Introduction

The chapters in Volumes 22A and 22B, Advances in Business Marketing & Purchasing, focus on four topics: how firms in the service industries manage information and knowledge; how the creation and deployment of business intelligence operations serves to sustain a firm’s competitive advantage; how firms in manufacturing-wholesaler-retailing supply chains go about improving their firm and interfirm competitiveness; and systems dynamics modeling of integrated supply chain operations for sustainable manufacturing. The chapters are both expansive and deep in coverage of their respective topics.

Michael Preece is the author of the chapter titled “Managing Information and Knowledge in Service Industries” in this volume. Preece examines the relationships between absorptive capacity and effective knowledge management through analysis of quantitative data (n = 549) drawn from managers and employees in 35 residential aged care organizations in Western Australia. Absorptive capacity is the ability of an organization to use prior knowledge to recognize the value of new knowledge from external sources, assimilate this new knowledge, and apply it to the benefit of the organization. The nitty-gritty details in Preece’s chapter provide valuable training in how service organizations go about transformation new knowledge into effective actionable (concrete) business plans. This chapter is very useful for learning how to go about doing an in-depth firm level assessment of how absorptive capacity transforms into effective management of knowledge. A major contribution by Preece is his reporting on such assessments by firms doing the transformations well and five firms who do such transformations poorly. Preece’s chapter is both broad and deep in examining issues on converting information into usable knowledge at the firm level within a particular industry.