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In few prior empirical studies on supply chain resilience (SCRES), the focus has been on the developed world. Yet, organisations in developing countries constitute a significant part of global supply chains and have also experienced the disastrous effects of supply chain failures. The purpose of this paper is therefore to empirically investigate SCRES in a developing country context and to show that this also provides theoretical insights into the nature of what is meant by resilience.

Using a case study approach, a supply network of 20 manufacturing firms in Uganda is analysed based on a total of 45 interviews.

The perceived threats to SCRES in this context are mainly small-scale, chronic disruptive events rather than discrete, large-scale catastrophic events typically emphasised in the literature. The data reveal how threats of disruption, resilience strategies and outcomes are inter-related in complex, coupled and non-linear ways. These interrelationships are explained by the political, cultural and territorial embeddedness of the supply network in a developing country. Further, this embeddedness contributes to the phenomenon of supply chain risk migration, whereby an attempt to mitigate one threat produces another threat and/or shifts the threat to another point in the supply network.

Managers should be aware, for example, of potential risk migration from one threat to another when crafting strategies to build SCRES. Equally, the potential for risk migration across the supply network means managers should look at the supply chain holistically because actors along the chain are so interconnected.

The paper goes beyond the extant literature by highlighting how SCRES is not only about responding to specific, isolated threats but about the continuous management of risk migration. It demonstrates that resilience requires both an understanding of the interconnectedness of threats, strategies and outcomes and an understanding of the embeddedness of the supply network. Finally, this study’s focus on the context of a developing country reveals that resilience should be equally concerned both with smaller in scale, chronic disruptions and with occasional, large-scale catastrophic events.

Traditional costing systems suffer from a number of problems because of the way in which they allocate overheads: product costs have arbitrary components; managers lack information about what causes costs to be incurred; and it becomes impossible to know which of several product lines is the most profitable. Describes a case study in which activity‐based costing and process mapping were applied in combination in an engineering firm, where it was found that it was necessary to specify a method of process‐based costing.

A robust body of scholarship has attached unintended childbearing, cohabitation, and stepfamily living arrangements to a greater risk of union instability in the United States. These aspects of family life, which often co-occur, are overrepresented among disadvantaged populations, who also have an independently higher risk of union instability. Existing scholarship has modeled these family experiences as correlated events to better understand family and union instability, yet the authors assert a direct effort to test whether or how unintended childbearing differs across marital and stepfamily statuses makes important contributions to established research on relationship stability. Drawing on the 2006–2017 National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG), the authors test potential moderating effects to better understand the linkages between unintended childbearing and union dissolution among 7,864 recent, higher-order births to partnered mothers via discrete-time, event history logistic regression models. Findings confirm that unintended childbearing, cohabitation, and stepfamily status are all linked with a greater risk of dissolution. However, unintended childbearing is differentially linked to instability by marital status, with unintended childbearing being associated with a higher risk of dissolution for married couples relative to cohabiting couples. Unintended fertility does not seem to increase the risk of instability across stepfamily status. Findings provide more evidence in support of selection, rather than causation, in explaining the association between unintended childbearing and union instability among higher-order births. Results suggest that among higher-order births, unintended childbearing may reflect underlying relationship issues.

Past research has established a relationship between the perceptions of fairness in the division of household labor and relationship satisfaction. Varying according to gender and time, this relationship has been found with differing outcomes, including relationship satisfaction, relationship happiness, divorce, and sexual frequency. Although this relationship has been well studied, little research has focused on how this relationship is moderated by relationship status. According to the Second Demographic Transition Theory (SDT), as societies become more “modern,” cohabitation will become more prevalent, eventually becoming socially and culturally equivalent to marriage. As such, it is vital to ask how cohabitation and marriage differ, or if they differ at all. Therefore, this gap is explored by asking, “How do perceptions of the division of household labor affect married and cohabitating heterosexual couples’ relationship happiness and chance of separation?” In order to answer this question, the National Survey of Families and Households (Wave III) is analyzed, with outcomes focusing on relationship happiness and chance of separation. Results indicate that when married and cohabitating individuals experience similar levels of happiness with their partner’s housework, they also experience similar levels of relationship happiness and chance of separation, with relationship status not affecting the impact happiness with partner’s housework has on these relationship outcomes. This suggests that cohabitation and marriage may continue to become more similar overall.

Mergers and acquisitions (M&A) are arguably one of the CEOs greatest challenges, and there is a critical need to get these decisions right. It is clear that no single theory is adequate to describe or inform how M&A are evaluated in uncertain conditions, but there are several that offer partial explanations or at least contribute toward our understanding of how managers can deal with the uncertain environment and assess the likely risks associated with M&A. The literature suggests how relevant theories might be aggregated to make sense of strategic investment decision and investment appraisal techniques in an organizational context and considers the implications for further research in this important area of M&A. This chapter focuses on strategic investment appraisal, and draws together a variety of theoretical perspectives, especially from the field of psychology, which may be unfamiliar to both scholars in and practitioners.

Knowledge is supposedly a good ally of the future. Postproject reviews aim to create knowledge and improvements based on the past, but what happens when those observations are ambiguous? Based on intriguing observations on developing structured postproject reviews, implications of the ambiguities of the past are analyzed and discussed.

The present research departed from an interactive clinical action research approach (Schein, 1987), employing several rounds of interaction over 11 months. The studied company had a clear objective to improve its project evaluations and learn from three past projects to improve future ones by developing a framework to facilitate project evaluation.

Despite top management support and a benevolent organizational climate, the development process encountered problems. The list of issues to consider grew ever more extensive, and the expected data refinement and accompanying insights did not happen. Participants debated what to observe, and there was uncertainty about how to link the elements and confusion and disagreement about what was learned.

Learning from past projects was more problematic and difficult than predicted based on the postproject review literature. The past did purvey multiple interpretations.

Learning from the past is not effective if the goal is generating causal knowledge, scoring forms and checklists for future use. Postproject reviews provide an opportunity to decide what the past should be about rather than identifying what it was about.

The past might appear stable, but, when examined, ambiguity emerges. Research on knowledge generation from postproject reviews assumes that a project’s past is more or less stable and agreed upon. However, this study addresses the critical role of ambiguity about the past and the challenges when organizations try to learn from history through project reviews and evaluation processes.

Catastrophic failures in high-reliability installations result from technical and human factors. The purpose of this paper is to use reports of the BP Texas refinery accident and the UK Buncefield oil storage explosions as the basis for exploring how protection and safety are managed in high-reliability manufacturing organisations in South Africa.

A survey of 21 high-reliability firms was undertaken to establish how firms perceived their safety and protection systems in relation to the findings of the Buncefield and BP Texas accidents. Interviews were held with staff in two firms.

The study identifies technical and behavioural shortcomings in managing safety and protective systems in manufacturing organisations. There are profound differences in perceptions of managers, supervisors and operators regarding a number of safety-related factors. Firms fail to identify all protective systems. Essential failure data for determining appropriate policies for failure finding are not collected.

Quantitative results are based on a relatively small sample and qualitative perspectives derive from two case studies.

Managers are unsure how protective devices should be managed. The paper highlights areas where significant improvements are essential if the South African firms are to meet developed world standards.

High-reliability organisations are obliged to minimise the possibility of serious incidents whose consequences may extend far beyond the physical bounds of the organisation.

Limited research has been published on the management of protective systems. This paper highlights a number of technical and behavioural issues that should be addressed for safe operation of high-reliability manufacturing organisations.

Notes limitations to measuring the performance of design activity in particular, and non‐production activities in general. First, validity and reliability in specific measures are strongly negatively correlated, making it hard to achieve both. Second, outcome measures are jointly determined by engineering design and other activities to varying degrees, and this problem of shared outcomes is only partly reduced by measuring at higher levels of aggregation. Third, there is no definite stopping rule for engineering design activity, yet unambiguous outcome measures rely on the existence of such a rule. Fourth, outcomes attributable to engineering design can sometimes only be measured a long time after completion of the activity, making them ineffective for most managerial purposes. There are also considerable problems in properly accounting for environmental variables. However, the use of performance measures have some benefits, e.g. correcting wrong inferences among engineering managers. Results point to the appropriate use of performance measurement in engineering design for raising questions and detecting discrepancies in performance at aggregate levels. They suggest that using measurement is inappropriate for managerial control, for attributing results to engineers or the environment, and for concluding problem solving activities.

It is essential in the design process to have a measure of a cell′s goodness which reflects current commercial and operational priorities. Develops a measuring framework with one component which makes the firm′s weighted manufacturing goals explicit, and a second which examines the impact of cell design decisions on these goals. Since the framework is concerned with design decisions, not the design process, it should be generally applicable to different kinds of design process. Although the framework is essentially subjective, this is largely unavoidable. One of its main benefits is to make the assumptions that underlie subjective judgements explicit and communicable.