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Several freight operations rely on human cognition and behavior. Tackling these aspects, gamification transforms activities to resemble game-like experiences. Since the freight transportation sector is rapidly adopting gamification, the purpose of this study is to provide an overview that synthesizes the state-of-the-art and plot future directions for research and the practice of gamifying this area.

A systematic review of the gamification of freight transportation was conducted. After screening 691 studies, 40 relevant studies were analyzed.

Most studies found positive psychological and behavioral outcomes from gamification. Literature mainly focused on tackling the operational-level issues of road and maritime transportation modes by implementing simulation games.

Besides elaborating how gamification can improve freight transportation, the authors describe directions still uncovered by the current corpus, such as research design and temporality and the variety of modes and tasks.

Practical implications emerged from the studies, primarily focusing on understanding users, tasks and contexts, targeting different audiences and transportation modalities, and balancing motivational affordances, while considering the demands of the freight transportation domain, including dynamic, spatially dispersed environments and cooperation between multiple stakeholders.

The transportation of goods dominates much of the global economy and ecology. Therefore, gamifying this domain has a huge societal impact potential, especially related to issues of sharing economy, safety, environmental sustainability and social media.

Beyond providing an original overview of gamified freight transportation, this study maps current research gaps and describes practical recommendations.

Just transition is a fundamental concept for supply chain management but neither discipline pays attention to the other and little is known about how supply chains can be orchestrated as socioecological systems to manage these transitions. Building from a wide range of just transition examples, this paper explores just transition to understand how to move beyond instrumental supply chain practices to supply chains functioning in harmony with the planet and its people.

Building from a systematic review of 72 papers, the paper identifies just transition examples while interpreting them through the theoretical lens of supply chain management, providing valuable insights to help research and practice understand how to achieve low-carbon economies through supply chain management in environmentally and socially just ways.

The paper defines, elaborates, and extends the just transition construct by developing a transition taxonomy with two key dimensions. The purpose dimension (profit or shared outcomes) and the governance dimension (government-/industry-led versus civil society-involved), generating four transition archetypes. Most transitions projects are framed around the Euro- and US-centric, capitalist standards of development, leading to coloniality as well as economic and cultural depletion of communities. Framing just transition in accordance with context-specific plural values, the paper provides an alternative perspective to the extractive transition concept. This can guide supply chain management to decarbonise economies and societies by considering the rights of nature, communities and individuals.

Introducing just transition into the supply chain management domain, this paper unifies the various conceptualisations of just transition into a holistic understanding, providing a new foundation for supply chain management research.

This study examines whether corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives positively impact customers’ selection of retail banks in Hong Kong (HK) and identifies which CSR domains affect customers’ selection of banks.

This study adopted a quantitative approach. Primary data were collected from 416 customers of 22 retail banks in HK. The theoretical framework of this study was developed from a literature review, prior studies by Oberseder et al. (2013 and 2014), and CSR initiatives implemented by leading retail banks in HK. Descriptive statistics and statistical tests were used to analyze the data.

The study found that CSR initiatives positively affect customers’ bank selection. CSR initiatives related to the customer and environment domains are likely to have a greater impact on customers than those related to the society domain and are not likely to significantly impact customers’ bank selection.

This study contributes to the CSR literature by offering enhanced insight into the dynamics of CSR and its effects on customer bank selection. Furthermore, this study tests consumers’ perceptions of CSR initiatives in each CSR domain in the banking sector in Hong Kong – a novel approach that has not been previously explored in existing studies. These findings can help banks review the effectiveness of their CSR initiatives and make informed decisions on which initiatives should pursue improved CSR performance and efficient resource allocation.

This research investigates the Islamic banks’ intermediation role (e.g. branches and deposits) in financing. It also examines how financing contributes to the regions' economic growth and poverty alleviation as a predictor and mediator variable.

A total of 297 observations were extracted from 33 Indonesian districts and 14 Islamic banks during the period 2012–2020. Fixed-effect regression analysis was used to examine variable’s interactions.

The empirical results indicate that Islamic banks have adopted a channelling role towards redistributing capital from lender to borrower. Besides, there are crucial roles in developing economies and reducing poverty at the district level. This study also reinforces the critical role of financing in mediating the relationship between branches and deposits as predictor variables and GDP and poverty as outcome variables.

The current study was limited to Indonesian Islamic banks and the district’s perspective. Future research needs to cover sub-districts and other poverty measurements (e.g. human education and development perspectives), including conventional and Islamic banks. It can help practitioners, regulators and researchers observe the dynamic behaviour of the banking sector to understand its role in the economic and social fields.

Bank managers and regulators should promote branches, deposits and financing. It also enlightens people about the essential role of Islamic banks and their fundamental operations in business and economics.

This study contributes to economic literature, bank managers and local governments' decision-making processes by developing and testing an economic growth and poverty model.

This paper seeks to determine whether family ties and structure correlate with the ethical and moral values that are important underpinnings of economic activities.

The analysis uses data from the World Values Survey (WVS). Given the multilevel nature of the data in a cross-country setting, the paper utilizes a multilevel linear mixed-effects model with maximum likelihood estimation.

Families with strong ties and those with traditional family structures are less tolerant of unethical conduct and have more restrictive moral values than households where ties are weak and the household is not married. There also appears to be a bi-causal relationship in the data.

This paper considers a broad array of values in a cross-country setting and utilizes a multilevel modeling approach that has not been done in studies linking both family ties and structure.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/IJSE-12-2021-0730.

This study aims to empirically investigate how difference in social trust explains the heterogeneity of intellectual property right (IPR) protection (proxied by software piracy rate) across countries. Specifically, the authors also examine whether this effect is complementary or substitute to legal and economic factors.

The authors use both ordinary least square and two-stage least square regressions to investigate this effect.

The authors find that there is also a complementary effect between trust and rule of law in reducing the violation of IPRs.

Although the literature by now has documented the solid relationship between trust and the quality of formal institutions, only few studies have explored more specific measures of institutional consequences. Thus, this study is the first study investigating the role of trust, a valuable social capital dimension, on IPR protection.

How does the era of austerity affect flexibility and control in budget implementation? The execution phase of the budget has remained underexplored in the budgeting literature. Theoretically, a crisis and austerity period may trigger changes in budget execution in one of two key directions: either toward greater control or greater flexibility. This paper seeks to uncover which outcome is more likely.

The authors conducted elite interviews of key officials involved in the budget execution phases in two European countries: Portugal and Austria.

The cases demonstrate that the experience of a fiscal crisis and period of austerity tend to lead to greater control and constrained flexibility in budget execution.

The execution phase of the budget process has remained underexplored in the public budgeting literature, and there has been only limited discussion on how the experience of austerity affects it. This empirical study of Portugal and Austria helps to shed light on that question.

As logistics talents in both Taiwan and Hong Kong are expanding their work area to Greater China, it is best to understand the competencies that logistics talents should possess. With this in mind, this study takes Mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan as the study scope, as well as logistics teaching and research experts and scholars as the study objects. The research findings can not only serve as informative references for universities intent on cultivating logistics talents, but as well as enhance the scope of both Taiwan and Hong Kong talents’ competence that can pave the way to the development of the logistics business in Greater China.

The study aims to demonstrate that farmers' markets can represent a model of environmental, social and governance reference for modern agri-food systems facing the challenge of post COVID-19 pandemic reconstruction, responding to consumer expectations in terms of health, safety and wholesomeness of agri-food products.

A sample of consumers was surveyed in farmers' markets and social network analysis (SNA) was adopted as a methodological approach to reconstruct the links between the worlds of production and consumption and to derive the relative importance attributed to various factors that promote relational structures.

The work demonstrates the importance of sustainability – as a productive and behavioural model of firms – for the construction of efficient and durable relationship systems in two farmer markets in Sicily. In particular, four fundamental components emerge in the construction of networks represented by consumer sensitivity to sustainability processes, the individual behavioural model of purchasing and consumption, the expectation of political direction and the level and factors of knowledge of the firm. The clustering elements of the relationships were found to be the territory and local products, the environmentalist attitude and the protection of resources, as well as the adoption of a rational waste disposal policy, the fight against food waste, the encouragement of healthier and more sustainable consumption styles, clear and transparent communication and the activation of sustainable supply chain processes in line with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

The paper aims to demonstrate how alternative food systems can become a useful model for large enterprises, which are committed to rebuilding their business strategy to overcome the current crisis.

The authors provide a novel interpretation of the relationship between skill demand and labour market concentration based on the training rationale.

The authors use a novel data set on Italian online job vacancies during 2013–2018 to analyse the relationship between labour market concentration and employers' skill demand. The authors construct measures of market concentration and skill intensity in the local labour market. The authors regress the measures of skill demand on market concentration, controlling for sector, occupations and other features of the labour market. The authors also use the Hausman–Nevo instrument for market concentration.

The authors show that employers in a highly concentrated labour market demand competencies associated with the ability of workers to learn faster (e.g. social skills) rather than actual knowledge. They also require less experience but higher education. These results are consistent with the hypothesis that employers in more concentrated labour markets are more prone to train their employees. Instead of looking for workers who already have job-specific skills, they look for workers who can acquire them faster and efficiently. The authors provide a theoretical framework within which to analyse these aspects as well as providing a test for the relevant hypotheses.

In addition to cross-countries differences in labour market regulations, the authors' findings suggest that policy authorities should consider the local labour market structure when studying workforce development programmes aimed at bridging the skill gap of displaced workers. Moreover, the authors show that market concentration can have relevant implications for human resource (HR) managers by affecting their recruitment behaviour through the demand for skills. In fact, concentrated markets tend to favour firms' collusion and anti-competitive behaviour that could strongly affect HR management practices.

The authors' paper innovates on the literature in a number of ways. First, the authors provide evidence of local labour market concentration in Italy. Second, the authors provide evidence of skill demand at the local level using a detailed skill taxonomy that goes beyond the classical distinction between high and low skills. Third, and most importantly, the authors provide evidence of the relationship between skill demand and labour market concentration. By analysing detailed skills and competencies, the authors take one step beyond understanding the features of labour demand in monopsonistic markets.