Purpose: This paper aims to examine the relationships between organizational purpose, leadership practices and sustainable outcomes for universities in emerging economies. We propose that a strong sense of purpose is a fundamental and defining feature in the leadership practices of these institutions, which ultimately contributes to their success.Design/methodology/approach: The authors present a research model that defines the relationships between a sense of purpose, leadership practices, student success outcomes, alumni involvement outcomes and societal reputation outcomes. Over 200 higher education administrators in India participated in the study.Findings: The institutions' sense of purpose directly relates to their leadership engagement practices and their student success outcomes. Student success outcomes are a crucial linkage between leadership engagement practices and alumni involvement outcomes to achieve their societal reputation.Practical implications: As competitiveness intensifies, educational institutions under resource constraints must differentiate their organizational practices. This paper demonstrates how their core purpose and leadership actions result in achieving effective outcomes and overall sustainable societal reputation.Originality/value: There is a significant difference between having an organizational purpose and enacting that purpose through their leadership practices. These results highlight the cascading effect from the institution's fundamental sense of purpose to their leadership practices and the positive outcomes of student success, alumni involvement and societal reputation.

Improved street lighting can provide better use of public space and helps to promote safety while driving or walking. In terms of balancing benefits and impacts, on the basis of cost saving, this research adopts two prominent mathematical models, the maximal coverage location problem and the location set covering problem, to optimize street light locations. By comparing with the currently installed lights following the rule of thumb, the mathematical models in this research achieve the effect of saving electric energy while meeting residents’ traffic safety needs and living conditions. Furthermore, the models can provide greater coverage of illumination using the same amount of energy.

Purpose: Having complexity theory as the overarching conceptual rationale, this paper presents a research model that defines external drivers, strategic and internal business practices and performance outcomes in service firm contexts.Design/methodology/approach: Using an original survey instrument, the authors empirically examine business process management (1) adopting the mediating roles of shared goal practices and technology imperative practices (2) involving moderating roles of competitive market environments and joint implementation practices.Findings: In response to dynamic market complexity, firms implement business process management through shared goal practices and technology imperative practices for achieving customer service outcomes. The findings also suggest the moderating roles of competitive pressure and joint implementation practices.Research limitations/implications: Generalizations here are limited to service firms. Increasing customer service expectations (e.g. simplicity, convenience, visual images and rapid responses) require firms to involve cross-functional work throughout their organizational processes.Practical implications: In digital environments, business process management requires socio-technological synergy through shared goal practices and technology imperative practices.Originality/value: Building on a theory-driven research model, a survey instrument provides tools to examine business process management of service firms that sense dynamic market complexity challenges and translate them to achieve desirable customer service outcomes.

Portraying the COVID-19 pandemic as the unprecedented challenges and disruptions to numerous firms, global supply chain disruptions and risk management have drawn extensive attention to practitioners and scholars in the supply chain management domain. We approach this study with the following questions: (1) What is the role of localization in a global supply chain turbulence situation? (2) How does digitalization contribute to predicting supply chain risk? (3) How could network coordination practices mitigate the impacts of disruption events? This paper presents antecedents of globalization balancing drivers, network resilience practices, and digital collaboration practices and the impact of the antecedents on business performances.