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Network configurations have been proposed as an efficient form of organisation and a promising area of research; however, a lack of conceptual clarity can be noted. The purpose of this review is to allow for a broad appreciation of network configurations and provide guidance for future studies of the concept.

A systematic literature review was conducted based on the PRISMA method; Scopus, Web of Science, PubMed and the Cochrane Library were searched for conference proceedings and journal articles describing organisational networks to integrate resources aimed at care delivery. Around 80 articles were included in the final review and analysed thematically and by use of bibliographic coupling.

The last decades have seen an increase in the frequency of articles describing networks for healthcare delivery. The most common contexts are care for multiple and/or long-term conditions. Three clusters of articles were found, corresponding to different conceptualisations of networks in healthcare: efficiency-enhancing cooperation, efficiency-enhancing integration and involvement for cocreation.

To increase conceptual clarity and allow the research on network configurations in healthcare to produce meta-learnings and guidance to practice, scholars are advised to provide ample descriptions of studied networks and relate them to established network classifications.

The current review has only included articles including networks as a key concept, which provides a focused overview of the use of network configurations but limits the insights into similar approaches not described explicitly as networks.

Quality management (QM) can support organisations in contributing to sustainable development. As a result of an expanding focus from customers towards stakeholders within QM, the perspectives to consider multiply. Understanding how practices and tools for process management are specifically affected by this increase in perspectives is key to creating the right conditions for improvement initiatives that support sustainable development.

This paper constructs a typology wherein the use of process management practices and tools is described in nine distinguished system contexts. Inductive discrimination is used to differentiate the system contexts and different use cases for process practices and tools.

Using the system of systems grid (SOSG), mainstream business process management (BPM) practices are positioned in a simple unitary context, whilst sustainability challenges also involve more complex contexts. Addressing these challenges requires integrating new tools and methods from paradigms outside of traditional functionalist business process management practices.

This paper highlights the necessity to consider system contexts when developing feasible practices and tools for effective process management.

Practical implications are that quality practitioners aiming to exploit the potential in process management to support sustainability get support for planning and conducting process improvement initiatives aiming to consider several stakeholder perspectives.

This paper presents a new typology for understanding the context of QM process initiatives and BPM in light of a contemporary sustainability focus.

Iron deficiency anemia (IDA) is the most common form of anemia in the world, affecting children, women and the elderly, while also being a common comorbidity in several medical conditions. Several studies have suggested a possible association between IDA and neurological dysfunction. Epilepsy, one of the common neurological disorders, has an unknown association with IDA. This pa per aims to investigate whether there is a causal relationship between IDA and epilepsy using a two-sample Mendelian randomization (MR) design.

This paper obtained summary data on IDA and epilepsy from the FinnGen consortium. Genetic variants significantly associated with IDA were used as instrumental variables (IVs). Epilepsy, focal epilepsy and generalized epilepsy were the outcomes. This paper used inverse variance weighted (IVW) as the primary estimate, and other MR methods were used as supplementary measures. Sensitivity analysis was also performed to assess heterogeneity and pleiotropy.

IVW estimates genetically predicted a causal relationship between IDA and the risk of epilepsy [odds ratio (OR), 1.15; 95% confidence interval (95% CI), 1.05–1.26; p = 0.002] and focal epilepsy (OR, 1.978, 95% CI, 1.58–2.48, p ≤ 0.0001), while no significant causal relationship was found with generalized epilepsy (OR, 1.1, 95% CI, 0.94–1.3, p = 0.24). There was no evidence of horizontal pleiotropy and heterogeneity in the sensitivity analysis.

This two-sample MR study found that IDA has a negative effect on the development of epilepsy. Clinical control of IDA may be helpful in the prevention of epilepsy. There is a need for further studies to explain the underlying mechanisms of this association.

The aim of this paper is to investigate the development of the quality movement in Sweden since the mid-20th century. The authors are convinced that a summary of the Swedish quality journey so far will offer important lessons for further quality improvements in Sweden and elsewhere.

The authors study how the quality movement has been included in the industrial agenda and how it has been adopted in student curricula and in research. The authors have a focus on how business leaders have learnt, adopted, adapted and innovated with respect to quality development. often in collaboration with academia.

Although the quality movement has fit well with the Swedish culture and that successful corporate leaders have successfully used the specific cultural characteristics there is still a lot to be learnt with respect to the public sector, where the ideas from the quality movement have problem to overcome institutional barriers.

The study is limited to the Swedish context.

There is a serious need to revitalize the public sector by getting leaders and politicians to understand the need for systematic quality improvement.

If future Swedish achievements with respect to healthcare and other social welfare elements are to once again become world-class, the public sector needs to be open-minded and collaborate with the industrial sector and academia to find cost-effective strategies for making quality improvements. However, the private sector must also be alert not to be overtaken by some highly active Asian countries.

Swedish large companies have been very successful in applying quality leadership – however, in the public sector, this has not been the case. Suggestions for improvement are made.

This chapter first reviews the current stages of retail CBDC development before examining some of the common characteristics of retail CBDC projects being proposed in various jurisdictions. This chapter then examines the possible future of retail CBDC going forward.

This study examines the interrelations among educational level, financial literacy, financial inclusion and informal financial business practices of female entrepreneurs in Lima, Peru, focusing on their intentions toward business formalization. Additionally, it explores the influence of legal formalization on both business formality and tendencies toward informality intentions.

The methodology involved a self-administered survey among 118 female entrepreneurs in the small vendor “Bodega” sector, with statistical analysis conducted via partial least structural equation modeling.

The study’s outcomes validated the significant role of financial literacy and inclusion as mediators between educational level and formalization intentions. Notably, legal formalization did not significantly alter these dynamics.

Limitations arise from the study’s explanatory power and lack of predictive capability for all dependent variables, likely due to sample specificity. Additionally, the quantitative research approach does not allow for a deeper understanding of these phenomena.

We advocate reevaluating prevailing attitudes toward legal formality and informal practices, emphasizing tailored public policies for older female entrepreneurs and access to formal financing independent of legal registration. This underscores the need for enhanced educational levels for young women and coordinated efforts among institutional actors to more effectively promote formality.

This research contributes original insights into the emphasis on informal practices over mere legal registration, especially pertinent to female entrepreneurship. It also highlights the counterintuitive significant inverse relationship between age and formalization intentions, enriching the discourse on entrepreneurial motivation.

The agricultural supply chain is susceptible to disruptive geopolitical events. Therefore, agri-food firms must devise robust resilience strategies to hasten recovery and mitigate global food security effects. Hence, the central aim of this paper is to investigate how supply chains could leverage digital technologies to design resilience strategies to manage uncertainty stemming from the external environment disrupted by a geopolitical event. The context of the study is the African agri-food supply chain during the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

The authors employ strategic contingency and dynamic capabilities theory arguments to explore the scenario and conditions under which African agri-food firms could leverage digital technologies to formulate contingency strategies and devise mitigation countermeasures. Then, the authors used a multi-case-study analysis of 14 African firms of different sizes and tiers within three main agri-food sectors (i.e. livestock farming, food-crop and fisheries-aquaculture) to explore, interpret and present data and their findings.

Downstream firms (wholesalers and retailers) of the African agri-food supply chain are found to extensively use digital seizing and transforming capabilities to formulate worst-case assumptions amid geopolitical disruption, followed by proactive mitigation actions. These capabilities are mainly supported by advanced technologies such as blockchain and additive manufacturing. On the other hand, smaller upstream partners (SMEs, cooperatives and smallholders) are found to leverage less advanced technologies, such as mobile apps and cloud-based data analytics, to develop sensing capabilities necessary to formulate a “wait-and-see” strategy, allowing them to reduce perceptions of heightened supply chain uncertainty and take mainly reactive mitigation strategies. Finally, the authors integrate their findings into a conceptual framework that advances the research agenda on managing supply chain uncertainty in vulnerable areas.

This study is the first that sought to understand the contextual conditions (supply chain characteristics and firm characteristics) under which companies in the African agri-food supply chain could leverage digital technologies to manage uncertainty. The study advances contingency and dynamic capability theories by providing a new way of interacting in one specific context. In practice, this study assists managers in developing suitable strategies to manage uncertainty during geopolitical disruptions.

Through an in-depth case study, this paper aims to investigate how workplace struggles can meaningfully change management accounting practices.

This is an archival study drawing on 10 years of governmental documents, news media and a court case. The theoretical notions of framing and overflowing are used to investigate how a calculative change was introduced, problematized and reverted.

An initiative to increase care quality through the empowerment of care recipients led to a calculative change and to an intensification of work, which union representatives turned into a health and safety complaint. “Seizing” the overflow from the calculative change and “redirecting” it into the health and safety arena allowed the unions to draw support from the national work health and safety agency. In response, the organization rolled back the calculative change.

This paper introduces the notions of seizing and redirecting overflows. When combined with conduits of overflows, a part of Callon’s (1998) conceptual apparatus that previously has received little attention, these notions constitute a framework that helps identify conditions that make emancipatory uses of accounting and control outputs possible.

This study explores the interplay between levels of cultures and aspects of quality management (QM), aiming to develop a conceptual framework and introduce propositions regarding managing quality in a multinational company (MNC).

A conceptual framework delineating the relationship between the levels of cultures in MNCs and various aspects of QM is proposed. Thereafter, based on a theory elaboration approach, a case study in Swedish facilities of MNCs is used to further illustrate the link between constructs of the framework, contributing to the identification of challenges and possibilities in managing quality in MNCs.

The research identifies key propositions regarding the intricate relationship between levels of cultures and their influences on aspects of QM in MNC. Proposition 1 emphasises the impact of national cultural differences on perceptions of QM principles. Proposition 2 reveals that diverse QM perceptions affect global consistency in QM practices. However, proposition 3 suggests that emphasising technical aspects in common QM practices fosters shared perceptions and a cohesive organisational culture, leading to Proposition 4, that a QM-centric organisational culture mediates national cultural differences, facilitating the management of quality globally.

This research relies on a case study from a Swedish perspective. There is a need for quantitative or mixed method approaches to validate the proposed framework.

This research yields practical insights into cross-cultural QM challenges and possibilities in MNCs.

By integrating national and organisational culture into the QM framework, this research offers a conceptual model and propositions as a foundation for future cross-cultural QM research in MNCs.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the influence of external enablers (EEs) – factors that are exogenous and independent of the actors – on the rate of new venture creation (NVC) in digital entrepreneurship.

The authors established a unique data panel comprising all formal digital entrepreneurial firms and startups licensed to operate in the digital space from Iran E-Commerce Development Center, from 2012 to 2022, totaling 124,751 businesses classified in 16 sectors. The authors used Poisson regression with robust standard errors to analyze the relationship between external factors and NVC. Additionally, the authors segmented the data set along demographic, spatial and sectoral subsets to compare them using the average treatment effect model.

This analysis confirms that technology readiness and technology intensity, as EEs, significantly boost digital entrepreneurship in a developing country. The authors also explored the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic as a natural environmental enabler and explored its facilitating effects and the enduring impacts post-pandemic. Moreover, the authors assessed the heterogeneous impact of the EEs across different groups and derived implications for each.

While this study is comprehensive, it focuses exclusively on formal digital entrepreneurship within a single developing country, namely, Iran. Although the authors explored various EEs, they did not address all possible types, highlighting the potential for further research in other entrepreneurial sectors for a comparative analysis of EEs.

The initial findings affirm that most NVC in Iran stems from external factors. These findings have been widely used by policymakers to define the goals and objectives of EEs concerning their nature and impact. This research reveals that EEs have heterogeneous effects on NVC, varying across different characteristics such as gender, geography and industry sectors. The results of this study suggest that governments should reassess the role of “macro” policies to support vulnerable groups. EEs disproportionately benefit male founders, which exacerbates existing gender gaps and necessitates ongoing attention and intervention. Additionally, EEs have diverse impacts across industries, potentially favoring some while disadvantaging others because of varying social, cultural and economic factors.

NVC, central to entrepreneurship in developing nations, encounters numerous challenges, yet the role of EEs remains underexplored in this context. EEs are opportunities that are not limited to a subset of entrepreneurial actors; they act as levers influencing a wide range of entrepreneurial activities. This research distinctively investigates the empirical impact of EEs in a Middle Eastern developing country context, contributing to the growing literature on the external enablers framework.