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This paper presents a review of the state of the art on the application of blockchain and smart contracts to the peer-review process of scientific papers. The paper seeks to analyse how the main characteristics of the existing blockchain solutions in this field to detect opportunities for the improvement of future applications.

A systematic review of the literature on the subject was carried out in three databases recognized by the research community (IEEE Xplore, Scopus and Web of Science) and the Frontiers in Blockchain journal. A total of 1,967 articles were initially found, and after the exclusion process, the 26 remaining articles were classified according to the following dimensions: System Type, Open Access, Review Type, Reviewer Incentive, Token Economy, Blockchain Access, Blockchain Identification, Blockchain Used, Paper Storage, Anonymity and Maturity of the solution.

Results show that the solutions are normally concerned on offering incentives to the reviewers' work (often monetary). Other common general preferences among the solutions are the adoption of open reviews, the use of Ethereum, the implementation of publishing ecosystems and the use of InterPlanetary File System to the storage of the papers.

There are currently no studies covering the main aspects of blockchain solutions in the field of scientific peer review. The present study provides an overall review of the topic, summarizing important information on the current research and helping new adopters to develop solutions grounded on the existing literature.

The involvement of clients in service encounters and service development has become a central principle for contemporary health and social care organizations. However, in day-to-day work settings, the shift toward client involvement is still in progress. We examined how health and social care professionals, together with clients and managers, co-develop their conceptions of client involvement and search for practical ways in which to implement these in organizational service processes.

The empirical case of this study was a developmental intervention, the client involvement workshop, conducted in a Finnish municipal social and welfare center. The cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT) framework was used to analyze the development of client involvement ideas and the modes of interaction during the intervention.

Analysis of the collective discussion revealed that the conceptions of client involvement developed through two interconnected object-orientations: Enabling client involvement in service encounters and promoting client involvement in the service system. The predominant mode of interaction in the collective discussion was that of “coordination.” The clients' perspective and contributions were central aspects in the turning points from coordination to cooperation; professionals crossed organizational boundaries, and together with clients, constructed a new client involvement-based object. This suggests that client participation plays an important role in the development of services.

The CHAT-based examination of the modes of interaction clarifies the potential of co-developing client-involvement-based services and highlights the importance of clients' participation in co-development.

Research done to date has produced a wide range of perspectives that center on the junction between the specific function and responsibility of the entrepreneur when applying ethical dimensions to the field of entrepreneurship. By combining a bibliometric analysis with the literature review, the purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of entrepreneurship ethics and its contribution to sustainable development goals, along with future research directions on the topic of entrepreneurship and ethics.

The research looked for literature based on entrepreneurship ethics from the Dimension database. The authors accumulated 2,279 articles for the period of 2002–2022 for analysis. The authors used bibliometric analysis for analyzing the topic with the use of VosViewer and Excel.

By combining a bibliometric analysis with a literature review, this study aimed to provide an overview of the ethics and entrepreneurship and contribution to sustainable development goals. The most influential author and journal are Vanessa Ratten and the Journal of Business Ethics, respectively. The top sustainable development goals (SDGs) being contributed by entrepreneurship ethics are SDG4, SDG8, SDG16, SDG11 and SDG3. By contrasting these two interpretations, the authors have demonstrated that the entrepreneurship environment involves various ethical issues connected to personal, organizational and societal sectors.

The current study may serve as a general guideline for future investigation into this topic.

Regarding the practical ramifications, the findings can help entrepreneurs who are preparing to launch a business or are already doing so. The findings provide a comprehensive framework of success variables that must be considered to improve the venture’s performance.

This study’s originality is from presenting a structured and in-depth literature review that describes the current state of entrepreneurship ethics and its contribution to sustainable development goals. A complete analysis of the data gathered on entrepreneurship ethics is offered to establish that it is sustainable.

The purpose of this study is to examine the factors that affect managers’ ethical decision-making in export-oriented readymade garments in Bangladesh.

This is an empirical study based on the quantitative approach undertaking a cross-sectional survey method where a convenience sampling technique was applied. The analysis was done using partial least square structural equation model applying Smart-PLS version 3.0.

This study confirmed that all the components of cognitive appraisal processes, including perceived severity, perceived vulnerability, response efficacy and self-efficacy, have a significant influence on attitude. Attitude, in turn, mediates the relationship between these variables and the behavioural intention of ethical practice, except for perceived vulnerability. Besides, moral obligation is found to mediate the relationship between attitude, self-efficacy and the behavioural intention of ethical decision-making. The study also found that ethical climate and subjective norms have a direct influence on behavioural intention. Furthermore, behavioural intention, ethical climate and self-efficacy are positively related to actual decision-making behaviour. However, this study did not find any direct effect of subjective norms on moral obligation.

The organization should include an emphasis on building ethical culture and setting an ethical code of conduct within the organization to sustain ethical practice within employees. However, the practitioner should work on enhancing self-efficacy to curb unethical practices by individuals.

This research contributes to the management of garments manufacturers by a practical and theoretical understanding of what influences the ethical behavioural decision-making process. Valuable guidelines are provided on the ethical decision-making process in the garments manufacturing companies for future researchers.

Project-based organizations (PBOs) face challenges to enhance employee work engagement because of dynamic and constant role configuration. Accordingly, this study aims to explore how ethical leadership enhances employee work engagement from a sensemaking perspective.

This study used a questionnaire-based quantitative research design to collect data from 194 full-time employees in PBOs. The data were analyzed via partial least squares-structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) technique to test hypotheses.

The findings show a positive relationship between ethical leadership and work engagement. Additionally, the relationship between ethical leadership and work engagement is mediated by two sensemaking mechanisms, i.e. goal commitment and prosocial.

This study deepens the understanding of how ethical leadership enhances work engagement in PBOs by providing two sensemaking mechanisms. By exploring the sensemaking process through which ethical leaders help employees construct identity, the findings contribute to the current literature on how ethical leadership enhances work engagement in PBOs.

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) reporting has been widely accepted as a vital tool for communicating with stakeholders on a range of social, environmental, and governance issues, but how companies define, interpret, apply, integrate, and communicate their CSR efforts and impacts in corporate reporting is anything but a straightforward task. The purpose of this chapter is to explore the concept of materiality in CSR reporting and demonstrate practical examples of good CSR and Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) reporting practices. We chose the aviation industry because of its economic relevance, constant growth, and future expected changes in the aftermath of COVID-19. In addition, airlines affect many of the SDGs directly and indirectly with contending results. This chapter is timely because of the growing willingness by companies to integrate CSR and environmental, social, and governance (ESG) thinking into the corporate strategy and business operations using materiality assessment and enhancing their competitive advantage and ability to maintain long-term value and because ESG and ethical investing have become part of the mainstream investing. Thus, this chapter contributes to an understanding of the wide range of existing and new reporting frameworks and regulations and reinforces the importance of discussing how this diversity of approaches can affect the work toward worldwide comparability of CSR and sustainability reporting.

Recent high-profile ethical scandals in start-up organizations have made people wonder whether entrepreneurship may cultivate a work environment with less emphasis on ethics. This study examined a psychological process about how an organization’s entrepreneurial orientation (EO) can affect its treatment of probationary employees, a vulnerable yet understudied group of workers.

The authors recruited 241 participants through Amazon Mechanical Turk. They answered an online survey about their experiences as probationary employees.

This study found that job feedback and meaning moderated the relationship between EO and ethical climate, such that this relationship was statistically significant and positive only among participants who reported high levels of feedback and job meaning. Ethical climate, in turn, was found to be related to a reduction in workplace incivility experienced by probationary employees. The indirect effect of EO on incivility via ethical climate was contingent on job feedback and meaning.

This study extends the discussion on the entrepreneurial context, adds to EO literature with findings on its indirect effect on nonfinancial performance and reinforces institutional theory through job characteristics’ moderating roles. However, a methodological limitation is conducting a cross-sectional single-source survey due to limited access to firms and probationary employees, considering the hidden population involved.

This study found no evidence of probationary employee exploitation in high EO organizations. Job seekers should embrace probationary work at start-ups. Entrepreneurial leaders should balance being proactive, innovative and caring toward employees.

It is debatable whether entrepreneurship leads to unethical organizational conduct. By studying a vulnerable group of employees, the authors discovered that EO, when paired with favorable job design factors, can create a more ethical workplace where temporary talents are treated with dignity and respect.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the link between corporate social responsibility (CSR) and the amount of trust customers have in Somali Islamic banks. Furthermore, the role of gender in CSR activities and Islamic bank clientele is evaluated.

Throughout February and March 2022, 410 clients of Islamic banks in Somalia were surveyed using a questionnaire. The partial least squares approach and the structural equation model are applied to examine the data.

Findings indicate that all variables of CSR activities, such as social product, social legal, social needs, social environment and social employees’ responsibility, are influential and significant predictors of trust in Islamic banks in Somalia. Gender inequalities moderate the relationship between social product, social needs, social environment, social employee and trust. Conversely, only social legal responsibility was unaffected by gender differences in Somalia regarding people’s trust in Islamic banks.

A sample from a developing country such as Somalia is useful for shedding light on the outcomes of consumers’ perceptions of and trust in businesses’ CSR in the developing world. Furthermore, this study contributes to knowledge regarding CSR and how it can help the Islamic banking industry. Its findings will be useful to policymakers and regulatory bodies in the banking industry in their efforts to improve CSR.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first empirical investigation of its kind about the understudied relationship among customer trust, CSR efforts and gender in Somalia context. Furthermore, it investigates how gender specifically moderates CSR in the Islamic banking sector in a developing country.

Stakeholder theory understands business in terms of relationships among stakeholders whose interests are mainly joint but may be occasionally conflicting. In the latter case, managers may need to make trade-offs between these interests. The purpose of this paper is to explore the nature of managerial decision-making about these trade-offs.

This paper draws on the ordonomic approach which sees business life to be rife with social dilemmas and locates the role of stakeholders in harnessing or resolving these dilemmas through engagement in rule-finding and rule-setting processes.

The ordonomic approach suggests that stakeholder interests trade-offs ought to be neither ignored nor avoided, but rather embraced and welcomed as an opportunity for bringing to fruition the joint interest of stakeholders in playing a better game of business. Stakeholders are shown to bear responsibility for overcoming the perceived trade-offs through the institutional management of social dilemmas.

For many stakeholder theorists, the nature of managerial decision-making about trade-offs between conflicting stakeholder interests and the nature of trade-offs themselves have been a long-standing point of contention. The paper shows that trade-offs may be useful for the value creation process and explicitly discusses managerial strategies for dealing with them.

This study aims to investigate the association between cognitive moral development (CMD) and unethical pro-organizational behaviour (UPB) by taking purchasing employees as research subjects. The moderating effect of perceived leader’s UPB is also explored.

Data were collected through a two-stage questionnaire survey on purchasing employees in companies across a spectrum of industries in Taiwan, and 492 purchasing employees were analysed in the study.

Research findings reveal that employees at the conventional level of CMD are more likely to conduct UPB than those at the pre-conventional and post-conventional levels. Perceived leader’s UPB will moderate the association between CMD and UPB. Employees’ UPB is strongly associated with their CMD when they perceive their leaders as being likely to perform UPB.

Although a variety of factors influencing UPB have been proposed in the literature, none of them have analysed the association between CMD and UPB. However, CMD is one important factor affecting ethical decision-making. The present study can promote further understanding of the role of CMD in UPB and contribute to a growing body of research on CMD and UPB.