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The COVID lockdowns were characterised by new forms of governmentality as lives were disrupted and controlled through the vertical transmission of biopolitics by the state. The paper considers how this was experienced by academics in 11 different countries through analysis of diaries written during the first lockdown. The paper asks if communities can offer an alternative to governmentality by looking at three levels: the national, the neighbourhood and the personal. Whilst at a national level the idea of community was instrumentalised to encourage compliance to extraordinary measures, at the local level community compassion through helping neighbours encouraged horizontal connections that could offer a “space” within the dominant logic of governmentality. At the level of personal communities, the digitalisation of social relationships helped to create supportive networks over widely dispersed areas but these were narrowly rather than widely focused, avoiding critical discussion.

Purpose That knowledge acquisition from external sources can play a pivotal role in product design is a well-known fact. However, knowledge acquisition need not play a pivotal role in every context; it is also documented to have a dark side (i.e. negative impacts). Specifically, given that product stewardship, by definition, calls on each party in the product life cycle – including suppliers – to share responsibility for the environmental impact of products, the purpose of this study is to answer the question “whether knowledge acquired from suppliers plays a beneficial role in the context of product stewardship?” Design/methodology/approach This study focuses on the effect of knowledge acquisition on product stewardship and its subsequent effect on environmental performance. Given that the effect of knowledge acquisition could be moderated by firm-specific and relational factors, this study also considers the moderating role of knowledge exploitation and supplier opportunism. Using primary data, the hypotheses are tested using two-stage hierarchical ordinary least squares regression models involving valid instruments. Findings Though extant research doubts that knowledge acquisition will always be beneficial, this study adheres to the tenets of knowledge-based view and hypothesize that knowledge acquisition is pivotal to product stewardship and its subsequent impact on environmental performance. But the results suggest an intriguing double-edged effect of knowledge acquisition; while its direct effect on product stewardship is nonsignificant, it seemed to have a significant positive moderating effect on the relationship between product stewardship and environmental performance. But whenever knowledge exploitation and supplier opportunism are maintained at ideal levels, this double-edged effect of knowledge acquisition is successfully negated. Originality/value While knowledge acquisition is key for new product design, its specific role in the product design that incorporates environmental considerations is still not clear. By proposing that knowledge acquisition could instead have a double-edged effect within the unique context of product stewardship, the study makes an invaluable contribution to the extant literature on knowledge management within supply chain relationships.

Financial inclusion is a vital development priority for countries worldwide. Mobile wallet (m-wallet) is considered as a disruptive payment method that will substitute the traditional physical wallet to achieve the so-called cashless society and enables financial inclusion. This study aims at developing and testing a research model that integrates a set of technology factors (perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, fun to use, monetary value), external factors (peer influence and perceived status benefit), and cultural factors (humane orientation and societal collectivism) to assess the intention to adopt and use m-wallet, for financial inclusion, in a developing country. The proposed conceptual model is tested using data collected from 621 m-wallet users in Cameroon. The model explains 47.5% of the variance of the actual use of m-wallet and 32.90% of the variance of financial inclusion. Eight out of the 10 proposed hypotheses were supported. Finally, implications for research and practice are discussed.

PurposeThe purpose of this article is to discuss the theme of managing operations and supply chains in the so-called “new normal”. It reflects the themes emerging from recent research and how these might be conceptualized.Design/methodology/approachThe article reviews research presented at the EurOMA 2021 conference and eight papers subsequently developed into full journal papers. It considers conceptual themes contained in these papers and how they reflect recent turbulent events in the external business environment.FindingsThe article notes the themes of resilience in relation to the Covid-19 pandemic, environmental sustainability, especially climate change and the Sustainable Development Goals, and the significance of digital technologies. Additional themes relating to inter-organizational relationships, complexity and manager cognition are also considered. In order to provide useful insights for future disruptions, general concepts on epistemology and responsiveness are described.Originality/valueThe article discusses general principles across cutting-edge research in operations and supply chain management, to support improved performance to add economic and social value.

Modern slavery and conflict minerals are often treated as two separate grand challenges governed by different legislation, yet conflict mineral settings commonly involve and inflict slavery in supply chains – hence these two wicked problems are deeply interconnected. This paper focuses on due diligence in the context of conflict mineral supply chains, and in doing so provides important insights for modern slavery in general. Using more than 38 h of recordings from exploratory interviews with 46 experts from 43 organizations, our study investigates: a) how due diligence costs and benefits are actually distributed in supply chains in practice; and b) the means through which due diligence costs and benefits can be (more appropriately) shared. We find that there is a lack of contextualization of cost-sharing mechanisms to conflict mineral supply chains, with most mechanisms being imported from the standard business literature where the producer must pay the production costs before reaping the benefits that offset these costs. But in conflict mineral supply chains, these benefits often do not materialize for the producer and, consequently, cost-sharing mechanisms lead to unintended consequences. The findings question the usefulness of due diligence, call for alternative financing mechanisms, and for contextualized solutions designed from the bottom up. This in turn has important implications for enhancing legislation on modern slavery.