Purpose Regulatory inspections ensure consumer safety and product quality. In tightly regulated industries, compliance and organizational improvement efforts must align to achieve operational excellence. This study examines how surveillance current good manufacturing practice (CGMP) inspections influence the relationship between quality management practices and a continuous improvement mindset at pharmaceutical manufacturing facilities. Methods The study builds on a regression analysis of pooled cross-sectional data from drug manufacturers and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research (CDER), supplemented by ten interviews with operational excellence leaders. Results Quality management practices catalyze continuous improvement. Inspections may provide useful external nudges in this context; however, the results suggest that their frequency should be carefully planned. In particular, we observe that a moderate frequency of CGMP inspections has the potential to support quality management efforts, whereas longer frequencies show a negative interactive effect. CGMP inspections validate quality management improvements and foster further improvements; however, this effect decays over time. Conclusion Regulatory agencies must carefully plan their surveillance inspection scheduling. If more frequent surveillance inspections are not feasible, they should consider complementing them with other initiatives —such as the Quality Management Maturity program—to further support the enhancement of quality practices and extend the duration of their positive effects on manufacturers.

This paper analyses how the persuasive form of AI-generated editing suggestions for language and style in academic writing can manipulate the usage of AI-tools from supporting learning processes to outsourcing sub-tasks - especially for multilingual writers. In a qualitative analysis comparing an undergraduate student draft introduction with a fully AI-generated and two AI-edited versions (one where AI-editing has a dominator function, i.e. there are no explanations and the user only needs to control the output and one with an operator function, with marked changes and explanations also supporting critical evaluation and learning processes). The results show that AI-editing as dominator produces a larger number of changes compared to AI-editing as operator, and these changes also affect content and meaning. Together with the persuasive phrasing of AI outputs and the writers’ expectation of efficiency, this contributes to support an uncritical way of usage. This can be problematic for undergraduate multilingual writers in particular, as they still lack the language skills and knowledge about academic writing conventions to be able to critically evaluate the AI-suggested output they are responsible for. In addition to that, the comparison also shows that changes through AI-editing stay on the language surface. Argumentation-related effects or errors indicating the learning level like mentioning academic titles of authors or very generalized method descriptions stay unchanged in the AI-editing process. These errors can serve as valuable indicators to discriminate AI-edited from fully AI-generated texts especially at undergraduate level.

Digital Transformation (DT) challenges organizations by unfolding through distributed and loosely coordinated initiatives, often creating tensions between strategic intent and operational execution, as well as between legacy systems and emerging digital capabilities. Despite substantial investment, many DT efforts fail due to fragmented governance and weak enterprise-level coordination. This short paper introduces the concept of enterprise-level steering as a situated practice to support alignment of strategy and execution in complex DT contexts. Drawing from project and IS literature on steering committees, we extend the concept to the enterprise-level. As initial steps in a broader research project adopting the echelonized Design Science Research approach, we derive initial design requirements and propose early-stage design principle candidates. The research aims to contribute to the DT discourse by addressing key tensions through an integrative platform for different stakeholders, and to the steering literature by reframing steering as an enterprise-level practice rather than a project-bound function.

If trade diplomats thought they knew one thing, it was how to cut industrial tariffs. Yet the Doha deadlock rests squarely on the inability to compromise on industrial tariff cuts. This column says that the arguments made for higher levels of ambition don't stand up to much scrutiny and should not be allowed to provide a basis for a continuing impasse.