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This paper aims to conduct a systematic literature review on the fintech services and financial inclusion of the developing nations that particularly focuses on lower middle-income group nations (LMIGN) and upper middle-income group nations (UMIGN) to highlight the research areas that have not received attention and present opportunities for future research.

This paper adopts a systematic approach to examine 65 research articles published from 2016 to 2021, adhering to the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses guidelines.

The study identifies research gaps in two key themes: backward and outward linkages. In backward linkages, the literature on UMIGN should pay attention to the behavioural patterns associated with lending, investment and market provision-related fintech services. Further research is needed to understand the relationship between fintech services on the usage and quality dimension of financial inclusion in both LMIGN and UMIGN. For outward linkages, future research work should explore the role of fintech and financial inclusion in the development of LMIGN. This study provides valuable insights and guides future research directions by comprehensively mapping the existing studies.

This study does not use quantitative tools, such as meta and bibliometric analysis, to validate the findings.

This research paper offers new perspectives that introduce a novel framework for analysing literature on fintech, financial inclusion and its impact on the overall development of UMIGN and LMIGN.

The globalisation of supply chains has contributed to modern slavery by degrading labour standards and work practices. The inherent difficulties involved in monitoring extremely fragmented production processes also render workers in and from developing countries vulnerable to labour exploitation. This research adopts a benchmark methodology that will help examine the inherent modern slavery challenges.

This study examines how the benchmark model, including governance, risk assessment, purchasing practice, recruitment and remedy of victims, addresses supply chain modern slavery challenges. The proposed hypotheses are tested based on the reoccurring issues of modern slavery in global supply chains.

Estimations suggest that modern slavery is a growing and increasingly prominent international problem, indicating that it is the second largest and fastest growing criminal enterprise worldwide except for narcotics trafficking. These social issues in global supply chains have drawn attention to the importance of verifying, monitoring and mapping supply chains, especially in lengthy and complex supply chains. However, the advent of digital technologies and benchmarking methodologies has become one of the existing key performance indicators (KPIs) for measuring the effectiveness of modern slavery initiatives in supply chains.

This review provides an understanding of the current situation of global supply chains concerning the growing social issue of modern slavery. However, this includes various individual specialities relating to global supply chains, modern slavery, socially sustainable supply chain management (SCM), logistic social responsibility, corporate social responsibility and digitalisation. Furthermore, the review provided important implications for researchers examining the activities on benchmarking the effectiveness of the existing initiatives to prevent modern slavery in the supply chains.

The circular economy (CE) represents an industry-wide transition from linear to circular processes. There has been a proliferation of literature on CE in the last decade. However, the existing studies on the adaption of CE in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are scarce. This study aims to develop a research agenda and the way forward for future researchers focusing on the adoption of CE.

This article analyses the CE concepts through a Systematic Literature Review (SLR). Coding and content analysis are performed to generate emergent themes with the help of “Atlas.ti” software.

The authors uncovered the contemporary significance of adopting CE and the state-of-the-art literature on CE. The study's findings fall into four broad themes: Technical know-how, resource and process optimization, reverse practices and technology and innovation. Ten thought-provoking questions were identified in the four themes that researchers can explore further in embracing CE to achieve sustainability in SMEs.

The study has highlighted the importance of CE adoption and CE's benefits to stakeholders across all three dimensions, i.e. social, economic and ecological. Practitioners can use the agenda in four themes to strengthen the practitioners' existing practices in SMEs to promote CE.

The study's uniqueness is the supply of current knowledge from diverse literature and practical consequences for SMEs. This study opens new lines of inquiry to adopt CE in SMEs, streamlining the existing literature into four themes to focus future research.

The growing complexity of consumer engagement (CE) due to the impact of Internet of things (IoT) has been attracting significant attention from both academics and industry practitioners especially in recent times. Hence, understanding this phenomenon remains very crucial to the body of knowledge. This study conducted a systematic review on IoT and CE with the aim of proposing future research opportunities using the TCCM model.

Extant literature studies were systematically examined by sourcing high ranking ABS journals from EBSCO, ScienceDirect and Emerald. A total of 58 articles were included in the final analysis of this research.

The analysis established the need to conduct more research on CE due to the impact of new technological implementation in retail. The results further suggest the need for extensive research across African countries and emerging markets to enable broader empirical generalizations of research outcomes. Using the TCCM framework, the authors indicated directions for future empirical research.

This study exposes the current trends in CE and IoT. The results and analysis are both compelling and verifiable, hence, establishing a firm base of reference for future research in related fields.

Digital Service innovation (DSI) plays a fundamental role in the successful transition from product manufacturer or traditional service provider to a provider of digitally-enabled service solutions. Multiple impediments make managing this transformation using digital technologies difficult for firms, their customers and wider ecosystems. Extant knowledge of these digital technology impediments requires synthesizing and mapping.

A systematic literature review (SLR) was conducted. DSI tools and terminology are synthesized via thematic analysis. Subsequently, impediments to DSI for servitization (covering barriers, challenges and tensions) faced by actors across three key innovation phases: strategic planning, design planning and implementation, and four interaction levels (Micro, Meso, Macro-environment, Macro-ecosystem) are mapped via template analysis.

Six impediment categories (external environmental factors, internal firm factors, capabilities, business models and processes, value creation and interaction) encompassing 28 unique impediment types to DSI during servitization are identified. A framework enabling impediment comparison across innovation phases and ecosystem/network interaction levels, revealing that the majority of barriers can be framed as “challenges” was developed.

Whilst literature is emerging relating to digital servitization, there is a lack of research on the role DSI plays in facilitating digital servitization and no comprehensive study of DSI impediments exists. Additionally, consensus around the cross-disciplinary terminologies used is lacking. This study is a structured attempt to map the domain, summarizing the terms, identifying and clarifying impediment categories and providing recommendations for researchers and managers in tackling the latter.

Although scholars argue that artificial intelligence (AI) represents a tool to potentially smoothen the bullwhip effect in the supply chain, only little research has examined this phenomenon. In this article, the authors conceptualize a framework that allows for a more structured management approach to examine the bullwhip effect using AI. In addition, the authors conduct a systematic literature review of this current status of how management can use AI to reduce the bullwhip effect and locate opportunities for future research.

Guided by the systematic literature review approach from Durach et al. (2017), the authors review and analyze key attributes and characteristics of both AI and the bullwhip effect from a management perspective.

The authors' findings reveal that literature examining how management can use AI to smoothen the bullwhip effect is a rather under-researched area that provides an abundance of research avenues. Based on identified AI capabilities, the authors propose three key management pillars that form the basis of the authors' Bullwhip-Smoothing-Framework (BSF): (1) digital skills, (2) leadership and (3) collaboration. The authors also critically assess current research efforts and offer suggestions for future research.

By providing a structured management approach to examine the link between AI and the bullwhip phenomena, this study offers scholars and managers a foundation for the advancement of theorizing how to smoothen the bullwhip effect along the supply chain.

This article offers a review of the literature on regional business cycles (BCs) in emerging economies. The objective is synthesizing the existing studies based on theoretical, empirical and methodological approaches.

The methodological framework includes the following stages: research questions, bibliography location, the selection of articles and the evaluation of the literature, analysis and synthesis, and the reporting and use of results.

The evidence suggests that expansionary phases last longer than recessions'; public expenditure shows a pro-cyclical behavior; and factors such as productive structure and international trade explain the synchronization of regional BCs.

Up until now, there is no research that performs a review of regional BCs in emerging economics.

Our purpose is to reconnect memetics to information, a persistent and unclear association. Information can contribute across a span of memetic research. Its obscurity restricts conversations about “information flow,” the connections between “form” and “content,” as well as many other topics. As information is involved in cultural activity, its clarification could focus memetic theories and applications.

Our design captures theoretical nuance in memetics by considering a long standing conceptual issue in memetics: information. A systematic review of memetics is provided by making use of the term information across literature. We additionally provide a citation analysis and close readings of what “information” means within the corpus.

Our initial corpus is narrowed to 128 pivotal memetic publications. From these publications, we provide a citation analysis of memetic studies. Theoretical directions of memetics in the informational context are outlined and developed. We outline two main discussion spaces, survey theoretical interests and describe where and when information is important to memetic discussion. We also find that there are continuities in goals which connect Dawkins’s meme with internet meme studies.

To our knowledge, this is the broadest, most inclusive review of memetics conducted, making use of a unique approach to studying information-oriented discourse across a corpus. In doing so, we provide information researchers areas in which they might contribute theoretical clarity in diverse memetic approaches. Additionally, we borrow the notion of “conceptual troublemakers” to contribute a corpus collection strategy which might be valuable for future literature reviews with conceptual difficulties arising from interdisciplinary study.

This paper aims to identify specific challenges and opportunities when crafting literature reviews of qualitative accounting research. In addition, it offers potential remedies to frequent challenges when conducting such reviews.

This piece is based on recent methodological advice on conducting literature reviews and my own experience when conducting and publishing reviews that primarily cover qualitative accounting research.

The author chart three typical advantages and three typical use cases of literature reviews of qualitative accounting research, as well as the typical process steps and outputs of such reviews. Along with these process steps, The author identifies three overarching specific challenges when conducting such reviews and discusses potential remedies. Overall, this paper suggests that literature reviews of qualitative accounting research feature idiosyncratic challenges but offer specific opportunities at the same time.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this paper is among the first to offer advice on the specific challenges and opportunities when conducting literature reviews of qualitative accounting research.

The presented research explored artificial intelligence (AI) application in the learning and development (L&D) function. Although a few studies reported AI and the people management processes, a systematic and structured study that evaluates the integration of AI with L&D focusing on scope, adoption and affecting factors is mainly absent. This study aims to explore L&D-related AI innovations, AI’s role in L&D processes, advantages of AI adoption and factors leading to effective AI-based learning following the analyse, design, develop, implement and evaluate approach.

The presented research has adopted a systematic literature review method to critically analyse, synthesise and map the extant research by identifying the broad themes involved. The review approach includes determining a time horizon, database selection, article selection and article classification. Databases from Emerald, Sage, Francis and Taylor, etc. were used, and the 81 research articles published between 1996 and 2022 were identified for analysis.

The result shows that AI innovations such as natural language processing, artificial neural networks, interactive voice response and text to speech, speech to text, technology-enhanced learning and robots can improve L&D process efficiency. One can achieve this by facilitating the articulation of learning module, identifying learners through face recognition and speech recognition systems, completing course work, etc. Further, the result also shows that AI can be adopted in evaluating learning aptitude, testing learners’ memory, tracking learning progress, measuring learning effectiveness, helping learners identify mistakes and suggesting corrections. Finally, L&D professionals can use AI to facilitate a quicker, more accurate and cheaper learning process, suitable for a large learning audience at a time, flexible, efficient, convenient and less expensive for learners.

In the absence of any systematic research on AI in L&D function, the result of this study may provide useful insights to researchers and practitioners.