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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.

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 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.

Government incentives are critical for successful indigenous innovation commercialisation, yet there are concerns about the efficacy of these incentives. Therefore, this study examines the effectiveness of government incentives on successful indigenous innovation commercialisation in the context of low-income economies by testing the effects of demand and supply-side incentives on firm performance in the small-scale industry in Ghana.

The theoretical framework for this study is built on the below-the-radar theory of innovation (Kaplinsky et al., 2009). Using a sample of 557 firms engaged in commercialising various indigenous innovations in the small-scale industry in Ghana, PLS-SEM was deployed to assess 11 hypothesised paths based on a validated questionnaire.

The model results, at a 5% significance level, indicate that supply-side incentives are statistically insignificant on sales and profitability but have significant positive effects on employment. The direct and moderating influence of supply-side incentives and market factors on overall firm performance is also insignificant, while demand-side incentives to buyers have significant positive effects on all the performance metrics and positively moderate the effects of market factors.

The research focused on commercialising indigenous innovation in the context of low-income economies. Few studies, if any, have separately explored the effect of demand and supply-side government incentives on indigenous innovation in the context of low-income economies. The findings suggest that innovation support should focus more on the demand side of the innovation value chain.

This study aims to explore how witnessing a hospitality employee mistreating a customer impacts observers’ revenge-seeking behavior, directed not only at the offending employee but also at innocent employees.

This study conducts four online experiments to test the proposed relationships involving 881 UK adults.

Observing hospitality employees mistreating customers prompts observers to view the guilty employee as harmful, triggering revenge-seeking behavior. This perception of harmfulness also extends to innocent employees, leading observers to seek revenge against them. However, empowering fellow customers during the recovery process reduces observers’ intent to seek revenge against both guilty and innocent employees. In addition, the results reveal the black sheep effect, where shared group membership between the observing customer and the guilty employee results in harsher punishment for the latter, particularly when the mistreatment targets an out-group customer.

The findings offer practical guidance for hospitality companies on how observers’ perceptions of employees can reshape service evaluations and influence restorative approaches. Service recovery efforts should extend beyond directly affected customers to include those who witnessed the incident.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to explain how observers appraise the mistreatment of fellow customers and how this influences their perceptions and revenge-seeking behavior toward both guilty and innocent employees.

In today’s competitive era, it has become significant for companies to understand their end consumer and target customers effectively. One of the ways to accomplish this goal is data-driven marketing. The current study seeks to explore the differences between traditional marketing and digital marketing, the pros and cons of data-driven marketing and usage of artificial intelligence (AI) in data-driven marketing. The research objective was met by exploration of published papers in the past 10 years covering the evolution of data-driven marketing, functions of data engineering, application of technology like AI in data-driven marketing and opportunities and challenges. This study is significant as it provides the insight into the relationship between marketing and data engineering and thus helps marketers to frame strategies by leveraging data-driven marketing to improve consumer experience and gain a competitive edge. Moreover, this study is an interdisciplinary study including marketing, engineering and data science. This study focusses on use of innovative methods to improve profitability of business and consumer experience.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a comprehensive understanding of workplace spirituality's (WPS) past, present and future by conducting a systematic literature review over the past 15 years, tracing its emergence in the managerial landscape and identifying the research gaps.

A PRISMA framework is used to systematically analyse 58 empirical studies categorised according to the ABDC journal quality list and published between 2009 and 2024. Furthermore, this review highlights the key trends, methodological approaches, dimensions explored, geographic distribution, research themes and the existing research gaps. Additionally, the Theory, Context, Characteristics and Methodology framework emphasises critical theoretical perspectives, contextual factors, distinguishing characteristics and methodological approaches that can shape future research in WPS.

The review revealed the global interest in WPS’s positive organisational impacts, supported by rigorous empirical studies and advanced statistical methods. Furthermore, this research highlights a significant gap in exploring WPS antecedents, suggesting a need for future studies to examine the factors contributing to WPS’s development and enhancement within organisational settings.

This study focuses on the Scopus database and English-language papers, deliberately excluding other sources such as unpublished work, books and non-empirical articles. Consequently, this study may need to look at some relevant studies.

This study is original in its systematic approach to review the literature on WPS, categorising the empirical articles according to established quality lists and applying the Theory, Context, Characteristics and Methodology framework to identify future research directions. This paper offers a holistic understanding of WPS and provides valuable insights for researchers and practitioners in this evolving field.