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The paper aims to clarify how an incumbent retail organisation explores digitalisation for its existing business.

The paper draws from an in-depth case study of home-furnishing retail giant, IKEA conducted with semi-structured interviews, participant observations and document analyses.

In the exploration phase of digitalisation, three major activities – interpreting, interrelating and integrating – illuminate how the exploration process can be organised in practice.

Although digitalisation ranks amongst the most significant ongoing transformations in retail businesses, research on how incumbent retail organisations have engaged in exploring digitalisation in practice has remained scarce. The paper contributes insights into digitalisation processes in retail businesses that may also apply to other trends affecting the retail industry.

In this chapter, we explore genre-blurring writing, where fiction meets theory, following the argument that texts in management and organisation studies suffer from the ‘textbook syndrome’. The stories that we tell through textbooks not only influence, but also set boundaries for, the way understandings are developed through the eyes of the reader. Often textbooks are written in a way that lead the reader into an idealised linear understanding of an organisation – far from the problems, dilemmas and messy everyday life that managers experience. Our discussion builds on previous literature on writing differently and our own experiences of writing a textbook by involving a professional novelist. Engaging in genre-blurring writing opens up how we think not only about writing, fiction and facts but also in our role as scientists. By situating ourselves, as researchers, at the intersection of fiction and the scientific work, not only new ways of writing, but also of thinking emerge. We discuss three aspects through which fiction challenge and develop our writing and thinking, namely to write with voice, resonance and an open end. Through genre-blurring writing, we create opportunities both to learn and to engage students in learning.

Based on a conceptual framework drawn from the original SERVQUAL model, the purpose of the paper is to explore the question of which service‐quality dimensions are deemed to be important by inbound tourists visiting a peripheral tourist location in Sweden.

Using questionnaires and interviews, Italian and British tourists visiting a peripheral tourist location in northern Sweden are studied in three phases: before the tourist experience, during the experience, and after return home.

Difference in the tourists' perceptions of the importance of various quality dimensions are identified before and after the tourism experience. Many similarities are identified between the needs and expectations of Italian and British tourists, although some differences also emerge.

Tourism managers should recognise that the needs of their customers can be influenced by: the time at which these needs are assessed; and cultural differences between nationalities.

The purpose of this paper is to offer a thematic analysis of global sourcing and international purchasing issues in international retail firms.

We review literature that addresses purchasing/sourcing activities of retail firms in foreign markets. We categorize this literature into different themes and analyse how these themes are conceptually or empirically linked to performance. We then use the thematic analysis as a foundation for suggesting potential avenues for future research.

Four distinct themes emerge from our literature review.

There is a lack of research that addresses how retail firms can extract value from global sourcing and international purchasing activities. A thematic review, along with a careful classification of different themes, could lead to an enhanced understanding of the processes and objectives that underpin global sourcing and international purchasing activities in retail firms.

The paper problematizes previous research on accountingisation, where the role of accounting in determining the scope of professional work is understood in relation to a professional/economic dichotomy and a model of episodic change. The purpose of this paper is to investigate everyday professional work in established new public management (NPM) settings, and proposes a new conceptual framework to analyze the role of accounting therein. The aim is to enable future investigations into how, when and where a situated “bottom line” emerges, by conceptualizing professional work as a process of calculation.

Qualitative data from case studies of two tertiary level geriatric organizations using observations of 33 employees and four interviews. Data related to patient discharge, and the management of the discharge processes, were analyzed.

Few visible trade-offs between distinctly professional or economic considerations were observed. Rather, the qualification of patients’ status and evaluation of their dischargeability centered on debates over treatment time. Time therefore operated as a situated “bottom line,” to which various other concerns were emergently linked in a process of calculation. Professional practitioners seldom explicitly evoke accounting concepts and technologies, but these were implicated in the ongoing translation of each patient into something temporarily stable, calculable and thus actionable for the professionals involved in their care. The study’s findings have implications for the conceptual understanding of professional work in established NPM settings.

Case study research is context-specific and the role of accounting in professional work will vary due to the professional groups and accounting technologies involved.

The study’s findings have implications for how to influence professional behavior through interventions in the existing landscape of accounting technologies. The possibility to change behavior through the introduction or removal of individual accounting technologies is questioned.

To date, research on the role of accounting in determining the scope of professional work has assumed a professional/economic dichotomy and studied episodic change linked to accounting-oriented reforms. This paper analyses the role of accounting as an on-going process with emergent boundaries between professional and economic considerations.

The materials planning (MP) environment sets the prerequisites for the MP process. Before and during production transfer and start-up (PTS) supply chain uncertainty of the MP environment increases, as the company goes from a known to an unknown situation. The purpose of this paper is to describe the impact of the MP environment on the MP process before and during PTS.

A conceptual framework describing the MP environment before and during PTS is developed and applied to one case of outsourcing from Sweden to China. The framework is based on a literature review and further evaluated by both researchers and managers.

A conceptual framework describing the dynamic MP environment before and during PTS has been developed compared to previously static MP environments descriptions. In addition, this framework proved to be useful in analysing the importance of various characteristics of the MP environment before and during PTS.

The study highlights the importance of a proactive approach to materials availability when transferring production. The conceptual framework developed here can be used as a checklist to identify the characteristics of the MP environment that are most important to ensuring materials availability.

The paper highlights the PTS when outsourcing, a substantial time frame with a large impact on success. This is an important contribution, given the focus of previous outsourcing research on strategic issues. Further, the paper demonstrates the differences between static and dynamic MP environments.

The purpose of this paper is to identify integrated solutions business as the first generation of servitized offerings and modular solution offerings as the second development phase in servitization of original equipment manufacturers. This study examines how the servitized manufacturer, Kone, moves from integrated solutions to modular solutions business and develops the requisite capabilities to design, produce and implement modular solution offerings.

The paper reports a longitudinal case study of a provider of integrated solutions installed in buildings. During the ten years studied, the manufacturer implemented a strategic initiative to modularize its integrated solutions offering.

The firm’s transition to modular solutions progressed through three major capability development phases: solutions based on ad hoc integration, smart solutions based on modular design and through-chain modularity. The modular structure aims at fostering the efficiency of the solution offering and the associated production system.

Leveraging the benefits of modularity calls for an aligned combination of strategic, operational and technical capabilities contributing to the integration of resources in a modular production system for the solution providers’ competitive performance.

The study reports how a solution provider can develop the operational capabilities to integrate the core and peripheral components into the solution, and orchestrate the modular production system.

This study is a rare longitudinal analysis of how a manufacturer builds a modular offering, the solution platform and the required competitive capabilities to provide the solution.