Achieving supply chain ‘Leagility’ through a project management orientation

Many forces have combined to make today's supply chains more complex than ever before. These forces include the significant trend to out-sourcing; the growth of offshore manufacturing and procurement; the rising demand for customer-specific solutions and the globalisation of markets. The paper highlights the challenges that organisations must address in order to gain and retain competitiveness in today's markets – in particular, the need to achieve ever lower costs while simultaneously enhancing responsiveness. In other words, the need is to develop hybrid supply chains that are both ‘lean’ and ‘agile’. Using a single case study of a global telecommunications company as an example, the authors demonstrate how supply chain complexity can effectively be mastered by adopting a project management orientation and in the process enabling outcomes that are ‘leagile’, that is, both lean and agile.     

Paradigm Shifts in Social Housing after Welfare-State Transformation: Learning from the German Experience

Welfare-state transformation and entrepreneurial urban politics in Western welfare states since the late 1970s have yielded converging trends in the transformation of the dominant Fordist paradigm of social housing in terms of its societal function and institutional and spatial form. In this article I draw from a comparative case study on two cities in Germany to show that the resulting new paradigm is simultaneously shaped by the idiosyncrasies of the country's national housing regime and local housing policies. While German governments have successively limited the societal function of social housing as a legitimate instrument only for addressing exceptional housing crises, local policies on providing and organizing social housing within this framework display significant variation. However, planning and design principles dominating the spatial forms of social housing have been congruent. They may be interpreted as both an expression of the marginalization of social housing within the restructured welfare housing regime and a tool of its implementation according to the logics of entrepreneurial urban politics.     

Unconscious Processes of Organizing: Intergroup Conflict in Mental Health Care

A critical but overlooked issue in Weick’s seminal work, The Social Psychology of Organizing (1969/1979), concerns ‘the heat’ of organizing processes, namely, the underground emotional processes underpinning the organizing of conflictual work relationships. We present a qualitative case study of psychiatric agencies mandated by public policy to collaborate but instead engaged in persistent conflict despite its deleterious effects on their working relationship and on the wellbeing of the clients they intended to serve. To explain these conflictual features of organizing, we integrate Weick’s organizing theory with systems psychodynamics to deepen the understanding of emotions in organizing, specifically the motivational forces underpinning sensemaking and actions between interacting psychiatric agencies. This integration of theories reveals a critical feature of the relationship between the conscious and unconscious organizing processes: When a threat is involved, sensemaking and action are overtaken by social defences, resulting in dysfunctional organizing of the primary task. Drawing on these findings, we enrich Weick’s seminal work by developing a model that portrays organizing as the ritualized interaction of emotions, sensemaking and behavioural responses.     

Which factors hinder the adoption of open innovation in SMEs?

The literature on open innovation (OI) is characterised by studies based both on large companies and small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Among all, one of the less explored issues in SMEs is what impedes them to adopt OI. Thus, this paper has the threefold objective to identify which factors hinder the adoption of OI in SMEs, to investigate if different behaviours exist among SMEs in relation to these factors, and to understand if the same factors effectively influence the level of adoption of OI. Based on a survey on 157 Italian SMEs, we identified four main barriers (namely, ‘knowledge’, ‘collaboration’, ‘organisational’, and ‘financial and strategic’) and three profiles of firms, different in terms of innovativeness of the industries they belong to (knowledge intensive, medium-innovative, and less innovative) and hampering factors perceived (‘knowledge’, ‘financial and strategic’, and ‘collaboration’ and ‘organisational’ barriers). Moreover, we found that some of these factors effectively impede the adoption of the paradigm.     

MODEL COMPARISONS IN UNSTABLE ENVIRONMENTS

The goal of this article is to develop formal tests to evaluate the relative in‐sample performance of two competing, misspecified, nonnested models in the presence of possible data instability. Compared to previous approaches to model selection, which are based on measures of global performance, we focus on the local relative performance of the models. We propose tests that are based on different measures of local performance and that correspond to different null and alternative hypotheses. The empirical application provides insights into the time variation in the performance of a representative Euro‐area Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium model relative to that of VARs.     

Disequilibrium theory,waiting costs,and saving behavior in centrally planned economies: A queueing-theoretic approach

An expected-utility maximizer, obliged to make a single purchase from two alternatives, finds that a queue forms for the good that would have been selected had both goods been available. An M/M/1 queue is posited and for each period of delay the maximum additional payment $\text{b}{}^1$ that the consumer would incur to join the queue is determined. This has implications for saving. Not only the availability of the good, but also the delay in obtaining it, the alteration in its arrival rate, and the “stampede effect” determine saving behavior.     

Outward foreign direct investment by Polish state-owned multinational enterprises: is ‘stateness’ an asset or a burden?

State-owned enterprises (SOEs) are commonly associated with undue advantages due to preferential treatment by the state. Simultaneously they are often quoted as handicapped given the notorious state interference, management problems and agency tensions. They used to be regarded as a mainly domestic issue but in the context of globalisation and the fact that states enter treaties with new obligations, SOEs’ performance ceased to be solely a domestic problem, increasingly so as state-owned multinational enterprises (SOMNEs) emerge. This article presents the results of research on Polish SOEs’ outward foreign direct investment (OFDI). It offers an overview of overseas activities of nine major Polish firms with a state stake and aims to contribute to the conceptual literature on foreign investments conducted by SOMNEs. We distinguish between FDI by SOMNEs as specific – privileged (facilitated) or discriminated (hampered) – investments subject to the home country’s state power and the host country’s state perception.