This study draws on institutional economics and communicative institutionalism to conceptualise language as an institution which comprises socially shared rules and meanings that govern human interaction and affects country-level foreign direct investment (FDI). Specifically, shared language governs interpretation and coordination in cross-border investment relationships, thereby reducing behavioural and environmental uncertainty. In turn, language differences weaken this institutional function of language. To test this hypothesis, we employ a gravity model of 87,209 bilateral FDI observations comprising equity and debt positions across 246 countries and territories from 2010 to 2019. We find that greater language differences are associated with lower bilateral FDI stocks. We further show that formal institutional proximity and cultural proximity mitigate this negative association, offering alternative mechanisms for uncertainty reduction when language differences are large. In addition, language difference from English is negatively associated with FDI for both source and host countries. Overall, the study demonstrates that language functions as a key institutional determinant of FDI, extending language-sensitive IB research and institutional explanations of cross-border investment.

We re-examine and advance the landscape of academic journal publishing, specifically focusing on international business (IB) journals. While previous journal rankings have identified sixteen domain-specific IB journals, a renewed look at the journal space shows that the landscape of publications for IB has grown, while at the same time, mostly, retained or even improved its quality propositions. Utilizing state-of-the art machine learning methods including Classification and Regression Trees (CART) and random forests next to data envelopment analysis (DEA) for performance evaluation as well as fuzzy clustering methods, our meta-ranking identifies opportunities for mid-range journals with potential for ascension to higher quality clusters. Comparative analysis further suggests Journal of World Business (JWB) as a candidate for future inclusion in elite journal lists such as the FT50 list, alongside the Journal of International Business Studies (JIBS). Overall, our results show the IB journal landscape is developing towards a quality-based growth trajectory. This advancement has the potential to bolster the long-term competitiveness of the discipline by expanding the scope of its scholarship. Furthermore, it enhances the discipline's influence within the broader management and business ecosystem.

The environmental hazards of improperly managed waste have gained universal recognition among scholars and stakeholders. These hazards are especially critical in the pharmaceutical sector since leftover medications contain active chemicals that threaten the environment and human health. Nonetheless, implementation of adequate measures to ensure proper collection and treatment of pharmaceutical leftovers remains insufficient, and tons of unwanted medications are discarded in landfills and wastewater annually. Such outcomes are due to lack of coordination between the parties involved and poor incentive systems in place. To address this issue, we study coordination in pharmaceutical reverse supply chains and government incentive strategies. We employ the evolutionary game methodology to evaluate strategic behaviour of pharmacies and a waste recycler under different incentive plans. We are focusing on both reward- and awareness-driven customer segments to boost the return volume of unwanted medications. Moreover, supply chain coordination is investigated as a tool to enhance the economic viability of the system. We compare the incentive plans based on return volume, participation rate, budget spend, and implementation time, to recommend the most effective plan. An extensive numerical study provides insights into the performance of the incentive plans in different conditions. The results reveal that a plan that provides proper incentives to pharmacies for targeting both, reward- and awareness-driven customers, coupled with contract-based coordination, outperforms other plans, and does not necessarily require a budget allocation. Our study is motivated by the UK’s National Health System but it is generalisable to pharmaceutical reverse supply chains in other countries as well.

Purpose This paper adopts a multi-tier perspective and aims to explore challenges of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in collaborative manufacturing amid the emergence of dedicated B2B platforms. Original equipment manufacturers welcome formation of demand-driven collaborations between SME suppliers to facilitate ramp-up of production capacity. While being potentially beneficial to suppliers, such collaborations face various barriers. Design/methodology/approach An exploratory study of 17 suppliers within the European Union’s aerospace industry was undertaken. The study comprised two stages. In the first stage, suppliers’ answers to self-administered interviews were analysed using thematic analysis. In the second stage, interactions between the barriers were determined through interviews with experienced SME collaboration facilitators. The authors apply system dynamics modelling to analyse the links between barriers and identify re-enforcing and balancing loops of other factors. Findings The authors establish five major groups of barriers to collaboration impeding: market transparency, access to orders, partner trust, contracting and (e) data sharing and coordination. The authors model application of four enablers that facilitate barrier removal for technology-enabled supply chains: digital platforms, supplier development, smart contracts and Industry 4.0. Research limitations/implications The study is limited by the data collection from the aerospace industry; validation of the models in other low-volume high-variability manufacturing sectors is needed. Practical implications The reader will learn about the barriers which impede demand-driven SME collaboration within manufacturing supply chains, interrelationships between these barriers and suggestions about how to remove them. SME cluster managers will find managerial implications particularly interesting as they will help them to overcome collaboration concerns and better prepare cluster members for Industry 4.0. Social implications The models developed within this study can be used to explore the effects of intervening at critical points in the model to create virtuous improvement cycles between key barriers and related variables in the model. This can help decision-making and policymaking in the area of supply chain integration. Originality/value There is currently a lack of studies about how the existing barriers amplify and de-amplify themselves and what the managerial approaches to tackle the barriers are. It is unclear how far companies will go in terms of information sharing, given the trust levels, power dynamics and governance structures evident in supply chains. This study contributes by explaining the reinforcing interaction between the barriers and showing ways to overcome these using enablers.

We outline a service that underpins formation of supply-chain collaborations. Companies can use the service to search for suitable partners with the objective of forming a collaboration with them. Such collaborations are intended to be built on demand — in response to complex business opportunities that may involve designing, manufacturing and delivery of a customized product and may therefore require capabilities and capacities that a single company may not possess. Potential collaborations are being presented to the user and their fit is being evaluated according to a range of criteria that include companies’ capabilities, geographic locations, and other characteristics. In addition to the calculation of the fit implemented in the service, we propose in this work to evaluate the risks associated with the potential collaborations.

This paper presents the architectural design and implementation of DIGICOR - a collaborative Industr y 4.0 (I4.0) platform aimed at enabling SMEs to dynamically form supply-chain collaborations so as to pool production capacities and capabilities and jointly address comple x supply chain requests. The DIGICOR architecture builds on the event-driven service-oriented architecture (EDSOA) model to support the col-laboration between SMEs, dynamic modelling of their systems and services, and their integration in the supply chains of large OEMs, enforcing digital platform governance rules for knowledge protection and security. In contrast to the extant platforms assessed through our systematic review, the proposed archi-tecture supports the entire lifecycle of I4.0 collaborations, from creation of viable teams to deployment and operation. The architecture provides an open and extensible solution for (i) creating a marketplace for the collaboration partners, (ii) providing services for planning and controlling the collaborative production, logistics, and risk management, while supporting APIs for third parties to provide complementar y services such as advanced analytics, simulation, and optimization; and (iii) seamless connectivity to automation solutions, smart objects and real-time data sources. We report on the design of the architecture and its innovative artefacts such as the component model description and the semantic model constructs created for meaningful event exchanges between architectural end-points. We also describe a running use case demonstrating implementation scenarios.(c) 2022 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Supply chain contracting is known to suffer from inefficiency in the presence of asymmetric information. Full vertical integration would eliminate the informational inefficiency but can be strategically undesirable. Yet today's supply chain partnerships exhibit a certain degree of partial vertical integration via equity ties between the firms. Such governance forms received limited attention in supply chain research. Management literature suggests that partial vertical integration may help the firms to ease contracting problems by aligning their incentives, and thus improve the total surplus. We address this proposition by studying a model of a partially integrated supply chain in which the buyer holds an equity stake in the supplier. We adopt an operational perspective and investigate contracting between the firms within the joint economic lot size framework. We demonstrate that in this classical setting, partial integration can in fact be sufficient for eliminating informational inefficiency and achieving coordination. However, contrary to what one may expect, a tighter integration may harm supply chain performance and defeat coordination. We explain the underlying mechanism and investigate it analytically and numerically. Our results characterize sensitivity of supply chain performance to the degree of integration and stress the importance of the operational planning perspective for strategic decision making.

Industry 4.0 technologies, process digitalisation and automation can be applied to support the formation of supply chain collaborations in manufacturing. Underpinned by information and communication technologies, collaborations of independent companies can dynamically pool production capacities and capabilities to jointly react to new business opportunities. These collaborations may involve a wide range of enterprises with different sizes and scope that individually would not be able to tender for such new business opportunities. To form these collaborative teams, assistive processes and technologies can underpin the effort towards exploring the tender requirements, unbundling the tender into smaller tasks and finding a suitable supplier for each task. In this paper, we present an approach and a tool to support decision making concerning forming supply chain collaborations in Industry 4.0. The approach proposed is unique in integrating industry domain ontologies, assistive human-computer interaction tools and multi-criteria decision support techniques to form team compositions speeding-up the collaboration process whilst maximising the chances of forming a viable team to fulfil the tender requirements. We also show evaluation results involving stakeholders from the supply chain function pointing to the effectiveness of the proposed solution, available online as a demo(1). (C) 2020 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

This empirical study investigates the financial performance effect of cross-border language use in 405 partnerships between microfinance banks and their international partners in 74 countries. Motivated by the literature on language in International Business, we find that microfinance banks that use a global language such as English have better financial performance. Further, the linguistic distance between the microfinance banks and their international partners is negatively related to the financial performance of these banks. This study highlights tangible performance outcomes of cross-border language use and suggests that language use needs to be addressed as a strategic issue in international business research.

This multi-year study examines the relationship between financial performance and language use, observing 405 partnerships between microfinance banks and their international financial partners in 74 countries. Drawing on language research in international business, we find that microfinance banks based in English-speaking, French-speaking, and Spanish-speaking countries have higher performance. Furthermore, the linguistic distance between the home country of a microfinance bank and the home country of its international partner(s) is negatively related to its financial performance. Our large-scale study confirms the effect of language use on organization-level financial performance and extends research on language in multinationals from intra-firm to inter firm relationships.

The question of how to assess research outputs published in journals is now a global concern for academics. Numerous journal ratings and rankings exist, some featuring perceptual and peer-reviewbased journal ranks, some focusing on objective information related to citations, some using a combination of the two. This research consolidates existing journal rankings into an up-to-date and comprehensive list. Existing approaches to determining journal rankings are significantly advanced with the application of a new classification approach, ‘random forests’, and data envelopment analysis. As a result, a fresh look at a publication's place in the global research community is offered. While our approach is applicable to all management and business journals, we specifically exemplify the relative position of ‘operations research, management science, production and operations management’ journals within the broader management field, as well as within their own subject domain. & 2014 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/).

Civil society increasingly holds focal companies accountable for ensuring socially and environmentally sustainable production standards among their supply base. These standards entail increased levels of complexity to be addressed by appropriately designed tools, such as the Voting Analytic Hierarchy Process (VAHP) proposed by Liu and Hai (2005). This method of multi-criteria group decision making structures decision criteria in a hierarchical fashion as per Saaty's Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) and employs data envelopment analysis (DEA) for deriving criteria weights from the ordinal preferences of the group members. Compared to AHP, the method permits a simpler application in a group decision context. However, its theoretical underpinnings have been questioned in the literature. This specifically concerns (i) the requirement of a strong convex order for the importance weights of ordinal rank gradations, and (ii) the choice of discrimination threshold for consecutive rank weights in the underlying DEA model. We propose a revised VAHP method that overcomes both issues (i) and (ii) by pursuing a game-theoretic approach to elicitation of criteria weights — so as to remove subjectivity from rank discrimination. We illustrate the application of the method on a real-world problem of sustainable supplier selection. We contribute to theory by proposing a more robust VAHP tool that helps supply chain and purchasing managers selecting suppliers based on a comprehensive set of criteria spanning all three sustainability dimensions (economic, environmental, and social), while coping with parsimonious input by group decision-makers.

Environmental and social impact of the world economy is increasingly attracting public attention around the globe. The society expects from the businesses a responsible action towards depletion of scarce natural resources, environmental pollution, and people - so as to achieve sustainable development goals. An essential element of today's economy, supply chains represent networks of companies that create and deliver products and services to the ultimate customers. The present paper classifies scholarly research in sustainable supply chain management in terms of its main paradigms, and further reviews research work centred around the circular economy paradigm - designated commonly as closed-loop supply chain management. We offer a literature review that updates the taxonomy of this research area originally proposed by Atasu et al. in 2008. To this end, we describe analytical modelling and decision-support approaches adopted in the literature, as well as main insights offered by these. In particular, we focus on the studies that have an integrated perspective at closed-loop supply chain management by addressing supply-chain design and coordination problems and taking into account operational-level aspects. We further classify the work within the design and coordination research stream, identify connections emerged between different streams of literature over time, and suggest directions for future work.

Efficient order picking requires a coordinated way of combining and utilizing three kinds of heterogeneous resources: articles, devices, and operators. Usually, the assortment of articles is subject to permanent adaptations. Hence, the interdependent decisions of assigning articles to devices and allocating manpower among devices need to be adjusted and the problem has to be solved frequently for similar instances. We propose a combination of exact and heuristic solution approaches. For an immediate reaction to each assortment change, a heuristic approach applying metamodel-based optimization is used. The data required for estimating the metamodel is provided by an exact approach which is utilized from time to time to reset the system to an optimal state. Based on sampled data of a pharmaceutical wholesaler, we compare exact and heuristic approach with regard to quality and time of solving in-sample and out-of-sample instances.