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Information and communication technologies brought a new paradigm that allows policymakers to ground their actions on real-time events. Smart cities were initially conceived as a technological vision separate from urban planning. As a result, projects were rarely connected between departments, objectives were not aligned with strategic goals and there was a lack of citizen participation. This study aims to propose a framework to guide and support the design and implementation of a smart city.

Interviews with eight policymakers and one secretary of state are conducted to explore current decision-making processes, specifically, to understand if and how smart city strategies are designed and who their main contributors are. Based on these findings, an inductive thematic analysis of existing literature studies to inspire the steps of the proposed framework is performed. Finally, these steps are discussed in a focus group with nine smart city experts to characterize the guidelines comprehensively.

Policymakers confirmed the lack of a standard method and approach to orient their smart city strategies. Results describe a flexible, participatory framework that envisions 12 steps divided into 4 phases with dedicated guidelines.

This paper integrates the plan-do-check-act cycle approach into the thinking for urban planning design. In addition, it raises the need to reflect on the definition of a country’s strategic plan and the alignment and execution of cities’ roadmaps.

The aim of this paper is to evaluate empirically the impact of oil price fluctuations on the relationship between banking sector development and economic growth in oil-importing MENA countries.

The study used the newly developed panel autoregressive distributed lagged (ARDL) approach in order to address any potential endogeneity between research variables.

The empirical results show a unidirectional causality in the long run from oil price to both economic growth and banking sector development for oil-importing countries. Also, banking sector development not only leads directly to economic growth but also can play a moderator role in the oil price—economic growth nexus.

The study has two principal limitations. On the one hand, this study was conducted in a relatively limited sample of countries. On the other hand, the study did not consider others indicators for banking sector development and others macroeconomic variables.

The results found have imperative implications for banks' managers, regulators and researchers. Bank managers should be more concerned with the negative repercussions of oil price fluctuations on the development of their banks. The regulatory authorities must emphasize policies and strategies to further strengthen their banking sector in order to alleviate the negative influence of oil price shocks on economic growth. Researchers focused on finance-growth nexus must take into account the potential influence of oil price shocks.

The developed conceptual model allows examining to what extent the oil price fluctuations might affect the relationship between economic growth and banking sector development. This effect is neither evaluated nor clarified in the relevant literature.

This study aims to examine a common failure in knowledge sharing, called disengagement from knowledge sharing (DKS), and investigates how technostress may contribute to this unintentional withholding of knowledge for knowledge workers. The authors apply the Job Demands-Resources (JD-R) model to explain the dual path of technostress creators and inhibitors on DKS via burnout and job engagement. The authors also examine how the pandemic and the changes in remote work and information and communication technology (ICT)-related stress may have impacted DKS.

Using a time-lag survey, two independent samples of knowledge workers who use information and communication technologies for their jobs were surveyed during early 2020 and mid-2021. Analyses were completed with partial least squares-structural equation modelling.

Technostress (via the JD-R model) explained DKS. Technostress creators were positively associated with burnout, which was in turn positively related to DKS. Technostress inhibitors were positively associated with job engagement, which in turn was also positively related to disengagement to knowledge sharing. Technostress inhibitors were negatively associated with burnout. Results from the multigroup analysis indicated that technostress inhibitors had a stronger relationship with engagement pre-pandemic than mid-pandemic.

This research addresses a more common source of knowledge sharing failures and illustrates how ICTs may impact this DKS via burnout and job engagement. In addition, this research captures a change in relationships associated with the pandemic.

Based on the perspective of knowledge management, this study aims to discuss how to build cross-city emergency management collaboration mechanism in major emergencies and explore the important role of knowledge management in emergency management collaboration.

Based on the theoretical analysis of knowledge management and the typical case study of cross-city emergency management collaborative rescue, this study provides an in-depth analysis of how these cities achieve high emergency management performance through multidimensional and multilevel knowledge collaboration, thus revealing the mechanism of knowledge transfer, integration and sharing in achieving high emergency management performance.

Through analyzing typical cases, this study finds that building a smooth mechanism for multichannel emergency rescue information can promote the diversification of knowledge transfer methods, building a platform-based integration mechanism for emergency rescue information can enhance knowledge integration capabilities and building a linkage mechanism for emergency rescue materials between cities can promote knowledge-sharing level, thereby improving emergency management performance level.

This study has great significance for how to build cross-city emergency management collaboration mechanism in the digital era. In the future, the authors need to further discuss the following two aspects in depth: research on the impact of cross-city emergency management collaboration mechanism on improving the knowledge management capabilities of government emergency management departments; and research on the impact mechanism of knowledge management capabilities on city resilience.

Through case analysis of cross-city emergency management collaborative rescue for major emergencies in China in recent years, this study proposes three specific strategies for cross-city emergency management (smooth, integration and linkage mechanisms) and reveals that these three strategies are essentially aimed at improving the government’s knowledge management level.

This study investigates the roles and interactions of various actors of one-stop digital culture platforms (ODCPs) by applying actor-network theory (ANT).

Data were collected from focus group interviews with 19 participants and over 20 policy texts related to the digitization of cultural services in China. Utilizing ANT as the analytical framework, we employed the grounded theory to analyze the dataset.

The empirical results indicate that: (1) governments, cultural institutions, enterprises and users each play dual roles, contributing to the functionality and development of ODCPs; (2) introduces the theory of commons to reconceptualize ODCPs as commons, highlighting the need for collective management and shared responsibility in the governance of ODCPs.

This study identifies and elaborates on the different roles of stakeholders and addresses conceptual ambiguities within ODCP projects. By introducing the theory of commons into the governance of ODCPs, this research provides new theoretical guidance for decision-makers and practitioners involved in ODCP projects.

The vehicle routing problem (VRP) is critical for the successful execution of logistics activities. However, there is strong evidence that efficiently solving the VRP is often complicated and requires more powerful – and possibly intelligent – support tools. In accordance with this necessity, the present study proposes a decision support system (DSS) applicable to the VRP, which includes both initial planning and replanning phases to support the real-time operations.

The proposed DSS lies at the basis of resilience thinking to provide a capacity to absorb and withstand the impact of disruptions, where resilience is connected with the factors of preparedness, flexibility and redundancy. These factors are approached in this study through a number of operational strategies in the reactive and proactive modes. The DSS includes a multi-layer perceptron neural network to predict changes that may arise in dynamic contexts, a modified k-means clustering algorithm to group customers with both static and dynamic attributes and two mixed-integer programming models to produce primary and alternate routing plans.

The research is motivated by the operational challenges faced by a collaborative networked clinical laboratory, which seeks to enhance efficiency and productivity in the daily management of medical sample collection and delivery through the implementation of increased automation. The findings reveal that centralized planning leads to heightened vulnerability in route planning and increased costs for replanning. Furthermore, the effectiveness of resilience-enhancement strategies varies based on the source and level of uncertainty.

The contributions of this paper are as follows: incorporating resilience thinking into the operational planning of logistics services, managing the decision-making of transport and collection companies through a DSS framework to ensure proper support to real-time operations, addressing the clustered VRP in a dynamic setting and adopting forecasting approaches to cover possible sources of dynamism.

The study explores the sustainability of biodegradable materials as an eco-friendly substitute for traditional plastics across diverse applications. These materials decompose harmlessly within a specific timeframe, contributing to a holistic lifecycle. Yet, their widespread adoption depends on convincing consumers, manufacturers and regulators of their effectiveness. An empirical study was undertaken to investigate the determinants impacting the sustainability of biodegradable plastics.

This study employed a quantitative approach, seeking to discern the factors shaping the endurance of these materials in Malaysia. The study encompassed 316 viable responses, with outcomes from the PLS-SEM analysis offering partial support to the research framework.

The study reveals that individual characteristics strongly influence the sustainability of biodegradable plastics and are essential factors in determining behavioural intentions related to sustainability, such as purchasing environmentally friendly packaged food products.

The study provides practical implications for government and corporate sectors to design effective strategies encouraging consumers to choose biodegradable plastics. Regular awareness campaigns should be conducted to increase consumer engagement in environmental concerns and reduce the use of non-eco-friendly packaging in the public sector.

Previous literature has overlooked the sustainability aspects of the biodegradable plastics market, leaving a gap in understanding the influential factors and their sustainability, especially in the Malaysian context. This study aims to fill this gap by exploring the determinants that govern the sustainability of biodegradable plastics.

Rural tourism has become increasingly popular given its opportunities to get to know local traditions and lifestyles, to immerse in appealing cultural and natural landscapes and to enjoy a calm and relaxing atmosphere, contrasting stressful city life. Additionally, visitors seek personalised, unique and memorable experiences and immersion in rural places, which could be fostered by co-creative and authentic multisensory experiences. The co-creation of value resulting from tourists' interaction with rural destinations' multiple local agents and resources calls for articulation and even coopetition amongst these agents who may benefit from joining efforts to compete not against each other but together within a wider competitive context to, thus, achieve a stronger, unique market position. This chapter presents a qualitative, exploratory case study, illustrating the overall rural tourist experience lived and co-created in a Portuguese schist village. Semi-structured interviews were applied to visitors, supply and development agents and to the local community in order to understand their perspective regarding the nature, quality and potential of the village experience. Experience co-creation seemed to have a positive impact on visitors' satisfaction. The coopetition approach was also identified in the discourse of supply and development agents who recognised the importance of cooperation, also within the Schist Village Network yielding a more cohesive and attractive tourism product in the village. Aligning locally embedded co-creation experiences and coopetition amongst local actors seems to be a strategic approach for fostering appealing, competitive and sustainable rural tourism experiences.

This study aims to demonstrate the importance of recognizing stress in the workplace. Accurate novel objective methods that use electroencephalogram (EEG) to measure brainwaves can promote employee well-being. However, using these devices can be positive and potentially harmful as manipulative practices undermine autonomy.

Emphasis is placed on business ethics as it relates to the ethics of action in terms of positive and negative responsibility, autonomous decision-making and self-determined work through a literature review. The concept of relational autonomy provides an orientation toward heteronomous employment relationships.

First, using digital devices to recognize stress and promote health can be a positive outcome, expanding the definition of digital well-being as opposed to dependency, non-use or reduction. Second, the transfer of socio-relational autonomy, according to Oshana, enables criteria for self-determined work in heteronomous employment relationships. Finally, the deployment and use of such EEG-based devices for stress detection can lead to coercion and manipulation, not only in interpersonal relationships, but also directly and more subtly through the technology itself, interfering with self-determined work.

Stress at work and EEG-based devices measuring stress have been discussed in numerous articles. This paper is one of the first to explore ethical considerations using these brain–computer interfaces from an employee perspective.

Innovative technologies have gained popularity in recent years as a means of improving workers' general well-being at work. Among these exciting new technologies is virtual reality (VR). With a focus on enhancing individual performance, this chapter explores the application of VR as a human resource (HR) intervention to improve spirituality in the workplace. To offer a theoretical foundation for comprehending the possible effects of VR interventions on workplace spirituality, this chapter thoroughly evaluates the literature on mindfulness, quantum consciousness and workplace spirituality. By integrating VR technology with the ideas of these theoretical frameworks, HR professionals may create interventions that foster employee effectiveness, resilience and personal growth. It has also been suggested that HR managers employ VR mindfulness and meditation sessions, virtual retreats, values alignment workshops, empathy-building simulations and spiritual reflection spaces as practical VR interventions to enhance workplace spirituality. To illustrate the usefulness of VR in enhancing workplace spirituality, a few companies that have successfully implemented VR therapies are also cited. Lastly, the challenges and moral dilemmas associated with utilising VR to promote workplace spirituality have been examined. These include privacy difficulties, possible biases in VR content and the requirement for ongoing evaluation and feedback techniques. This chapter highlights how VR has the potential to be a game-changing tool for improving workplace spirituality and boosting individual effectiveness.