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The purposes of this article are to provide a brief overview of the research on international manufacturing networks (IMNs), identify corresponding gaps and provide background for the papers published in this special issue. First, this article shows the importance of addressing the management of IMNs, especially in times of global turbulence as a result of new economic, political and technological trends. Second, it highlights research into the management of IMNs as a missing link in the Operations Management (OM) discipline, as most of the current OM research neglects the fact that the internal structures and relationships of multi-plant organizations inside firms play a critical role in how a supply chain/network operates and relies mostly on scholars in other fields for insights into high-level and strategic issues in the management of global operations. Finally, this article argues there is still a lot to do in order to develop new theories towards the total management of global networks that can holistically analyze different global (intra- and inter-firm multi-functional) networks and address the complex interdependencies between them.

The rapidly increase of tuition and the reduced financial support from government and families have forced many more students to take part-time jobs, however, different jobs might bear different benefits. The main purpose of this study were to identify the major benefits of part-time jobs or work-study experiences performed by college students, and to calculate the relative weight of each benefits perceived by students, and finally, to determine the most appropriate type of job for college students. A self-developed questionnaire is administered to 250 students from three universities. The results of this study not only help students to select the most appropriate types of job for a given purpose, but also provide school administrators with a guide to develop their student part-time job policies.

ABSTRACTThis paper examines the effects of increasing anti‐terrorism expenditure on economic growth rate and social welfare. It is shown that: (i) spending the least amount possible on anti‐terrorism expenditure will lead to a maximum economic growth rate; and (ii) to achieve maximum social welfare, the government should allocate its budget to anti‐terrorism expenditure. The results shed light on why the US government has chosen to uphold and pursue its anti‐terrorism policies in recent years to present day.

We uncover the marginal impacts of energy prices on carbon price variations across carbon-energy price distributions in Phase III of the European Union Emission Trading Scheme (EU ETS). Applying a novel Quantile-on-Quantile (QQ) regression and the causality-in-quantiles approach, our empirical results demonstrate asymmetric and negative impacts of energy prices on carbon prices. The impacts are stronger at lower carbon quantiles and relatively smaller at higher quantiles (in absolute terms). Concerning different energy sources, the impacts of both oil and coal prices show a quasi-monotonic increase along with a rise in carbon quantiles; the absolute values of their impacts are much greater than that of the gas price impacts, depicting a relatively flat pattern. The results are consistent with our theoretical explanations which identify the two effect-transmission channels from energy to carbon prices, viz. the aggregated carbon demand effect and the fuel-switching effect. Thanks to the differences in energy sources and variability over their price distributions, the observed differential in carbon price-response is an indication of non-unique carbon market dynamics, the efficient management of which would require differentiated policy interventions. Robustness checks further confirm the accuracy of our conclusions.

PurposeThis study investigates the relationships between environmental performance feedback and green supply chain management (GSCM). It explores how environmental performance above or below aspirations affects the implementation of GSCM practices (specifically sustainable production [SP] and sustainable sourcing [SS]) through the lens of the behavioral theory of the firm (BTOF), which has received scant attention in the operations management literature.Design/methodology/approachThe study used data from the sixth round of the International Manufacturing Strategy Survey (IMSS). It employed hierarchical linear regression to test the proposed hypotheses. Moreover, the study tested an alternate model to rule out the possible role of financial performance aspirations in explaining the implementation of SP and SS.FindingsThe results indicate that organizations determine their efforts put into the two GSCM practices according to environmental performance feedback: the greater the aspiration–environmental performance discrepancy, the stronger the efforts put into implementing GSCM practices.Originality/valueThis study contributes to the GSCM literature by revealing the impact of environmental performance aspirations on the implementation of GSCM practices through the lens of the BTOF. It also extends the BTOF by applying it in the GSCM context and indicating that performance feedback is based on environmental performance instead of financial performance in this specific context.

AbstractThe technical innovation efficiency of farmer professional cooperatives has a far-reaching impact on the economic transformation and development in rural China, but it has been rarely studied. Addressing this gap, this article builds an index evaluating system for the technical innovation efficiency of provinces through a three-stage data envelopment analysis model that measures the relative efficiency of the technical innovation of cooperatives in China's thirty-one provinces. The results show that the Eastern and Central provinces in China are more efficient than the Western provinces in terms of the technical innovation efficiency of farmer professional cooperatives. However, due to the lack of sustainable innovative capability of these cooperatives, investment redundancy is common in technical innovation. Besides, the impact of the external technology environment on the technical innovation of provincial farmer professional cooperatives is significant, and the scale of the rural market greatly incentivizes the cooperative technical innovation. Some policy suggestions are accordingly proposed.