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This chapter focusses on the identification of sustainability factors. Out of the 77 variables used in the questionnaire for collection of the information, on sustainability of financial innovation in e-payment system (EPS), the important factors are identified and derived using exploratory factor analysis (EFA). This chapter further presents validation of the identified factors through confirmatory factor analysis (CFA). Based on the identified factors, a model for EPS is proposed. The chapter also presents a scale developed based on identified factors.

This chapter provides personal (auto-ethnographic) reflections on the career as a business leader in the software-development space and insights into the formation of an authentic leader. The author reviews his journey that led to running a leading video game developer at a valuation of $190 million with 1,200+ staff across 10 locations in eight countries and an array of global clients. Pohontu considers the social, economic, political and psychological elements that shaped his business methodology and discusses how he translated these into a mode of leadership. The development of foresight – a concept that emerged from the author's story – may be of interest to researchers looking to explore diverse leader contexts through theoretical lenses to achieve a greater understanding.

Internet + and Electronic Business in China is a comprehensive resource that provides insight and analysis into E-commerce in China and how it has revolutionized and continues to revolutionize business and society. Split into four distinct sections, the book first lays out the theoretical foundations and fundamental concepts of E-Business before moving on to look at internet+ innovation models and their applications in different industries such as agriculture, finance and commerce. The book then provides a comprehensive analysis of E-business platforms and their applications in China before finishing with four comprehensive case studies of major E-business projects, providing readers with successful examples of implementing E-Business entrepreneurship projects.

Internet + and Electronic Business in China is a comprehensive resource that provides insights and analysis into how E-commerce has revolutionized and continues to revolutionize business and society in China.

The development of the digital economy in the context of modern financial globalization is becoming an issue of national security and independence of a country. Promotion of the digital economy in the financial sector is a high-priority task for the short-term perspective. Nicholas Negroponte, an American scientist, first used the concept of “digital economy” in 1995. Since then, this concept has started spreading rapidly with the help of the Internet and has enhanced exchange and storage of information, complex calculations, and computer modeling of engineering facilities.

In the new economy, digital platforms are the most open electronic platforms that allow receiving full information about financial institutions and organizations; they are also being developed primarily for the financial sector. The introduction of digital technologies can lead to the reduction of headcount of financial institutions.

Digitalization and online publishing of documents related to various tenders and purchases may contribute to the reduction of risks and corruption.

In this chapter, I want to take some stock of the subdiscipline of environmental sociology. I believe that a productive approach to restoring some of the coherence of environmental sociology is to conceive of mainstream environmental sociology as reflecting several paradoxes. The bulk of this chapter will be devoted to a brief explication of environmental sociology's theoretical and empirical paradoxes. I will begin with three paradoxes that have played a major role in environmental sociology since the 1970s. However, many of the theoretical and empirical paradoxes of the subfield are relatively new ones – and some have not even been thought of as paradoxes. The thrust of the present chapter consists of something of a research agenda for environmental sociology for the next decade or so.

Purpose – Health system performance depends on production and use of quality health data and information. Routine health information systems (RHIS) are defined as systems that provide information at regular intervals of a year or less to meet predictable information needs. These include paper-based or electronic health records and facility- and district-level management information systems. RHIS are receiving increasing attention as an essential component of efficient, country-owned, integrated national systems. To guide investment decisions on RHIS, evidence is needed on which types of RHIS interventions work and which do not.

Design/methodology/approach – This chapter is a systematic review of the literature on the evaluation of RHIS interventions in low- and middle-income countries, starting from the premise that investments in RHIS could be better understood and so produce greater benefits than they currently do.

Findings – We describe the conceptual literature on the determinants of RHIS performance and its role in improving health systems functioning, discuss the evidence base on the effectiveness of strategies to improve RHIS performance, provide an overview of RHIS evaluation challenges, and make suggestions to improve the evidence base.

Originality/value – The goal is to help ensure that (a) RHIS interventions are appropriately designed and implemented to improve health systems functioning and (b) resulting RHIS information is used more effectively.

To elucidate issues involved in the problem of scale, in particular the relations, analytical and dialectical, among first-person experiences of theorist and theorist’s object-complex of individual actor, group, society, motives and causes, intended and unintended effects, and so forth, as these experiences are manifest in an aesthetics of the judicial moment of perception, and enunciated as first-person accounts directly or indirectly, of third-person accounts, sometimes via explicit but usually via virtual or even vicarious second-person accounting practices.

Discussion begins with some classical formulations by neo-Kantian theorists (Simmel, Durkheim, Weber) regarding relations of “individual and society.” Brief citations of various twentieth century responses to the problem of scale follow. Attention then becomes more intensively focused on the basic problem of first-person experience and accounts with respect to the problem of scale, using Coleman’s “foundations” work as guidepost for navigating issues of effects of cognition, consciousness, and action in still mostly obscure processes of aggregation. This leads to explication of the thesis of “impossible individuality,” in present-day theoretical contexts and in the context of post-Kantian romanticism, with special attention to Hölderlin and the feeling/knowing dialectic, Benjamin’s treatment of temporality with respect to metrics of history, and the question what it means to “theorize with intent.”

The discussion ends with some tentative resolutions and several lacunae and aporia which are integral to the current face of the problem of scale (i.e., processes of aggregation, etc.).

The discussion builds upon the work of many others, with first-person illustrations.

Facing the widely spread malaise in and through irresponsible practices of and by modern organizations, phenomenology can provide an approach that is helpful for assessing this situation as well as getting a renewed perception concerning work and life (Fay & Riot, 2007). In particular, it can contribute to a renewal of understanding and enacting responsibility in the lifeworld of business. Practically, it may also provide reflexive practitioners with clues that can trigger new and more responsible practices. The following phenomenological perspective on responsiveness is a kind of application of phenomenology (Harmon, 1990) for reevaluating the constitution of responsibility as capacity to respond adequately in and of organizations and its members. Part of the organizational realities for its members is that it is challenging them to act, speak, and express, that is, they are provoked to give answers. A corresponding responsiveness as an answering behavior can be defined specifically as one, in which there is openness for the points of view of both (or various) parties involved, and by which the setting of pattern and standards coevolve.³