Editorial: Finance, management, and society in an era of transformation: a research agenda for the future

Purpose: Over the past 40 years, theoretical and empirical studies that investigate the relationship between information and communication technologies and development have accumulated under the name of ‘ICT for Development’. This paper critically reconstructs the historical evolution of this field, summarizes the theoretical debates, and proposes the direction and key conceptual questions to be explored beyond the existing ICT4D paradigm in the era of digital transformation. Originality: ICTs have received spotlight as an innovative tool for providing catch-up and leapfrogging opportunities for developing countries, reducing the transaction cost in development mechanism and increasing individual capability. Despite large investments and high expectations for technologies, its effectiveness for development has been questionable, and the large gap between theories and empirical findings have been criticized. Moreover, the wake of the pandemic has called for digital transformation to become a global agenda, providing a turning point for the ICT4D field. Therefore, it is timely to provide reflections on the major theoretical frameworks and critically review the historical evolution of the fields. Methodology: This study conducts a thematic qualitative analysis based on the proceedings of the IFIP ‘Implications of Information and Digital Technologies for Development’ and ICTD conferences, providing methodological triangulation by diverse primary data sources including participant observation in the program committees. Result: This study provides a historical overview of the ICT4D field broken down into five phases: 1) Emergence, 2) Formation, 3) Expansion, 4) Diffusion and 5) Digital Transformation. It also critically reconstructs conceptual evolution and research contributions of the main studies. This is followed by a discussion of future research agenda, emphasis on multi-disciplinarity and reconceptualization of the field. Conclusions and Implication: Existing research have dominantly been conducted at the micro-level unit of analysis, applying an interpretivist epistemological approach and focusing on system as a technological artefact. In the era of digital transformation, it is inevitable for the mainstream view to incorporate theoretical, methodological, and contextual pluralism. This will also have implications for Korea’s international development cooperation, which lacks critical empirical research and philosophical debate despite high expectations for science, technology and ICT ODA.

At the 2005 annual conference of the Program in Early American Economy and Society (PEAES), entitled Connection, Contingency, and Class, distinguished scholars brought their formidable intellectual energy to a discussion about economic development during the first two generations of the early republic.1 As conference participants quickly realized, our conceptualizations of the American economy from 1815 to 1850 have shifted considerably in recent years. Current work incorporates a more expansive set of concerns than those investigated by previous generations, including the pace and character of the era's economic change, concerns about unemployment and foreign immigration, the meanings of goods in shops and homes, the volume of ships passing through the nation's harbors, the exchange activities of Native Americans and their relations with the aggressive frontier settlers who had become their neighbors, the networks of rural exchange, the configurations of slave economies, and more. Economic historians have also joined the chorus echoing more broadly throughout the historical profession to reframe familiar narratives and reinterpret familiar evidence by asking new questions, especially under the recent pervasive influence of cultural studies.2The historians whose articles appear in this special issue ask us to consider some venerable, but still vital, questions in light of such refraining and reinterpreting: How did household, farm, and craft production change in the early decades of the nineteenth century? How did Americans reconcile elements of an emergent capitalist system with slavery or the marginality of many free laborers? How did people in local communities understand world markets? How did they understand the value or usefulness of the most mundane objects in their everyday lives? Other equally expansive framing questions have led to stimulating new avenues of inquiry. Did Americans' predictions of abundance, anticipations of manufacturing growth, and hopes for commercial expansion run ahead of their potential to realize them? Were detractors who feared the pace of change and the era's reckless speculation expressing legitimate concerns about the increasingly dire economic condition of numerous Americans, or were they retrograde curmudgeons? What balance existed between the impulses to have more-more proprietorships, more real estate development and banking, more market connections-and the advantages of restraining and regulating the opportunities and material benefits in a swiftly changing economy? Who succeeded, who failed, and why? What is success, and what is failure?Modern scholars risk being blinded by the apparent evidence of the early republic's economic changes. It takes considerable effort, for example, to resist the tendency to look for in the early republic's economy, or to organize significant clusters of economic change under the rubric of revolution-including those of the consumer, political, transportation, market, and industrial varieties, in roughly that chronological sequence. But, increasingly, such transitions and revolutions seem inadequate for managing the cumbersome, often contradictory, bodies of evidence that freight our stories of the past, and so too do concepts such as authority, national identity, and capitalism. The themes of connection, contingency, and class offered conference presenters, commentators, and audience participants the opportunity to reach broadly and creatively across this transformative era, thereby revitalizing research agendas about the early republic.However we label the early republic's patterns of economic development, the narratives we construct must be rooted in the particular lives of countless Americans who chose to pursue or avoid one or another economic activity for a host of reasons that sit uneasily with the general trajectories of change historians have proposed. During the conference it became clear that scholarly generalizations about the American economy during this era could not be swiftly and decisively refuted by particularities of historical analysis or the specific ways that our historical subjects operated in their households and shops, pursued opportunities or heeded constraints, or perceived their economic circumstances in relation to the people around them. …

Between 1900 and 1956, women increased from a small proportion of public company stockholders in the U.S. to the majority. In fact, by the 1929 stock market crash, women stockholders outnumbered men at some of America’s largest and most influential public companies, including AT&T, General Electric, and the Pennsylvania Railroad. This Article makes an original contribution to corporate law, business history, women’s history, socio-economics, and the study of capitalism by synthesizing information from a range of historical sources to reveal a forgotten and overlooked narrative of history, the feminization of capital—the transformation of American public company stockholders from majority-male to majority-female in the first half of the twentieth century, before the rise of institutional investing obscured the gender politics of corporate control. Corporate law scholarship has never before acknowledged that the early decades of the twentieth century, a transformational era in corporate law and theory, coincided with a major change in the gender of the stockholder class. Scholars have not considered the possibility that the sex of common stockholders, which was being tracked internally at companies, disclosed in annual reports, and publicly reported in the financial press, might have influenced business leaders’ views about corporate organization and governance. This Article considers the implications of this history for some of the most important ideas in corporate law theory, including the “separation of ownership and control,” shareholder “passivity,” stakeholderism, and board representation. It argues that early-twentieth-century gender politics helped shape foundational ideas of corporate governance theory, especially ideas concerning the role of shareholders. Outlining a research agenda where history intersects with corporate law’s most vital present-day problems, the Article lays out the evidence and invites the corporate law discipline to begin a conversation about gender, power, and the evolution of corporate law.

In this Era of digitalization and digital transformation, both Information Technology (IT) and Information Systems (IS) have become vital resources for organizations. IT/IS support organizations to effectively respond to evolving business needs and emerging opportunities, enhancing their competitiveness. Therefore, the success of today’s organizations is almost totally dependent on their IS. Organizations need to have a capable IS Function (ISF) to tackle the challenges and responsibilities of the IT/IS. Considering its importance, a scoping literature review was performed to characterize the state of the art of the research focused on the ISF. The results provide a comprehensive picture of the research's key themes: ISF capability, ISF structure changes, ISF performance, ISF contributions, ISF transformation, ISF maturity, ISF and the organization, and others. Directions for research are provided according to these same themes.

The integration of smart technologies into everyday life has raised significant questions about their role in fostering sustainability and shaping consumer behavior. This study presents a comprehensive systematic literature review to explore the intersection of smart technologies, sustainability, and consumerism, motivated by increasing academic fragmentation across these domains. We employ a systematic review of 192 articles that combines the Theory–Context–Characteristics–Methodology (TCCM) framework with Probabilistic Topic Modeling (PTM). This dual method enables a synthesis of theoretical, contextual, and empirical developments in the field. The findings reveal dominant themes, evolving research trends, and underexplored areas, particularly in consumer‐centric adoption and sustainability‐centric outcomes. This contributes to the literature by offering two conceptual frameworks that integrate insights across sectors and highlight behavioral and sectoral dynamics in technology adoption. The study identifies theoretical blind spots, practical implications across industries, and proposes an agenda for future research in the era of digital and sustainable transformation.

Digital transformation revolutionises the way people work not only in office settings but also in physical work settings such as manufacturing or construction. New ways of combining digital and physical innovations and intensified inter-organisational collaborations are key characteristics for success. Knowledge sharing becomes increasingly important, but its inter-organisational nature and the blurring of organisational boundaries create new challenges for the protection of knowledge. Existing research on knowledge protection mostly focuses on single organisations or on dyadic relationships. Complex sharing arrangements and especially sharing in networks has received little attention so far. This paper presents a literature review, integrating the perspectives of the base domains of knowledge, strategy, innovation, and information security management with the goal to identify knowledge protection requirements in the era of digital transformation. Five avenues for future research on knowledge protection to support organisations coping with challenges imposed by digital transformation are presented.

Agile supply chain management: where did it come from and where will it go in the era of digital transformation?

This discussion centres on the growing impact of the transformation to digitalisation in various industry sectors. Enterprises seek to engage individuals who possess an appropriate profile to fulfil vacancies or new positions to assist in the transformation endeavour. Traditional job descriptions are replaced by the need for agile technical skills, project management competencies, and critical thinking. Challenges increase proportionally to the local employment rate. To evaluate such an impact, a project has been established to determine the reaction of employers once confronted with the lack of same-culture candidates. This manuscript represents the first phase of the project wherein the status quo is documented through an analysis of the extant literature. The findings of this exercise then serve as a benchmark from which survey results will be monitored. Although the literature review does not dispel all Czech stereotypes, it does provide a more realistic image of Czech cultural traits and characteristics.

In a country such as Saudi Arabia where gender equality-related challenges continue to be social issues, measuring the health empowerment of Saudi working women is critical in understanding the real picture of women empowerment in the country during this era of great transformation. Therefore, we conducted this research to evaluate psychometric properties of the Health Empowerment Scale Arabic version (HES-A) in measuring the health empowerment of Saudi working women. We surveyed a sample of 322 Saudi working women from June to August 2020 using an online survey constituting questions on demographic and work-related information and the HES-A. The computed values for the item-level content validity index of the 8 scale items were from .80 and 1.00, whereas the computed value of the scale-level content validity index by average method was .91. The principal component and confirmatory factor analyses revealed a unidimentional scale. The computation revealed an alpha of .92. Education, type of employment, years of working experience, and salary were identified as significant factors influencing the health empowerment. The HES-A exhibited adequate validity and internal consistency for use in measuring the health empowerment of Saudi women. The HES-A can expand the research agenda on health empowerment Arab women. Researchers and policymakers could use the HES-A in assessing the status of health empowerment of Arabic-speaking women, which could inform policies and interventions aimed at ensuring health empowered women in this part of the globe.

Legacy corporate governance has long been based on the “closed system” framework that is focused on the idea of aligning the interests of managers (agents) and shareholders (principals) through internal and external mechanisms and practices. The more recent “open system” approach to governance seems potentially more helpful to align different stakeholders when companies need to strategize and execute strategy in the new realities of openness, interdependencies, dynamism, and fluidity brought forward by digital technology diffusion and use. We build on the “open system” approach and introduce the idea of a “open source” approach to corporate governance. This framework builds on two core principles: (a) the need of systematically increasing complementarities among internal and external stakeholders in both governance and strategy; and (b) the need for purposely balancing short-term compliance and long-term legitimacy among broader groups of the firm’s stakeholders. A key part of open-source governance is associated with a reliance on “strategic” rather than “financial controls” within the firm’s governance mechanism. We claim that these changes are needed if boards are to remain relevant and effective. We highlight a research agenda to develop the open-source corporate governance approach further.

Earth is experiencing widespread ecological transformation in terrestrial, freshwater, and marine ecosystems that is attributable to directional environmental changes, especially intensifying climate change. To better steward ecosystems facing unprecedented and lasting change, a new management paradigm is forming, supported by a decision-oriented framework that presents three distinct management choices: resist, accept, or direct the ecological trajectory. To make these choices strategically, managers seek to understand the nature of the transformation that could occur if change is accepted while identifying opportunities to intervene to resist or direct change. In this article, we seek to inspire a research agenda for transformation science that is focused on ecological and social science and based on five central questions that align with the resist–accept–direct (RAD) framework. Development of transformation science is needed to apply the RAD framework and support natural resource management and conservation on our rapidly changing planet.

As a result of the rapid growth of urban populations and use of smartphones, the new millennium has ushered in an age of unprecedented levels of collaborative and competitive local and global relations, constantly reshaped by advances in science, public policy, technology platforms, and open practices. The dynamic nature of these open innovation-oriented relationships is not sufficiently incorporated into and addressed by conventional education systems. Today’s digital talents are still primarily siloed in functions and disciplines that were designed to meet the needs of an earlier era. Current rewards and incentives are also focused along these lines. Consequently, traditional academics are encouraged to delve deeper within their areas of specialization rather than reach out to colleagues in other disciplines to develop transdisciplinary research agendas. Across all sectors, the new digital millennium requires new types of professionals and work practices as well as new types of citizens and social practices. To help people be successful in this dynamic environment of rapidly changing smart service systems, should the education systems of the future encourage hyperspecialization, hyperflexibility, or something else? In this commentary, we make the case for an education system that encourages the development of T-shaped digital professionals and citizens—future-ready innovators who uniquely combine specialization (critical thinking and problem-solving depth) and flexibility (empathy, breadth of knowledge, skills, experience, and complex communication abilities) and who also use smart machines as assistants. This combination of personal capabilities allows for rapid formation of high-performance teams working in open innovation environments to build smarter service systems.

PurposeQuality 4.0 (Q4.0) is related to quality management in the era of Industry 4.0 (I4.0). In particular, it concentrates on digital techniques used to improve organizational capabilities and ensure the delivery of the best quality products and services to its customer. The aim of this research to examine the vital elements for the Q4.0 implementation.Design/methodology/approachA review of the literature was carried out to analyze past studies in this emerging research field.FindingsThis research identified ten factors that contribute to the successful implementation of Q4.0. The key factors are (1) data, (2) analytics, (3) connectivity, (4) collaboration, (5) development of APP, (6) scalability, (7) compliance, (8) organization culture, (9) leadership and (10) training for Q4.0.Originality/valueAs a result of the research, a new understanding of factors of successful implementation of Q4.0 in the digital transformation era can assist firms in developing new ways to implement Q4.0.

Despite the rising potential of the Digital Intelligence (DI) emerging concept for practitioners, only a few research studies have considered its contribution to the enterprise digital transformation. Due to its novelty, the scope, application domains, and main research themes of DI are still unclear to date. Through a Systematic Literature Review (SLR), we analyzed relevant academic literature and tentatively identified major research areas to facilitate the understanding and study of DI in the digital transformation era. The results have shown that DI is at an early stage of research and investigation. To fill the gap between theory and practice, we have proposed a research agenda of DI with several perspectives.

This paper identifies skills required for workers in Industry 4.0 in France and provides insights to guide the development of a future research agenda. The research draws on a bibliometric analysis of 80 papers, mapping the technical and interpersonal skills needed for professionals to adapt and thrive in the evolving industrial landscape. The results highlight the importance of a multidisciplinary approach integrating competences in information technology, automation, robotics, artificial intelligence, data analysis, project management, interpersonal skills, adaptability, and collaboration. This holistic approach to skills development reveals six major domains: Technical, Flexibility, Inter-Agency, Soft Skills, Innovation, and Information Technology. The conclusions emphasize that the interconnection between these domains is essential to prepare a workforce capable of meeting the challenges and seizing the opportunities of Industry 4.0 in France. The research shows that there is a need for a multidisciplinary and integrated approach that combines technical and interpersonal skills in Industry 4.0 activities. It provides a solid foundation for formulating talent development strategies and educational curricula aligned with the demands of Industry 4.0. By proposing a future research agenda, this study not only highlights key areas for further exploration—economic impact, public innovation policies, and curriculum adaptation—but also contributes to the evolution of human resources in the digital transformation era.