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The healthcare sector is experiencing a major paradigm shift toward a people-centered approach. The key issue with transitioning to a people-centered approach is a lack of understanding of the ever-increasing role of technology in blended human-technology healthcare interactions and the impacts on healthcare actors' well-being. The purpose of the paper is to identify the key mechanisms and influencing factors through which blended service realities affect engaged actors' well-being in a healthcare context.

This conceptual paper takes a human-centric perspective and a value co-creation lens and uses theory synthesis and adaptation to investigate blended human-technology service realities in healthcare services.

The authors conceptualize three blended human-technology service realities – human-dominant, balanced and technology-dominant – and identify two key mechanisms – shared control and emotional-social and cognitive complexity – and three influencing factors – meaningful human-technology experiences, agency and DART (dialogue, access, risk, transparency) – that affect the well-being outcome of engaged actors in these blended human-technology service realities.

Managerially, the framework provides a useful tool for the design and management of blended human-technology realities. The paper explains how healthcare services should pay attention to management and interventions of different services realities and their impact on engaged actors. Blended human-technology reality examples – telehealth, virtual reality (VR) and service robots in healthcare – are used to support and contextualize the study’s conceptual work. A future research agenda is provided.

This study contributes to service literature by developing a new conceptual framework that underpins the mechanisms and factors that influence the relationships between blended human-technology service realities and engaged actors' well-being.

Global climate change is a serious threat to the survival and development of mankind. Reducing carbon emissions and achieving carbon neutrality are the keys to reducing greenhouse gas emissions and promoting sustainable human development. For many countries, taking China as an example, the electric power sector is the main contributor to the country’s carbon emissions, as well as a key sector for reducing carbon emissions and achieving carbon neutrality. The low-carbon transition of the power sector is of great significance to the long-term low-carbon development of the economy. Therefore, on the one hand, it is necessary to improve the energy supply structure on the supply side and increase the proportion of new energy in the total power supply. On the other hand, it is necessary to improve energy utilization efficiency on the demand side and control the total primary energy consumption by improving energy efficiency, which is the most direct and effective way to reduce emissions. Improving the utilization efficiency of electric energy and realizing the low-carbon transition of the electric power industry requires synergies between the government and the market. The purpose of this study is to investigate the individual and synergistic effects of China’s low-carbon policy and the opening of urban high-speed railways (HSRs) on the urban electricity consumption efficiency, measured as electricity consumption per unit of gross domestic product (GDP).

This study uses a panel of 289 Chinese prefecture-level cities from the years 1999–2019 as the sample and uses the time-varying difference-in-difference method to test the relationship between HSR, low-carbon pilot cities and urban electricity consumption efficiency. In addition, the instrumental variable method is adopted to make a robustness check.

Empirical results show that the low-carbon pilot policy and the HSR operation in cities would reduce the energy consumption per unit of GDP, and synergies occur in both HSR operated and low-carbon pilot cities.

This study has limitations that would provide possible starting points for future studies. The first limitation is the choice of the proxy variable of government and market factors. The second limitation is that the existing data is only about whether the high-speed rail is opened or not and whether it is a low-carbon pilot city, and there is no more informative data to combine the two aspects.

The findings of this study can inform policymakers and regulators about the effects of low-carbon pilot city policies. In addition, the government should consider market-level factors in addition to policy factors. Only by combining various influencing factors can the efficient use of energy be more effectively achieved so as to achieve the goal of carbon neutrality.

From the social perspective, the findings indicate that improving energy utilization is dependent on the joint efforts of the government and market.

The study provides quantitative evidence to assess the synergic effect between government and the market in the low-carbon transition of the electric power industry. Particularly, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, it is the first to comprehend the role of the city low-carbon pilot policy and the construction of HSR in improving electricity efficiency.

This study aims to examine how external and internal conditions drive the impact of circular economy mechanism by decomposing into three policy networks in terms of reduce, reuse and recycle, to better understand the contingency model of climate change and effect of firm size on subsequent performance.

Drawing on circular economy network and resource-based view (RBV)-network-resilience strategy framework, a pooled longitudinal cross-sectional data model is developed using a sample of 4,050 Taiwanese manufacturing multinational corporations (MNCs) making foreign direct investment between 2013 and 2018. Structural equation modeling analysis is used to comprehensively examine and investigate each circular economy policy network in the context of climate change and firm size. Post hoc multigroup analysis (MGA) is also conducted.

MGA shows that the reduce policy network is positively and negatively related to manufacturing know-how and production size, respectively. The impact of reuse policy network can enhance the competence of large firms. The recycle policy network is more prominent in terms of competence enhancement of climate change.

MNCs are seeking to build circular economy policy networks to a greater extent, given climate change pressure and guidelines.

This study adds to the circular economy and RBV-network-related literature on climate change and interactions to enhance performance, echoing the recent call on the sustainability of the circular economy of MNCs.

The e-freight program launched by the International Air Transport Association (IATA) has gradually become a standard specification for international air freight operations. This study examined critical factors affecting air freight forwarders’ decision to adopt the IATA e-freight using a technology-organization-environment model with air freight forwarders in Taiwan as the base. Our findings show that ‘information technology (IT) competence’, ‘trading partner pressure’, ‘government policy’ and ‘competitive pressure’ all have significant positive effects on air freight forwarders’ decision to adopt the e-freight and the top three factors among these are ‘government funding’, ‘government’s active promotion’ and ‘government’s requirement of electronic air waybill (e-AWB)’. Finally, this study proposes strategies that can encourage air freight forwarders to decide on e-freight adoption for the information of relevant oK regyawniozradtison International Air Transport Association (IATA); IATA e-freight; Technology organization environment model; Air freight forwarder

This study aims to examine the linkages between port aesthetics, destination image, tourist satisfaction and tourist loyalty in Hong Kong.

To achieve this objective, the authors surveyed 247 tourists in Hong Kong. Using factor analysis and structural equation model (SEM) to identify the constructs of port aesthetics and analyze its relationship with destination image, tourist satisfaction and tourist loyalty.

Five-port aesthetics constructs were identified, namely, leisure and culture, design and cognition, atmosphere, recreational facilities and memory. The results of SEM revealed the following: port aesthetics positively influenced destination image; destination image positively influenced tourist satisfaction; and tourist satisfaction had a positive influence on tourist loyalty. This research also found that the indirect effect of port aesthetics on tourist loyalty via destination image and tourist satisfaction.

While the environmental qualities of a port could potentially affect destination image, tourist satisfaction and loyalty, this study developed and validated a measurement instrument of perceived port aesthetics from a tourist’s perspective. Specifically, this research proposed a structural model to explain the relationships between port aesthetics, destination image, tourist satisfaction and loyalty.

The paper concludes with showing that in the most optimistic scenario, end-of-life (EOL) batteries will account for 86% of energy storage for wind and 36% for solar PV in 2040.

With the growing demand for electric vehicles (EVs), the stock of discarded batteries will increase dramatically if no action is taken for their reuse or recycling. One potential avenue is to reuse them as energy storage systems (ESS) to mitigate the intermittent generation of renewable energy such as solar PV and wind. In a sense, the reliability for solar PV and wind energy can increase if energy storage systems become economically more attractive, making solar and wind systems more attractive through economies of scale.

The paper concludes with showing that in the most optimistic scenario, EOL batteries will account for 86% of energy storage for wind and 36% for solar PV in 2040.

The projection of scenarios can contribute to the information of policies, standards and identification of environmental promotion and promotion related to efficient management for EOL batteries.