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Smart manufacturing, as a buzzword in recent years, is increasingly attracting attention in academia and industry. However, it is challenging for most manufacturing enterprises as they are uncertain about the ROI of smart manufacturing, and they are currently confronting many difficulties and hurdles. In previous studies, most researchers tended to emphasize larger companies while small and medium enterprises (SMEs) received limited attention. To comprehensively understand the barriers and challenges of smart manufacturing adoption faced by manufacturing companies especially SMEs, the author of this paper conducted a systematic review to identify more than 80 barriers and challenges which are classified into five categories: nature of SMEs, technology, organization, environment, and financial. The top factors include high investment, lack of skilled workforce, lack of strategy and awareness, and security issues. Furthermore, the author pointed out that we should not neglect some less frequently mentioned factors, such as limited bandwidth and speed of internet transfer, and the energy needed for data transmission.

In this paper, we construct a novel weighted network named subject categories network from the dataset of readers' borrowing lists in library. We empirically study the statistical properties and take the first step to uncover the topological structure of this network. Our results indicate that subject categories network is strongly heterogeneous and has a small world phenomenon. We also find that: (i) well-connected subjects are typically read more; (ii) subjects with large strength tend to bridge communities; (iii) those connections held large intensity preferably cluster together each other; (iv) it is likely that well-connected subjects have a majority of low-degree neighbors and are linked by edges with larger weights. Finally, through these results, we constructed a simple example of local structure for providing a framework to understand the hierarchies and organization principles in the subject categories system.

The paper assesses the ecological approach which challenges the standard concept of scarcity in both neoclassical economics and neo-Darwinian orthodoxy. The focus is on comparative theory analysis with regards to the relevance of matter/energy influx. It should not be surprising, in light of the mathematical structure, that the ideas of optimization of utility in orthodox economics and optimization of fitness in mainstream biology are based on common assumptions. One of the assumptions is that environmental resources are given or exist passively in relation to the actor. Otherwise, the mathematical maximization functions would not be feasible. The orthodox assumption of resources as given for a specific population of firms or organisms need not deny that the environment continuously changes, but the assumption entails that such changes are by-products of the interaction of the population with the environment, the interference of other populations, and other exogenous factors. Thus, the orthodox assumption of resources as given, according to the ecological school, excludes, at first approximation, endogenous factors in the explanation of environmental dynamics or the economy-environment nexus. Inspired by Alfred Lotka's work, the ecological agenda in economics (as led by Daly and Costanza) and in biology (as advocated by Odum, Wicken, Depew, Weber, and Ulanowicz) advance the same alternative to the orthodox axiom concerning resources; viz., resources are a function of the active agent. While such an alternative is very fruitful, it does not go far enough. It has limitations: In economics, the ecological approach generally cannot solve the long-term problem of the asymmetric exchange between human economy and the environment. In the life sciences, the ecological approach, as far as it adheres to reformed Darwinism, faces difficulties with regards to the concepts of organization and the process of development/evolution. These problems call for similar conceptual innovations in both disciplines.

Three core imperatives are essential for modern businesses and organizations: seamless integration of customer and operational processes, agility, and the ability to change. These imperatives are relevant in view of successfully executing strategic choices, but all too often not satisfied.

Businesses and organizations are complex adaptive socio-technical systems and can be viewed from two fundamentally different perspectives: the functional (black-box) perspective and the constructional (white-box) perspective. Management and governance of businesses and organizations regard the functional, black-box perspective, which is inherently ill-suited for addressing the imperatives mentioned. It will be argued that establishing system integration, agility and change requires a focus on the system's design, hence necessitates the constructional perspective.

The concept of architecture is considered fundamental for operationalizing the constructional perspective. Next to the more familiar notion of technology architecture, the concepts of business, organizational and information architecture are formally introduced and elucidated. Various domains within these architectures will be highlighted, whereby the importance of coherence and consistency is stressed, especially in view of the ability to change. Collectively, the four architectures are labeled Enterprise Architecture. Finally, enterprise architecture will be positioned as a crucial means for linking strategy development and execution.

For groups of agents to act collaboratively, they need to recognize the need for collaboration, decide on the method to be followed for achieving goal states, assign responsibilities to subgroups and individuals, and so on, until responsibilities that can be fulfilled by individuals are reached. Aiming to support collaborative activity of humans within organized settings, this paper introduces a set of constructs for specifying organizational structures and introduces an explicit representation of individual and collaborative responsibilities within organizations. We conjecture that group members create common awareness towards recognizing the need for collaboration by forming group acceptances. Acceptances are formed by means of shared practices and beliefs of individual agents. The paper introduces state recognition recipes that drive group members within organizations to form acceptances, and thoroughly explains the exploitation of these recipes in conjunction to state achievement recipes for achieving goal states and fulfilling responsibilities collaboratively.

Recent research in organizations and firms has called for a broadening of knowledge research, including issues such as the sociology of knowledge consumption. This paper introduces preliminary frameworks for integrating knowledge production and knowledge management with the "consumption" aspects of knowledge. The social anthropological research on inalienable exchange is shown to complement potential research on knowledge consumption.

Competitive advantage and sustainability of business organizations can only be achieved when an organization identifies, boosts, and directs its resources toward building its capabilities. The literature identified knowledge management (KM) resources and capabilities as the most critical enablers of organizational performance and innovations. This systematic review identified KM resources (enablers) and their effects on KM capabilities. The review also went into the theories used in the empirical research on the problem. To achieve those goals, the authors summarized 27 quantitative, peer-reviewed studies found in well-known databases and published in the last 5 years between January 2014 and April 2019. The review revealed that the primary organizational KM resources are culture, people, leadership, organization structure, resources, capabilities, strategy and technology. To these, the review added some factors, which are social factors, organizational knowledge and organizational characteristics. The study is significant in finding the most common variables or factors in business KM and their implication of them for enhancing knowledge capability and organizational performance.

A framework for technological and organizational capability audits is proposed, and the relevance of integrating technology and organization and product competitiveness of Chinese firms is then examined. Empirical data were acquired through a recent study of innovative firms from Beijing, China. An organization-technology map and statistical analyses are used to verify five hypotheses in order to identify the relationship amongst product competitiveness and integration of technology and organization. The results effectively verify the positive relationship among technological innovation, organizational innovation and product competitiveness. The findings also reveal that integrated innovation between technology and organization is critical for the improvement of product competitiveness of Chinese firms.

Although knowledge has been cited as one of the most important strategic assets, the creation and sharing of knowledge at the organizational level is a difficult process that will not proceed without incentives and conscious efforts by management. The complexity of knowledge management (KM) is further compounded by the influence of a wide variety of factors such as leadership, ba, organizational culture, organizational control and individual work styles.

Based on a large dataset gathered from a questionnaire survey of a multi-national Japanese pharmaceutical company and its subsidiary in the US, we compare how the aforementioned organizational factors influence KM, expressed through the SECI model of socialization, externalization, combination and internalization. The results of a structural equation modeling path analysis show that a single model of KM should not be applied unilaterally to both organizations, although part of the same company, and instead may need to be adapted to each stage of KM maturity.

Many theoretical models viz., technology acceptance model (TAM), technology–organization–environment (TOE), diffusion of innovation (DOI), and human–organization–technology-fit (HOT-fit), etc., have been developed, validated, and tested to explain the acceptance of innovative technologies by the intended end users. However, given the limitations associated with these theoretical models as well as different cloud computing adoption scenario, they may not point out to the major constructs and the variables under so-called “selective contexts” in an explicit manner. Therefore, several research studies have been undertaken to integrate more than one model to provide a holistic evaluation of the determinants of cloud computing adoption for different domains. Such studies have also been conducted for education sector as well. But, the target of these studies is mostly specific to higher education using TOE or TAM models. To solve this limitation, we propose integrated approach of TAM, TOE framework, DOI, and HOT-fit frameworks in an effort to improve predictive power of proposed resulting model and, stretching the constructs to enrich the literature and implementing the same for Indian school education system as a case study.

The contribution of the paper is the building of a model to predict the proper employees’ allocation in the Greek public sector. To acknowledge the set and weights of criteria upon which our model feeds data, a validated questionnaire was developed and used to conduct a primary quantitative survey amongst HR departments and employees of state organizations in Greece. On the acquired findings, several experiments were administered using linear and machine learning tools, aiming to replace time consuming and subjective procedures, followed by many organizations. Concluding, data classification algorithms are proposed to predict the best matching of employees, giving as inputs personnel qualifications as well as job specifications, leading to a model based on J48, a decision tree algorithm.

This study aims to understand performance of social enterprises and assess the most influential factors affecting this performance based on a Systematic Literature Review (SLR). The study extracted data (articles) from three prominent databases (Scopus, Web of Science and Google Scholar). Four main determinant groups of performance are identified, namely, technology and innovation, investment considerations, overall organization orientation and a general category of other influential factors. The results indicate that fiscal, environmental, social contexts, creative methods and employee contributions have a major influence on the performance of social enterprises. It was also revealed that strategic and business orientation has proven to be a significant contributor as well. The findings contribute to social entrepreneurship literature in terms of performance improvement of hybrid enterprises. Future research suggestions are provided based on the findings.

To compare the consequences of different types of major organizational innovation and to identify the characteristics of more beneficial innovations, a telephone interview survey of senior managers from 513 UK organizations was conducted. Although 90% of major innovations were reported to have an overall beneficial impact, statistical analyses showed that specific effects on finances, employee relations, customers, and quality of life depended on the type of innovation and its characteristics. The effects of different types of innovation were related but not reducible to their characteristics. The findings suggest that a more differentiated view of the outcomes of innovation is both possible and useful.

This paper explores orchestration capability as a concept defining the firm's ability to purposefully build and manage innovation networks. Due to the lack of empirical research on the subject as well as the focus on the organizational level in earlier studies, we approach the issue from a multi-level perspective. By utilizing expert panel discussions and an in-depth case study in an innovation network, we show that orchestration capability consists of both organizational and individual level determinants. Distinct capabilities and skills are identified and illustrated. Furthermore, we identify mechanisms suggesting that the two levels are interconnected in several ways.

In the eastern region of India known as Chhota Nagpur, a diverse community comprising people from different tribes, economic backgrounds, and beliefs come together to organize a festival called Chaitra Parva. This festival serves as a platform for various folk dances, including the captivating and skillful Chhau dance.

The purpose of this study is to examine the management and organization of Chaitra Parva and its significance in sustaining the art form of Chhau. It specifically explores the role of encouragement, innovation, and the active involvement of royal families in supporting Chhau. The study also delves into the ritualistic and religious aspects of Chaitra Parva, and how they ignite passion and excitement among both the Chhau performers and the local audience.

To gather data for the study, group discussions, interviews with experienced artists and scholars, and document analysis were conducted. The data were then analyzed using techniques such as tabulation, deductive coding, axial coding, and thematic analysis. The study sheds light on the organizational skills, inspirations, motivations, and real-life challenges faced by the Chhau artists in this context.

An approach which has the purpose to catch what characterizes the specificity of a living system, pointing out what makes it different with respect to physical and artificial systems, needs to find a new point of view — new descriptive modalities. In particular it needs to be able to describe not only the single processes which can be observed in an organism, but what integrates them in a unitary system. In order to do so, it is necessary to consider a higher level of description which takes into consideration the relations between these processes, that is the organization rather than the structure of the system. Once on this level of analysis we can focus on an abstract relational order that does not belong to the individual components and does not show itself as a pattern, but is realized and maintained in the continuous flux of processes of transformation of the constituents. Using Tibor Ganti's words we call it "Order in the Nothing". In order to explain this approach we analyse the historical path that generated the distinction between organization and structure and produced its most mature theoretical expression in the autopoietic biology of Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela. We then briefly analyse Robert Rosen's (M,R)-Systems, a formal model conceptually built with the aim to catch the organization of living beings, and which can be considered coherent with the autopoietic theory. In conclusion we will propose some remarks on these relational descriptions, pointing out their limits and their possible developments with respect to the structural thermodynamical description.

Confronted with fast changing technologies and markets and with increasing competitive pressures, firms are now required to innovate fast and continuously. In order to do so, several firms superpose an intrapreneurial layer (IL) to their formal organization (FO). The two systems are in complex relations: the IL is embedded in the FO, sharing human, financial and technical components, but strongly diverges from it when it comes to representation, structure, values and behavior of the shared components. Furthermore, the two systems simultaneously cooperate and compete. In the long run, the organizational dynamics usually end to the detriment of the intrapreneurial layer, which remains marginal or regresses after an initial period of boom. The concepts of Multiple Systems and Collective Beings, proposed by Minati and Pessa, can help students of the firm adopt a different viewpoint on this issue. These concepts can help them move away from a rigid, Manichean view of the two systems' respective functions and roles towards a more fluid and elaborate vision of their relations, allowing for greater flexibility and coherence.

Infradisciplinary, besides interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary, applications, forms part of the definition of new company organizational models and, in particular, for networked-companies. Their related systemic connotations characterize them as collective beings, especially regarding the optimization of interactions between agents as well as context-specific interference.

Networked-companies in the building industry (chosen to illustrate the infradisciplinary values of the systemic approach towards company organizational models) require, due to their nature and particularities of context, certain specifications: behavioral microrules of an informal nature, suitable governance of their sector, etc. Their nature and particular context thus determine, especially in the systemic view, the need not only for an interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary approach, but also an infradisciplinary one.

In this article we analyse the problem of downward causation in emergent systems. Our thesis, based on constructivist epistemological remarks, is that downward causation in synchronic emergence cannot be characterized by a direct causal role of the whole on the parts, as these levels belong to two different epistemological domains, but by the way the components are related: that is by their organization. According to these remarks downward causation, considered as relatedness, can be re-expressed as the non-coincidence of the operations of analysis and synthesis performed by the observer on the system.

The substitution of knowledge to information as the entity that organizations process and deliver raises a number of questions concerning the nature of knowledge. The dispute on the codifiability of tacit knowledge and that juxtaposing the epistemology of practice vs. the epistemology of possession can be better faced by revisiting two crucial debates. One concerns the nature of cognition and the other the famous mind-body problem. Cognition can be associated with the capability of manipulating symbols, like in the traditional computational view of organizations, interpreting facts or symbols, like in the narrative approach to organization theory, or developing mental states (events), like argued by the growing field of organizational cognition. Applied to the study of organizations, the mind-body problem concerns the possibility (if any) and the forms in which organizational mental events, like trust, identity, cultures, etc., can be derived from the structural aspects (technological, cognitive or communication networks) of organizations. By siding in extreme opposite positions, the two epistemologies appear irreducible one another and pay its own inner consistency with remarkable difficulties in describing and explaining some empirical phenomena. Conversely, by legitimating the existence of both tacit and explicit knowledge, by emphasizing the space of human interactions, and by assuming that mental events can be explained with the structural aspects of organizations, Nonaka's SECI model seems an interesting middle way between the two rival epistemologies.