Search results

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused significant disruptions to global supply chains (SCs), affecting the production, distribution, and transportation of goods and services. To mitigate these disruptions, it is essential to identify the barriers that have impeded the seamless operation of SCs. This study identifies these barriers and assesses their impact on supply chain network (SCN).

To determine the relative importance of different barriers and rank the affected industries, a hybrid approach was employed, combining the best-worst method (BWM) and the technique for order preference by similarity to an ideal solution (TOPSIS). To accommodate the inherent uncertainties associated with the pandemic, a triangular fuzzy TOPSIS was used to represent the linguistic variable ratings provided by decision-makers.

The study found that the airlines and hospitality industry was the most affected by the barriers, accounting for 46% of the total, followed by the healthcare industry (23%), the manufacturing industry (19%), and finally the consumer and retail industry (17%).

This study is limited to the four critical industries and nine identified barriers. Other industries and barriers may have different weights and rankings. Nevertheless, the findings offer valuable insights for decision-makers in SC management, aiding them in mitigating the impact of COVID-19 on their operations and enhancing their resilience against future disruptions.

This study enhances understanding of COVID-19’s impact on SCN and provides a framework for assessing disruptions using multi-criteria decision-making processes. The hybrid approach of BWM and TOPSIS in a fuzzy environment is unique and offers potential applicability in various evaluation contexts.

This paper argues for an increased volume of references to Gabriel Tarde and Georg Simmel in the field of organization sociology. The text emphasizes the importance of these two sociologists in understanding the role of imperfection in organizing and the phenomena of fashion and imitation in contemporary organizations. Tarde’s theory challenged the antinomy between continuity and discontinuity, considering finite entities as cases of infinite processes and stable situations as transitory. Simmel’s theory of fashion explores the democratic and democratizing nature of fashion, which satisfies the demand for social adaptation and differentiation. They both saw fashion as a selection mechanism for organizational forms and managerial practices. Furthermore, referring to Tarde and Simmel can help counter the overemphasis on identity construction and the neglect of alterity in social sciences. The construction of identity often overlooks the inevitability of difference and alterity, which are essential aspects of collective projects. Lastly, this paper discusses Simmel’s concept of the stranger and its relevance in analyzing the experiences of foreigners and their potential advantages as “double strangers” in academia and society. The conclusion is that Tarde and Simmel’s contributions offer valuable insights for understanding the dynamics of management, organizing, and social interactions in contemporary organizations.

Like an online carnival, Web3 aims to turn the internet’s social order upside down. Unlike a carnival, Web3 wants to be more than a weeklong party and morph into a legitimate substitute for the internet’s status quo. Web3’s secret sauce for upheaval is decentralized, permissionless technologies, in particular blockchain technologies. In this exploratory paper, we draw on the concept of institutional isomorphism to muse about Web3’s future and to highlight the inherent tension between striving to be different from Web2 yet wanting to become more legitimate. We argue that technical merits are hardly enough to realize Web3’s high aspirations. Regulatory pressures, rampant uncertainty, and the professional norms of Web3 participants drive the space to adopt many of the organizational structures and practices that it aims to displace. To maintain divergence from Web2, despite isomorphic pressures, we suggest that it is important to increase the overall diversity of people in Web3, to double down on the value of decentralization, and to reaffirm Web3’s commitment to creatively re-imagine various institutional arrangements.

This paper aims to introduce the experience-dominant (Ex-D) logic model, which synthesizes the creation, perceptions and outcomes of Ex-D logic. It is designed to offer valuable insights for strategic managerial applications and future research directions.

Employing a qualitative approach by using eight selected product launch events from reviewed 100 event videos and 55 in-depth interviews with industrial managers to develop an Ex-D logic model, and data were coded and analysed via NVivo.

Results show that the firm’s Ex-D logic is operationalized as the mentalizing of the three types of customer needs (service competence, hedonic excitations and meaning making), the materializing of three types of customer experiences and customer journeys (service experience, hedonic experience and brand experience) and the moderating of three types of customer values (service values, hedonic values and brand values).

This study has implications for adding new insights into existing theory on dominant logic and customer experience management and also offers actionable recommendations for managerial applications.

This study sheds light on the importance of Ex-D logic from a strategic point of view and provides an organic view of the firm. It distinguishes firm perspective from customer perspective, firm experience from customer experience and firm journey from consumer journey.

Effective customer journey design (ECJD) is considered a key variable in customer experience management and an essential source of brand meaning and pro-brand behavior. Although previous research has confirmed its importance for driving brand attitudes and loyalty, the role of consumer-brand identification as a social identity-based influence in this relationship has not yet been discussed. Drawing on construal level and social identity theories, this paper aims to investigate whether effective journeys and the resulting overall journey experience are equally powerful in driving brand loyalty among customers with different levels of consumer-brand identification.

The present article develops and tests a research model using data from the European and US service sectors (N = 1,454) to investigate how and when ECJD affects service brand loyalty.

Across two cultural contexts, four service industries and 33 service brands, the results reveal that ECJD is a crucial driver of service brand loyalty for customers with low consumer-brand identification. Moreover, the findings show that different aspects of journey effectiveness positively impact the valence of customers’ experience related to those journeys – a process that is ultimately decisive for their brand loyalty.

This study is unique because it generates theoretical and practical knowledge by combining the literature streams of customer journey design, customer experience and branding. Furthermore, this work demonstrates that consumer-brand identification is a critical boundary condition to be considered in the relationship between ECJD and brand loyalty in services.

The 50th anniversary of Fox's Beyond Contract and Man Mismanagement coincides with another vital contribution to the sociology of work from 1974: Braverman's Labor and Monopoly Capital. This article analyses these two scholars' complementary approaches to job design and the extent to which Fox's ideas influenced subsequent labour process thought.

The article's methodological approach is a historiographical reading of Fox and Braverman's thought in the context of their times and later scholarship.

The article demonstrates that despite some noteworthy overlap with Braverman concerning scientific management, Fox's insights were marginal to later iterations of labour process analysis. It delves into the reasons for this relative neglect, providing an understanding of the dynamics at play.

This paper's value lies in its combined industrial relations and labour process historiography. It offers a fresh perspective on Alan Fox's relationship to the latter field of study.

The present study undertakes an extensive review of the causes of service failures in artificial intelligence (AI) technology literature.

A hybrid review has been employed which includes descriptive analysis, and bibliometric analysis with content analysis of the literature approach to synthesizing existing research on a certain topic. The study has followed the SPAR-4-SLR protocol as outlined by Paul et al. (2021). The search period encompasses the progression of service failure in AI from 2001 to 2023.

From identified theories, theoretical implications are derived, and thematic maps direct future research on topics such as data mining, smart factories, and among others. The key themes are being proposed incorporates technological elements, ethical deliberations, and cooperative endeavours.

This research study makes a valuable contribution to understanding and reducing service defects in AI by providing insights that can inform future investigations and practical implementations. Six key future research directions are derived from the thematic and cluster discussions presented in the content analysis.

Prior research has proposed a number of scales measuring the customer experience (CX), which tend to conceptualize and operationalize CX differently, raising potential confusion among researchers (e.g. regarding which scale to use). Addressing this issue, this article conducts a systematic review to inventorize key CX scales and assess their theoretical rigor, with a focus on the identification of potential scale-related drawbacks or risks.

Drawing on the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) approach, 104 CX scale development studies published between 1996 and 2024 are identified and analyzed in terms of their respective CX conceptualization, dimensionality, itemization, and adopted theoretical perspective to evaluate their theoretical rigor.

The findings reveal the existence of five main risks associated with the adoption of specific CX or related scales, including (1) defining experience with explicit reference to other extant constructs, (2) failure to accurately and comprehensively capture the experience, (3) experience-based tautology and theoretical indeterminacy, (4) experience-based composite constructs, and (5) lacking robustness of experience-based conceptual models. Based on these observations, recommendations are offered for scholars to improve the rigor of their adopted, refined, or proposed CX or related scales.

This article assesses the benefits and potential risks inherent in the adoption of particular CX scales, equipping researchers with a CX roadmap.

As a company’s corporate social responsibility (CSR) image can protect from the backlash of a service failure, it is important to remind customers of the company’s CSR commitment when a service failure occurs. One novel mechanism for doing so is through a prosocial service recovery. However, explorations of such service recovery strategies are relatively unknown. Thus, this paper aims to examine how recoveries including prosocial elements compare to those only utilizing monetary compensation strategies and to explore boundary conditions for such effects.

This research utilizes an experimental design approach across three studies. Participants were recruited from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk.

This research demonstrates that a recovery including prosocial (vs only monetary) elements can positively impact purchase intent through the firms’ CSR perceptions. The authors show that the benefits of prosocial compensation are contingent on the motivation for visiting a company (e.g. hedonic vs utilitarian) as well as the degree to which the company is perceived as luxurious.

The series of studies provides important theoretical contributions to services marketers by advancing the understanding of novel recovery strategies and demonstrating when companies should initiate such strategies. Implications of the findings and directions for future research are explored.

Peer-to-peer (P2P) secondhand resale platforms (SRP) are competitive places where different value systems beyond market values interact. This study aims to investigate the conflicts that may arise in interactions between users on SRP and the extent to which these conflicts are (ir)resolved, by drawing on economies of worth theory.

The study takes a qualitative and interpretative approach to examine 22 active users on P2P resales platforms such as Vinted, including in-depth interviews. Following the Straussian view of grounded theory, the study uses constant comparison (open, axial and selective coding) to analyze data on SRP users’ experiences.

Drawing on the economies of worth theory, the study shows that SRP users rely on four different value systems or “worlds” when using the platforms (market, domestic, green and civic worlds) that come into conflict, at either an interactional (three conflicts identified) or an individual (two conflicts identified) level. The findings reveal that these conflicts are temporarily resolved at the interactional level and in a sustainable way at the individual level.

This study sheds further light on the relationship between consumers on SRP by offering a more nuanced perspective on these exchanges than market-oriented exchanges. It also analyzes the data through the economies of worth theory, which is an appropriate lens to better understand social interactions and conventions. Finally, the study offers recommendations on how managers can improve buyers’ and sellers’ experiences on these platforms and, thus, foster their satisfaction.