Social enterprise is recognized as an alternative for sustainable development, as it balances social aspects with economic prosperity. Evaluating social enterprises is very important for both the enterprises themselves and the government, since grants from the government or institutions highly depend on their performance. While relatively significant attention is paid to the social value that these enterprises create, there is a lack of interest in assessing the operational performance directly linked to the sustainable operation of social enterprises. Therefore, this research analyzes the performance of social enterprises from the efficiency perspective, incorporating both operational (economic) and social performance measures. To this end, we apply data envelopment analysis to assess the performance of social enterprises when considering the dual-role factor-the grants. To facilitate clarity for readers, a dataset of Korean social enterprises is used. Through this analysis, we show that the grants can be used for performance evaluation in different ways for each enterprise. Furthermore, an industry-specific analysis provides more realistic and feasible benchmarking information to which inefficient social enterprises should refer. We expect that these findings will complement existing methods of social enterprise evaluation.

Despite the importance of constant product improvement to becoming a sustainable organization, the relationship between different types of innovation and new product development has received little attention. This article contributes to prior research by proposing a necessary condition for successful product development, which increases organizational sustainability. While it has been widely argued that technological innovation is an important factor for new product development, we contribute by illustrating the importance of process and administrative innovation, which changes an organization’s way of doing business. By analyzing survey responses from 2127 Korean firms, we empirically demonstrate that process and administrative innovation increase the likelihood of achieving new product development goals. Our findings also show that innovation-supporting human resource practices such as talent development programs and work autonomy increase the effectiveness of process and administrative innovations. Overall, we suggest that organizations are able to achieve a sustainable presence in the product market when they constantly innovate the way they run themselves. Additionally, in order to manage such innovation, organizations should nurture a creative environment by devising effective, innovation-supporting human resource practices.

This paper proposes an extended data envelopment analysis (DEA) model for deriving eco-efficiency. In order to derive eco-efficiency, the proposed model utilizes the concepts of operational efficiency and environmental efficiency. Since DEA can separately measure operational efficiency and environmental efficiency, the treatment for constructing the unified indicator is required to ultimately evaluate eco-efficiency through balancing operational and environmental concerns. To achieve this goal, we define the environmental stringency as the business condition reflecting the degree of enforcing environmental regulations across the firms or particular industries in different countries. The proposed model provides flexibility, as required by the pollution-intensity of industry, in that it allows the decision maker to evaluate DMU's (decision-making unit) eco-efficiency appropriately depending on the business environment. We present a case of agricultural production systems to help readers understand what eco-efficiency becomes when we vary the stringency conditions. Through the illustrative example, this paper presents the potential application by which different environmental stringencies can successively be incorporated in DEA.

The primary purpose of this study is to investigate the relationship between high-commitment human resource management (HCHRM) practices and process improvement activities (i.e., manufacturing flexibility) by utilizing the theory of social exchange. We conducted an empirical study to discover the links between social exchange theory and process management from an HRM perspective. For the empirical investigation, we used data from 601 manufacturing enterprises provided by the Ministry of Trade, Industry, and Energy in South Korea. The research is conducted based on employees’ capabilities for process management as a mediator in the analysis of the impact of the HCHRM system on manufacturing flexibility (i.e., internally-driven and externally-driven flexibility). The results of the study show that the HCHRM system ultimately explains manufacturing flexibility through enhancement of employees’ capabilities.

Abstract:In supply chain management, selecting the right supplier is one of the most important decision-making processes for improving corporate competitiveness. In particular, when a buyer considers selecting multiple suppliers, one should consider the issue of order allocation with supplier selection. In this article, an interactive multiobjective optimization approach is proposed for the supplier selection and order allocation problem. Also, the concept of desirability is incorporated into the optimization model to take into account the principles of diminishing marginal utility. The results are presented by comparing them with the solutions from the weighting methods. This study shows the advantage of the proposed method in that the decision-maker directly checks the degree of desirability and learns his/her preference structure through improved solutions.