Most studies of corporate social responsibility (CSR) performance in a supply chain context have been conducted from the buyer's perspective. Few have paid attention to how suppliers leverage this kind of performance to expand exchange relationships with major customers. From a resource dependence and social exchange perspective, this article specifically examines whether two supplier CSR performance dimensions-environmental and product performance-can serve as a mechanism to expand a supplier's relationships with a smaller number of major buyers, where its increasing exchange dependence often measures this factor. Moreover, these dependent relationships may further develop and change under different conditions of uncertainty. Using large-scale longitudinal data to test the proposed model, we find empirical evidence that a supplier's environmental and product performance relate positively to greater customer dependence and improved financial performance across diverse sets of industries. However, the findings also reveal that both demand-driven and supply-side uncertainty can weaken the effect. Specifically, the positive effect of environmental performance tends to weaken in the face of supply-side uncertainty, whereas the positive effect of product performance tends to weaken amid demand-driven uncertainty. Accordingly, we note important nuances and contingencies for suppliers to consider when considering how investments in these CSR performance dimensions affect exchange dependence.

Companies across many industries seek to understand how customer ordering impacts supply chain distribution performance. In the US medical supplies industry, wholesalers are uniquely positioned to use information about downstream customers to study and potentially influence buyer policies and practices due to their industry scale and data visibility. In this study, wholesale medical supplies buyers are first examined based on their ordering practices over a 2-year window using the theoretical lens of data clumpiness-patterns of data non-conformity to equal spacing-to derive insights into how their ordering practices affect the distribution efficiency of the medical supplies wholesale distributor. The analysis also considers how different buyer and industry characteristics moderate these upstream ordering effects. The results reveal several significant findings for both theory and practice. First, buyers exhibiting less clumpiness in order sizing and greater clumpiness in order-timing practices drive greater distribution efficiencies for the wholesale distributor. These effects are greater when buyers have more category experience and lower when ordering across multiple categories. Industry customers' use of centralized purchasing also tends to lower wholesale distributor efficiency. Still, these negative effects can be mitigated when customer ordering practices favor replenishment based on customer needs and consistent order sizing. After discussing the implications of our analysis, we offer additional practical and theoretical extensions of our approach that can be applied to study other industry supply chains or that could affect related healthcare purchasing markets.

Prior research demonstrates that manufacturing firms increase production (relative to sales) to transfer fixed costs from cost of goods sold (COGS) to inventory accounts, thereby increasing income to reach or surpass earnings thresholds. We examine how the market reacts to this earnings management strategy. We find that investors respond positively to inventory growth based on an expectation of increased future sales; however, this signal is weaker for inventory manipulators. Further, the market premium from meeting or beating analyst earnings forecasts by manipulating inventory is smaller than the premium for achieving this threshold absent inventory manipulation or through accrual manipulation. Finally, we examine firms considered to be "serial" inventory manipulators, finding that the market consistently discounts earnings beats for these firms, suggesting that inventory manipulation erodes investor confidence in firms' earnings. Collectively, our results provide new insights into a challenge facing operations managers and finance managers in manufacturing firms.

Healthcare providers are expected to compete across multiple performance dimensions, thereby managing both their financial productivity and the patients' "in process" experiences. This fact creates tensions in some healthcare settings, as providers need to provide high-quality care and positive customer experiences while still being financially responsible. Increasingly, these goals create pressures that require emergency departments (EDs) to generate operational efficiencies to improve how healthcare providers manage patient flow at different service stages and to deliver better care for an increasing number of patients at a more reasonable cost. From the perspective of managing patient process flow stage times, this article uses online ratings and secondary source data to examine how EDs can simultaneously improve both experiential and financial productivity performance. Our findings strongly indicate that EDs may be able to leverage the physician-directed evaluation time stage to improve departmental efficiencies in both performance areas. However, the diminishing value of evaluation time and the time a patient spends in pre-care for ED services are necessary contingencies to consider. Finally, to illustrate the practical relevance of these findings, we explore the perceived tradeoffs of managing the different patient flow time stages.

INTRODUCTION:The American Medical Association formed the Accelerating Change in Medical Education Consortium through grants to effect change in medical education. The dissemination of educational innovations through scholarship was a priority. The objective of this study was to explore the patterns of collaboration of educational innovation through the consortium's publications.METHOD:Publications were identified from grantee schools' semi-annual reports. Each publication was coded for the number of citations, Altmetric score, domain of scholarship, and collaboration with other institutions. Social network analysis explored relationships at the midpoint and end of the grant.RESULTS:Over five years, the 32 Consortium institutions produced 168 publications, ranging from 38 papers from one institution to no manuscripts from another. The two most common domains focused on health system science (92 papers) and competency-based medical education (30 papers). Articles were published in 54 different journals. Forty percent of publications involved more than one institution. Social network analysis demonstrated rich publishing relationships within the Consortium members as well as beyond the Consortium schools. In addition, there was growth of the network connections and density over time.CONCLUSION:The Consortium fostered a scholarship network disseminating a broad range of educational innovations through publications of individual school projects and collaborations.

ABSTRACT Using absorption costing, manufacturing firms can alter production (relative to sales) to shift fixed costs between cost of goods sold and inventory accounts, thereby managing earnings either upward or downward. The accounting‐oriented benefits of such a strategy are met with operations‐oriented costs (e.g., carrying costs, inventory obsolescence, and/or stock outages), creating business frictions between accounting and operations. We use a large sample of manufacturing firms to study how production cost structure and inventory valuation method affect this strategy. Thus, the goal of this investigation is less about whether firms manage earnings in general and more about examining the impact of firm characteristics on the likelihood of altering inventory to manage earnings. Our results indicate that firms with high fixed‐cost ratios (FCRs) are more likely to alter inventory but make smaller abnormal inventory changes than companies with low FCRs. Because Last‐In‐First‐Out (LIFO) firms in the manufacturing sector also may manage earnings by liquidating LIFO layers and releasing the LIFO reserve into earnings, these firms are less likely than other companies to manage earnings by shifting fixed costs between COGS and inventory. Finally, we examine our findings in a multi‐period context, determining that when firms have greater abnormal inventory changes in period t , they are less inclined to alter inventory in period t + 1. These results suggest that manufacturing firms alter inventory levels to reach accounting earnings targets, but they tend to do so when the strategy is relatively less costly.

As business systems become more complex with retailers and manufacturers both competing in a dynamic environment, the reduction of operational variation has become crucial for both demand and inventory management. This is why many firms have undertaken lean or six-sigma programs as a means for understanding and addressing this variance. Much of this variation can be mitigated through the integration and coordination between entities in the supply chain through both human and technical systems. Coordination theory posits that there are common mechanisms for activity integration while network governance theory indicates that individuals can be relationally embedded through multiple types of connections. Most notably, individuals can utilize aspects of information sharing, trust, and problem solving to serve as human-oriented coordination mechanisms in order to enhance personal performance. This article models how the occurrence of multiple different layers of connectivity in human operational systems impacts variability in business process outcomes. Results from the social network analysis, utilizing both multi-modal blockmodeling and a multiple regression quadratic assignment procedure, indicate that information sharing, trust, and problem-solving network connectivity reduce sales performance variation, while joint-problem solving connections between individuals reduce the variance in inventory performance variation.

Health care organizations are facing significant marketing challenges as a result of the rise in patient consumerism (McColl-Kennedy et al. 2017), in addition to the ever-increasing transparency in health care (U.S. News and World Report 2015). The current health care industry has seen a shift from ‘fee for service’ to ‘fee for value’ (Schroeder and Frist 2013), necessitating a need to improve the quality of care, while also enhancing hospitals’ performance (Mandal and Mandal 2017). Firms like Consumer Reports, US News World Report, and the Leapfrog Group have increased healthcare organizations’ marketing challenges by providing and communicating relevant information in a consumer-friendly way (Ranard 2016). For instance, a Hospital Safety Score is assigned to US-based hospitals by Leapfrog in the form of a letter grade (A-F). One consequence of these consumer-friendly measures is that consumers increasingly rely on them to make decisions about whether to see a specific healthcare professional or visit a hospital (Findlay 2016). With the passage of the Affordable Care Act, the federal government began pressuring healthcare organizations to improve patient outcomes. Since 2017, hospitals that do not demonstrate a certain level of proficiency in care quality are penalized up to 2

Purpose This study aims to develop and empirically validate the concept of experience capability, which represents an organisation's ability to be adept at managing the customer experience. Organisations that build an experience capability develop an expertise in deploying a set of resources and routines to understand, evaluate and improve how they interact with customers across all the points of contact. Design/methodology/approach A rigorous process was employed to identify, operationally define, evaluate and validate six dimensions reflecting experience capability. The dimensions were developed and validated using relevant literature, expert interviews, item-sorting techniques, a pilot survey and two surveys, providing a degree of certainty that the intellectual insights are generalisable. Findings The experience capability concept is identified as comprising six dimensions that are informed by 27 measurement items. The six dimensions are employee training, employee empowerment, employee evaluation, experience performance management, cross-functional work and channel integration. The findings provide evidence suggesting that the multi-item measurement scale exhibits appropriate psychometric properties. Practical implications The empirically validated 27-item measurement scale provides practitioners with an approach to evaluate and improve their organisation's experience capability. It permits both longitudinal comparisons of individual organisations and competitive benchmarking both within and across industry sectors. The approach alerts managers to the critical operational areas that should be measured and provides a structured method to pursue competitive advantage through customer experience capability. Originality/value Developing valid and reliable measurement scales is an essential first step in effective theory-building. The paper proposes a theoretical foundation for the experience capability construct and validates a corresponding measurement scale. The scale was developed carefully to achieve the specificity required to undertake meaningful practitioner-centric assessment while maintaining relevance across sectorial contexts. The results complement existing customer-centric experience research by providing distinct intellectual insights from a practitioner perspective. The developed scale permits future intellectual investigation through capability comparisons both within and between companies in different industries/sectors.

The current research examines the difference between strong self-relevant (SR) customer-brand relationships (as represented by brand identification and self-brand connection) and strong self-neutral (SN) brand relationships (as represented by quality, satisfaction, and trust) in the context of service failure and recovery. Whereas strong SR relationships foster a sense of entitlement in customers after service failure, strong SN relationships foster forgiveness. As a result, SR relationships increase recovery expectations and subsequent complaint behavior whereas SN relationships decrease complaint behavior. Study 1 examines these effects using complaint behavior for airlines. Study 2 confirms these effects on survey data from hotel customers and Study 3 then explores the phenomenon more deeply in a controlled situation using scenario-based surveys. Viewed holistically, the results help further understanding of how a brand's deep, customer relationships can either become a thorn in the company's side or provide forbearance.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine the influence of different antecedent factors (contingencies) on the design of a service recovery system (SRS). Design/methodology/approach A conceptual model was framed and a series of hypotheses generated and tested using data from 158 practicing managers using a multivariate general linear modeling technique. Findings The analyses indicated that firms, by and large, mainly considered environmental factors in the SRS design. Additional evidence suggests that managers do consider other contingencies but may do so in a fragmented manner. The results presented herein indicate that firms design back-office aspects of SRS in response to external factors (i.e. the environmental contingency). In contrast, the front-office components appear to have more diverse antecedents but are strongly influenced by the firm’s recovery orientation. The specific recovery practices appear to be implemented per industry standards. In sum, evidence indicates that there are diverse driving factors to total SRS design. Research limitations/implications Limitations are based primarily on the methodology as data were obtained from a single person who represented the entire SRS. Care was taken in the study design in order not to compromise the validity of the findings. Practical implications The results indicated that managers responsible for system design need to be holistic in SRS design to more tightly link decisions across multiple contingencies so as to more fully integrate total service system design. This is potentially accomplished through the inclusion of aspects of all relevant contingencies when designing recovery systems. Originality/value This paper’s main contribution is that it employs established theory to develop and test a model to show that firms consider multiple contingencies while designing SRS. It contributes to the emerging body of work on SRS design by providing insights that can be considered as driving forces behind the design of SRS.

Similar to the adaptation and evolution of organizations, individual consumers must live and exist within similar environmental conditions. The research presented utilizes a quantitative study to examine a consumer's environment and the subsequent impact on green behaviors. The results suggest that internal factors (i.e. interest, altruism, willingness to conduct research) are significant predictors of green behavior. An examination of the external factors (i.e. organizational influence, media influence, governmental influence) suggests that consumers face numerous outside influences and are unsure of whom to trust. A discussion of the theoretical implications, as well as the practical implications for boardrooms, is presented. Areas for future study and the limitations of the research are also identified.

Does improving employee happiness affect customer outcomes? The current study attempts to answer this question by examining the impact of employee satisfaction trajectories (i.e., systematic changes in employee satisfaction) on customer outcomes. After accounting for employees’ initial satisfaction levels, the analyses demonstrate the importance of employee satisfaction trajectories for customer satisfaction and repatronage intentions, as well as identify customer-employee contact as a necessary conduit for their effect. From a macro perspective, employee satisfaction trajectories strongly impact customer satisfaction for companies with significant employee–customer interaction, but not for companies without such interaction. From a micro perspective, employee satisfaction trajectories influence customer repatronage intentions for frequent customers, but not for infrequent customers. These effects are robust to controlling for previous customer evaluations and recent employee evaluations. Overall, these findings extend the dominant view of examining static, employee satisfaction levels and offer important implications for the management of the organizational frontline.

Journal of Operations ManagementVolume 66, Issue 1-2 p. 4-11 EDITORIALFree Access Editorial: Delivering effective healthcare at lower cost: Introduction to the special issue Lawrence D. Fredendall, Lawrence D. Fredendall Department of Management, College of Business, Clemson University, Clemson, South CarolinaSearch for more papers by this authorJeffery S. Smith, Corresponding Author Jeffery S. Smith [email protected] orcid.org/0000-0002-2760-1012 Department of Supply Chain Management & Analytics, School of Business, Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, Virginia Correspondence Jeffery S. Smith, Department of Supply Chain Management & Analytics, School of Business, Virginia Commonwealth University, 301 West Main St. Richmond, VA 23284. Email: [email protected]Search for more papers by this author Lawrence D. Fredendall, Lawrence D. Fredendall Department of Management, College of Business, Clemson University, Clemson, South CarolinaSearch for more papers by this authorJeffery S. Smith, Corresponding Author Jeffery S. Smith [email protected] orcid.org/0000-0002-2760-1012 Department of Supply Chain Management & Analytics, School of Business, Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, Virginia Correspondence Jeffery S. Smith, Department of Supply Chain Management & Analytics, School of Business, Virginia Commonwealth University, 301 West Main St. Richmond, VA 23284. Email: [email protected]Search for more papers by this author First published: 26 December 2019 https://doi.org/10.1002/joom.1078Citations: 2AboutSectionsPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL 1 HEALTHCARE IN OPERATIONS MANAGEMENT The healthcare industry represents a substantial portion of worldwide economic and social activities and initiatives and employs many people around the globe. The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) estimates that its member countries spend over 8% of gross domestic product (GDP) on healthcare. The United States spends almost 18% of GDP and is projected to move closer to 20% in the near future (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, 2019). The World Health Organization (WHO) has estimated that there are over 59 million workers in the healthcare arena, while the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) has reported that the United States alone has over 18 million (Centers for Disease Control, 2018; World Health Organization, 2019). Research about health-related problems by operations-management (OM) scholars is increasing: The Journal of Operations Management (JOOM) has published 22 papers on this topic (not including these in this special issue) since 2015. One reason research by OM scholars about healthcare processes has rapidly increased is the open access to rich data sets that enable investigations on core operational issues. The U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) have collected and made available volumes of data (e.g., Ding, 2013; Dobrzykowski, McFadden, & Vonderembse, 2016; Senot, Chandrasekaran, & Ward, 2016), enabling OM researchers to partner with medical professionals to examine pressing, real world, operational issues in healthcare. 2 SPECIAL ISSUE PROCESS AND PAPERS The editorial team, led by Lawrence Fredendall and Jeff Smith and assisted by Healthcare department co-editors Anand Nair and Anita Tucker, considered papers about any aspect of healthcare delivery and using any methodology as long as the paper maintained JOOM's empirical focus. In all, we received 73 submissions to the special issue. Each was evaluated by teams of knowledgeable individuals.1 At the end of this process, 11 papers were accepted for the SI. The 11 SI papers are outlined in detail in Tables 1 and 2. The papers are presented in two broad groups—operational and strategic—based on their level of investigation. These 11 articles use a wide range of operational and outcome data to address multiple aspects of the healthcare environment. Two papers (Catena, Dopson, & Holweg, 2020; Lee, Venkataraman, Heim, Roth, & Chilingerian, 2020) examine how operational policies set by a national health system affect the delivery of healthcare. Two papers (Ding, Peng, Heim, & Jordan, 2020 and Mishra, Salzarulo, & Modi, 2020) examine how strategic approaches taken by hospitals, possibly in response to national health-system policies, affect the delivery of healthcare in those hospitals. Two papers describe hospital-emergency-department operations (Berry Jaeker & Tucker, 2020; Davis, Zobel, Khansa, & Glick, 2020). Two papers (Dreyfus, Nair, & Rosales, 2020; Mukherjee & Sinha, 2020) examine perioperative services. Two papers examine operations at the level of the entire hospital (Johnson, Burgess, & Sethi, 2020; Tucker, Zheng, Gardner, & Bohn, 2020). In addition, two papers (Mukherjee & Sinha, 2020; Stevens & van Schaik, 2020) use the lens of new-technology implementation to examine how technology affects care delivery. Tables 1 and 2 also reveal the variety of methods employed. Seven papers analyze secondary data, two use observational studies, one is an ethnographic study, one a case study, one collects and analyzes survey data, and one applies a design-science methodology. Table 1. Summary of operational level papers Methodology Operations management effects Paper Title Level of analysis Research design Type of data Source of data Research question Perspective / research audience Research findings Capacity Variance Inventory Berry Jaeker & Tucker The value of process friction: The role of justification in reducing medical costs Hospital emergency department Retrospective examination of procedure change Requirements for ultrasound test ordering and number of tests ordered Two hospitals in same healthcare system Does the introduction of "process friction" reduce the number of non-required tests? Hospital planner / manager Including a justification step to order tests (i.e., process friction) reduces the MD available time and forces the MD to reflect on the actual need. Justification reduces provider capacity and allows time for reflection. Johnson et al. Temporal pacing of outcomes for improving patient flow: Design science research in a National Health Service hospital Hospital Process intervention Design science research Primary quantitative and qualitative data How to change processes to improve patient flow Hospital manager Improving patient flow by revising routines engaged doctors and nurses and increased coordination over time leading to performance improvements. Capacity is affected by the use of returns Variance is reduced through the use of routines Davis et al. Emergency department resilience to disaster level overcrowding: A component resilience framework for analysis and predictive modeling Hospital emergency department Retrospective data analysis Secondary data Data from one Ed in 2016 What factors affect ED resilience to overcrowding? ED planner/manager Analysis suggests number critical care patients and boarding time predicts ED overcrowding. Decision support system improves ED resilience to overcrowding. Decision support system allows early response to potential overcrowding of ED Reduced variance in patient wait times Tucker et al. When do workarounds help or hurt patient outcomes? The moderating role of operational failures Hospital nursing units Survey Survey data plus audit data about pressure injuries Nurses were surveyed from 56 hospitals and 262 nursing units What are the effects of operational workarounds on health outcomes? Nurse manager On nursing units with lower levels of operational failures, nurse workarounds increase pressure related injuries. This is evidence that workarounds that are process avoiding lead to negative patient outcomes. Workarounds can increase capacity by providing shortcuts. Workarounds to avoid process requirements increase outcome heterogeneity. Dreyfus, David The impact of planning and communication on waste in the operating room Perioperative services Observational Ethnographic data gathered through observation, survey data, and archived data Primary quantitative and qualitative data Perioperative services manager Changes to the surgeon preference card have a curvilinear relationship with unplanned costs. The greater the OR team's communication the lower the unplanned costs. Supply costs affected by planning Stevens & van Schaik Implementing new technologies for complex care Cardiology/endovascular treatment Observational Primary, observational data of new technology adoption in one hospital Primary quantitative and qualitative data How can new healthcare technology be implemented and how can team learning support this? Hospital manager, team leader Team learning is supported by relational and cognitive embeddedness Learning affects capacity of process. Learning affects process variance Table 2. Summary of Strategic Level Papers Methodology Operations management effects Paper Title Level of analysis Research design Type of data Source of data Research question Perspective /research audience Research findings Capacity Variance Inventory Catena et al. On the tension between standardized and customized policies in healthcare: The case of length-of-stay reduction National Health System Retrospective data analysis Secondary data from English NHS. National Health Service of England How does a national length of stay policy affect patient outcomes? Health policy analyst, hospital manager Policy limiting length of stay for hernia patients reduced the aggregate cost, but increased risk of readmission and poor health outcomes. MIXED: Readmissions increases capacity utilization. LOS limit increases aggregate cost efficiency. Increased variance in health outcomes Lee et al. Impact of the value-based purchasing program on hospital operations outcomes: An econometric analysis National Health System Retrospective Secondary CMS How does the CMS value based purchasing program affect hospital process improvement outcomes Policy analyst/hospital manager VBP penalties affect hospital process improvement efforts and patient mix. VBP bonuses reduce hospital incentives to make process improvements Reduced variance is due to investment in improvement Ding et al. Service mix, market competition, and cost efficiency: A longitudinal study of U.S. hospitals Hospital Retrospective data analysis Secondary data CMS hospital cost reports, Dartmouth atlas of health care What is the interaction of service mix and cost efficiency? Does higher specialization always improve performance? Hospital planner/manager As hospital cost specialization increases, its cost efficiency increases at a decreasing rate. Service mix is potentially an operational level to improve cost efficiency given competition. Specialization allows focus in capacity decisions and increases cost efficiency. Specialization reduces service mix variance. Mishra et al. Patient care effectiveness and financial outcomes of hospital physician contracting emphasis Hospital Retrospective Secondary data CMS How does physician contracting emphasis affect patient care and financial performance? Hospital planner / manager Physician contracting can improve operating margins, but also increase patient length of stay. This may be due to reduced patient care effectiveness. Contracting allows capacity contraction and expansion at lower cost. Patient length of stay increases Mukherjee & Sinha Robot-assisted surgical care delivery at a hospital: Policies for maximizing clinical outcome benefits and minimizing costs Surgical unit Retrospective Duration time and other data about surgeries. Integrated field and empirical data. Used for analytical modeling and simulation. Hospital How do hospital policies about scheduling a surgical robot affect health outcomes. Perioperative services manager Hospital policies about the training and minimum number of surgeries performed and patient criticality to determine suitability for scheduling surgery using the robot Experience affects actual capacity of surgical robot for surgery Patient health condition affects value of robot technology. Operational-level articles Six papers examine traditional OM topics related to healthcare at the operational level. Three papers examine aspects of process design, two examine the operation of the system, and one examines how learning occurs, while implementing a new technology. In the first paper, "The value of process friction: The role of justification in reducing medical costs," Berry Jaeker and Tucker (2020) explore the impact of including an arguably non-value-added "justification" step (i.e., a process-friction point) to the ultrasound testing process. The research was conducted in two different teaching hospitals in the same healthcare system, where one required the justification step and the other did not. The authors found that, when justification for the ultrasound test was included in the process, the test was less likely to be ordered. Interestingly, there was also a spillover effect in that other diagnostic tests not requiring justification were also ordered less frequently. This process change did not decrease quality but did significantly reduce costs (estimated to be over $200,000) and patient length of stay. The second paper examines how a hospital changed its process in agreement with the theory of swift and even flow (Schmenner & Swink, 1998). This paper, "Temporal pacing of outcomes for improving patient flow: Design science research in a national health service hospital," by Johnson et al. (2020) examines a process redesign's effect on patient flow and timely patent discharge. The research team partnered with a medium-sized hospital in the United Kingdom to iteratively redesign the patient-care process to achieve consistent patient flow. The mechanisms or triggers were daily routines with performance targets that kept the healthcare team focused on the need to process patients so as to keep them moving. Through the redesign project, the hospital was able to reduce the average patient length of stay by 14% and increase the percentage of patients seen within 4 hours in the emergency department from 84% to 97%. An unintended outcome was that employees became more satisfied with their jobs. These outcomes together resulted in a net cost savings of over three million pounds. The demand function of emergency departments has a high coefficient of variation of work arrivals, making it very difficult to economically meet demand. Because extra capacity is generally seen as expensive, patients are expected to wait for long periods of time to be served. The paper, "Emergency department resilience to disaster level overcrowding: A component resilience framework for analysis and predictive modeling," by Davis et al. (2020) seeks to better predict occurrences of severe overcrowding as defined by a National Emergency Department Overcrowding Scale (NEDOCS) score exceeding 180. The focal hospital experienced overcrowding on more than 40% of its operating days. The authors find that their decision-support model was more effective than NEDOCS at predicting instances of overcrowding. Their model provides the emergency department manager roughly a six-hour window for advanced planning. After implementing the model, patient flow improved (allowing for more timely treatment) and costs were reduced because of more efficient capacity utilization. Two papers explore why waste exists in healthcare processes. Tucker et al. in "When do workarounds help or hurt patient outcomes? The moderating role of operational failures," seek to better understand the impact of personnel actively circumventing hospital procedures by using workarounds. The relationship between use of workarounds and hospital-acquired pressure injuries (HAPIs) was shown to be moderated by operational failures. The study illustrates that the role of workarounds is not straightforward. Workarounds can make the process run less effectively and increase the accident rate—or they can be used by highly motivated employees to correct for operational failures. The authors propose that efforts to reduce these expensive pressure injuries (that substantially increase length of stay) begin with process analysis to eliminate operational failures. "The impact of planning and communication on unplanned costs in surgical episodes of care: Implications for reducing waste in hospital operating rooms," by Dreyfus et al., 2020 focuses on waste reduction through improved planning. The authors posit that waste, measured as costs due to improper material utilization in the operating room, can be reduced by more thorough planning before the operation and by enhanced communication during surgery. The research team uses observational techniques coupled with data on surgical-material usage during the operation. The results indicate that planning instances have a curvilinear effect on unplanned costs, while communication density during the procedure directly reduces costs. The authors show that the potential cost savings from increased attention to updating the surgical preference cards, especially by surgeons. The paper "Implementing new technologies for complex care: The role of embeddedness factors in team learning" by Stevens and van Schaik used an in-depth case study to explore the implementation of a new technology in a cardiology practice. This led to enhanced health outcomes for patients with aortic disease needing endovascular treatment. Relational and cognitive embeddedness were shown to support team learning, enabling the team to treat more patients, while offering more tailored care and better management of emergencies. Strategic level articles Five papers address policies at the national, hospital, or department level. As expected, all of these papers find that the policies used affect performance and outcomes. National policies have a large and significant impact on both healthcare delivery and ultimate performance outcomes. The paper "On the tension between standardized and customized policies in health care: The case of length-of-stay reduction" by Catena et al. (2020) examines how the English National Health System policy to decrease the length of stay (LOS) of hernia patients affects patient outcomes by using almost two million patient medical records covering a fifteen-year timespan. The results of the investigation indicate that the policy is effective at reaching its intended goal of lower LOS as well as reducing the relative cost per procedure. However, unintended consequences, such as an increased risk of readmission and an increased probability of death for vulnerable and elderly patients, also occurred. The authors suggest that these unintended consequences create the potential for a significant increase in long-term costs and thus propose a differentiated policy (i.e., one that has thresholds identified in their Cox risk-analysis models) to mitigate the unintended consequences. Their analysis suggests that using their policy could result in an approximately 20% reduction in cost per hernia procedure. This paper is particularly effective at highlighting the impact of national policies on specific patient groups and demonstrating that policies need flexibility to avoid unplanned consequences that ultimately result in higher costs and worse patient outcomes. Lee et al. (2020) investigate the value-base purchasing program in the United States. Their paper "Impact of the value-based purchasing program on hospital outcomes: An econometric analysis" investigates how value-based purchasing penalties drive decisions by hospital managers about hospital operations and affect operating outcomes. Results of their empirical analyses indicate that hospitals that had a prior-year penalty had a significant association between penalty magnitude and current-year process improvements and increased their patient mix metrics, possibly improving revenue. Hospitals who received a bonus were less likely to pursue process improvements. The value-based purchasing program was seen as being effective at pushing lower performing hospitals to improve processes (or to look for new revenue streams), but may not be effective at motivating high performers to continue to improve. Ding et al. investigate hospital strategy using the concept of service mix in their paper "Service mix, market competition, and cost efficiency: A longitudinal study of U.S. hospitals." They explore the impact of hospital specialization and differentiation on cost performance. In their definition, specialization addresses service-line offerings, while differentiation is the deviation from an average level of specialization. The authors posit that, as specialization increases, cost efficiency improves at a decreasing rate, while differentiation improves cost performance in competitive markets. The authors integrate data from multiple sources over 18 years to facilitate the study. Their results indicate that specialization does improve cost efficiency at a decreasing rate, following a U-shaped pattern. Additionally, they demonstrate that specialization improves the cost efficiency of acute-care general hospitals to a greater extent when there are other specialty hospitals competing in the same hospital service area. This article effectively outlines the complex relationship between hospital strategic decisions (i.e., what service lines to offer), cost performance, and associated contingencies. Mishra et al. (2020) also explore hospital strategy in their paper, "Patient care effectiveness and financial outcomes of hospital physician contracting emphasis." This article examines the effectiveness of employing contract physicians instead of permanent doctors. Using data that span 21 years, the authors find that using contract physicians increases operating margins, but these cost savings are offset by the increase in patient LOS that results from using contract physicians. The results remained valid over multiple contingencies and time periods. This article suggests that administrators need to understand how personnel decisions impact the delicate balance between cost and quality. Mukherjee and Sinha in "How do hospital scheduling policies for a surgical robot affect health outcomes," examine the deployment of robots for hysterectomy surgeries with both performance and cost-reduction objectives. They used 3 months of hospital data that considers patient selection, surgeon pool size, and surgeon experience to develop a scheduling policy, and then utilized discrete-event simulation to explore the boundaries of the policy recommendations. The simulation results indicate that cost savings increase when robotic surgeries are scheduled using policies that prioritize based on patient condition and physician experience. Effective deployment of robots depended on optimizing the surgeon-pool size, which then depended on surgeon experience and patient heterogeneity. The authors then suggested triage to ensure that critical patients were given priority, with remaining time slots allocated to less-critical patients on a first-come, first-served basis. The objective of this special issue was to facilitate emerging partnerships between OM and medical researchers and to assist efforts to address operations problems to deliver more effective healthcare at a lower cost. While the special issue urged researcher teams to include both academic researchers and medical practitioners on the research team, it was not required as a condition for acceptance in the special issue. However, the accepted articles demonstrate a high level of collaboration between academics and medical practitioners, since much of this data could not have been gathered without intensive collaboration. This set of papers represents a step in combining the power of OM theory with the detailed process understanding of those who work in the healthcare system daily can provide. The goal of the collaboration is to not only further develop operations theory, but to provide a means by which healthcare delivery can increase its value added for all patients by reducing costs and increasing quality. Endnotes 1 A total of 103 individuals served in various roles of the reviewer process. Each is recognized in the Appendix at the end of this editorial. 2 A special thank you goes to Jamie Sanchagrin for all the work that went into managing the submissions, while in transition to the new publisher's system. Appendix A: List of Reviewers and Associate Editors2 Abbey, James. Abdulsalam, Yousef J. Agnihothri, Saligrama. Ambulka, Saurabh. Anderson, David. Avgerinos, Emmanouil. Baguma, David. Barrett, David. Batt, Bob. Bavafa, Hessam. Bendoly, Elliot. Beraldo, Sergio. Bernardes, Ednilson. Bichescu, Bogdan. Bitner, Matthew David. Candido, Carlos. Davis, Zachary. Devaraj, Srikant. Dilts, David M. Ding, Xin. Dobrzykowski, David D. Dreyfus, David. Eckerd, Stephanie. Ferrand, Yann. Field, Joy. Froehle, Craig. Gao, Gordon. Gardner, John. Glover, Wiljeana J. Goodale, John C. Holmström, Jan. Jacobs, Mark. Jaeker, Jillian Berry. Johnson, Dana. Karuppan, Corinne M. KC, Diwas. Kistler, Justin. Kristal, Murat. LaGanga, Linda. Laker, Lauren. Lan, Yingchao. Land, Martin. Mackelprang, Alan W. Matthias, Olga. McFadden, Kathleen L. Meng, Lesley. Merrick, Jason. Metcalf, Ashley Y. Mills, Alex F. Mirzaei, Tala. Moritz, Brent B. Morrice, Douglas. Mukherjee, Ujjal Kumar. Murphy, Lyn. Nair, Anand. Narayanan, Arunachalam. Nyaga, Gilbert N. Ow, Terence T. Pathak, Surya. Peng, David Xiaosong. Queenan, Carrie. Quiroga, Bernardo F. Ran, Lun. Restuccia, Joseph. Roehrich, Jens K. Rosales, Claudia. Rossetti, Christian. Scholtes, Stefan. Senot, Claire. Shang, Guangzhi. Shockley, Jeff. Simpson, Dayna. Singh, Rajendra. Song, Hummy. Srinivasan, Jayakanth. Stauffer, Jon M. Stock, Gregory. Stratman, Jeff. Subramanian, Vijaya C. Sülz, Sandra. Terpend, Regis. Theokary, Carol. Thirumalai, Sriram. Thurer, Matthias. Touboulic, Anne. Tucker, Anita. Turkoglu, Aykut. Venkataraman, Sriram. Walker, Helen. Wang, Qiuchen. Wani, Deepa. Warsing, Donald P. Wemmerlov, Urban. White, Denise. Wilhelm, Miriam Michiko. Wooten, Joel. Wu, Tianshi. Yao, Yuliang. Zacharia, Zach G. Zenteno, Cecilia. Zepeda, E. David. Zhang, Jie J. Zhang, Qingyu. Zheng, Sarah. Zobel, Christopher W. REFERENCES Berry Jaeker, J. A., & Tucker, A. L. (2020). The value of process friction: The role of justification in reducing medical costs. Journal of Operations Management, 66(1-2), 12– 34. Catena, R., Dopson, S., & Holweg, M. (2020). On the tension between standardized and customized policies in health care: The case of length-of-stay reduction. Journal of Operations Management, 66(1-2), 135– 150. Centers for Disease Control. (2018). Healthcare workers: Report from the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH). Retrieved from www.cdc.gov. Davis, Z., Zobel, C. W., Khansa, L., & Glick, R. E. (2020). Emergency department resilience to disaster-level overcrowding: A component resilience framework for analysis and predictive modeling. Journal of Operations Management, 66(1-2), 54– 66. Ding, D. X. (2013). The effect of experience, ownership and focus on productive efficiency: A longitudinal study of U.S. hospitals. Journal of Operations Management, 32(1–2), 1– 14. Ding, D. X., Peng, D. X., Heim, G. R., & Jordan, V. S. (2020). Service mix, market competition, and cost efficiency: A longitudinal study of U.S. hospital. Journal of Operations Management, 66(1-2), 176– 198. Dobrzykowski, D. D., McFadden, K. L., & Vonderembse, M. A. (2016). Examining pathways to safety and financial performance in hospitals: A study of lean in professional service operations. Journal of Operations Management, 42-43(1), 39– 51. Dreyfus, D., Nair, A., & Rosales, C. (2020). The impact of planning and communication on unplanned costs in surgical episodes of care: Implications for reducing waste in hospital operating rooms. Journal of Operations Management, 66(1-2), 91– 111. Johnson, M., Burgess, N., & Sethi, S. (2020). Temporal pacing of outcomes for improving patient flow: Design science research in a national health service hospital. Journal of Operations Management, 66(1-2), 35– 53. Lee, S. J., Venkataraman, S., Heim, G. R., Roth, A. V., & Chilingerian, J. (2020). Impact of the value-based purchasing program on hospital operations outcomes: An econometric analysis. Journal of Operations Management, 66(1-2), 151– 175. Mishra, S., Salzarulo, P. A., & Modi, S. B. (2020). Patient care effectiveness and financial outcomes of hospital physician contracting emphasis. Journal of Operations Management, 66(1-2), 199– 226. Mukherjee, U. K., & Sinha, K. K. (2020). Robot-assisted surgical care delivery at a hospital: Policies for maximizing clinical outcome benefits and minimizing costs. Journal of Operations Management, 66(1-2), 227– 256. Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development. (2019). OECE health statistics 2019. Retrieved from www.OECD.org. Schmenner, R. W., & Swink, M. L. (1998). On theory in operations management. Journal of Operations Management, 17(1), 97– 113. Senot, C., Chandrasekaran, A., & Ward, P. T. (2016). Collaboration between service professionals during the delivery of health care: Evidence from a multiple-case study in U.S. hospitals. Journal of Operations Management, 62(1), 42– 43. Stevens, M., & van Schaik, J. (2020). Implementing new technologies for complex care: The role of embeddedness factors in team learning. 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Purpose The “services triangle” is a dynamic model in which three interlinked entities (customer, employee and firm) combine to create three dyads [employee-firm (EF), customer-firm (CF) and customer-employee (CE)] that work together to deliver services. This study aims to determine whether significant differences exist vis-à-vis the impact of EF, CF and CE dyads on the service experience. Design/methodology/approach Empirical evidence from data garnered from 398 surveys was used to test a conceptual model. To test the hypotheses, like-signed first-order dyads were constructed and combined to create second-order dyads, and analysis of variance and post-hoc tests (least significant differences) were used to investigate whether differences among the second-order dyads exist. Findings The analysis reveals the differential impact of the three services triangle dyads on the service experience. Specifically, customers’ perception of EF fit appears to have the greatest impact on customers’ evaluation of the service experience, followed by CF and CE fit. Research limitations/implications The main implication is that this paper extends conceptual research by providing empirical evidence that the EF dyad is the foundation of the services triangle. The limitations are based primarily on methodology, where the use of a survey to collect data rules out the potential generalizations of true cause and effect while also potentially being subject to common method bias. Practical implications Managers should realize that fit within some dyads is more instrumental in determining the service experience than fit within others. A number of managerial implications are proposed and discussed. Originality/value Prior research has neither empirically examined the services triangle nor whether significant differences exists among the impact of its dyads on the service experience. Insights from various literatures, the application of the balance theory and the construction of first- and second-order dyads enables an investigation of the various relational patterns contained in the services triangle.

It is hard to overstate the importance of service recovery. One estimation is that companies lose $83 billion annually from bad customer service (Loechner 2010). At the same time, emerging research and practice has begun to focus on moving customers from being merely satisfied to being connected with a company at a deeper level. As an example, consider customer-company identification (CCI), which represents the extent a customer thinks and feels a company represents cherished aspects of his or her self. CCI is highly motivating, such that a customer willingly supports a company through identity sustaining (e.g., patronage) and promoting (e.g., word-of-mouth) behaviors.

In a recent critique of the so-called “market failures approach” (MFA) to business ethics Abraham Singer maintains that business firms have ethical responsibilities to voluntarily restrain their profit-seeking activities in accordance with the demands of justice. While I ultimately share Singer’s intuition that the MFA has overlooked the importance of justice in business ethics, I argue that he has not presented a fully adequate case to explain why justice-related responsibilities should be assigned to business firms. I conclude by offering a brief – and supportive – alternative to his position. THE SO-CALLED “market failures approach” (MFA) to business ethics characteristically grounds norms of business conduct in the normative conditions standing behind Pareto efficient markets. Ethical business firms, thus, have a responsibility to uphold the “implicit morality of the market” and, among other things, support voluntary contracting, refrain from “exploiting” standard market failures, such as information asymmetries, low levels of competition and negative externalities, Seattle University. Email: smitjeff@seattleu.edu 1 ____________________________________________ Discuss this commentary at http://bejr.co/2017-0503x Cite as: Bus Ethics J Rev 5(3): 15–21, 
 http://doi.org/10.12747/bejr2017.05.03 Edited by Chris MacDonald & Alexei Marcoux

Companies are investing greater resources into corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives as a component of their marketing strategy. Corporate philanthropic giving, sustainability initiatives, and community involvement are all on the rise as companies attempt to establish, maintain, and/or enhance a reputation for socially responsibility. For example, a Forbes listing of the seventy eight most generous companies noted that charitable giving rose from $3.6 billion in 2006 to $3.8 billion in 2007 (Kirdahy 2008). Similarly, many of the companies in Fortune’s ranking of the 100 best companies to work for avoided laying off employees despite the recent global economic downturn (Fortune 2010). Additionally, General Electric is doubling the investment into Ecomagination, a green focused research and development program, between 2010 and 2015 (Lombardi 2010). Initiatives such as these are becoming more common for companies as they are blatant, tangible signals of a firm’s CSR efforts. While being deemed socially responsible by analysts (e.g, CNN, Fortune, or KLD) requires a company to excel on all areas of CSR, a consumer’s evaluation may not entail the same broad assessment.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine the interplay between technical and social systems within an organization that potentially affect the service experience, as perceived by end customers. Design/methodology/approach The paper explores the potential impact of an integrated service quality system on the service experience. A conceptual model is presented, accompanied by a detailed development of the hypotheses. Two samples (Study 1: n =474, Study 2: n =225) of consumers are used to empirically test the proposed model. Findings The analysis reveals the impact a technical system has on employees’ inherent abilities (i.e. the social system), which, in turn, affect the overall assessment by customers. Additionally, the situation in which an employee works (i.e. operating environmental conditions) results in differences in the model. Research limitations/implications This paper’s main implication is this paper employs established theory to develop a model that is empirically tested to show that implementing and maintaining a quality-oriented service system can positively influence the overall customer experience. The limitations are based primarily on the methodology in which individual employees assessed all aspects of both the social and technical systems. Practical implications Managers should be diligent in their design and implementation of the quality components as these affect the work setting in which employees operate. Originality/value Prior research has neither explored an integrated service quality system’s impact on the service experience nor employed an established theoretical framework. This work accomplishes both with the results providing contributions to both theory and practice.

Why do customers' attitudinal loyalty fail to predict their behavior? More importantly, what creates such latent loyalty? We attempt to answer these questions by examining the antecedents and outcomes of loyalty conviction, which represents the inherent strength/uncertainty in a customer's attitudinal loyalty. For deep attitudinal loyalty (i.e., conative loyalty), the findings suggest that customer satisfaction creates loyalty held without conviction. In contrast, customer-company identification creates loyalty held with conviction. Importantly, attitudinal loyalty without conviction loses its ability to predict behavior when situational and competitive barriers are present whereas loyalty with conviction maintains a predictive relationship with behavior despite the same barriers. Published by Elsevier Inc. on behalf of New York University.