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Cancer discussion is perceived as a taboo subject among different cultures and societies including Africans. This perception has caused limited knowledge about the disease and prevented some from seeking early diagnosis and treatment. With West Africans now living in western societies where cancer is openly discussed, this study aims to explore how black Africans perceive the disease and the implications for healthcare.

Five focus groups of 53 persons from Ghanaian and Nigerian migrant communities in Luton participated in this study.

Perceptions of fear, shame and denial were identified as key elements of how people perceive and react to cancer among the study population.

Secrecy and apprehension were identified as major barriers and have prevented some from adequately accessing and utilizing cancer facilities in the country. The feelings of fear, secrecy and stigma associated with the disease across different ethnic groups, cultures and nations also exist among the study population. These outcomes are similar and chime with published findings of limited cancer perception research among other ethnic groups and races here in the UK and across the globe.

In this chapter, the authors describe and explain how executive management enacts strategizing routines to strengthen their entrepreneurial agility, as a precondition to make new strategic moves possible. The authors contribute to the routine dynamics research program, by showing how the dynamics of routines, in a strategy context, shape strategic outcomes: the authors describe four strategizing routines – distancing, evaluating, experimenting, and re-assembling – as a particular promising focus for routine and strategy research. The authors discuss executive management’s enactment of such routines as part of their strategy work. The authors show how routine enactment makes entrepreneurial agility and new strategic moves possible. By exploring the dynamics of strategizing routines and their impact on strategic outcomes, the authors at the same time benefit from and contribute to the strategy-as-practice research program. Empirically, the authors study how the executive management of Hoechst AG successfully made unthinkable new strategic moves possible, discussable, and realizable in the context of the corporation’s strategic transformation between 1994 and 1996.

The purpose of this paper is to identify the contributions of information systems (IS) for the evolutionary process of corporate environmental management by highlighting implications for big data research.

The authors conducted two case studies with Brazilian enterprises certified by ISO 14001, by conducting interviews, document analysis and direct observation. Implications for a research agenda on big data are also presented.

As results, the authors present the identification of the main contributions of IS for the evolution of environmental management in the studied cases. The authors found that advanced stage regarding IS may be considered a factor that implies a more effective environmental management.

The main contribution of this research consists of the presentation of a framework that identifies the support of IS for corporate environmental practices. By confirming the relation between IS and maturity levels of environmental management, the authors highlight that application of big data has the potential of boosting the relation between IS and corporate environmental management.

The present paper takes a look at the particularities of German strategy research over the last three decades. In contrast to much of the Anglo-Saxon research, which has focused on competition as a guiding concept in theorizing about strategy, German research has typically been concerned with more fundamental questions about the general relationship between organizations and their environments and, as a result, tended to be more conceptual than empirical. Researchers have been particularly influenced by the German sociological and philosophical traditions, specifically by the critical theory of Jürgen Habermas and by the systems theory of Niklas Luhmann. Also, there are authors who draw on the economic tradition of the Austrian School in order to develop a competence-based theory of the firm. Another branch builds on Anthony Giddens's structuration theory and Jacques Derrida's philosophy of deconstruction. As we will demonstrate, much of the research has been concerned with fundamental theoretical tensions: evolution vs. planning, selection vs. compensation, cognitive–instrumental rationality vs. moral–practical rationality, etc. We note that, as a consequence, much of German strategy research shows a particular interest in paradoxa and oxymora (such as ‘planned evolution’, ‘productive misunderstandings’ or ‘unfocused monitoring’). This paper will identify and explore important strands of German strategy research and discuss its particularities compared to mainstream strategy research in the United States.

This paper analyzes the impact of economic downturns on the revenue and expense sides of city financing for the period 2003 to 2009 using a convenience sample of the audited end of year financial reports for thirty midsized US cities. The analysis focuses on whether and how quickly and how extensively revenue and spending directions from past years are altered by recessions. A seven year series of Comprehensive Annual Financial Report (CAFR) data serves to explore whether citiesʼ revenues and spending, especially the traditional property tax and core functions such as public safety and infrastructure withstood the brief 2001 and the persistent 2007 recessions? The findings point to consumption (spending) over stability (revenue minus expense) for the recession of 2007, particularly in 2008 and 2009.

In order to elaborate the concept of resources (a key component of the well-established resource-based theory of the firm) this paper concentrates on exploring and elaborating the associated concept of competences, in particular distinctive and core competences. This exploration includes an examination of the extant literature, alongside and in parallel with, an extensive body of action research undertaken over 15 years and with 44 top management teams engaged in strategy making. As such the concepts are scrutinized both in terms of their theoretical underpinnings as well as their impact on practice. The research reinforces the view that distinctiveness emerges most powerfully from the identification (or creation) of unique bundles or combinations of competences and that effective and meaningful core competences can be identified from understanding and refining the links between competences and organizational goals. The resultant conceptualization of the systemic competence/goals structure emerges from the interaction of theory and practice.

For many years, science fiction has been perceived as “rayguns and rocket ships” boys' literature. Any number of impressionistic and statistical studies have identified the typical SF reader as male, between the ages of twelve and twenty and, in the case of adults, employed in some technical field. Yet I continually find myself having conversations with women, only to find that they, like myself, began reading science fiction between the ages of six and ten, have been reading it voraciously ever since, and were often frustrated at the absence of satisfying female characters and the presence of misogynistic elements in what they read. The stereotype of the male reader and the generally male SF environment mask both the increasing presence of women writers in the field of science fiction and the existence of a feminist dialog within some SF novels. This dialog had its beginnings in the mid‐sixties and is still going strong. It is the hope of the feminist SF community that this effacement can be counteracted.

Lean office covers the improvement of administrative processes and information flows. In offices, one of the essential challenges is to coordinate the development of information management capabilities. Thus, this paper aims to identify the key factors of information management in lean office deployment contexts.

By adopting a qualitative approach, it consists of theoretical research that applies grounded theory's coding technique and exploits 27 scientific studies on lean office published in the past 20 years.

It identifies five key factors for managing information into an organizational structure that optimizes information flow, such as “information-seeking,” “access to information,” “information quality,” “information processing” and “use of information and communication technology”.

Data analysis was restricted in scientific research regarding lean office deployment. Therefore, the accuracy of the concepts and categories of information management proposed in this paper can be adjusted and validated in future research, thus deepening the discussion of its findings.

It highlights issues for managing information in contemporary organizations such as failures in information retrieval, restrictions on access to information, lack of quality information, inadequate information processing criteria and inefficiency of information systems infrastructure.

It analyzes the lean office deployment from the theoretical framework of information management. Thus, it differs from other studies in this field because it is not limited to the operational aspects of lean management. Nevertheless, it shows that lean office reconfigures information flows and continually improves organizations’ strategic management.

The manufacturing domain presently focusing on Industry 4.0 (I4.0). One such domain is the automotive sector. The purpose of this study is to analyse the I4.0 research studies with a focus on the automotive sector using a systematic literature review (SLR).

This paper presents a SLR of previous studies on I4.0 characteristics from its inception to performance measures focusing on the automotive sector. A total of 90 papers published in reputed journals during 2014–2020 were collected from major publishers, namely, Elsevier, Springer, Taylor and Francis, Emerald, Institute of Electrical and Electronics, MDPI, etc.

The findings of the study provided vital insights on various perspectives of I4.0 in an automotive organization. Moreover, this systematic analysis would help the automotive industry policymakers in implementing I4.0 in an organization. Based on the SLR, a conceptual framework is established to guide industry practitioners towards I4.0 implementation. The review findings could be used to carry out future studies in assessing the readiness of I4.0 in the organization with the help of a survey.

The limitation of the study is in the adoption of the sampling approach. In the present study, conference papers and refereed journals have been considered based on the relevance of I4.0 in the automotive industry. As I4.0 is a growing concept, non-refereed articles, book chapters and white papers may cover practical aspects regarding I4.0 implementation that need to be considered for depth analysis. Moreover, the framework needs to be validated with various automotive industries for ensuring practical validity.

The unique contribution of the study is the SLR of I4.0 in manufacturing with a focus on the automotive sector.