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This study seeks to explore the importance of digital platforms in restoring global supply chains interrupted by the coronavirus pandemic. Specifically, the research focuses on internally developed digital platforms and their potential to ensure supply chain continuity between developed and emerging markets.

Multiple comparative case studies have been selected for the research methodology. Eight cases concerning digital platform implementation for global SC management – four from developed countries and four from emerging markets – have been selected. The four pairs of cases represent four global supply chain mechanisms.

The results revealed that the use of internally developed digital platforms serves as a quick solution for immediate problems caused by ripple effects in global supply chain and negative environmental conditions. Digital platforms could therefore facilitate reciprocal monitoring and information exchanges between SC partners in different countries.

The digital platform research stream is in its early stages. Research thus far has mostly focused on externally developed digital platforms managed by an orchestrator. The platforms' usefulness in the dialogue between developed and emerging markets requires further exploration.

This study aims to focus on a key unanswered question about how digitalization and the knowledge processes it enables affect firms’ strategies in the international arena.

The authors conduct a systematic literature review of relevant theoretical and empirical studies covering over 20 years of research (from 2000 to 2023) and including 73 journal papers.

This review allows us to highlight a relationship between firms’ international strategies and the knowledge processes enabled by applying digital technologies. Specifically, the authors discuss the characteristics of patterns of knowledge flows and knowledge processes (their origin, the type of knowledge they carry on and their directionality) as determinants for the emergence of diverse international strategies embraced by single firms or by populations of firms within ecosystems, networks, global value chains or alliances.

Despite digital technologies constituting important antecedents and critical factors for the internationalization process, and international businesses in general, and operating cross borders implies the enactment of highly knowledge-intensive processes, current literature still fails to provide a holistic picture of how firms strategically use what they know and seek out what they do not know in the international environment, using the affordances of digital technologies.

This chapter argues that the Americanisation of online policing has questionable impacts in Australian prosecutions involving drugs obtained and distributed through dark web cryptomarkets. The authors describe several Australian prosecutions of mid- and low-level dealers who have accessed drugs through the dark web and contrast these with the United States (US) case against the cryptomarket, AlphaBay. The discussion in this study emphasises how Australian police and courts view the relative weight of dark web activity associated with the domestic and transnational supply of illicit drugs that result in formal prosecutions. The authors suggest that large-scale forms of online and dark web police surveillance undertaken by US enforcement agencies reflect Ethan Nadelmann’s (Cops across borders: the internationalization of US criminal law enforcement, University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993) thesis on the Americanisation of global policing through transnational communications networks. The authors then explain how key elements of transnational dark web drug supply appear to have a marginal bearing on criminal investigations into low- and mid-level traffickers in Australia, which rely on conventional surveillance tactics to identify clandestine mail pickups, physical distribution methods, and irregular money trails. However, the authors then illustrate how the Americanisation of online policing that targets high-level entrepreneurs and seeks to dismantle or eliminate dark web cryptomarkets has important implications on Australian reforms aimed at enhancing online surveillance powers to target a range of crimes that are often wrongly associated with illicit drug cryptomarkets. The authors conclude by demonstrating how intensive dark web surveillance has limited direct impact on routine drug policing in Australia, with dark web communications simply another medium for facilitating the physical detection of illicit transnational drug transactions.

This paper aims at discussing the options available to governments when it comes to the use of technology to contain the spread of the COVID-19 virus.

This is an opinion piece, based on very recent developments (COVID-19), and based on a well-known trade-off between privacy and state surveillance, especially in times of crisis that threaten the survival of a nation.

The main finding is that technology alone will not help, and there are several reasons to doubt that the recently proposed European system to track the contagion in a privacy-preserving way (pan-European privacy preserving proximity tracing [PEPP-PT]) would be a fully effective solution.

This is a short paper, which is very dependent on current developments. It was written in a very short time, so the level of depth in the references to the literature and the caselaw is limited. The main implication is that this paper is very far from the final word in the analysis of the interplay between technology and society, especially in democratic countries.

There is a need to ensure that the temporary measures that will be adopted during the pandemic do not extend to the post-COVID-19 period.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, this is a very fresh debate; the paper is thus original and proposes one of the first structured comments to the PEPP-PT and DP-3T conceptual designs.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an example of best practice towards enhancing employability in the cross-sectoral labour market for doctorate-holders. This was achieved through an Erasmus+ KA2 (Strategic Partnership) skills development project which created a training programme (TRANSPEER) involving a multi-disciplinary cohort of researchers at a range of career stages, drawn from universities in Norway, Portugal, Sweden and the UK.

Research support staff designed and delivered four transnational training events for the cohort, with the overarching theme of enhancing researcher employability. An initial skills awareness survey of the researcher cohort was undertaken prior to the start of the programme; this survey was repeated after each event. An additional aim of the project was the development of the consortium’s research support staff through exposure to the facilitation techniques and methodologies of their international colleagues.

The findings indicate that transnational collaboration in researcher development enhances the learning environment for participating researchers and provides significant professional development opportunities for both researchers and researcher developers. The findings further suggest the benefits of mixing cohorts across career stages and engaging researchers with novel and interactive approaches on themes not typically addressed in academic competence development offerings.

Transversal skills development cooperation between universities – especially transnational cooperation – is rare. Even more so is the professional development of research support staff in a transnational context. This paper outlines the benefits of such collaborative activities.

This chapter explores the disruptive potential of the Internet to transform illicit drug markets while also challenging stereotypical depictions and superficial understandings of supply and demand. It argues that the digital transformation of illicit drug markets combines, on one hand, a reconfiguration of the scope and impact of how sellers, buyers, and other actors interact within and upon digitally mediated retail drug markets and, on the other hand, continuing trends in the embeddedness of market structures in cultural, economic, political, and legal realms. We develop conceptual ideas for studying the architecture of digital drug markets by drawing on interdisciplinary approaches to digitalisation, markets, and drugs. To understand the functioning of online drug markets, we first need to understand digitalisation. Thus, we draw on scholarship on the digital transformation of society and, second, put forward an understanding of markets that considers how personal relations and social structures enhance and restrict market exchange. Thus, we draw on economic sociology. Third, we build on and extend social science research on illicit drug markets which points out that drug markets exhibit significant variations over time and across jurisdictions. The introduction aims to provide a research agenda that can help us to explore ongoing digital transformations of illicit drug markets. It expands and deepens scholarship on the technological, structural, economic, and cultural factors underlying the resilience and growth of digital drug markets. It also goes beyond a concern with just one type of digital drug market into wider forms of digital environments.

This paper explores practices of foresight within the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) program Futures Literacy, as a form of transnational governmentality–founded on the interests of “using the future” by “emancipating” the minds of humanity.

The paper draws on ethnographic material gathered over five years within the industry of futures consultancy, including UNESCO and its network of self-recognized futurists. The material consists of written sources, participant observation in on-site and digital events and workshops, and interviews.

Building on Foucault's (1991) concept of governmentality, which refers to the governing of governing and how subjects politically come into being, this paper critically examines the UNESCO Futures Literacy program by answering questions on ontology, deontology, technology and utopia. It shows how the underlying rationale of the Futures Literacy program departs from an ontological premise of anticipation as a fundamental capacity of biological life, constituting an ethical substance that can be worked on and self-controlled. This rationale speaks to the mandate of UNESCO, to foster peace in our minds, but also to the governing of governing at the individual level.

In the intersection between the growing literature on anticipation and research concerning governmentality the paper adds ethnographically based knowledge to the field of transnational governance. Earlier ethnographic studies of UNESCO have mostly focused upon its role for cultural heritage, or more broadly neoliberal forms of governing.

The internationalization of business has grown the production value chains and created performance challenges for industrial production. Industry 4.0, the digital transformation of industrial processes, promises to deliver performance improvements through smart functionalities. This study investigates how digital transformation translates to performance gain by adopting a systems perspective to drive smartness.

This study uses qualitative research to collect data on the lived experiences of digital transformation practitioners for theory development. It uses semi-structured interviews with industry experts and applies the Gioia methodology for analysis.

The study determined that enterprise smartness is an organizational capability developed by digital transformation, it is a function of integration and the enabler of organizational performance gains in the Industry 4.0 context. The study determined that performance gains are experienced in productivity, sustainability, safety and customer experience, which represents performance metrics for Industry 4.0.

This study contributes a model that inserts smartness in the linkage between digital transformation and organizational outcomes to the digital transformation and production management literature.

The study indicates that digital transformation programs should focus on developing smartness rather than technology implementations, which must be considered an enabling activity.

Existing studies recognized the positive impact of technology on performance in industrial production. The study addresses a missing link in the Industry 4.0 value creation process. It adopts a systems perspective to establish the role of smartness in translating technology use to performance outcomes. Smart capabilities have been the critical missing link in the literature on harnessing digital transformation in organizations. The study advances theory development by contributing an Industry 4.0 value model that establishes a link between digital technologies, smartness and organizational performance.