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The shift toward a circular economy (CE) represents a collaborative endeavor necessitating the presence of efficient frameworks, conducive contexts and a common comprehension. This research serves as a pivotal stride towards this goal, presenting an exclusive prospect for the investigation and fusion of these frameworks, with particular emphasis on the Quintuple Helix Model (5HM), into a unified theoretical framework that underscores the core principles of the CE. This study is centered on three pivotal questions aimed at decoding the CE transition in specific regional settings.

Adopting an abductive approach firmly anchored in a two-stage qualitative process, this study specifically merges the foundational principles from institutional theory, entrepreneurship literature and CE frameworks to provide insights into the dynamics of circular ecosystems, with a specific focus on the Huelva region in Spain.

The findings demonstrate significant potential in the CE, ranging from the integration of product and service systems to innovations in eco-industrial practices. Yet, a notable deficiency exists: the absence of institutional entrepreneurs, highlighting the essential role that universities can play. As recognized centers of innovation, universities are suggested to be key contributors to the transformation toward a CE, aligning with their societal and economic responsibilities.

This study highlights the importance of managing relationships with entities like SMEs and policymakers or academia for effective CE adoption. Policymakers can refine strategies based on the research’s insights, while the impact of university-driven circular ecosystems on sustainable societies is another crucial area for research.

The sustainability models cited in CE literature may not be comprehensive enough to prevent problem shifting, and it can be argued that they lack a sound theoretical and conceptual basis. Furthermore, the connections between sustainability objectives and the three levels of the CE operating system remain vague. Additionally, there is insufficient information on how regions foster the involvement of the environment in fivefold helix cooperation and how this impacts the CE.

The purpose of this paper is to supply insights into talent management (TM) in Russia in the light of Soviet experience and the contemporary officially sanctioned business‐antagonistic political culture.

A diachronic approach, whereby a key dictum of Karl Marx which underlays Soviet thinking and methods is contextualized and applied to post‐communist Russia, and TM practice in Russian firms and foreign firms in Russia is contrasted.

A key finding is that there is seemingly greater value placed on Russian employees' talents by foreign companies. Six influential factors are identified which give Russian‐style TM a dysfunctional character: Russia's default position (i.e. instinctive gravitation to authoritarian rule), mistrust of institutions, entrenched “bossdom”, persistence of “Soviet mental software”, negative selection, and limited tradition of empowerment.

The paper highlights needs for: comparative empirical studies, contrasting Russian firms' and foreign firms' understanding and application of TM; investigation into the relationship of Russian‐style TM and career progression in Russian companies; and studies into contrasting ways of transferring TM concepts and practices by Western firms.

Foreign firms must be prepared to engage with Russia's prevailing officially sanctioned business‐antagonistic, occasionally xenophobic political culture.

The paper demonstrates how engagement with contemporary Russia for management research purposes requires a deep appreciation of the Soviet period and the complexities of its legacy and judicious use of Russian‐language material adds credibility.

Tax evasion is an economic crime that nearly all world countries suffer from. Its consequences are countless, including poor public spending on infrastructure projects and social welfare programs, low economic growth and development, institutional mistrust and fiscal deficits. For developing countries in particular, targeting development programs and infrastructural investments requires an efficient tax collection policy to generate sufficient funds for such purposes. This makes the tax evasion problem a critical one and countering it extremely policy relevant. Based on evidence that shows how the understanding of taxpayers' behavior is an essential factor in fighting evasion, this paper aims to test different factors that might incentivize citizens using a behavioral and experimental approach, in non-Western educated industrialized rich democracies (non-WEIRD) countries, to comply more.

This paper uses a survey experiment to examine the impact of different behavioral primes on tax compliance behavior. Specifically, it observes subjects' compliance behavior in two contexts: voice and empathy. A total of 273 students from a big public university in Egypt were randomly selected to participate in this study.

In the “Voice” treatment, the explanatory variable (VOICE) was found statistically significant, thus confirming the hypothesis that democracy, through having a voice in the decision-making process, affects compliance positively. As for the “Empathy” treatment, the explanatory variable (EMPATHY) was also found significant. This confirms the second hypothesis that triggering feelings of empathy, through highlighting the good cause behind public spending that uses taxpayers' money, affects compliance behavior positively.

Despite the fact that the experimental methodology is a methodology with high internal validity, examining the impact of a specific intervention on behavior, a replication of the experiment in other contexts might be useful in increasing the external validity of the findings. Specifically, conducting this experiment on a nonstudent sample might lead to even more powerful results by increasing the ecological validity of the results.

This study advocates a more behaviorally informed public policy. Specifically, Egyptian policymakers are recommended to adopt behavioral nudges as a complement to existing policies. The authors believe the findings, if confirmed by repeated experiments (lab, lab-in-the-field and rational choice theories on both student and non-student samples) in a number of Arab countries, might also help in offering cost-effective nudges for the Arab world policymakers, where culture and the political context are to a great extent similar.

The findings of the study have a number of social implications. Higher tax compliance will enable higher levels of public spending on a number of social targets such as education, health and welfare programs.

While the study builds on recent research examining how to incentivize tax compliance, it simultaneously seeks to make three contributions. First, the study design aims to apply recent advances in behavioral sciences (impact of voice and empathy) in a policy area that has not seen much use of such interventions in the Egyptian context (i.e. tax compliance). Second, the study is policy relevant in the sense that it aims to increase the effectiveness of existing government policies by complementing them with behavioral primes. Third, there is nearly no literature found applying this topic in a non-WEIRD country such as Egypt.

To respond to the COVID-19 “infodemic” and combat fraud and misinformation about the virus, social media platforms coordinated with government healthcare agencies around the world to elevate authoritative content about the novel coronavirus. These public health authorities included national and global public health organisations, such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the World Health Organisation (WHO). In this article, the authors evaluate the effectiveness of this strategy by asking two key questions: (1) Did people engage with authoritative health content on social media? (2) Was this content trusted?

The authors explore these issues by drawing on data from a global online questionnaire on “Public Trust in Experts” (n = 429) conducted during the initial phase of the pandemic in May 2020, a crucial period when reliable information was urgently required to influence behaviour and minimise harm.

The authors found that while the majority of those surveyed noticed authoritative health content online, there remained significant issues in terms of Internet users trusting the information shared by government healthcare agencies and public health authorities online.

In what follows, the authors examine the role of trust in implementing this novel public health strategy and assess the capacity for such policies to reduce individual and social harm.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/OIR-12-2021-0655

The outbreak of the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 virus and subsequent COVID-19 illness has had a major impact on all levels of society internationally. The extent of the impact of COVID-19 on prison staff and prisoners in England and Wales is unknown. Testing for COVID-19 both asymptomatic and symptomatic, as well as for antibodies, to date, has been minimal. The purpose of this paper is to explore the widespread testing of COVID-19 in prisons poses philosophical and ethical questions around trust, efficacy and ethicacy.

This paper is both descriptive, providing an overview of the widespread testing of COVID-19 in prisoners in England and Wales, and conceptual in that it discusses and argues the issues associated with large-scale testing. This paper provides a discussion, using comparative studies, of the issues associated with large-scale testing of prisoners across the prison estate in England and Wales (120 prisons). The issues identified in this paper are contextualised through the lens of COVID-19, but they are equally transferrable to epidemiological studies of any pandemic. Given the prevalence of COVID-19 globally and the lack of information about its spread in prisons, at the time of writing this paper, there is a programme of asymptomatic testing of prisoners. However, there remains a paucity of data on the spread of COVID-19 in prisons because of the progress with the ongoing testing programme.

The authors argue that the widespread testing of prisoners requires careful consideration of the details regarding who is included in testing, how consent is gained and how tests are administered. This paper outlines and argues the importance of considering the complex nuance of power relationships within the prison system, among prisoner officers, medical staff and prisoners and the detrimental consequences.

The widespread testing of COVID-19 presents ethical and practical challenges. Careful planning is required when considering the ethics of who should be included in COVID-19 testing, how consent will be gained, who and how tests will be administered and very practical challenges around the recording and assigning of COVID-19 test kits inside the prison. The current system for the general population requires scanning of barcodes and registration using a mobile number; these facilities are not permitted inside a prison.

This paper looks at the issues associated with mass testing of prisoners for COVID-19. According to the authors’ knowledge, there has not been any research that looks at the issues of testing either in the UK or internationally. The literature available details countries’ responses to the pandemic rather and scientific papers on the development of vaccines. Therefore, this paper is an original review of some of the practicalities that need to be addressed to ensure that testing can be as successful as possible.

Coronavirus (COVID-19) rapidly became the “new normal” with profound implications for everyone's daily life. In this paper, emerging psychologists from diverse cultural backgrounds discuss four main ways in which COVID-19 impacted diverse psychological populations.

This paper was written as a reflection on how COVID-19 has impacted diverse psychological populations using authors' academic and personal experiences.

First, the authors explore inaccessible populations with a focus on domestic violence victims living in rural areas. Second, the authors consider consequences of social isolation with a focus on remote workers. Third, the authors investigate the consequences of public (dis)trust in the pandemic with a focus on migrant worker communities. Finally, the authors discuss pandemic-relevant subcultures with a focus on “anti-vaxxers”.

The paper concludes with a discussion of negative implications of the COVID-19 pandemic on diverse psychological populations, both for the present and the future, and ends with an action plan of possible interventions to overcome these limitations.

Overall, the current paper provides a broad overview of how the pandemic has shaped and will continue to shape diverse psychological populations.

How should we make sense of Europe's current malaise? Focused on the great recession, the European Union (EU)'s architecture, or diverging national interests, the literature offers useful economic, institutional, and political explanations. It is our contention that, however diverse, these works share one important limitation: a tendency to focus on rather immediate causes and consequences and not to step back with historical or comparative perspectives to gain a “longer” view of the dynamics at work. In this article, we begin by examining parallels between the EU's current conditions and the Austrian-Hungarian Empire. Then, introducing the articles contained in this special issue, we raise research questions pertaining to long-term historical, social, cultural, economic, and political factors. Are the current challenges unprecedented or do they have roots or connections to past events and developments? Is there a European trajectory into which we can contextualize current events? Are there bright spots, and what do they suggest about Europe's present and future? To engage in such questions, the papers leverage the insights of historical and comparative sociology, as well as comparative politics. In so doing, they offer analyses that see the EU as an instance of state formation. They propose that a key dimension of tension and possible resolution is the classic problem of sovereignty. They grapple with the question of identity and institutions, exploring in that context the extent and limit of citizens' support for more Europe. And they delve into the nature of the nationalist and populist sentiments within and across European countries.

This study aims to integrate and revalidate previously proposed various structural models in understanding residents’ attitudes and behaviors in relation to mega-events before the events.

This study focussed on the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics and used a questionnaire-based quantitative survey prior these events. A PLS-SEM analysis was run on a sample of 473 residents, in testing relationships between residents’ trust, perceived impacts, support for hosting and subjective well-being.

Results revalidate propositions from previous research, but suggest key contextual differences in light of biosecurity risks. Residents’ perceived positive (cultural) and negative (environmental) impacts affect their support for mega-events, and their perceived positive (economic and cultural) and negative (social) impacts affect their subjective well-being. Variances in the relationships were found for those who perceive a high biosecurity risk.

The data were collected from one mega-event, and thus the findings of this study are highly contextualized.

This research suggest that mega-event organizers should put effort into promoting the benefits of hosting mega-events and work collaboratively with stakeholders to reduce potential negative costs and risks as well as increase resident well-being via bringing in economic and cultural benefits.

This research focusses on social well-being during and post COVID in relation to the hosting of a mega-event.

The data were collected from the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics, a mega-event that, because of COVID-19 and restricted spectator flows, potentially had characteristics quite different from that of other Winter Olympics or sporting mega-events.

While the impact of information and communication technology (ICT) on logistics and supply chain management (SCM) is recently much discussed, this is hardly linked to emerging economies and base of the pyramid (BoP) settings. The paper aims as offering a framework linking different conceptual elements to each other for explaining how ICT enables sustainable value creation in emerging economy supply chains (SCs).

The paper builds on conceptual reasoning linking constructs from the different fields to each other.

Using conceptual reasoning linking constructs, six elements are identified: (1) SC flows, (2) BoP challenges and (3) ICT services as starting points, and environmental conditions driving sustainable value creation. The application of ICT within BoP SC operations drives the process of sustainable value creation by enabling new ways of (4) electronic business (e-business) transactions and (5) SSCM behaviors. This leads to (6) sustainable value for businesses using ICT applications and their respective stakeholders.

Empirical testing by collecting field data in emerging economy contexts would be demanded to address the limitation of building on conceptual reasonings.

The framework provides various SC-related measures driving e-business value creation for managers of businesses, charity organizations and policymakers in emerging communities.

Understanding the use of smartphones and other mobile devices for businesses and their supply chains in emerging markets would have wide ranging social implication addressed in the sustainable value creation of the framework offered.

The conceptual framework brings different elements together offering insights into ICT applications in BoP SCs. Linking SCM, ICT and BoP to each other is a novel contribution having wider implications for the future development of emerging economies.