Search results

The manufacturing industry in Pakistan, like any other industry, promotes sustainability in its supply chain operations. Yet, the scenario is different in the chemical manufacturing sector, which lags in the development and implementation of sustainable development practices and policies to safeguard its long-term viability. Embracing sustainable practices not only fulfills manufacturing needs but also stands out from other companies. Hence, the purpose of this study is to explore the eco-friendly business practices that impact corporate innovation. Organizational size is considered a moderator in the relationship between green practices and corporate innovation.

The quantitative study was conducted to collect the data through convenience sampling techniques. In total, 138 responses were analyzed through the partial least squares method.

The findings reveal that the implementation of green practices increases corporate innovation. Thus, the impact varies based on different organizational sizes. The crux of the organizational strategy relies on the implementation of eco-friendly practices and holding the right size to survive.

The proposed study provides new grounds for the natural resource-based perspective theory and stakeholder theory. Chemical manufacturers can tailor their strategies that accommodate varying resources and capabilities, facilitating more effective implementation of green practices across different companies within the sector.

The paper provides new ground for the natural resource-based perspective theory. More specifically, this study was expected to help chemical manufacturers choose environmentally friendly practices that would help them meet corporate sustainability performance goals through innovation.

The purpose of this paper is to conceptualise how place management practices in UK housing associations (HAs) involve processes of ecological place management.

Ethnographic fieldwork focusing on how communal spaces are organised on a housing estate in a UK city revealed the importance of negotiation with other actors, including an HA which is responsible for managing the estate. The authors draw on extensive participant observation with residents, as well as interviews with both residents and employees of the HA, to show the wider forces and complexities involved in these ecological place management practices.

This paper identifies hybrid socio-ecological, socio-political and political-economic dynamics unfolding as places are managed and organised. These widen the scope of place management research and practice to account for multiple ways places are organised.

This paper offers a critical perspective on place management, developing an ecological approach that is applicable both to the relatively new context of housing and to more established sites in town and city centres.

This paper’s findings point to ways that housing and place management practitioners, both in the UK and elsewhere, can use an ecological approach to re-frame their strategic and practical actions with regards to “place”.

This paper contributes to unveiling the complexity involved in place management and organisation, thereby encouraging place managers to embrace ecological thinking capable of addressing future challenges.

In the context of educational segregation by ethnic group, it has been argued that rigorous pairwise segregation comparisons over time or across space should be invariant in two situations: when the ethnic composition of the population changes while the distribution of each ethnic group over the schools remains constant (invariance 1), or when the size distribution of schools changes while the ethnic composition of each school remains constant (invariance 2). This paper makes two contributions to the segregation literature. First, it argues by means of the Mutual Information or M index, which is neither invariant 1 nor 2, that both properties have strong implications, and it provides reasons to defend that the overall segregation index need not satisfy either one. Second, nevertheless, it is shown that in pairwise comparisons this index admits two decompositions into three terms. In the first decomposition, a term is invariant 1 and also satisfies a weak version of invariance 2. In the second decomposition, a term is invariant 2 and also satisfies a weak version of invariance 1. It is shown that these decompositions can be used to reach the analogous ones obtained in Deutsch et al. (2006).

This chapter discusses the experiences of black men who encounter the phenomena of a mental health diagnosis, detention and death in a forensic setting in England. Although there are black women with mental health issues who have also died in forensic settings, the occurrence is significantly higher for men who become demonised as ‘Big, Black, Bad and dangerous’. The author discusses the historical over representation of mental ill health amongst black people in the general community and the plethora or reasons attributed to this. The author then discusses the various points of entry into the criminal justice system, where black men with mental health issues are over represented. The author explores some inquiries into the deaths of black men in custody and the recommendations that were subsequently made, which successive governments have failed to act upon. The author argues that the term ‘Institutional Racism’ is insufficient to explain this phenomenon; and offers her own theoretical interpretation which is a combination of systemic racism influenced by post-colonial conceptualisation

The purpose of this paper is to study talent retention, which has long been an important area of inquiry across many industries. Consistently, both academicians and practitioners have recommended several “posthire” solutions to retain employees, such as allowing employees to work from home, providing them with flexible work schedules, promoting a work–life balance and rewarding good performance. In this study, the authors focus on how the “prehire” career-related characteristics of call center agents and their personality traits relate to their turnover intentions. This is important because selecting the right person at the employee selection stage can prevent firms from trying to retain someone who is likely to quit his/her job.

The authors surveyed 442 employees working in the call centers of a major multinational logistics company across China and Malaysia and used covariance-based structural equation modeling (CB-SEM) to test the model.

The results showed that call center agents who reapplied for a job in the current company had lower turnover intentions than first-time applicants. Similarly, call center agents who provided supplementary information during their application had lower turnover intentions than the ones who did not provide any such information. As for the personality traits, the results indicated that while the call center agents’ agreeableness and openness to experience were positively associated with their turnover intentions, their consciousness and emotional stability were negatively associated with them.

This study shows the uniqueness of Asian emerging markets and the call center industry by presenting several interesting patterns that are different from those that have been found in other industries.

The purpose of this study was to develop and validate a scale for host sincerity.

The ten-item host sincerity scale was developed by following a multi-stage scale development procedure (Delphi technique, qualitative interviews and surveys).

The findings reveal that host sincerity is a second-order construct with two underlying dimensions: “sincere social interaction” and “sincere emotional response”. By incorporating host sincerity into the consumer-based model of authenticity, the findings established significant relationships among all constructs, confirming the predictive validity of the host sincerity construct.

Data were gathered from visitors to troglodyte heritage sites (Kandovan and Cappadocia). Future studies should test the newly formed sincerity scale at other cultural destinations to further explore the generalisability of the scale. Further, data were gathered from tourists. Future studies should consider host sincerity from a host perspective.

Cultural destination managers and local hosts can use this instrument as a supplementary tool to evaluate how sincere their hospitality offering appears to tourists.

This paper develops a host sincerity scale to explore the importance of sincere host–guest interactions and tourists’ emotional response to these interactions. It extends the consumer-based model of authenticity by drawing further attention to the importance and impact of host sincerity in stimulating memorable tourism experiences.

Productivity is often cited as a key barrier to the adoption of metal laser-based powder bed fusion (ML-PBF) technology for mass production. Newer generations of this technology work to overcome this by introducing more lasers or dramatically different processing techniques. Current generation ML-PBF machines are typically not capable of taking on additional hardware to maximise productivity due to inherent design limitations. Thus, any increases to be found in this generation of machines need to be implemented through design or adjusting how the machine currently processes the material. The purpose of this paper is to identify the most beneficial existing methodologies for the optimisation of productivity in existing ML-PBF equipment so that current users have a framework upon which they can improve their processes.

The review method used here is the preferred reporting items for systematic review and meta-analysis (PRISMA). This is complemented by using an artificial intelligence-assisted literature review tool known as Elicit. Scopus, WEEE, Web of Science and Semantic Scholar databases were searched for articles using specific keywords and Boolean operators.

The PRIMSA and Elicit processes resulted in 51 papers that met the criteria. Of these, 24 indicated that by using a design of experiment approach, processing parameters could be created that would increase productivity. The other themes identified include scan strategy (11), surface alteration (11), changing of layer heights (17), artificial neural networks (3) and altering of the material (5). Due to the nature of the studies, quantifying the effect of these themes on productivity was not always possible. However, studies citing altering layer heights and processing parameters indicated the greatest quantifiable increase in productivity with values between 10% and 252% cited. The literature, though not always explicit, depicts several avenues for the improvement of productivity for current-generation ML-PBF machines.

This systematic literature review provides trends and themes that aim to influence and support future research directions for maximising the productivity of the ML-PBF machines.

Purpose – To develop measures of segregation that are appropriate when either the groups or the organizational units are defined by ordered categories. These methods allow the measurement of segregation among groups defined by ordered educational attainment categories or among ordered occupational categories, for example.

Approach – I define a set of desirable properties of such measures, develop a general approach to constructing such measures, derive three such measures, and show that these measures satisfy the required properties.

Originality – Traditional methods of measuring segregation focus on the measurement of segregation among groups defined by nominal categorical variables (e.g., race and gender) among organizational units also defined by nominal categorical units (e.g., schools and neighborhoods). Such methods are not appropriate to the measurement of occupational segregation, for example. The methods developed here are widely applicable and appropriate for such cases.

A royal charter of incorporation imposing public benefit/social responsibilities established the privately owned British South Africa Company (BSAC), in return for power to exploit a huge territory using low-cost local labour. This study explores the dual principal–agent problem of how the BSAC used annual report narratives to report on its conflicting economic responsibilities to investors versus its public benefit charter responsibilities to the British Crown.

Having digitised the dataset, the research analyses narratives from 29 BSAC annual reports spanning a continuous 35-year royal charter period, using computer-aided keyword content analysis to identify economic-orientated versus public benefit-orientated annual report narratives. The research analyses how the annual report narratives shifted according to four key contextual periods by reference to the changing influence of private investors versus the British Crown.

There are two key findings. First, economic primacy. At no point do public benefit disclosures outweigh economic disclosures. Second, the BSAC's meso-corporate context and macro-social/political context can explain patterns in public benefit disclosures. The motivation for producing public benefit information is not altruism. Rather, commercial interests motivate disclosure. The BSAC used its annual reports to sustain what proved ultimately unsustainable – royal charter-style colonialism.

This accounting history study contributes to an understanding of corporate narrative reporting using one of the earliest known cases of such analysis and shows how accounting plays a central role in facilitating a company in sustaining its interests. This 100-year lookback may be a portend of the future for modern-day annual report corporate social responsibility narratives in, say, mining and oil and gas company corporate reports, especially if these natural resources run out.