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While the potential for digital innovation (DI) to transform organizational practices is widely acknowledged in the information systems (IS) literature, there is very limited understanding on the socio-political nature of institutional interactions that determine DI and affect organizational practices in social cash organizations. Drawing on the neo-institutionalist vision, the purpose of the study is to examine the unique set of institutional exchanges that influence the transition to digital social cash payments that give rise to new institutional arrangements in social cash organizations.

The paper draws on an in-depth case study of a government social cash organization in Pakistan. Qualitative data were collected using 30 semi-structured interviews from key organizational members and stakeholders.

The results suggest that DI is determined by the novel intersections between the coercive (techno-economic, regulatory), normative (socio-organizational), mimetic (international) and covert power (political) forces. Hence, DI is not a technologically deterministic output, but rather a complex socio-political process enacted through dialogue, negotiation and conflict between institutional actors. Technology is socially embedded through the process of institutionalization that is coupled by the deinstitutionalization of established organizational practices for progressive transformation.

The research has implications for government social cash organizations especially in the Global South. Empirically, the authors gained rare access to, and support from a government-backed social cash organization in Pakistan (an understudied country in the Global South), which made the data and the consequent analyses even invaluable. This made the empirical contribution within this geographical setting even more worthy, since this case study has received little attention from indigenous scholars in the past. The empirical findings showcased a unique set of contextual factors that were subject to BISP and interpreted through an account of socio-cultural sensitivities.

The paper provides practical implications for policymakers and practitioners, emphasizing the need to address institutional challenges, including covert power, during the implementation of digitalization projects in the public sector. The paper has certain potential for inspiring future e-government related (or public sector focused) studies. The paper may guide both private and government policy-makers and practitioners in presenting how to overcome certain institutional challenges while planning and implementing large scale multi-stakeholder digitization projects in similar country contexts. So while there is scope of linking the digitization of public sector organizations to anti-corruption measures in other Global South countries, the paper may not be that straightforward with the private sector involvement.

The paper offers rich social insights on the institutional interchanges that occur between the social actors for the innovation of technology. Especially, the paper highlights the social-embeddedness nature of technology that underpins the institutionalization of new organizational practices. These have implications on how DI is viewed as a socio-political process of change.

This study contributes to neo-institutional theory by theorizing covert power as a political force that complements the neo-institutional framework. This force is subtle but also resistive for some political actors as the force shifts the equilibrium of power between different institutional actors. Furthermore, the paper presents the social and practical implications that guide policymakers and practitioners by taking into consideration the unique institutional challenges, such as covert power, while implementing large scale digital projects in the social cash sector.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has received much attention due to its promethean-like powers to transform the management and delivery of public sector services. Due to the proliferation of research articles in this context, research to date is fragmented into research streams based on different types of AI technologies or a specific government function of the public sector (e.g. health, education). The purpose of this study is to synthesize this literature, identify challenges and opportunities, and offer a research agenda that guides future inquiry.

This paper aggregates this fragmented body of knowledge by conducting a systematic literature review of AI research in public sector organisations in the Chartered Association of Business Schools (CABS)-ranked journals between 2012 and 2023.

The search strategy resulted in the retrieval of 2,870 papers, of which 61 were identified as primary papers relevant to this research. These primary papers are mapped to the ten classifications of the functions of government as classified by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), and the reported challenges and benefits aggregated.

This study advances knowledge by providing a state-of-the-art of AI research based the OECD classifications of government functions, reporting of claimed benefits and challenges and providing a research agenda for future research.

Regarding human resource and labour relations management, academia focuses mainly on cities; however, rural areas are an integral part of China's economic structure. This study focuses on the movie projection industry in China's rural areas and explores how human resource practices (HRPs) are transformed and the labour process is reconstructed in digital transformation.

We adopt a case study of a rural movie projection company. The company's HRPs reconstructed the labour process of movie projection, and they have been promoted as national standards. Data were collected from in-depth interviews, files and observations.

Rural movie projection companies combine high-performance and paternalistic HRPs in the media industry's digital transformation. HRPs and digital technology jointly reconstruct the labour process. First, the HRPs direct labour process practices towards standardisation. Second, the digital supervision platform guides the control style from simple to technical, placing projectionists under pressure while increasing management efficiency. Third, rural movies made using digital technology have disenchanted rural residents. Accordingly, the conventional relationships between the “country and its citizens,” “individuals themselves,” and “models and individuals” have been removed, and a new relationship between “individuals themselves” is formed thanks to the novel HRPs.

This research plays a crucial role in exposing researchers to the labour process of rural movie projection, which is significant in China but often ignored by Western academia and advances the Chinese contextualisation of research on labour relations.

Digital platforms that offer on-demand gig work, while providing work opportunities in the economy, have raised social and economic concerns. Though extensive research on regulation of the gig economy exists, the effect of economic regulations on the welfare of the workers is not well understood. In this work, this paper aims to specifically study the effect of minimum wage and leisure regulations on the unemployment rate and offered wages. This paper also analyses the effect of up-skilling of the workers on unemployment and wages.

This paper builds an agent-based model of the labour market with heterogeneous workers and online platform firms that interact to match supply and demand. This paper also interviewed online workers in the two under-studied markets in online beauty and house maintenance services in India and included salient observations in to the model. This paper further validates the model findings with the interview observations.

Extensive simulations of the model indicate that the regulator's intervention on minimum wage and leisure reduces unemployment and offers better wages/leisure in the short term. However, these cannot be sustained unless the workers upgrade their skills, thereby improving their value to the employers. This paper also corroborates the authors’ interview observations on platforms deviating on stated worker contracts by simulating the same in the model. This paper finds that when platforms deviate on their stated incentive schemes, the unemployment rate tends to increase. This paper also finds that the emergence of online platforms in an erstwhile off-line market decreases the average unemployment rate with a moderate increase in the offered wage and leisure.

In this work, the focus has been to determine the worker-platform dyadic relationship. However, this is affected by consumer-related attributes such as ratings and associated reputation systems to promote trust between different stakeholders. Examining such a triadic relationship between consumers, platform and workers is required to comprehensively address the challenges of online gig economy.

Skilling and training are critical for worker mobility across tasks and jobs, especially in the gig economy. Gig workers, in general, seek to improve their skill level through self- or platform-enabled training programmes. The workers are able to generate more revenue through the new skills and hence can improve their reservation wage as well. This in turn increases average offered wages and reduces the overall unemployment in the sector. Despite attempts to classify gig workers as formal workers by labour laws across countries, there is resistance from online platforms. This is due to increased liability and responsibility that the platforms have to incur that possible increase their costs and expenses. This study shows that regulations, such as minimum leisure or minimum wage, increase the average wage or leisure in the market and increase unemployment. However, this might be a short-term phenomenon. In the long term, the gig workers benefit by enhancing their skills to not only stay employed but also bargain for better wages and leisure. The governments can play a larger role by facilitating upskilling programmes for the gig workers.

An extensive literature survey indicates that while most of the work on gig economy regulation emphasises the social and legal aspects, this work is unique in modeling the techno-economics of gig work. Further, while most of the economic research on gig work, focuses on consumers, this work focuses on the under-researched area of worker welfare. This paper also validates the model results with findings from the interviews with gig workers.

In the project “Working the way I want” (AWIEW), people with and without disabilities are co-creating a needs assessment tool (NAT) to support participation in the labour market. This tool will include a technological solution at its core and a set of tested new social practices for its successful application in Germany.

The AWIEW project combines several methods and a participatory approach from different disciplines in a transdisciplinary project design. At the micro level, the participatory design approach is used to jointly develop the digital tool with people with disabilities (PWD). At the meso level, semi-structured interviews are used to gather data from different stakeholders in the PWD’ social ecosystem to uncover factors facilitating or hindering the successful transition of PWD to the labour market.

This paper discusses how transdisciplinary results can be incorporated into the development of a tool that supports PWD in navigating their occupational orientation processes. Some preliminary findings are: (a) Vocational orientation for PWD often starts with difficulties in imagining a future job; participative designs need to start from this premise. (b) PWD’ knowledge about the labour market depends on information provided by their social ecosystem; thus, research and design must take this ecosystem into account. (c) Welfare organisations instil a feeling of security and competence within their structures that has to be considered in needs assessment – both as a hindering and an empowering factor.

This paper highlights the importance of combining a digital solution and new practices for a promising approach towards enhancing the participation of PWD in the labour market.

The research aims to show the importance of considering the specific threats to economic security that arise in the context of digital transformation. The classification and understanding of these threats allow us to develop the most effective public policy tools to overcome them. The research is based on content analysis of information from government documents and internet resources. According to the authors, economic security in the digital environment is the state of the subject of economic activity (individual, society, or state), which ensures its normal functioning in the virtual world and maintains the security, stability, and predictability of the relations in which this subject participates in the digital environment. Moreover, there should be no factors of the digital environment that can cause harm in the virtual and real world, or these factors should not affect the subject. The government plays a central role in solving the problem of ensuring economic security in the digital age because it concentrates on the social will and aspirations and sets the vector for the development of society, including in the digital environment. Simultaneously, the form that evolutionary processes take in a particular society has its own national, regional, and historical specifics.

This paper aims to explore how accounting is fostering neoliberal citizenship through the participants of Australia’s National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS). More specifically, this paper aims to understand how accounting discourse and the management accounting technique of budgeting, when intertwined with automated administrative processes of the NDIS, are giving rise to a pastoral form of power that directs people’s behaviour toward certain ends.

Publicly available data has been crafted into an autoethnographic case study of one fictitious person’s experiences with the NDIS – Mina. Mina is an amalgam created from material submitted to the Joint Parliamentary Standing Committee on the NDIS. Mina’s experiences are then analysed through the lens of Foucault’s concept of pastoral power to explore how accounting has contributed to marketising and digitising public disability services.

Accounting rhetoric appears to be a central part of rationalising the decision to shift to individualised disability funding. Those receiving payments are treated as self-governable, financially responsible subjects and are therefore expected to have knowledge of management accounting techniques and budgeting. However, NDIS’s strong reliance on the accounting concepts of funds, budgets, cost and price is limiting people’s autonomy and subjecting them to intervention and control.

This paper addresses calls to explore the interplay between accounting and current disability policies. The analysis shows that incorporating accounting into the NDIS’s algorithms serves to conceal the underlying ideology of the programs, subtly driving behaviours towards neoliberal objectives. Further, this research extends the Foucauldian accounting literature by revealing the contribution of accounting to reinforcing the authority of digital pastors in contemporary times.

With the popularization of sustainable concepts, how to transform into a sustainable supply chain has received widespread attention in practice. Under this circumstance, this paper aims to propose a theoretical framework of sustainable supply chain transformation (SSCT) from a perspective of resource identification and utilization, investigates resources/capabilities that can be used to promote SSCT and explores how to use resources/capabilities to achieve SSCT effectively.

An inductive multi-case analysis is applied to this paper. Four state-owned/non-state-owned enterprises from the manufacturing sector are selected as the research objectives, which are all leaders in the industry based on the 2022 China TOP 500 Enterprises Ranking. Meanwhile, to guarantee the diversities of enterprises, the four selected enterprises are respectively positioned in upstream and downstream of the supply chain.

A theoretical framework of SSCT is proposed with following research findings: (1) Technology resources, facilities and equipment resources, and business process reengineering capability are the key resources/capabilities to promote SSCT. (2) From the supply chain structure perspective, there exists a leader-participant structure in SSCT. The enterprise with dominant resources/capabilities should actively transfer to a SSCT leader. From the supply chain function perspective, specific sustainability assessment indicators and special teams are two necessary settings for SSCT. From the supply chain lifecycle perspective, SSCT should be promoted in a phased manner and dynamically adjusted in each stage. (3) Digital transformation degree and enterprise ownership play a moderating role in the implementation of strategies.

This paper proposes a conceptual framework of SSCT based on the resource orchestration perspective, which provides decision support for enterprises in practice.

Digital transformation is becoming a necessity for all organizations all over the world. The importance of digital transformation is not only applicable to the private sector but also extends to the public sector. Kuwait boasts the Kuwait Direct Investment Promotion Authority (KDIPA), a pivotal entity entrusted with the mission of spearheading investment promotion across diverse sectors. More importantly, the focus has been recently on investing in digital transformation technologies where their statistics show that 33% of their investment are in emerging technologies. However, the success of KDIPA was not a mere chance or coincidence where it is really attributed to the transformative leadership that it has. It started to invest in projects that develop the talents and skills of Kuwaitis to create sustainable development and bring innovative technologies to the state of Kuwait. This chapter provides an overview of digital transformation and the role of KDIPA and its transformative leadership in attaining the strategic development goals for a new Kuwait Vision of 2035.

This study aims to investigate how a firm’s sustainable competitive advantage is influenced by the combination of entrepreneurial ecological orientation, digital transformation and dynamic capabilities.

Based on the qualitative comparative analysis method, this study systematically explores the significant key conditions and configuration effects that affect the growth of sustainable competitive advantage. This study uncovers the causal relationship and complex mechanisms underlying the sustainable and unsustainable competitive advantages for new ventures, by examining the grouping effects of the above three factors – entrepreneurial ecological orientation, digital transformation and dynamic capabilities on those advantages.

A single factor fails to constitute a necessary condition for sustainable competitive advantage. Three types of configurations are beneficial to sustainable competitive advantage, namely, flexible and responsive type, dynamically adjusted type and type of opportunity resource integration, whereas four types of configurations lead to the unsustainable competitive advantage of new ventures, namely, type of organizational rigidity, informal entrepreneurial type, information-blocking type and technology-deficient type.

According to this study, adopting an entrepreneurial ecological orientation is a novel strategic move. This study offers an extensive review of three aspects of entrepreneurial ecological orientation, dynamic capacities and digital transformation and their mutually synergistic cascading effects on the sustainable competitive advantage of new ventures. This study investigates how three dimensions interact to achieve sustainable competitive advantage for firms, ultimately contributing to the study of sustainable competitive advantage strategies from an entrepreneurial ecosystem perspective.