Unfortunately, however, the initial report of wrongdoing is often insufficient to remedy the situation. Thus, this chapter investigates auditors’ whistleblowing persistence, measured as the number of times an auditor is willing to repeatedly report the wrongdoing, if he/she is not satisfied with the initial and/or subsequent responses received. Specifically, this chapter examines auditors’ persistence when reporting the wrongdoing of a peer auditor on the same audit team. Results show communication medium utilized within the audit team (instant message vs video) and client importance (high vs low) influence persistence in a 2 × 2 experiment. The manipulation for communication medium uses actual prerecorded videos and instant messages. Results related to one of our four hypotheses show that whistleblowing persistence is affected by client importance; that is, auditors are more likely to persist in reporting when working on a less important client. Furthermore, the findings suggest that client importance and communication medium interact such that communication medium affects persistence on more important clients, but not less important clients. Specifically, when working on a more important client, auditors are more likely to persist in reporting when interacting with their peers via video compared to via instant message. Given that whistleblowing persistence is often necessary to obtain a satisfactory resolution to the issue at hand, our results suggest avenues to encourage whistleblowing persistence should be further explored.

Purpose – This paper examines the interaction of efficiency and bank risk taking in the Ghanaian banking industry.

Design/methodology/approach – We relate risk taking to price competitiveness, foreign ownership and cost efficiency and other control variables. Cost-inefficiency scores from a stochastic frontier model are used, and a Lerner price index is employed to proxy for market power.

Findings – Our results suggest that market power affects risk taking when conditioned on foreign ownership, but foreign bank risk-taking behaviour is not statistically different from local banks. Cost inefficiency diminishes bank soundness. We also find that industry concentration discourages greater risk taking.

Originality/value – Our study extends the views on risk taking and competition among banks in Ghana, which throws more light from an emerging economy perspective.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the influence of leadership roles on the quality of services provided in higher education.

Drawing upon a sample of 134 faculty and administration members at the Technological Educational Institution (TEI) of Larissa, a structured questionnaire is developed to measure leadership roles and quality in services and internal processes. The competing values model is adopted to operationalise the eight leadership roles.

Results indicate that different leadership roles are linked with different dimensions of higher education service quality. The importance of the innovator and monitor role in explaining the variance of two out of four teaching quality aspects is confirmed, while the broker and facilitator roles are strongly associated with both dimensions of administration quality. The producer, director and coordinator proved to be the most prevalent roles among administration staff, while the director, coordinator and mentor roles dominated among faculty members.

The possibility to generalise the results to other countries with different characteristics (e.g. regulatory framework, economic development) needs to be verified, by executing similar research projects.

Understanding the nature of the association between leadership and higher education service quality would enable academics and administrators to pursue or cultivate these roles and behaviours fostering both the quality of teaching and administration.

The research led to the diagnosis of the leadership role profiles of both administration and faculty members. Findings also highlight the importance of specific leadership roles in explaining the variance of different aspects of higher education service quality.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate empirically the critical factors for the diffusion of web technologies in supply chain management (SCM) functions, based on the technology‐organizational‐environment model, and to identify the benefits resulting from diffusion.

Data were collected, via an internet survey, from 251 respondents, ranging from middle‐level to top‐level managers, from firms which currently utilize web technologies for their supply chain activities. Structural equation modelling was employed for five factors: relative advantage; competitive pressure; complexity; trialability; and top management support, which have been hypothesized to affect the diffusion of web technologies in SCM functions.

The results suggest that all the factors except trialability are significant predictors of web technologies' diffusion in supply chain functions. The results show also that by diffusing web technologies, organizations can enhance their supply chain activities.

The survey was conducted in a Malaysian context, using a limited set of variables, thus limiting the generalizability of the findings.

This study provides a greater understanding of managers' perception of web technology diffusion in their organizational SCM functions, and benefits realizing from diffusion of web technology, such as operational efficiency.

Those interested in adopting web technologies in their supply chain activities may find these results helpful in guiding their efforts.

This research provides accounting-ethics authors and administrators with a benchmark for accounting-ethics research. While Bernardi and Bean (2010) considered publications in business-ethics and accounting’s top-40 journals this study considers research in eight accounting-ethics and public-interest journals, as well as, 34 business-ethics journals. We analyzed the contents of our 42 journals for the 25-year period between 1991 through 2015. This research documents the continued growth (Bernardi & Bean, 2007) of accounting-ethics research in both accounting-ethics and business-ethics journals. We provide data on the top-10 ethics authors in each doctoral year group, the top-50 ethics authors over the most recent 10, 20, and 25 years, and a distribution among ethics scholars for these periods. For the 25-year timeframe, our data indicate that only 665 (274) of the 5,125 accounting PhDs/DBAs (13.0% and 5.4% respectively) in Canada and the United States had authored or co-authored one (more than one) ethics article.