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To draw attention to a particular outsourcing risk that has not yet been adequately addressed in the literature, namely information leakage arising from acts of accidental disclosure or even purposeful betrayal by consultants that work for several client firms at the same time.

A review of the literature.

It illustrates how specialist IT service providers are playing pivotal roles in determining the extent to which unique firm specific skills and core competencies are being transferred to the wider industry context (via leakage) and becoming standard practices. It is shown that consultants face a dilemma as they are expected to spread cutting edge level expertise to their respective client firms, yet at the same time honour confidentiality commitments.

Conceptual rather than empirical.

A management tool is developed for managers to aid decision making.

A critique of the outsourcing literature and a warning to managers to be aware of the risk of information leakage.

This study aims to identify perceptual, experience related, demographic, socio‐economic and situational characteristics of internet banking adopters and non‐adopters. In particular, perceptual differences between IB adopters and non‐adopters are to be examined.

Based on relevant literature and previous research that included interviews with leading internet banking managers in Turkey, a questionnaire was designed. Face‐to‐face questionnaires were distributed to 155 convenience samples of internet users.

There were significant differences between adopters and non‐adopters of the service in terms of their perceptual, experience and consumer related characteristics. Internet banking adopters perceived internet banking use as less risky, more user‐friendly and more useful compared to internet banking non‐adopters. Internet banking non‐adopters who intend to use the service in the future (i.e. later adopters) perceived internet banking use as less risky and more useful compared to non‐adopters who do not intend to use the service (i.e. laggards). Internet banking adopters were also found to have more experience with mobile internet, and have higher income and longer working hours.

The managerial implications of the study are that the banks in Turkey should reduce the risk perceptions of non‐adopters, particularly the ones who do not intend to use the service in the future (i.e. laggards). They should also motivate non‐adopter segments to have more experience with more general internet based services. The initial target to diffuse internet banking in Turkey should include the segments which have greater income and longer working hours.

This study applies the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) to identify the perceptual differences between internet banking adopter and non‐adopter segments and sub‐segments in the Turkish context.

This study aims to investigate how contract complexity and relational trust could impact offshore outsourcing innovation (OOI) performance of small and medium enterprises (SMEs). This study further examines the moderating effects of knowledge routines and joint actions on the relationships between contract complexity, as well as relational trust and OOI performance.

The empirical investigation extends transaction cost economics and the relational view of buyer-supplier dyads in the context of offshore outsourcing SMEs. To test the hypotheses, the authors collected and analysed survey data from 200 European manufacturing SMEs that have existing offshore supplier relationships.

The results suggest that both complex contracts and relational trust as governance structures positively affect SMEs’ OOI performance. Additionally, while both formal knowledge routines and joint actions help strengthen the relationship between complex contracts and OOI, they showed no significant moderating effect on the relationship between relational trust and OOI. Furthermore, based on the results, the authors also develop a governance framework covering four configurations – fit, firm, flexible and fragile (4F).

The 4F governance scenarios – fit, firm, flexible and fragile – introduced in this study emphasise the need for a combination of contract complexity and relational trust mechanisms in OOI relationships. The 4F labelling has rich implications for practitioners on how interfirm outsourcing innovation relationships can be managed based on configurations of contractual and relational governance. The study also adds to the understanding of how SMEs’ specific characteristics (e.g. resource shortcomings and flexibility) may influence their OOI decisions in comparison with large firms.

To examine the literature on counterfeit products and explore whether imitation and counterfeit product activities can actually facilitate the development of new products.

The paper examines the dominant school of thought on counterfeit products that characterises it as a significant economic and social problem throughout the world, and develops an alternative school of thought, which focuses on the overlooked benefits of imitation and counterfeit activities. The paper suggests that the concepts of counterfeit and imitation are often misrepresented as powerful lobby groups present their cases.

This paper argues that while some counterfeit firms adopt short‐term profit motives other counterfeit firms demonstrate a longer‐term motive which manifests itself in an ability to reverse engineer, imitate and learn. Such firms may be suitable long‐term partners, in particular for multinational firms with operations in transition economies. Thus, firms face a difficult strategic choice when faced with product counterfeiters that of whether to fight or co‐operate.

Companies need to improve their risk management, in particular in their foreign market entry and collaborative strategies. Companies should seek to take a long‐term view and to protect their technology‐based competitive advantage. Furthermore, copyright and trademark holders need to positively identify collaborators and to offer sufficiently attractive prospects for these business partners to keep them “on the straight and narrow” and to benefit from the contribution they can make.

This paper brings together in a clear and coherent way an alternative perspective on counterfeiting products, which challenges the dominant perspective. This is based on recognising that reverse engineering (RE) and imitation form an essential part of the product innovation process.

This paper aims to examine the roles of quality managers at community colleges, their experiences balancing accountability and improvement and their insights into the future of quality assurance.

This phenomenological, qualitative study used semi-structured interviews with eight community college quality managers to investigate their roles, experiences and perspectives. A reflexive thematic approach was used to analyze the interview data.

Four themes were identified from participant responses: quality managers frame and enable program quality, quality managers drive program change, quality managers cultivate a culture of quality and quality managers seek system change. The findings illustrate the roles played by quality managers as they work to improve college education at program, institution and system-wide levels.

The decision of participants to accept the recruitment invitation might reflect particular attitudes, perspectives or experiences.

Quality assurance has emerged as a key mechanism for ensuring postsecondary programs are current, relevant and meeting the evolving needs of students and employers. This study advances the understanding of how quality assurance processes play out at the operational level and explores the experiences of quality managers as they navigate various quality tensions.

Quality managers play key roles in leading, evaluating and influencing quality assurance processes in postsecondary education yet they are underrepresented in the literature. The findings of this study shed new light on the aspirational and influential roles they play in advancing quality assurance.

The purpose of this paper is to understand the role of resilience enablers in combating counterfeits in the medicine supply chain based on a Systematic Literature Review (SLR). The objective is also to help practitioners and scholars as the review revealed that little research has been conducted on selecting and implementing practices to improve resilience to counterfeiting.

Based on the literature review, a content analysis was performed for 84 selected papers to explore the potential relationship among resilience enablers and counterfeit anti-measures.

This paper contributes to Supply Chain Resilience (SCR) research by summarizing the highly fragmented literature concerning how to combat counterfeiting. The SLR indicated reengineering, collaboration, visibility, innovation, SCR culture and trust as six key enablers to combat counterfeit medicines and identified literature gaps. Moreover, the paper discusses other resilience enablers which have been less studied in the literature and shows new avenues of research.

This paper is limited in that it is an exploratory literature review and focuses only on three databases over the past 15 years. Furthermore, counterfeit is a rapidly evolving issue and anti-measure studies require frequent surveillance concerning new discoveries.

The main contribution of this paper is to provide a better understanding of enablers most often associated with counterfeit anti-measures, which, therefore, might help to increase resilience to counterfeit medicines. Moreover, research gaps involving enablers less associated with anti-measures are presented.

The production and sale of counterfeit products is big business in the international economy. Nowhere is this more evident than in China. This paper aims to review the anti-counterfeiting strategies that have been identified in the literature on counterfeiting.

The paper takes the form of a literature review.

This paper reviews 11 anti-counterfeiting strategies that have been suggested by relevant literature and has identified some of the success conditions. It also finds that firms should seek to take a longer-term view and to protect their technology-based competitive advantage. This is already happening: Japanese blue chip companies have begun to relocate sensitive R&D and high-tech manufacturing away from risky locations and back to Japan.

The paper shows that the dominant legal enforcement (perspective) approach has been of limited success and explains the reasons for its failure.

The paper concludes that anti-counterfeiting strategies should be seen as complementary rather than as mutually exclusive and that in the long run, as countries get more technologically advanced, governments will develop a strong self-interest in tackling the counterfeit problem themselves.

The paper provides a systematic discussion of alternative anti-counterfeiting strategies that have been suggested by the literature and explores their success conditions in some detail.

It is widely accepted that companies operating in research‐intensive industries need to pursue an “outward‐looking”, collaborative research and technology development strategy. Research collaboration, however, always carries risks, in particular, the risk of sensitive information leakage, be it as a result of purposeful betrayal by collaborators or accidental disclosure. It has been shown that traditional legal and bureaucratic control mechanisms are not able to deal with this problem adequately and that the more “outward‐looking” the research strategy that a company follows, the more it has to rely on social control mechanisms such as reputational concerns of key researchers and the incremental development of higher levels of trust among individuals. This paper analyses the relationship between management control and social control in collaborative research and development in more detail and introduces the results of a small‐scale interview‐based study of the trust‐building and control processes in fine fragrance research.

The purpose of this paper is to adopt a contingency theory from a quality perspective to develop a model for assessing the impact of counterfeit prevention efforts on supply chain (SC) performance.

Based on the participation of 140 managers across ten industry sectors, a theoretical model is proposed and structural equation modeling is used to examine the relationships among SC risk management integration, SC counterfeit risk orientation (CRO), SC counterfeit risk mitigation (CRM), SC metric consistency (MC) and SC performance (service and cost benefits).

Findings suggest that firms with greater SC risk management integration have a stronger orientation toward counterfeit risk, greater maturity in CRM, more consistent SC metrics and better SC performance outcomes. CRO alone was not found to significantly improve SC MC.

Results are based on managerial perceptions of SC counterfeit risk and performance metrics. Survey respondents were predominantly from the same country (the USA).

The paper represents a potential quality management framework for SC risk management, in the context of counterfeiting that includes a contingency perspective.

The study advances knowledge of how firms may address the challenging issue of counterfeiting in the SC. Empirical findings offer a firm-level quality management framework for managerial decision making in the context of counterfeiting.

The paper aims to examine the promotion of intra‐organisational collaboration within a university setting.

An ethnographic approach influenced by a phenomenographic framework of analysis was used.

Content analysis of qualitative data resulted in 11 overlapping themes being identified in respect of collaboration. Final analysis led to the identification of four hierarchically inclusive degrees of collaboration.

The research, whilst based within one UK university, raises important conceptual as well as practical questions.

The implications of this paper have relevance for the ways in which universities and other agencies promote intra‐ as well as inter‐departmental (or agency) working.

By using the framework developed it is possible to see parallels across different professional and agency settings.