Can low-cost comparative information trigger firms to improve the performance of a digital asset they already own? Using two large-scale randomised controlled trials with approximately 7000 UK firms in the distilling and retail sectors, we study whether peer benchmarking of website performance prompts measurable improvement. Firms receiving benchmarked website metrics and targeted recommendations exhibit modest average improvements, with more favourable effects among initially underperforming firms, consistent with partial convergence towards the industry frontier. The catch-up dynamic is strongest on mobile metrics, including as a spillover in the first experiment, in which reports contained desktop metrics only, a pattern consistent with firms focusing improvement efforts where performance gaps are greatest. Treated firms also show suggestive report-aligned increases in the adoption of mobile-optimisation and content-delivery technologies. These patterns are consistent with comparative performance information helping firms identify and respond to performance shortfalls. The findings position peer benchmarking as a scalable, low-cost instrument for narrowing the digital divide among SMEs: informational aspiration cues generate more favourable responses among firms furthest behind than among firms nearer the frontier.
The global health care workforce crisis is increasingly linked to moral injury resulting from health systems that prevent clinicians from delivering the care they are trained to provide. Value-based health care (VBHC) may support a systems-level solution by aligning health and care delivery models with what matters to patients. Drawing on international examples from the UK and Canada, this article explores how measuring meaningful patient outcomes and redesigning care around those outcomes can reduce moral injury, elevate patient experience, advance equitable access, and reconnect the health care workforce with professional purpose.
Sensible foolishness through play can offer a valuable escape from prevailing dogmas and rational models of intelligence, affording actors freedom to explore, imagine, and create without constraint. Yet the value of sensible foolishness, and the vital interplay between play and reason, remains underexplored in strategy scholarship. Drawing on a qualitative experimental study of three SMEs, we examine how high-stakes strategic challenges can be addressed through sensible foolishness. Our analysis shows how the interplay between play and reason gains generative momentum during strategy-making workshops, as actors co-create playful atmospheres and shift into more expressive, embodied ways of being. We identify three transitional modes - deliberate, dialectical, and dwelling - through which actors integrate play and reason and co-produce moments of strategic insight and value. We develop a process theory of integrating sensible foolishness into strategy-making, showing how attuned facilitation and atmospheric shifts enable its enactment as a collective, affectively sustained mode of strategizing. This extends debates in strategy and serious play scholarship by advancing a practice-based view of sensible foolishness as a complementary instrument of collective strategic intelligence.
ABSTRACT The aim of this editorial perspective is to highlight the importance and relevance of interdisciplinary research (IDR) in HRM, offer insights into the core aspects of IDR (i.e., what, why, when, and how), and offer guidance and tools necessary to conduct IDR in HRM. It incorporates the input of leading scholars on the key components of IDR, such as paradigms, theory, methodological plurality, contributions and impact and an integrative framework to facilitate IDR in HRM. This perspective seeks to move the field of HRM forward by offering theoretical and methodological alternatives that are needed to effectively engage in IDR, and practical tools and techniques for conducting IDR research in HRM.
