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An NHS hospital is a complex organisation with many departments which are all inter‐dependent. The “millennium bug” can potentially affect any or all of its systems. Disruption in one department, over the millennium period, is likely to affect the overall delivery of health care with potential threat to life. The NHS Executive has identified the year 2000 issue as the first non‐clinical priority and every hospital has established a business continuity plan. However, many of the critical risks are outside the hospitals’ direct control and service delivery will essentially depend on the ability of key suppliers to maintain their business continuity. Unlike in industry or profit‐making organisations, the cost of assessing the risk, testing and replacing non‐compliant equipment in hospitals cannot be passed to the consumer. Additional costs will have to be met from within existing resources which will have a major effect on the already stretched health care provisions.

Two new User Specifications have recently been published by the Council for Educational Technology for the United Kingdom (formerly NCET). Prepared by the Working Party on Standards and Specifications for Educational and Training Equipment, the new USPECs bring to four the number published so far.

The concept of care has attracted considerable policy and professional interest recently and there has been growing attention both to the needs of carers and how they may sometimes conflict with those of service users. This paper draws on initial research findings to examine experiences of care in mental health for men and women and for carers and users.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how supplier concentration influences a buyer firm's R&D intensity. This study proposes a mediation and moderation model to test this relationship in the Chinese household appliance industry. Specifically, this study tests the mediation effect of operational slack on the relationship between supplier concentration and R&D intensity and the moderation effect of financial constraints on this relationship.

Drawing upon real options theory and resource dependence theory, the proposed relationships are tested with the Chinese household appliance market using financial data from listed companies over a ten-year span from 2012 to 2021. Fixed effects (within-group) panel regression models are used to test the hypotheses. In addition, the authors use the bias-corrected bootstrap method to test the mediation effect.

The authors find that supplier concentration negatively affects a buyer firm's R&D intensity and that internal operational slack mediates this relationship. Interestingly, financial constraints from the external financing organization weaken the negative relationship between the buyer firm's supplier concentration and R&D intensity.

Based on the argument of real options theory and resource dependence theory, this study provides novel insights into the issue of how concentration on several major suppliers may reduce buyer firms' R&D intensity. First, this study introduces operational slack as a form of internal uncertainty that mediates the supplier concentration–R&D intensity relationship. Second, this study suggests that the effect of supplier concentration on R&D intensity is contingent upon firms' financial constraints from external financial organizations, disclosing a synergetic interactive effect of supplier concentration and financial constraints on firms' R&D activities. Third, this study is conducted in the unique institutional context of China, providing meaningful insights into the relationship between supplier concentration and R&D intensity.

ALL TAXES must, at last, fall upon agriculture, wrote Gibbon. Today he would probably change it to ‘all taxes must, at last, be borne by others for agriculture’. It vexes every government in and out of Europe, hovering over Common Market desks and troubling lands like New Zealand.

In the present chapter, we present the case study of the only woman film director who has ever won an Academy Award for Best Director, Kathryn Bigelow. We analyzed 43 written interviews of Kathryn Bigelow that have appeared in the popular press in the period 1988–2013 and outlined eight main themes emerging regarding her exercise of leadership in the cinematic context. We utilize three theoretical frameworks: (a) paradoxical leadership theory (Lewis, Andriopoulos, & Smith, 2014; Smith & Lewis, 2012); (b) ambidextrous leadership theory (Rosing, Frese, & Bausch, 2011), and (c) role congruity theory (Eagley & Karau, 2002) and show how Bigelow, as a woman artist/leader working in a complex organizational system that emphasizes radical innovation, exercised paradoxical and ambidextrous leadership and challenged existing conventions about genre, gender, and leadership. The case study implications for teaching and practice are discussed.

This issue is a selected bibliography covering the subject of leadership.

The purpose of this study is by drawing on signaling theory to address the need for more investigation into the conceptual underpinnings of sponsorships by investigating and seeking to understand sponsorship objectives, opinions and practices, with a focus on smaller organisations.

This empirical study contributes to the literature through researched findings from German respondents and a critical evaluation of literature relating to the impact of sports sponsorship on SMEs within local German communities.

Drawing on signalling theory and extant studies, the following four categories of SME sport sponsorship activities are proposed: value-based connections, social engagement, recognition and bonding.

Sponsor, sponsee and dyadic antecedents have increased in both sophistication and complexity, resulting in expected positive consumer outcomes as the justification for marketing communication investments.

Sponsorship has evolved from short-term philanthropic activities to long-term strategic alliances involving billions of dollars of annual spending globally.

SME companies have certain local opportunities that larger multinational corporations cannot replicate.

No study to date has provided researchers with a framework to understand sports sponsorship from an SME perspective. This paper contributes to the theories and practice of sport sponsorship, drawing on signalling theory and extant studies.

Peter G. Scotese, now chairman of the executive committee of Springs Industries, learned about planning chiefly by doing it. Successively a salesman, sales manager, and general manager early in his career, he got actively into planning in the 1960s, when he became the chief executive officer of the Boston Store division of Federated Department Stores in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. In 1969, he joined Springs Mills, now Springs Industries, as the first non‐family president in the company's history. In the mid‐1970s, he became vice‐chairman and chief executive officer. When he retired from active management in April 1982, he had become a confirmed and practiced planner, and he conducted a thorough search for his successor, Walter Y. Elisha. After Scotese's 12 years with the firm, Springs' sales had tripled and earnings from continuing operations had quadrupled. Among the other companies on whose boards he sits today, are Bell & Howell, Armstrong Rubber, National Distillers, and the Dry Dock Savings Bank.

Advance the state-of-the-art on how frugal innovation links to sustainability outcomes and based on content analysis of empirical publications in the field of frugal innovation, analyzing when and how FI is connected with social, environmental and economic outcomes.

Quantitative content analysis on empirical papers published on frugal innovation, using data visualization techniques to disclose relationships among the constructs adopted. Materials were collected following a step-wise methodology. In total, 130 articles were identified, read in depth and coded according to five main categories: context; development; implementation, adoption, diffusion; characteristics; and impacts.

The potential of frugal innovation to drive sustainability outcomes is influenced by the type of actors developing the innovation, regarding their organizational form (large firms, small firms, non-firm actors), their geographical origin (foreign or local) or motivations (mostly profit-motivated or socially-oriented). Collaboration plays a key role along the various stages of the frugal innovation cycle and is thus relevant for its potential to drive sustainability outcomes. The results reaffirm the need for greater attention to where and when sustainability-enhancing outcomes of frugal innovation are more likely to occur.

This study provides a qualitative study based on content analysis of empirical studies to explore the associations between frugal innovations and improved economic, environmental and social sustainability outcomes. The key novelty of this study lies in the systematic coding of each paper regarding the features of the innovation, the innovators, and the outcomes achieved. This allows taking stock of the evidence emerging in such a scattered literature, quantifying the extent to which insights take place in the empirical literature, looking for correlations, and highlight research gaps to understand to what extent frugal innovation can contribute to sustainable development.