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This chapter discusses conceptual links among Hazel Kyrk’s A Theory of Consumption (1923), the overall work of Thorstein Veblen, and Wesley C. Mitchell’s essays on spending and money. The three authors are concerned with transformations in production, related changes in the organization of consumption, and the effects on people. The approach is based on reading of Kyrk’s book in light of an integrated view of Veblen’s overall work. This chapter explains how Mitchell’s essays on money and spending built on Veblen’s work and discusses their relevance for understanding Kyrk’s book as conceptually linked to institutional economics. This chapter delineates the following commonalities: conception of living humans and money as an institution; distinction between business and industrial concerns; connection between distribution, waste, and consumption; and Veblen’s “machine process” of standardization in production and its relation to consumption. This chapter brings more detail in the conceptual and theoretical discussion of Veblen’s influence on Kyrk’s book.

Hazel Kyrk, one of the first women economists at the Economic Department of the University of Chicago and author of A Theory of Consumption (1923), conducted groundbreaking research for the Bureau of Home Economics of the US Department of Agriculture and the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Kyrk made a considerable contribution to the development of standards for a “decent living,” the Consumer Price Index, and the conceptualization of what would later turn into the definition of the poverty line. This chapter evaluates Kyrk’s use of eugenic notions of gender and race that were widely used in Kyrk’s day. This chapter shows that eugenic reasoning impacts Kyrk’s theoretical work only superficially but does structure her research on consumption standards through her focus on the white middle-class family as the unit of analysis for consumer behavior. This chapter also makes clear that the American Institutionalist approach to consumer behavior, rather than marginalized and side-tracked due to a lack of theoretical progress, was relegated to the margins of economics science together with the research of women economists into Home Economics departments and policy research at government institutions.

This study aims to explore the dissemination and evolutionary path of online public opinion from a crisis management perspective. By clarifying the influencing factors and dynamic mechanisms of online public opinion dissemination, this study provides insights into attenuating the negative impact of online public opinion and creating a favorable ecological space for online public opinion.

This research employs bibliometric analysis and CiteSpace software to analyze 302 Chinese articles published from 2006 to 2023 in the China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI) database and 276 English articles published from 1994 to 2023 in the Web of Science core set database. Through literature keyword clustering, co-citation analysis and burst terms analysis, this paper summarizes the core scientific research institutions, scholars, hot topics and evolutionary paths of online public opinion crisis management research from both Chinese and international academic communities.

The results show that the study of online public opinion crisis management in China and internationally is centered on the life cycle theory, which integrates knowledge from information, computer and system sciences. Although there are differences in political interaction and stage evolution, the overall evolutionary path is similar, and it develops dynamically in the “benign conflict” between the expansion of the research perspective and the gradual refinement of research granularity.

This study summarizes the research results of online public opinion crisis management from China and the international academic community and identifies current research hotspots and theoretical evolution paths. Future research can focus on deepening the basic theories of public opinion crisis management under the influence of frontier technologies, exploring the subjectivity and emotionality of web users using fine algorithms and promoting the international development of network public opinion crisis management theory through transnational comparison and international cooperation.

The paper provides a detailed historical account of Douglass C. North's early intellectual contributions and analytical developments in pursuing a Grand Theory for why some countries are rich and others poor.

The author approaches the discussion using a theoretical and historical reconstruction based on published and unpublished materials.

The systematic, continuous and profound attempt to answer the Smithian social coordination problem shaped North's journey from being a young serious Marxist to becoming one of the founders of New Institutional Economics. In the process, he was converted in the early 1950s into a rigid neoclassical economist, being one of the leaders in promoting New Economic History. The success of the cliometric revolution exposed the frailties of the movement itself, namely, the limitations of neoclassical economic theory to explain economic growth and social change. Incorporating transaction costs, the institutional framework in which property rights and contracts are measured, defined and enforced assumes a prominent role in explaining economic performance.

In the early 1970s, North adopted a naive theory of institutions and property rights still grounded in neoclassical assumptions. Institutional and organizational analysis is modeled as a social maximizing efficient equilibrium outcome. However, the increasing tension between the neoclassical theoretical apparatus and its failure to account for contrasting political and institutional structures, diverging economic paths and social change propelled the modification of its assumptions and progressive conceptual innovation. In the later 1970s and early 1980s, North abandoned the efficiency view and gradually became more critical of the objective rationality postulate. In this intellectual movement, North's avant-garde research program contributed significantly to the creation of New Institutional Economics.

How does the interaction between time and knowledge affect the evolution of organizations? Past research in organizational evolution has mostly investigated time and knowledge as two separate variables. In contrast, theoretical perspectives integrating these variables are still seemingly scant. The authors believe that filling this literature gap needs attention. Thus, this study aims to contribute by developing a conceptual framework.

This is a conceptual study. The framework is centred on the concept of “co-evolutionary time”, which the authors explain through a business example from the tourism industry. Supported by a narrative-based style, from a methodological point of view the framework is featured by the attempt to synthesize specific, extant literature into new theoretical development.

As its main theoretical contribution, the co-evolutionary time suggests how firms can adapt in a way that, from an evolutionary perspective, proves fitting both in terms of contents and methods, thus opening possibilities for new long-term social construction and reconstruction. As its main practical contribution, co-evolutionary time can constitute not only a temporary source of organizational success and competitive advantage but also an agent of enduring change and long-term business survival.

As its main novelty, the framework is developed through merging two literature streams. In particular, the authors first consider the literature about time, with a focus on its objective and subjective dimensions. The authors then consider the literature about organizational evolution, with a focus on the co-evolutionary nature of the firm/environment relationship.

The primary objective of this research is to chronicle how the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and other United States Federal Government Agencies (USFGA) agencies have played a role in shaping the trajectory of financial reporting for sustainability, with a particular emphasis on triple bottom line (TBL). This exploration extends to other indexes reporting sustainability data encompassed within financial, social and environmental reporting.

This study adopts an illustrative methodology, utilizing data sourced from governmental, business and international organizational documents.

Sustainability accounting predominantly finds its place within the framework of TBL. However, it is crucial to note that sustainability reporting remains voluntary rather than mandatory. Nevertheless, accounting firms and professional accounting societies have embraced it as a supplementary facet of financial accounting reporting.

The research highlights the historical evolution of sustainability within the USFGA and corporate entities. Corporations’ interest in accounting for sustainability performances has significantly contributed to the emergence of voluntary sustainability accounting rules, as embodied by the TBL.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the symbiotic evolution decisions of digital innovation enterprises, research institutes and the government in the digital innovation ecosystem.

Based on innovation ecosystem theory and an evolutionary game model, this study constructs a tripartite symbiotic evolution game model of digital innovation ecosystems with digital innovation enterprises, research institutes and the government as the main bodies and analyzes the influencing factors as well as the evolution paths of the different behavioral strategies of each subject through numerical simulation.

The research shows that the digital innovation ecosystem has the characteristic of self-organization, which requires the symbiotic cooperation of each subject. The government plays an active role in any stage of symbiotic evolution, and the system cannot enter symbiosis under a low level of subsidies and penalties. Only when the initial willingness to cooperate of digital innovation enterprises and scientific research institutes is at a medium or high level is the system likely to become symbiotic. While digital innovation enterprises are more sensitive to government subsidies and punishments, scientific research institutes are more sensitive to the distribution proportion of cooperation income.

This study includes government regulation into the research scope, expands the research mode of the digital innovation ecosystem and overcomes the difficulties of empirical research in collecting dynamic large sample data. It vividly and systematically simulates the symbiotic evolution process of the digital innovation ecosystem, which provides a theoretical and practical reference for digital innovation ecosystem governance.

This paper aims to reveal the interdisciplinarity of information science (IS) from the perspective of the evolution of theory application.

Select eight representative IS journals as data sources, extract the theories mentioned in the full texts of the research papers and then measure annual interdisciplinarity of IS by conducting theory co-occurrence network analysis, diversity measure and evolution analysis.

As a young and vibrant discipline, IS has been continuously absorbing and internalizing external theoretical knowledge and thus formed a high degree of interdisciplinarity. With the continuous application of some kernel theories, the interdisciplinarity of IS appears to be decreasing and gradually converging into a few neighboring disciplines. Influenced by big data and artificial intelligence, the research paradigm of IS is shifting from a theory centered one to a technology centered one.

This study helps to understand the evolution of the interdisciplinarity of IS in the past 21 years. The main limitation is that the data were collected from eight journals indexed by the Social Sciences Citation Index and a small amount of theories might have been omitted.

This study identifies the kernel theories in IS research, measures the interdisciplinarity of IS based on the evolution of the co-occurrence network of theory source disciplines and reveals the paradigm shift being happening in IS.

The effectiveness of rhetorical structure is essential to communicate key messages in research articles (RAs). The interdisciplinary nature of library and information science (LIS) has led to unclear patterns and practice of using rhetorical structures. Understanding how RAs are constructed in LIS to facilitate effective scholarly communication is important. Numerous studies investigated the rhetorical structure of RAs in a range of disciplines, but LIS articles have not been well studied.

In this study, the authors encoded rhetorical structures to 2,216 articles in the Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology covering a period from 2001 to 2018 with the approaches of co-word analysis and visualization. The results show that the predominant rhetorical structures used by LIS researchers follow the sequence of Introduction-Literature Review-Methodology-Result-Discussion-Conclusion (ILMRDC).

The authors' temporal examination reveals the shifts of evolutionary pattern of rhetorical structure in 2008 and 2014. More importantly, the authors' study demonstrates that rhetorical structures have varied greatly across research areas in LIS community. For example, scholarly communication and scientometrics studies tend to exclude literature review in articles.

The present paper offers a first systematic examination of how rhetorical structures are used in a representative sample of a LIS journal, especially from a temporal perspective.

This study reveals the green building development path and analyzes the optimal government subsidy equilibrium through evolutionary game theory and numerical simulation. This was done to explore the feasible measures and optimal incentives to achieve higher levels of green building in China.

First, the practice of green building in China was analyzed, and the specific influencing factors and incentive measures for green building development were extracted. Second, China-specific evolutionary game models were constructed between developers and homebuyers under the market regulation and government incentive mechanism scenarios, and the evolutionary paths were analyzed. Finally, real-case numerical simulations were conducted, subsidy impacts were mainly analyzed and optimal subsidy equilibriums were solved.

(1) Simultaneously subsidizing developers and homebuyers proved to be the most effective measure to promote the sustainability of green buildings. (2) The sensitivity of developers and homebuyers to subsidies varied across scenarios, and the optimal subsidy level diminished marginally as building greenness and public awareness increased. (3) The optimal subsidy level for developers was intricately tied to the building greenness benchmark. A higher benchmark intensified the developer’s responsiveness to losses, at which point increasing subsidies were justified. Conversely, a reduction in subsidy might have been appropriate when the benchmark was set at a lower level.

The expeditious advancement of green buildings holds paramount importance for the high-quality development of the construction industry. Nevertheless, the pace of green building expansion in China has experienced a recent deceleration. Drawing insights from the practices of green building in China, the exploration of viable strategies and the determination of optimal government subsidies stand as imperative initiatives. These endeavors aim to propel the acceleration of green building proliferation and materialize high-quality development at the earliest juncture possible.

The model is grounded in China’s green building practices, which makes the conclusions drawn more specific. Furthermore, research results provide practical references for governments to formulate green building incentive policies.