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Conflict and violence are the main drivers of globally escalating humanitarian needs. Local grassroots initiatives are pivotal in distributing humanitarian supplies in the acute response phase until more established humanitarian aid organizations can enter. Nevertheless, scant research exists regarding the role of grassroots associations in providing humanitarian assistance during a military conflict. The purpose of this paper is to understand the role of grassroots associations and identify important themes for effective operations.

This paper adopts a case-study approach of three Ukrainian grassroots associations that began operating in the immediate days of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The findings are based on analyzing primary sources, including interviews with Ukrainian volunteers, and are supported by secondary sources.

Grassroots associations have local contacts and a contextual understanding of population needs and can respond more rapidly and effectively than large intergovernmental agencies. Four critical themes regarding the operations of grassroots associations emerged: information management, inventory management, coordination and performance measurement. Grassroots humanitarian response operations during conflict are challenged by personal security risks, the unpredictability of unsolicited supplies, emerging volunteer roles, dynamic transportation routes and shifting demands.

Grassroots responses are central to humanitarian responses during the acute phase of a military conflict. By examining the operations of grassroots associations in the early months of the 2022 war in Ukraine, the authors provide a unique perspective on humanitarian logistics. Nonetheless, more inclusive models of humanitarian responses are needed to harness the capacities and resilience of grassroots operations in practice.

Information and communications technology (ICT) is helping to create a sustainable information society and foster development. This study aims to investigate the interdependencies of organisational flexibility enabled by ICT, demographics and containment measures in the ever more dismal economic performances seen during COVID-19 with a view to preparing socio-economic systems for similar future shocks.

Using non-classical fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis, the authors are able to capture the asymmetric relationships and complexities found in real life.

Analysing data acquired from the Oxford COVID-19 Government Response Tracker and Eurostat, the authors find these conditions give mixed results depending on how they are combined. The results imply that countries under strict containment measures might only be able to survive when fully equipped with ICT solutions. E-commerce also plays an important role in countries with a below-average decrease in their growth rate. Put differently, the presence and absence of telework produces mixed results. If the population is old, telework seems to generate the desired outcomes. Yet, when the population is young, it might be more beneficial to avoid this practice.

Unlike studies that mainly assumed symmetrical effects and linear relationships, this study investigates the interdependencies of organisational and macro-level factors. On the micro level, this study is useful for managers allocating IT investments for any future occurrence of a general disaster/pandemic. On the macro level, the study can act as an example for the rest of the world regarding the appropriateness of assorted COVID-19 pandemic responses as witnessed in European countries.

This paper proposes an Information and Communication Technology (ICT) platform to increase the sustainability and resilience of smallholders to face supply chain disruptions in the event of COVID-like crises. The platform facilitates interactions between smallholders and buyers, workers and freight transport companies in agri-food ecosystems. Furthermore, this research work presents the implementation of the freight transport companies’ platform module.

The research work begins with a literature review aiming at analyzing current available ICT solutions supporting smallholders and other actors in the agri-food supply chain. This analysis identifies the research gaps which have to be filled by the platform. Then, the authors proceed with the analysis of the operational scenarios of each platform actor by interacting with experts and operators working in the agri-food sector. The results of such analysis resulted in a comprehensive, unambiguous and consistent set of specification being used to define the platform structure and modules architecture. The platform modules have been developed by using the web-application framework Laravel.

Preliminary tests show that the proposed platform is usable and promises to improve the resilience and economic, social and environmental sustainability of agri-food supply chains, with a focus on smallholders.

The research work allows players in the agri-food supply chain and in particular small local producers to react and mitigate the impact of COVID-like crises through development of a platform in which smallholders, citizens (buyers and workers) and freight transport companies are simultaneously present.

The article attempts to shed light on the social aspects of research that deal with Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and sustainable cities. The aim is to offer a global view of these facets' evolution and to provide information on people-centered smart cities.

The research is qualitative. A systematic bibliometric approach is a framework for the research. The unit of analysis is publications on SDGs and Smart Cities (SCs) indexed in Scopus. The authors used VOSviewer text mining functionality to construct co-occurrence networks of socially related critical terms extracted from textual data. The co-occurrence of keywords presents a valuable method and process for attaining in-depth analysis and fast comprehension of trends and linkages in articles from a holistic approach.

Social media, social sustainability and social capital are the three multifaceted social keywords that co-occur in SDGs and SCs. The paper provides a brief compendium of resources and frameworks to build a socially sustainable smart city.

The retrieval date was on 15 August 2019. The authors used the same search query for new papers released in 2019 and afterwards to update their findings. The authors collected 657 documents on SCs, compared to 2,975 documents about SDGs demonstrating that their findings are still trending in the same direction, emphasizing the importance of the research topic. SCs' social aspects are still chartered areas that require the attention to future research.

The authors’ decision to use two separate data sets for SCs and SDGs data files helps to provide a more comprehensive picture of the research landscape. It may identify areas where research is lacking or needs future research. The authors present an integrative agenda for a smart city to be socially sustainable. Innovative approaches to urban planning are required to empower the place and context and improve the users' satisfaction, where innovative solutions enable smart, sustainable and inclusive societies. Infrastructure governance is a critical keystone. It could guarantee that public investments contribute to sustainable urban development while enhancing city resilience, particularly in facing climate change and inclusive growth challenges.

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, remote working (RW) has emerged as a viable alternative to working employees in general and knowledge workers in particular. However, previous researchers have worked on the concept, development and facilitation of RW since the 1970s. Therefore, this study aims to review the existing literature on RW to ascertain the evolution of the concept in the business and management domain and provide for requisite arguments to extend the settings for future research agendas.

The authors based this study on a bibliometric analysis of articles (n = 349) retrieved from the Web of Science database published between January 1990 and October 2021. The authors have used a bibliometric toolbox comprising performance analysis, science mapping and network analysis in various software namely, VOSviewer, Gephi and Biblioshiny package in R.

The study’s results accentuated important themes like work–life balance, strengthening digital infrastructure, performance and productivity, hybrid work models and well-being and clustered them under four heads with proposed future research questions.

The study is based on a single database; the authors have used an extensive but not exhaustive list of keywords to retrieve the articles. The analysis employs certain threshold limits while using the science mapping technique.

This study would enable managers and academics to comprehensively understand remote work and offer logical implications to appreciate its nuances.

This study is unique as it recognizes the intellectual structure in the existing literature on RW and traces the advancements and exponential growth post-COVID-19. The authors recapitulated the literature as network analysis of the RW facilitation model comprising the antecedents, outcomes, mediators and moderators.

This paper aims to empirically investigate how knowledge coordination is carried out within and across expert teams in the outsourcing service desk context from the standpoint of the information and communication technologies (ICT) provider.

The authors draw on an embedded case study to unravel the mechanisms used by expert teams to achieve knowledge coordination. Data collection included semi-structured interviews and document analysis over eight months.

Four groups of coordination mechanisms were found according to their nature and role in helping MESA achieve its organizational goals. The authors also identified how this set of mechanisms responds to the task-resource dependency and how it evolves over time to provide reliable ICT services. Furthermore, the analysis of four knowledge coordination dimensions inside each group uncovers the complexity of coordination in the studied context, with the “who” dimension being predominant across the groups. The analysis further reveals that the content (what) and mode of coordination (how) of each group respond to elements in the knowledge coordination process relevant for the different stages of the ICT service delivery process.

The case study addresses how people in outsourced services coordinate their knowledge to manage the interdependencies among the involved organizations and thus, achieving their goals. This study extends previous research that had analyzed the consequences of knowledge coordination for providers and customers by delving into the mechanisms used in this process from the provider’s point of view.

Although there is a growing body of work on immigrants' information behavior, little is known about the pre-arrival information experiences of immigrants who consult formal information sources such as immigration agents. Drawn from a larger study on the information behavior of immigrants, this paper mainly reports the semi-structured interview findings on the pre-arrival information experiences of Bangladeshi immigrants who used formal information sources with discussion on how that affected their post-arrival settlement into Canada.

The study used a mixed method approach with semi-structured interviews (n = 60) and surveys (n = 205) with participants who arrived in Canada between the years of 1971 and 2017. Data were collected from May 2017 to February 2018.

Although the overall scope of the original study is much larger, this paper features findings on the pre-arrival information experiences derived mainly from an analysis of interview data. This study provides insights into the pre-arrival information experiences of Bangladeshi immigrants consulting formal information sources such as immigration firms, individual immigration consultants and more formal government agencies. The author introduces a new concept of “information crafting” by exploring the negative consequences of selective information sharing by immigration consultants/agents in newcomers' settlements in Canada, primarily positive information about life in Canada, sometimes with exaggeration and falsification. The interview participants shared story after the story of the settlement challenges they faced after arriving in Canada and how the expectations they built through the information received from immigration consultants and government agencies did not match after arrival. This study emphasizes the importance of providing comprehensive information about life in Canada to potential newcomers so that they can make informed decisions even before they apply.

The findings of this study have theoretical and practical implications for policy and research. This study provides insights into the complicated culturally situated pre-arrival information experiences of Bangladeshi immigrants. Moreover, the study findings encourage researchers in various disciplines, including psychology, migration studies and geography, to delve more deeply into newcomers' information experiences using an informational lens to examine the information newcomers receive from diverse sources and their effects on their post-arrival settlement in a new country. The study challenges the general assumptions that formal information sources are always reputable, useful, and comprehensive, and it provides some future directions for research that seeks to understand the culturally situated information behavior of diverse immigrant groups.

The COVID-19 pandemic has posed many challenges in almost all sectors around the globe. Because of the pandemic, government entities responsible for managing health-care resources face challenges in managing and distributing their limited and valuable health resources. In addition, severe outbreaks may occur in a small or large geographical area. Therefore, county-level preparation is crucial for officials and organizations who manage such disease outbreaks. However, most COVID-19-related research projects have focused on either state- or country-level. Only a few studies have considered county-level preparations, such as identifying high-risk counties of a particular state to fight against the COVID-19 pandemic. Therefore, the purpose of this research is to prioritize counties in a state based on their COVID-19-related risks to manage the COVID outbreak effectively.

In this research, the authors use a systematic hybrid approach that uses a clustering technique to group counties that share similar COVID conditions and use a multi-criteria decision-making approach – the analytic hierarchy process – to rank clusters with respect to the severity of the pandemic. The clustering was performed using two methods, k-means and fuzzy c-means, but only one of them was used at a time during the experiment.

The results of this study indicate that the proposed approach can effectively identify and rank the most vulnerable counties in a particular state. Hence, state health resources managing entities can identify counties in desperate need of more attention before they allocate their resources and better prepare those counties before another surge.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to use both an unsupervised learning approach and the analytic hierarchy process to identify and rank state counties in accordance with the severity of COVID-19.

This study aims to examine the role of trust and digital literacy in influencing citizens’ adoption of e-government services.

Grounded in the technology acceptance model (TAM), a research model was developed focusing on e-filing services adoption. Hypotheses were formulated to assess the moderating effect of digital literacy on the relationship between trust and the key TAM determinants of perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use. A questionnaire-based survey of 876 citizens who have used e-filing using the snow-ball sampling technique was adopted to generate data. The data was analyzed using PLS-SEM through the aid of SmartPLS 4 to assess the measurement model and structural relationships.

Trust positively influences perceived usefulness and ease of use, which in turn drive adoption. Additionally, digital literacy significantly moderates the impact of trust on usefulness and ease of use perceptions – the effect is stronger for higher digital literacy.

The study adopted a single country developing economy context limiting cross-cultural applicability. Second, the focus on e-filing adoption precludes insights across other e-government services. Third, the reliance on perceptual measures risks respondent biases and fourth, the study is a cross-sectional survey design.

The findings emphasize multifaceted strategies to accelerate e-government adoption. Nurturing citizen trust in e-government systems through enhanced reliability, security and transparency remains vital. Simultaneously, initiatives to cultivate digital access, skills and proficiencies across population segments need to be undertaken.

This study integrates trust and digital literacy within the theoretical model to provide a more holistic understanding of adoption determinants. It highlights the need for balanced technology-enabled and social interventions to foster acceptance of e-government services.

This study aims to develop a framework that explains how and when telework is related to emotional exhaustion and task performance, by conceiving work overload as a mediator and self-leadership as a moderator. For this purpose, two studies were conducted. Study 1 aims to understand whether telework would be related to emotional exhaustion and task performance and if work overload would mediate such relationships. Study 2 aims to analyze whether self-leadership was a significant moderator of the mediated relations found in Study 1.

The hypotheses were tested in a sample of 207 (in Study 1) and 272 (in Study 2) participants, which were exclusively teleworking. The results were analyzed using PROCESS macro in SPSS.

The results of Study 1 showed that telework dimensions were negatively related to work overload, which consequently decreased emotional exhaustion and increased task performance. In Study 2, self-leadership moderated the indirect effect of work overload on the relationship between telework and emotional exhaustion, such that the indirect effect was stronger for those who scored higher in self-leadership. However, it was not significant for task performance.

This paper adds to research on telework by focusing on the employee's mental health and performance, in the context of mandatory confinement. The authors identified telework dimensions that may act as resources to cope with the increased work overload inherent to telework, as well as the importance of personal resources in these relationships.