The links between operational practices and performance are well studied in the literature, both theoretically and empirically. However, it is mostly internal factors that are inspected more closely as the basis of operational performance, even if the impact of external, environmental factors is...

Competitiveness research projects, especially in the United States, revealed and described some phenomena, having become commonplaces by now, for the first time in the 1980s. Examples of such phenomena are the following: each developed market economy can be described as an open economy and we...