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Cryptocurrency arose, and grew in popularity, following the financial crisis of 2008 built upon a promise of decentralizing money and payments. An examination of the history of money and banking in the United States demonstrates that stable money benefits from strict controls and commitments by a centralized government through chartering restrictions and a broad safety net, rather than decentralization. In addition, financial crises happen when the government allows money creation to occur outside of official channels. The US central bank is then forced into a policy of supporting a range of money-like assets in order to maintain a grip on monetary policy and some semblance of financial stability.

In addition, this chapter argues that cryptocurrency as a form of shadow money shares many of the problematic attributes of both the privately issued bank notes that created instability during the “free banking” era and the “shadow banking” activities that contributed to the 2008 crisis. In this sense, rather than being a novel and disruptive idea, cryptocurrency replicates many of the systemically destabilizing aspects of privately issued money and money-like instruments.

This chapter proposes that, rather than allowing a new, digital “free banking” era to emerge, there are better alternatives. Specifically, it argues that the Federal Reserve (Fed) should use its tools to improve public payment systems, enact robust utility-like regulations for private digital currencies and limit the likelihood of bubbles using prudential measures.

The purpose of this study is to address United Nations’ sustainable development goals (SDGs) 8 and 9 from a service perspective. SDG 8 is a call to improve the dignity of service work by enhancing wages, working conditions and development opportunities while SDG 9 calls upon nations to construct resilient infrastructures, promote inclusivity and sustainability and foster innovation.

This study uses a bibliometric review to extract important themes from a variety of scholarly journals.

Researchers tend to investigate policy-level topics, such as national and international standards related to working conditions, while ignoring the experiences or well-being of workers occupying marginalized and low-opportunity roles in service organizations. Service researchers, educators and practitioners must collaborate to improve the state of service industries by conducting participatory action research, promoting grassroots organizing/advocacy, implementing digitized customer service and addressing workforce soft skills deficiencies.

The authors consider how service work can be transformed into respectable employment and present four specific ways nations can enhance their service industries.

Economic planners can view SDGs 8 and 9 as a framework for understanding and promoting the well-being of service employees and accelerating the productivity and innovation levels of the service sector.

The United Nations’ SDGs are examined from a services perspective, which increases their significance in service-dominated economies.

The research paper aims to study dissatisfaction of teleworking employees in Spain during the Covid-19 health pandemic in order to propose three models: sociodemographic profile of the teleworking dissatisfied employee; advantages and disadvantages for the teleworking dissatisfied employee and advantages for the teleworking dissatisfied employee.

This study uses official open data obtained from the Spanish National Statistical Institute (INE, 2022) through Decision Trees statistical multivariable models implementing Classification and Regression Trees and Recursive Partitioning and Regression Trees techniques to determine the variables that can influence the satisfaction or dissatisfaction of the subjects.

This investigation offers three models with two sociodemographic profiles of dissatisfied teleworking employee, who is a high/middle-level manager/employee around 45 years old, and she/he lives with the partner. Regarding the most important advantage of teleworking, employees consider “use/saving of time” and as disadvantage “worse organization and coordination of work”.

This research provides empirical evidence with inductive reasoning on understanding the challenges of teleworking dissatisfied employees in Spain not only in turbulent times but also in “normalcy” to improve overall teleworker well-being and accomplish company’s and organization’s long-term objectives for better productivity and effectivity. The study has high practical value due to the integral approach incorporating dissatisfaction as a driver that can trigger negative behaviours towards the organizations and that is seldom addressed in the literature. Additionally, this paper could provide some new ideas for accomplishing “Spain Digital 2025” and “Europe’s Digital Decade: 2030” plans on institutional level.

In this study, the deployment of an integrated Quality Function Deployment (QFD) decision framework is presented to help cities design targeted strategies to become “smart”. Arguably smart cities leverage advanced technologies to enhance their smartness to improve everyday urban life. To this end, a QFD – Analytic Hierarchy Process – Analytic Network Process (QFD-AHP-ANP) framework is proposed to deliver guidance for selecting the appropriate mix of smart technologies based on the specific smart needs of each city.

The AHP and ANP methods are incorporated into QFD to enhance its methodological robustness in formulating the decision problem. AHP accurately captures and translates the “Voice of the Experts” into prioritized “Smart City” dimensions, while establishing inter-relationships between these dimensions and “Smart City Technologies”. Meanwhile, ANP explores tradeoffs among the technologies, enabling well-informed decisions. The framework’s effectiveness is evaluated through an illustrative application in the city of Thessaloniki.

Applying the framework to this real-world context confirms its practicality and utility, demonstrating its ability to particularize local, social, political, environmental and economic trends through the resulting mix of technologies in smart urban development strategies.

The importance of this study lies in several aspects. Firstly, it introduces a novel QFD decision framework tailored for smart city strategic planning. Secondly, it contributes to the operationalization of the smart city concept by providing guidance for cities to effectively adopt smart technologies. Finally, this study represents a new field of application for QFD, expanding its scope beyond its traditional domains.