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This study aims to analyze the mediating role that green practices (GPs) and green technologies (GTs) play in the relationship between lean manufacturing (LM) and industrial performance (IP). It is suggested that GPs and GTs are crucial for transforming lean routines into enhanced performance that simultaneously meet current environmental requirements.

The hypotheses are tested using a mixed methodology, which includes a partial least squares structural equation modeling approach and a fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) applied to a multisectoral sample from three European countries (Spain, Sweden and Croatia).

The results confirm that GPs mediate the relationship between LM and IP; however, in the case of GTs, this mediation does not appear to occur, although GTs emerge as a peripheral condition in the subsequent fsQCA. These findings highlight the need to avoid an exclusively technocentric approach and underscore the importance of implementing green organizational practices alongside technology investments to achieve successful lean initiatives.

It seems clear that managers should apply GPs, combined with LM, to improve sustainability and efficiency and should apply GTs once a more mature lean-green culture has been established.

In recent years, the scientific community has increasingly focused on the impact of implementing GPs and GTs on IP within LM plants. However, to the authors’ knowledge, no study has yet analyzed the combined effect of both initiatives. This paper seeks to address this gap by examining, in aggregate, the moderating effect of GPs and GTs on IP in LM plants.

The survival of companies today hinges on their adaptability and flexibility, with digital transformation (DT) and organizational slack (OS) playing crucial roles. Despite their recognized importance, these factors are often studied separately. This study aims to explore how OS facilitates DT and evaluate their synergies and trade-offs to improve performance.

Using data from the European Manufacturing Survey, structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) and fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA), we investigate causal relationships and possible combinations between different dimensions of OS and DT that contribute to business performance.

We confirmed the positive effect of OS and DT on business performance, highlighting the importance of organizational over technological factors. While not definitively establishing OS as a precursor to DT, our findings underscore the need for human and operational slack to improve performance, especially in less technology-intensive contexts.

Our findings evidence that decision-makers should integrate OS with DT initiatives to improve the firm’s competitiveness. However, it is worth noting that while OS seems essential in low-tech shopfloors, its importance is lower in high-tech environments. Furthermore, within the possible combinations, managers should promote operational slack and digitalization, as it seems fundamental to improve business performance.

This article contributes to the management field in three ways. First, it clarifies controversies by providing evidence of the positive roles of DT and OS as drivers of competitiveness for manufacturing firms. Second, we verify that OS is not directly linked to DT, challenging existing assumptions. Third, it investigates the combinations of OS and DT that drive business performance improvement, emphasizing their synergies and trade-offs.

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate how temporary labor moderates the relation between two well-known lean initiatives (process flow and process quality) and line productivity. This paper focuses on high-volume, low-variety (HVLV) shop floors, where work experience may not be as relevant as expected and extrinsic motivation of the temporary workforce could become a key driver of individual performance.

The authors follow an insider econometrics approach based on panel microdata (1,793 observations) from nine lines over two years in a Spanish manufacturing plant. The authors selected this setting for two reasons: Spain has traditionally had one of the highest levels of temporary employment in the world, so it perfectly represents labor market trends in OECD countries. Simultaneously, the authors also searched for a type of shop floor that could be representative of one of the most common manufacturing environments: a shop floor with highly repetitive and low-complexity work tasks.

The results of this paper suggest that in HVLV environments, temporary labor could contribute up to a 1.4% improvement in line productivity, provided there is a strong lean implementation. Otherwise, the use of temporary labor could undermine the positive effects of both process flow and process quality on plant productivity.

External incentives derived from high levels of unemployment, coupled with manufacturing’s increasing automation and specialization, may be minimizing the weaknesses traditionally associated with temporary workers in lean environments. By contrast, those shop floors lacking lean standards face serious productivity consequences from adjusting to global trends by using temporary work.

Most studies explore the success of mergers and acquisitions through ex ante analyses based on the compatibility of resources and capabilities between the acquirer and target. As more than half of them fail, there seems to be room for enhancing our understanding of when and how acquisitions can actually improve firms' competitiveness. Diverging from these conventional approaches, the authors posit that attention should be at the strategic level. The purpose of this paper, therefore, is to explore the existence of compatibility between acquirers’ and targets’ competitive strategies and its effect on post-acquisition business performance.

Through the Thomson Reuters Eikon financial and acquisition databases, the authors built a unique data panel of 174 acquirer–target matched acquisitions in the manufacturing sector from 24 different countries between 2000 and 2020. The authors used a two-step System-GMM approach to address the hypotheses proposed in this paper. This methodology allowed to isolate and easily compare the differential effects of each possible combination of strategic similarity and dissimilarity between the target and acquiring company on the latter’s post-acquisition strategies.

The need to unravel the motives behind successful acquisitions has gained enormous interest in recent years among academics and managers to improve – or maintain – firm competitiveness. Through a panel data of 174 acquisitions among manufacturing firms (2000–2020), this study shows that differentiated firms improve their business performance by acquiring firms with similar strategies; nevertheless, their performance worsens if the acquired firm follows a cost-leadership strategy. Concerning acquirers with a cost-leadership strategy, the lack of clear behavioral patterns suggests that the lower knowledge absorption capacity associated with these firms might be a decisive factor in being able to assimilate and efficiently exploit the acquired firm's knowledge.

Overall, this approach offers a new and valuable perspective for practitioners because it improves understanding of the possible causes of merger failure and opens new attentions to consider in maximizing success and long-term competitiveness. The results of this study bring, thus, an unexpected result to this research: the importance of the acquirer’s strategy beyond the similarity or dissimilarity of the strategies of the acquirer and the acquired company.

This paper aims to examine how lack of financial cooperation damages the operational efficiency of supply chains. The thesis is that economic and technological forces are provoking increasing financial tensions that push companies to transfer their credit needs and inventory requirements to their weakest suppliers. Thus, what might initially seem positive from an individual perspective can in fact generate losses in production efficiency for the supply chain as a whole.

This paper uses official data collected from 116 first- and second-tier suppliers in the Spanish automotive components sector, covering nine years (2001-2009). The relationships between the key variables are analysed using panel data estimations.

Significant differences were found between the working capital (WC) of first- and second-tier companies, proving additionally that although this approach may temporarily improve the results of first-tier suppliers, it leads to lower production efficiency in plants throughout the value chain.

Practitioners should avoid short-sighted attitudes when organizing the supply chain on a cooperative basis, going beyond the conventional wisdom on physical and information flows between original equipment manufacturers and their suppliers to reach upstream stages and embracing financial considerations.

The paper takes a novel approach to the issue of inter-organizational collaboration in the supply chain, aiming to go beyond conventional Lean Supply practices. From an empirical point of view, while much of the research on the topic utilizes key informant insights collected using psychometric data collection techniques, this study uses different financial proxies collected from secondary panel data.

The purpose of this paper is to present an overview of the conceptual framework related to the Lean and Green practices, paradigms, future prospects and problems, indicating points of convergence and divergence between them.

Based on this premise, through vast literature systematization, the authors sought to categorize studies in order to consolidate constructs, reinforcing aspects regarding the positive and negative approaches and pointing out the gaps in the current state of the art. Broad literature systematization was carried out; the authors found 107 articles published between 2014 and 2018, separated into 10 categories.

The main constructs confirmed are the positive approximation of the Lean and Green union, evidenced by studies premised on the independent variable category demonstrating that their union influences other environmental performance variables.

The present research is a systematization of the literature, so its results have to be confirmed by other studies.

The study supports the Lean and Green theme, confirming converging issues between the two areas and launching new topics for future research.

The study contributed to the environmental theme by confirming synergies of the Lean and Green union and presenting new research themes.

To assert that Lean and Green systems union is sustainable, with regard to the tripod of sustainability, more studies on the social category are necessary.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is vastly impacting the digital transformation of societies, economies, businesses, markets and enterprises, at a very fast pace, mostly after the global success of the generative algorithms. In this respect, this study, with an exploratory intention, aims to provide evidence about the fundamental issues of AI, particularly if generative, when adapted to humanism, with a specific focus on the wine business.

An exploratory analysis, conducted on a convenience sample of wine business operators, has been performed to investigate AI applications when connected with the conceptual platform of the “Industry 5.0” framework.

The results of the survey provide evidence about the success of AI in the wine business. Specifically, the research outcomes highlight that the interviewees (wine business operators) recognized the high relevance of the potential use of AI in the strategic and operating management of wine firms.

This study aims to provide new empirical evidence with regard to the application of AI in real business contexts. More specifically, in this exploratory investigation, a potential interaction between AI and sustainability has been highlighted in the wine industry, especially from an environmental point of view, i.e. for respectfully governing and managing the business impact on the planet and also for increasing the general efficiency of the process, with peculiar applications on the managerial, economic and financial side of the wine business.

Today’s businesses are looking for a circular bioeconomy (CBE) to develop a sustainable manufacturing process as industrial operations result in significant amounts of waste materials and the depletion of natural sources. The industry commonly applies techniques such as lean manufacturing (LM), digital innovations (DI) and green practices (GP) for operational and quality improvement. However, publications explaining how these technologies enable the CBE transition are scarce. This study examines CBE components, common practices of each technology facilitating the CBE transition, problems of solitary technology deployment as well as coupling technologies for the CBE transition.

A scoping review was conducted to analyse previous studies in this new field. The data collection is in a quantitative manner, but the data synthesis process follows a similar method of synthesising data in the grounded theory method, which includes familiarisation with the data, open-coding and finalisation of the themes.

Critical components of CBE were identified as biobased goods, industry symbiosis, material resource efficiency, renewable energy, product lifecycle and sharing economy. GP is the most prominent in moderating the CBE transition. We identify each technology has coupled relationships (Lean-4.0, Green-Lean and Green-4.0) technologies facilitated by the circularity concept, which form the core pillars of enablers and advance the CBE paradigm.

This study demonstrates that combining lean principles with green technology and digital technologies can effectively decrease waste and resource usage in biobased manufacturing processes, therefore endorsing the concept of resource efficiency in circular bioeconomy models.

The results allow entrepreneurs to strategically incorporate different existing technologies to meet CBE fundamental objectives by initiating it with dual technologies and facilitate industry professionals and regulators to support the improvement of environmental sustainability performance in the manufacturing industry. The management will be able to focus on the common practices across the technologies, which have a dual benefit for both operational and environmental performance.

The paper makes the first attempt to present the synergic impact of the three quality management technologies on a new concept of sustainability, CBE.