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The Covid-19 pandemic generated significant changes in the operating methods of hospital logistics departments. The objective of this research is to understand how these changes took place, what collaboration mechanisms were developed with clinical authorities and, to what extent, logistics and clinical care activities should be decoupled to maximize each area's contribution?

The case study is selected to investigate practices implemented during the COVID-19 pandemic in hospitals in Canada. The pandemic presented an opportunity to contrast practices implemented in response to this crisis with those historically used in this environment.

The strategy of decoupling logistical tasks of an operational nature from clinical activities is well-founded and helps free clinical staff from tasks for which they are not trained. However, the decoupling of operational tasks should be combined with an integration of the clinical information flow to the logistics hub players. With this clinical information, the logistics hub can generate its full potential enabling better inventory management decisions to be made.

The concept of decoupling is studied to identify configurations that offer the best benefits for clinical staff.

This paper presents a comprehensive overview of the cross-disciplinary literature on the drivers, barriers and performance outcomes of sustainable packaging to understand the current state of research in this field and identify research opportunities.

A systematic review is conducted within no time limit. The Methodi Ordinatio methodology was applied that resulted in retaining 48 relevant and high impact articles published in 26 academic journals with various scopes.

Seven key drivers are identified and defined: the integrative and collaborative supply chain, environmental capabilities and resources, market-based instruments, cost reduction, consumer pressure, competitive advantage, and regulatory pressure. Three main barriers are identified and defined: cost/benefit ambiguity, additional costs and complex trade-offs between packaging requirements. The review shows that the drivers and barriers to packaging sustainability are contingent on the firm size. Sustainable packaging positively affects the environmental, social and economic performance; however, its operational performance requires a proactive and integrated supply chain. The results highlight the importance of integrated packaging decisions at three different levels to improve packaging sustainability: vertical and horizontal integration, upstream and downstream integration, and product-packaging integration. The authors developed research propositions and provided insightful directions for future research.

Most studies focus on specific drivers, barriers and outcomes of sustainable packaging, while this paper brings them together to build a comprehensive framework. The latter provides a deeper understanding of the factors that incentivize or deter firms from pursuing sustainable packaging and its performance outcomes.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to argue that the production of past workplace and organizational ethnographies needs to be better understood in their historical context. Design/methodology/approach – A programme of research work on the history of workplace and organizational ethnography is proposed, and a historiographical discussion outlines the purpose, scope and means by which such a project might be realised. Findings – The article highlights why organizational ethnographers should understand the history of their research practice. Originality/value – The paper suggests that a serious attempt is made to create a body of historical knowledge about workplace and organizational ethnography. The value of this would be to deepen the contribution ethnographic research makes to organization and management studies, and ensure that continuity and change in ethnographic research practices are better understood.

As postmodernity is increasingly discussed in the management disciplines, there is growing acceptance that the postmodernity debates challenge the adequacy of traditional research and teaching practices. Argues that, to date, this has been interpreted primarily as a need for new theoretical and/or pedagogical content. Believes the issue is more fundamental. Contrasting modernist and postmodernist theories of post‐industrialism, argues that postmodern transformations of work and society throw the very forms, even the existence of organizational theorizing, academic business education, and “management” as it is currently understood into question. While it is directed at those who have some background with these debates, attempts to provide background and citations sufficient to point the new reader towards other commentary on these issues.

The purpose of this paper is to explore practitioner and post‐colonial perspectives on the implementation of learning organisation theory and practice in a non‐Western setting.

A qualitative interpretive study, using in‐depth interviews and participant observation, was conducted in two public organisations in Singapore. The study looked at relationships between the concepts of the learning organisation and of Singapore national culture, as the members of the organisations saw them. This study is presented and then discussed in commentaries from two different perspectives, i.e. the “insider” perspective of a Singaporean practitioner, and the “outsider” perspective of a New Zealand academic using a post‐colonial critique.

The findings indicate that Western LO practitioners need to pay specific attention to the cultural values expressed by non‐Western organisational members, and to their own cultural limitations and biases which may be embedded in the implementation of LO programmes. This process requires an active dialogue between both parties.

The findings indicate that practitioners need to pay specific attention to the cultural values of employees, and to the cultural assumptions of new management programmes, when adopting Western concepts of management to non‐Western organisations.

This is an empirical study that reveals the particular tensions experienced in two specific non‐Western organisations when LO practice was introduced without explicit exploration of its Western cultural underpinnings. The paper argues that the development of an LO discourse of organisational post‐colonialism can provide a valuable critical framework to examine the global mobilisation of LO concepts.

Knowledge transfer considers the company as a dynamic system dealing with different kinds of knowledge. As production becomes more knowledge-based, this increases the potential for capturing and taking advantage of knowledge. On the other side, these factors become more complex and difficulties increase for the effective transfer of knowledge across organizational boundaries.

Research on knowledge transfer has experienced substantial growth in the past 30 years and research on knowledge transfer is still increasing (Kumar & Ganesh, 2009). The literature argues quite unanimously that there is a positive link between knowledge sharing and competitive advantage. This is analyzed in several studies, but according to Dyer and Hatch (2006), this assumption has not been generally proven. In this chapter, we discuss the points of view from different contributions on this subject. In the empirical part of this chapter, we propose the idea that knowledge transfer is a way for organizations to be more competitive and implement changes essential to their survival. This is done by looking at five firms in the meat producing industry in different countries.

This chapter provides a deep dive into knowledge networks. The authors provide an inclusive definition of a knowledge network. A knowledge network includes nodes as sources and targets of knowledge, relationships as knowledge links, and messages as knowledge transactions and flows. The authors note how knowledge networks differ from other types of networks, specifically their dynamic and chaotic state and continuous transactions. These peculiarities reflect the economic properties and behaviors of knowledge. The elements of networks described in Chapter 2 are elaborated for knowledge networks. The chapter calls out knowledge network domains, geographies, typologies, nodes, messages, and relationships.

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the debate on reflexivity in organization and management studies by scrutinizing the possibilities of self‐reflexivity.

By means of auto‐ethnography, the authors analyze their own experiences as (pro‐)feminist men in the field of gender studies.

The authors argue that self‐reflexivity is partial, fragmentary and transient: it surfaces in situations where the authors’ activities and identities as researchers are challenged by others and they become aware of their precarious position.

The paper's perspective complements more instrumental understandings of self‐reflexivity, and stimulates further debate on its limits as well as potential.

Since the late 1980s we’ve been inspired by feminist theorizing to interrogate our field of organization studies, looking critically at the questions it asks, at the underlying premises of the theories allowing for such questions, and by articulating alternative premises as a way of suggesting other theories and thus other questions the field may need to ask. In so doing, our collaborative work has applied insights from feminist theorizing and cultural studies to topics such as leadership, entrepreneurship, globalization, business ethics, issues of work and family, and more recently to sustainability. This text is a retrospective on our attempts at intervening in our field, where we sought to make it more fundamentally responsive to problems in the world we live in and, from this reflective position, considering how and why our field’s conventional theories and practices – despite good intentions – may be unable to do so.