Search results

This study investigates a production process that requires N kinds of components for the production of a finished product. The producer orders the various kinds of components from different suppliers and receives the orders in lots at the beginning of each production cycle. Similar to situations often encountered in real life, the lead times are random variables with known probability distributions so that a production cycle starts whenever all N kinds of components become available. Each of the lots received at the start of a production run contains both perfect and imperfect quality components. Once all N kinds of components become available, the producer initiates a screening process to detect the imperfect components. The production of the finished product uses only perfect quality components. The imperfect components are removed from inventory whenever the screening process is completed. The percentage of components of perfect quality present in each lot is a random variable with a known probability distribution.

This production process is described and modeled mathematically and the optimal production/ordering policy is derived based on the mathematical model.

The formulated mathematical model resulted in the determination of the optimal policy consisting of the optimal number of finished items ordered to be produce during each production run, the number of components ordered from each supplier, and the reorder point. The derived closed form expression for the optimal lot size depends on the minimum of the number of perfect quality components in a lot, whereas the reorder point is determined based on the maximum lead time.

The modeling approach and results of this study provide practical implications that may be beneficial to both production and supply chain managers as well as researchers.

This modeling approach that incorporates decision-making related to the logistics of acquiring the components and accounts for the probabilistic nature of the lead times and quality of components addresses a gap in the logistics/production literature.

Previous research provides adequate evidence on performance management (PM) for hospitals and healthcare providers; however, less is known about their individual and PM appraisal process. Additionally, there is limited research exploring PM in the Middle Eastern context. This study investigates PM practices in the Middle Eastern healthcare industry.

This study adopts the qualitative research methodology through semi-structured interviews of healthcare professionals in Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Thematic analysis was adopted for analyzing this qualitative data.

The main findings have uncovered different facets of appraisal challenges for both the appraiser (i.e. manager) and the appraisee (i.e. employee). These challenges include communication deficits, lack of goal setting standards and regular meeting updates in order to ensure employee satisfaction and motivation in the workplace.

This study has significant implications for policymakers in Middle Eastern hospitals in terms of implementing PM for their staff. Moreover, future studies can conduct in-depth analysis and provide comparison between public and private sectors in the Gulf countries.

This study is one of the first to portray challenges involved in conducting PM in the Middle East healthcare sector specifically in the UAE and Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA), both from the perspectives of the appraiser and appraisee.

This paper aims to analyse the impact of dynamic capability (DC) of emerging market multinationals (EMNEs) on their firm technological performance by teasing out the concepts of agility and knowledge management (KM) through DC.

Evidence from this study is contextualised on EMNEs that operate in the UK, Germany and France. This study examines the investment in intangible assets which EMNEs use to develop their DC over the period 2005-2016 and how this leads to increased firm technological performance.

Results show that higher investments in DC allow EMNEs to be more agile and gain competencies through KM and thereby sustain competitiveness in the three leading European countries. This research also identifies which EMNE groupings show greater technological performance and how such EMNE groupings are able to translate dynamic capabilities into greater technological performance compared to others over time. In summary, the role of DC during of the global financial crisis was also examined, where they are required to be more agile.

This paper sheds light on a novel way and motivation of successful EMNEs in using developed host countries as a location for generating DC through agility and KM.

The COVID-19 pandemic has showcased the lack of resilience found in the global value chains (GVCs) of multinational enterprises (MNEs). Existing evidence shows that MNEs have only recently and slowly started recovering and attempting to rebuild the resilience of their GVCs. This paper analyzes the challenges/inhibitors faced by MNEs in building their resilience through their GVCs.

A four-stage hybrid model was used to identify the interrelationship among the identified inhibitors and to distinguish the most critical ones by ranking them. In the first stage, we employed a modified total interpretive structural modeling (m-TISM) approach to determine the inter-relationship among the inhibitors. Additionally, we identified the inhibitors' driving power and dependency by performing a matrix multiplication applied to classification (MICMAC) analysis. In the second stage, we employed the Pythagorean fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (PF-AHP) method to determine the weight of the criteria. The next stage followed, in which we used the Pythagorean fuzzy combined compromise solution (PF-CoCoSo) method to rank the inhibitors. Finally, we performed a sensitivity analysis to determine the robustness of the framework we had built based on the criteria and inhibitors.

We find business sustainability to have the highest importance and managerial governance as the most critical inhibitor hindering the path to resilience. Based on these insights, we derive four research propositions aimed at strengthening the resilience of such GVCs, followed by their implications for theory and practice.

Our findings contribute to the extant literature by uncovering key inhibitors that act as barriers to MNEs. We link out our findings with a number of propositions that we derive, which may be considered for implementation by MNEs and could help them endow their GVCs with resilience.

This paper documents and links firm- and country-level outcomes to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UNSDGs) by portraying how the Chinese economy has fared during the COVID-19 crisis. It does so by shedding light on the factors that determine the effectiveness of health policies implemented in China.

Unlike the prior literature, in which lagging performance measures are used, the authors use leading indicators with event study methodology to develop effectiveness scores and identify the determinants of effectiveness, including financial variables, firm infection, geographical location of the spread, travel bans, lockdown periods, policies of home quarantine, health innovations and other innovative measures undertaken by the Chinese authorities.

The detailed disaggregated results show many dimensions where abnormal returns are indeed associated with various health policies and that the effectiveness, influenced by firm size, profitability, firm infection and location. The results remain robust when the authors control for various event windows and models and provide evidence of a strong UNSDG link, which the authors draw up a list.

Apart from the quantitative analysis approach, future studies can complement and add further insights by utilizing qualitative research approaches.

The results offers robust evidence for policy-makers and firm managers on how a crisis of such proportions and subsequent health policies is affecting different firms and why.

The study shows how COVID-19 health policies open a new dimension in terms of energy demand reduction and lower emissions, factors linking to the UNSDGs.

The study is the first to show detailed disaggregated results across many dimensions where abnormal returns are indeed associated with various health policies and that the effectiveness, influenced by firm size, profitability, firm infection and location.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the role of intellectual capital and knowledge management in the entrepreneurial success of firms through a research model which is subsequently tested empirically.

The paper utilises the knowledge-based perspective to formulate three sets of hypotheses which the authors subsequently test in the empirical analysis on data derived from the Orbis database, which includes over 1-million data points from approximately 240,000 firms across 174 geographic subdivisions of economic regions in 14 European countries, from 2010 to 2013. The analysis utilises probit model regressions on the likelihood of becoming a high-growth firms (HGF), in the presence of a number of control factors including firm age, firm size, tangible assets, foreign ownership, competitiveness (via Herfindahl index), return on assets, industry sector and country location.

Findings from our analysis suggest that investments in intangible assets and generating patents from research and development (R&D) efforts is positively related to the likelihood of becoming a HGF. In addition, cluster membership seems to be a positive influence on becoming a HGF, however the moderating impact of intangible investments and patents is less clear in clusters.

The authors highlight the mixed effects from cluster membership and the beneficial impact from intellectual capital and knowledge management in achieving high growth firm status.

The authors derive and test our research model, which outlines the interrelationship of the various factors leading to firms becoming high-growth firms. The results suggest that there may be further fruitful ground for future investigation in the intersections of knowledge management and intellectual capital concepts within entrepreneurial contexts.

This paper aims to examine the relationship between foreign ownership and firm performance, using an approach which the authors show is more advanced than existing methods, and more aligned with accepted theory and conceptual frameworks developed in international business. The authors demonstrate that simply relying on a binary distinction between foreign and domestic firms ignores much of the information regarding the importance of ownership structure and is disconnected from the wider literature on ownership structure, motivations for Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) and performance.

The authors illustrate this by using a threshold estimation method to endogenously uncover the level of foreign ownership up to which the transfer of foreign firm advantage from the parent company to the affiliate is the strongest.

The results show that for Germany, Poland, Italy and the UK, there are significantly different thresholds of foreign ownership over the period, 2001-2010. Due to non-linearities and different thresholds, the authors argue that before one can entertain secondary considerations concerning foreign firm impact on host countries, one needs to apply the appropriate approach.

This is the first paper that uses an endogenous threshold approach on a large firm level data set to show that there are significant differences and non-linearities in the relationship between foreign ownership and productivity.

This paper examines the leading publication trends including the extent and impact of intellectual capital research in the Journal of Intellectual Capital (JIC) over a two-decade period (2000–2020). The bibliometric analysis offers the description of publications trends such as key authors, articles, cited references, institutions and countries— in other words the extent and impact in the field. This paper also presents the knowledge structure (including conceptual, intellectual and social structures) of JIC, that is prominent themes, co-citation and bibliographic networks.

In order to achieve research objectives, we collected the bibliographic information of the articles published in JIC for the period 2000 to 2020 from the Scopus database on 11.04.2020. The bibliographic information of 737 documents were analysed using to open source analysis tool, that is bibliometrics package in r software and VOSviewer. These tools were used to create the graphical visualization of bibliographic data on basis of co-occurrence, co-citation and bibliographic coupling.

The results show that the journal is progressing in terms of publication quantity and reputation in the field. To date, 737 documents have been published in JIC, which includes 659 research articles, eight editorials, seven notes and 63 review papers. This paper also portrays the author impact list in terms of most impactful articles published in JIC. Country-wise Italy, Australia, and USA exert maximum influence on JIC scholarship.

Bibliographic analysis offers a comprehensive understanding of past trends and presents the future direction of a journal.

Based on the multi-faceted nature of high-growth firms (HGFs) and the significant investments by governments to make the business environment more conducive to firm growth, the effects of changing institutions impacting on HGFs has not been explored in any great detail. While the authors have a very clear understanding of the spatial variations of HGFs and their firm characteristics in various advanced countries, the authors are lacking such insights for emerging countries. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

Given the growth prospects and economic reforms, the authors chose emerging Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries as the research context. Utilising a cross-country panel data set spanning 11 countries, the authors investigate the share of HGFs across these countries and further examine how changes in institutions impact firms to become HGFs. The authors frame the arguments around three institutional dimensions, namely corruption, investment climate and bureaucratic quality.

The findings suggest that the rates of HGFs are significantly higher in emerging CEE countries as compared with those in developed countries. Second, the results show that an improvement in a country’s institutional environment impacts positively on the likelihood of firms becoming HGFs. Among the three measures of institutions, bureaucratic quality seems to have the largest positive impact as compared with corruption and investment climate.

The authors contribute to the literature by presenting the share of HGF across 11 emerging CEE countries and estimating how changes in institutions impact on firms becoming HGFs for the period 2000-2013.

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has seriously affected the global economy. How agribusinessmen are overcoming this crisis is being noticed in emerging markets. Using social capital to diversify agribusiness for getting more customers is a useful solution for the growth of agribusiness. However, there is a lack of evidence on the aggregate measurement scale of social capital and the influence of behavioral goals on the intention toward agribusiness diversification. Therefore, this study aims to develop an integrated measurement of social capital and investigate its effect on agribusiness diversification intention using the expanded theory of planned behavior (TPB).

A mixed-methods approach is used, including four in-depth interviews, three focus group discussions and two surveys. Structural equation modeling is applied to a sample of 484 respondents to test the proposed hypotheses.

The study shows the role of social capital in influencing the intention to diversify agribusiness under the premises of the resource-based view (RBV). The scale of social capital is also developed, which is the first integrated measurement of this asset. The findings contribute significantly to the existing knowledge of social capital, the TPB and diversifying agribusiness.

This is the first study to explore the comprehensive effect of the facets of social capital on behavioral intention through behavioral goals and determinants of the TPB under the premises of the RBV. The findings will help emerging economies, for example, Vietnam, where most farmers are family business owners or microscaled entrepreneurs in agriculture.