The aim of the paper is to map the thematic landscape of the sustainable supply-chain management (SSCM) research field and contribute to exploring “relationships among specific constructs” in the field. The use of bibliometric methodology and the focus given to relationships among topics categorized into thematic clusters within the field are the features which differ the study from other reviews in the research field. The operational objectives of the study are as follows: (1) to profile the development of the SSCM research field and its scientific output, (2) to identify leading thematic areas in the field and explore their composition and relationships among them, (3) to identify ‘hot’, emerging topics in the field. The analysis of change in the number of publications and citations related to the SSCM concept supports the study of research productivity in the field. General publication profiling focuses on the identification of subject areas and leading contributors to the research field, i.e., countries, research institutions, source titles and authors. Keywords co-occurrence analysis is employed to identify and explore leading and emerging topics. The study points out that the main thematic areas in the SSCM research field are: (1) economy and management in the context of the environment, (2) supply chain in the context of sustainability, (3) sustainable supply chains—process approach, (4) decision making for SSCM, (5) the practice context of supply-chain management, and (6) competition and social responsibility (SR) issues. The most up-to-date topics of scientific inquiry in the field focus around the following issues: (1) human aspects, (2) sustainable supplier selection, (3) manufacturing, (4) circular economy, (5) efficiency, (6) sustainable practices, (7) commerce, (8) costs, (9) environmental impact, and (10) the textile industry.

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The dynamic growth in the use of cloud computing systems results in increasing energy consumption. Consequently, more and more attention is given to energy efficiency issues both in research and theory development as well as the business practice of cloud computing systems. In spite of the rapid development of research, the field has not been mapped from the bibliometric perspective yet. This study aims at publication profiling and mapping the thematic structure of the cloud computing energy efficiency research field. Detailed research objectives include: (1) profiling scientific publications in the field, (2) identifying and exploring thematic research areas, (3) identifying emerging topics and discussing their potential as future research lines. The aforementioned objectives are translated into the following study questions: (1) What are the most productive nations, institutions, source titles, and scholars contributing to research on energy efficiency in cloud computing? (2) What does the thematic structure of the research field look like? (3) What are the “hot” research topics attracting scholars’ attention? The research methodology toolbox includes a combination of bibliometric descriptive studies (research profiling), science mapping (keyword co-occurrence analysis), and literature reviews (systematic literature review). Bibliometric data for analysis were elicited from the Scopus database. The VOSviewer software supported bibliometric analysis and data visualization.

The innovation capability of a company is considered the determinant of its competitiveness in the long-term. Therefore, it is of increasing importance to understand the critical variable behind a firm’s innovation capability. The paper explores these issues and contributes to the research on the factors that drive a company’s innovation capability. The aim of the paper is to identify which factors determine the innovation capability of manufacturing enterprises operating in Poland. In the theoretical part, it provides an overview of recent contributions to the literature on a company’s innovation capability enhancers. The empirical contribution of the paper refers to recognising the relationship between the certain practices pursued by Polish manufacturing enterprises and their innovation capability measured by innovation output. Using a model for panel data, the study finds that that the factors driving innovation capability of manufacturing enterprises operating in Poland are the following: inter-organisational cooperation, hiring employees in research and development (R&D) activities as well as firms’ internal expenditures on R&D. The study is based on the data from publications of the Central Statistical Office of Poland, which contain information on the activities of manufacturing enterprises and reports presenting the results of research on the innovation capability of enterprises.

The issues of responsible and sustainable innovations have been attracting the growing attention of the ranks of scholars in recent years. However, this amassing productivity in the field has not been mapped and profiled thoroughly, yet. Therefore, the aim of the paper is to map the research output related to the concepts of responsible and sustainable innovations with the method of research profiling. The analysis consists of three components: general research profiling, subject area profiling and topic profiling conducted with the use of Scopus database. The research process is directed at answering three research questions: (1) who are the main contributors within the scholarly community? why? so what? (2) how is the research output distributed among subject areas? why? so what? (3) what are the central topics and issues discussed within the research field? why? so what? First of all, key contributing countries, research institutions, journals, and authors are identified in order to characterize the scholarly community working in the field. Secondly, research output is profiled through the prism of respective subject areas. This type of profiling aims at discovering varieties among key journals, authors and core references distributed across various subject areas. Thirdly, topic analysis is conducted in order to point out most crucial aspects studied in the body of literature in the field. The research sample consists of 1,083 publications indexed in Scopus database, including the phrases ‘responsible innovation’ or ‘sustainable innovation’ within their titles, keywords, and abstracts (topic search). The findings from the general research profiling confirm the growing interest of academia in exploring and investigating the issues of responsible and sustainable innovations. The leading contributors in the field are scholars and research institutions from the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Dutch universities and research centers occupy three top three positions in regard to the number of publications. Among them, Delft University of Technology is the unquestionable leader. Journal of Cleaner Production and Journal of Responsible Innovation are found to be the most prolific and highly recognized source titles in the field. Subject area profiling shows a relatively high level of interrelatedness among the four leading subject areas i.e., Business, Management and Accounting, Engineering, Social Sciences, and Environmental Science in regard to authors, source titles and core references. Topic profiling indicates two leading thematic streams in the research field focused on the features and core aspects of responsible and sustainable innovations, and the relationships of the concept with people (human, humans), research, ethics, and technology. Discussion of research findings is focused around comparing and contrasting three overlapping concepts (i.e., responsible research and innovation, responsible innovation, and sustainable innovation), providing the critical assessment of the reasons for the scholarly research to have developed along with certain patterns and identifying unexplored aspects or possible future avenues of research.

This paper compares the way of perceiving and implementing social innovations in companies and social enterprises in Poland with those in Europe. Special attention is paid to internal social innovations, so-called workplace innovations (WPI), and the reasons and outcomes of their introduction in companies, both in Poland and in other European countries. Moreover, the paper investigates the relationship between the need for internal social innovations and positive employment relations in analyzed entities. The research findings prove that introducing innovations, including social innovations, is mainly driven by the need to improve a company’s performance. Among social innovations which both companies and social enterprises value is investment into improving employees’ work conditions. Moreover, for more than half of Polish companies and social enterprises the need for innovations is related to creating development opportunities, higher work flexibility, better social and life conditions of employees, as well as supporting employee’s reconciliation between work and family life. These reasons for introducing social innovations were also noted by both managers and employees in other European companies. The paper also shows the links between issues of internal social innovations and positive employment relationships. The presented research findings prove that positive relationships among employees are significantly and positively correlated with a broad approach to the need for introducing social innovations. Moreover, the paper points out that positive employment relations are perceived as an important outcome of workplace innovation practices in European companies.

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