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The purpose of this paper is to enrich the knowledge about blockchain (BC) technology implementation in the agri-food industry by providing an interpretive framework of the key marketing opportunities and challenges, related to the adoption of BC for Geographical Indication (GI) products.

The study adopts an explorative qualitative research design through the cognitive mapping technique applied to the cognition of different market players involved in agri-food BC projects: farmers, distributors, companies and consultancies.

This study presents a comprehensive examination of the marketing impacts of BC across various marketing objectives, including product enhancement, brand positioning, consumer relationships, market access and supply chain relationships. It highlights the capability of BC to facilitate data-enabled ecosystems within the agri-food sector, involving supply chain actors and control agencies. Additionally, the study sheds light on the challenges (technological, collaborative, political, financial and organizational) associated with the implementation of BC in the marketing of agri-food products.

This work provides a comprehensive examination of the relevance of BC in the marketing activities of firms, particularly in the context of quality food products. It highlights the main areas of impact and effects and emphasizes the complexity of the phenomenon, which extends beyond its technical issues. Furthermore, it offers a systematic exploration of the challenges associated with the adoption of BC in marketing activities, thus contributing to a broader understanding of the implications of BC adoption in companies' marketing strategies.

The practical implications for this work addresses both GI companies and policy makers. Implications for companies relate to the market benefits associated with the implementation of BC, which allow further strengthening of market positioning, relationships of trust within the supply chain and integration between physical and digital market channels. The study also systematizes the challenges underlying the implementation of BC projects. The implications for policy makers regard the role they have to play in BC projects at regulatory, financial and policy levels.

Studies focusing on BC applications in marketing are still limited and characterized by a very narrow perspective (especially in the food industry). This study contributes to the conceptual design of the marketing applications of BC in the agri-food sector. The value of the study also lies in having framed the marketing impacts of BC in a holistic perspective, along with the technological and non-technological challenges that are related to the integration of BC in marketing strategy and operations.

This study aims to assess the alignment of South Korea’s government-certified social enterprises (GCSEs) with prevailing social enterprise (SE) models, notably the entrepreneurial nonprofit, social cooperative and social business models delineated in the “Emergence of Social Enterprises in Europe” (Defourny and Nyssens, 2012, 2017a, 2017b) and the “principle of interest” frameworks (Defourny et al., 2021). Thereby, it seeks to situate these enterprises within recognized frameworks and elucidate their hybrid identities.

Analyzing panel data from 2016 to 2020 for 259 GCSEs, this study uses tslearn for k-means clustering with dynamic time warping to assess their developmental trajectories and alignment with established SE models, which echoes the approach of Defourny et al. (2021). We probe the “fluid” identities of semi-public sector SEs, integrating Gordon’s (2013) notion that they tend to blend various SE traditions as opposed to existing in isolation.

Results indicate that GCSEs do align with prevalent SE frameworks. Furthermore, they represent a spectrum of SE models, suggesting the versatility of the public sector in fostering diverse types of SEs.

The concept of a semi-public sector SE model has been relatively uncharted, even though it holds significance for research on SE typologies and public sector entrepreneurship literature. This study bridges this gap by presenting empirical evidence of semi-public SEs and delineating the potential paths these enterprises might take as they amalgamate various SE traditions.

Over the past years, business strategies have been designed to improve ‘firms' financial and non-financial performances and achieve sustainable development, leading to corporate sustainability. This article is a bibliometric analysis of two decades of the relationship between corporate sustainability and firm performance, identifying the research focus and the gaps for future research.

The bibliometric review of corporate sustainability and performance research is between January 2004 and June 2023. As per the Web of Science database, the theme's research commenced around 2004, growing gradually till 2023. Five hundred thirty-nine published articles by peer-reviewed ABDC-indexed A and A* journals in English have been reviewed. The bibliometrix package in R software is used with VOSviewer for the bibliometric analysis.

The study's findings indicate a lack of research on the theme from developed and underdeveloped nations. Further, the analysis reveals five clusters of research: (1) business sustainability, (2) corporate sustainability reporting, (3) corporate sustainability, strategy, and innovation, (4) stakeholder and corporate sustainability, and e) corporate sustainability assessment.

The future research areas proposed are on two major themes, namely, corporate sustainability and organizational competitive advantage, including sub-themes such as “Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) and financial performance” and “greenhouse-gas emissions” and “market orientations,” respectively. There is a need for more research in developing markets, a comprehensive definition of corporate sustainability, and further exploration of the theme linking strategy and innovation.

The organizational digital transformation (ODT) in companies presents small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) – who remain at the beginning of this transformation – with the challenge of offering digital services based on sensor technologies. Against this backdrop, the present paper identifies ways SMEs can enable digital servitization through sensor technology and defines the possible scope of the organizational transformation process.

Around 21 semi-structured interviews were conducted with experts from different hierarchical levels across the German manufacturing SME ecosystem. Using the Gioia methodology, fields of action were identified by focusing on influencing factors and opportunities for developing these digital services to offer them successfully in the future.

The complexity of existing sensor offerings must be mastered, and employees' (data) understanding of the technology has increased. Knowledge gaps, which mainly relate to technical and organizational capabilities, must be overcome. The potential of sensor technology was considered on an individual, technical and organizational level. To enable the successful implementation of service offerings based on sensor technology, all relevant stakeholders in the ecosystem must network to facilitate shared value creation. This requires standardized technical and procedural adaptations and is an essential prerequisite for data mining.

Based on this study, current problem areas were analyzed, and potentials that create opportunities for offering digital sensor services to manufacturing SMEs were identified. The identified influencing factors form a conceptual framework that supports SMEs' future development of such services in a structured manner.

The purpose of this paper is to assess sub-national business cycle (BC) synchronization's impact on national cycles in four emerging markets economies with inflation targeting (IT-EMEs): Brazil, Colombia, South Korea and Mexico.

The authors use panel data models with fixed-effects and distributed lags.

The authors disclosed that sub-national synchronization increased national cycle amplitudes during expansion and recession phases. The authors also noticed that South Korea exhibited a more pronounced effect compared to Latin American countries, and this seemed to be associated with differences in the homogeneity of the production structures in the regions of these countries.

The authors cautioned that contrasting the findings with prior research on the effects of regional BC synchronization in IT-EMEs or with studies in different geographical contexts, is not possible due to the absence of prior research endeavors with this specific focus.

This study constitutes a first attempt to explain the impact of subnational cycle synchronization on the magnitude of national cycles in four IT-EMEs.

This study examines the Robo-Advisors (RA) based on Artificial Intelligence (AI), a new service that digitises and automates investment decisions in the financial and banking industries to provide low-cost and personalised financial advice. The RAs use objective algorithms to select portfolios, reduce behavioural biases, and improve transactions. They are inexpensive, accessible, and transparent platforms. Objective algorithms improve the believability of portfolio selection.

This study adopts a qualitative approach consisting of an exploratory examination of seven different RA case studies and analyses the RA platforms used in the banking industry.

The findings provide two different approaches to running a business that are appropriate for either fully automated or hybrid RAs through the realisation of two platform model frameworks. The research reveals that relying solely on algorithms and not including any services involving human interaction in a company model is inadequate to meet the requirements of customers in decision-making.

This study emphasises key robo-advisory features, such as investor profiling, asset allocation, investment strategies, portfolio rebalancing, and performance evaluation. These features provide managers and practitioners with new information on enhancing client satisfaction, improving services, and adjusting to dynamic market demands.

This study fills the research gap related to the analysis of RA platform models by providing a meticulous analysis of two different types of RAs, namely, fully automated and hybrid, which have not received adequate attention in the literature.

Digital transformation misalignment refers to disparities in digital transformation levels between suppliers and buyers across the production and operation process. It has negatively affected supply chain stability. However, the existing research concerning the economic consequences has not been adequately addressed. Therefore, this paper aims to investigate whether such digital transformation misalignment increases supplier financial risk and to identify the factors influencing this relationship.

This paper examines binary combinations of suppliers and buyers listed on China’s A-share market between 2011 and 2021. This group constitutes a sample to empirically test the influence of digital transformation misalignment on the supplier’s financial risk, as well as the moderating effect of the geographical and organizational distances.

The paper’s findings demonstrate that digital transformation misalignment has indeed a significant increase in the supplier’s financial risk. Moreover, the impact is more intense when the geographical or organizational distance between the supplier and the buyer is relatively large.

The existing literature rarely explores the potential risks arising from digital transformation misalignment between supply chain partners. Therefore, this paper fills a notable gap as it is the first to study the impact of digital transformation misalignment on the supplier’s financial risk and the specific applied mechanisms. The contribution significantly improves the field of corporate digital transformation, particularly, within the context of supply chain management.

This research aimed to conceptualize organizations as open and purposeful systems to study how organizational culture (OC) influences firms' Innovative Performance (IP). The authors proposed goal setting and internal integration/external adaptation paradox as central to explaining OC's mediating and suppressing effects on IP.

The authors collected data from 372 Costa Rican organizations and analyzed them with structural equations. This research used the Denison Model instead of the usual typology-based approaches.

The mission had a direct and high impact on IP. The mediated effect via adaptability was also elevated, as well as the suppressor effect through consistency. There was no effect on IP of involvement. According to these results, the Open and Rational Systems Framework emerge as the main theoretical explanatory concepts.

Disaggregating the OC through a performance-oriented dimensional model makes it possible to study the dynamics between the elements that compound it and facilitate integrating these findings with other research streams.

The study aims to explore digital transformation from the viewpoint of human resource management to uncover possible threads of relationship using bibliometric analysis. It also aims to identify the trending research themes within the domains of digital transformation (DT) and human resource management (HRM) collectively.

The research employs a mix of quantitative bibliometric techniques and qualitative content analysis. A corpus of 227 articles retrieved from the Scopus database was analyzed using the R-based Biblioshiny and VOS viewer.

The study shows publication trends, influential authors, leading journals, highly productive institutions, and, countries in the domain of DT and HRM. Co-citation and co-occurrence analysis was undertaken to identify the research clusters, depicting trending research themes that extensively dominate the research under this domain.

This study will serve as a ready reckoner for academicians and business leaders, giving them useful insights to make their road towards digital transformation less challenging with the assistance of human capital.

This study is one of the initial efforts to quantitatively synthesize the results of earlier publications using bibliometric techniques in the domain of DT and HRM together. It will aid researchers in locating research gaps and filling those gaps in the future.