Interdisciplinary Research Agenda Research Articles

Gender diversity and financial sustainability in professional football: a competitive strategy and proposed interdisciplinary research agenda

ABSTRACT There is a strong body of work in the financial corporate governance realm that analyses the impact of gender diversity on financial sustainability and suggests commercial implications of the inclusion of women in decision-making. Sport governance research has yet to consider the financial benefits of greater gender diversity and the research pool of knowledge is predominantly focused on skills benefits. This commentary offers a brief summary of the business and sport governance literature and proposes an interdisciplinary research agenda that aligns financial and diversity aims. A wider research pool of knowledge around the impact of diversity in governance on football clubs is recommended. Research in this area can support football executives’ understanding of increasing gender diversity (on boards and in other areas) as a form of competitive advantage and financial sustainability.

Exploring the social implications of buying and selling cyber security

Governments, businesses, private citizens and even organised crime are increasingly investing in cyber security, with the cyber security industry growing in size and relevance. This paper demonstrates that markets for the buying and selling of cyber security should be subject to many of the same critical inquiries typically targeted at the private security industry. Using a number of illustrative examples of emerging trends in the commodification of cyber security it will be highlighted how these markets create significant social impacts and present similar dilemmas of democracy, justice, sovereignty, and deleterious side-effects for wider society. Key conceptual differences between cyber security commodities and ‘conventional’ security commodities will also be considered before arguing for an inter-disciplinary research agenda into the considerable social implications of the buying and selling of cyber security commodities.

Esports Scholarship Review: Synthesis, Contributions, and Future Research

Esports, or competitive video gaming competitions, bring together aspects of sports, business, leisure, technology, and digital media, appealing to academics across multiple disciplines. Yet, esports scholarship remains highly fragmented, with scholars operating within traditional academic silos and forgoing opportunities to build on esports’ interdisciplinary nature. The purpose of this integrative review is to synthesize esports scholarship from across disciplines, identify critical scholarly issues, and develop a pragmatic, interdisciplinary research agenda. We find that extant esports scholarship is categorized by literature seeking to conceptualize and legitimize esports via sport parallels, with a focus on the consumers and culture of esports. Scholarly issues include researchers examining esports in their respective academic silos, omitting opportunities to connect conceptually similar streams of literature. Overall, we synthesize esports scholarship, bridge chasms between disjointed streams of literature, and outline a pragmatic research agenda which could benefit from interdisciplinary inquiries based on a shared understanding of esports.

Framing water as a financial risk: Reviewing the processes shaping a narrative

AbstractWater is increasingly framed as a financial risk in equity markets. This article illustrates that this framing must be understood as a new aspect of the wider history of the financialization of the water sector. Unlike earlier instances, where water‐related services, or water risks are the primary subjects to be financialized, water itself is here being reformed to fit market logic. This article reviews, unpacks, and analyses the factors that have enabled, reframed, and defined water as a financial risk. As such, the article goes beyond simply reviewing what has happened, but also presents a critical analysis of why and how, and the potential effects this may have. Drawing on advanced theoretical perspectives from the social sciences, specifically building on the constitutive nature of language, the role of expertise in the knowledge‐policy interface, and the sociology of quantification, it proposes that the reframing of water into a financial risk is not a value‐free exercise. Critically, it shows that the value of water, at least as it relates to company activities, could be reduced to only embody those aspects which, in quantitative terms can be shown to affect Return on Investment. To alleviate this reductive process, an ambitious multi‐ and interdisciplinary research agenda must be developed moving forward to ensure that the multiple values of water are recognized and accounted for in equity markets and beyond.This article is categorized under: Human Water > Value of Water Human Water > Water Governance

Does green growth foster green policies? Value chain upgrading and feedback mechanisms on renewable energy policies

The expansion of renewable energies not only lowers carbon emissions, it also redistributes resources among actors. This article argues that green industrialization – specifically, manufacturing and the development of renewable energy technologies — creates economic gains that impact political processes and increase renewable energy policy ambition. Building on a combined framework of policy feedback and global value chain literature, we see domestic value creation as a key determinant of coalition strength and learning effects for policymakers. We analyze the relationship of value chain involvement to policy ambition using panel data on countries’ manufacturing and innovation activities in the wind and solar industry from 2010 to 2018. The results show a positive technology policy feedback mechanism, implying that higher local value creation leads to more ambitious renewable energy policies. These first large-N findings support previous case studies on the importance of green growth for raising policy ambition; it implies that transformative policies fostering value creation could create a virtuous cycle for policy ambition. We further propose an interdisciplinary research agenda to shed light on the role of value chain dynamics for policy feedback mechanisms across different political economies.

The polarized mind in context: Interdisciplinary approaches to the psychology of political polarization.

Existing research into the psychological roots of political polarization centers around two main approaches: one studying cognitive traits that predict susceptibility to holding polarized beliefs and one studying contextual influences that spread and reinforce polarized attitudes. Although both accounts have made valuable progress, political polarization is neither a purely cognitive trait nor a contextual issue. We argue that a new approach aiming to uncover interactions between cognition and context will be fruitful for understanding how polarization arises. Furthermore, recent developments in neuroimaging methods can overcome long-standing issues of measurement and ecological validity to critically help identify in which psychological processing steps-e.g., attention, semantic understanding, emotion-polarization takes hold. This interdisciplinary research agenda can thereby provide new avenues for interventions against the political polarization that plagues democracies around the world. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Environmental Finance: An Interdisciplinary Review

• We provide a systematic review of environmental finance. • Environmental finance research has experienced significant growth in recent years. • Current main research streams are identified and reviewed. • Emerging research themes are proposed and analyzed. • We provide an interdisciplinary research agenda for environmental finance. Environmental finance has gained considerable attention globally as an emerging interdisciplinary research area. This study uses bibliometric analysis to systematically review major studies on environmental finance-related areas published since the 1970s. Through a bibliometric analysis of 892 environmental finance-related articles sourced from the Web of Science database, we identified the main research streams and illustrated the trending research themes of environmental finance. We find that publications related to environmental finance have increased exponentially over the past decade. Current research streams include corporate and social responsibility (CSR), climate negotiations, natural gas price volatility, national policy, and cost comparisons. Further analysis of the recent five years of literature shows that emerging research topics include climate finance, sustainable finance, firm value, climate risk, and green bonds. Finally, we conclude with a future research agenda for environmental finance.

Arctic Connectivity: A Frugal Approach to Infrastructural Development

As the Arctic is heating up, so are efforts to strengthen connectivity within the region, enhance the connections from remote settlements to the global networks of trade, and increase sociality. With global interest in the Arctic on the rise, it becomes increasingly relevant to ensure that investments in Arctic infrastructure actually serve the people of the Arctic, while promoting industrial and commercial innovation in the region through widespread access to broadband and Internet of things (IoT) services. This challenge calls for interdisciplinary research strategies that are able to connect and integrate technological and societal approaches, which are commonly applied in isolation from one another. In this article, we propose an interdisciplinary collaborative research agenda for Arctic connectivity. Drawing on examples from Greenland, we stress the need for localized knowledge to design valuable and cost-effective connectivity solutions that cover the needs for everyday life and may also provide a new set of collaborative connectivity tools for innovation at an international level. Such solutions, termed “frugal connectivity,” are vital for the development of connected Arctic communities.

The design of subsidized housing: towards an interdisciplinary and cross-national research agenda

Comparative housing studies traditionally focus on housing systems and social or economic policy, only rarely considering design issues. Through an examination of subsidized housing and its design in 20 countries, this paper explores how design research can benefit cross-national housing studies. Subsidized housing is essential to delivering decent and affordable homes, underpinning the right to housing. To relate design dimensions to housing systems, the analytical focus is on regulatory instruments, technical standards, and socio-spatial practices as well as housing providers, tenures, and target groups. Design research benefits the contextualization of housing systems and design outcomes in several ways. It reveals the contextual and contingent nature of regulatory cultures and instruments, socio-technical norms and standards, and socio-cultural expectations and practices that shape housing solutions. The paper concludes by considering productive ways architectural design research might contribute to an interdisciplinary housing research agenda by offering new means of theorization and analysis beyond traditional housing system typologies.

Market power and sustainability: a new research agenda

Perfectly operating markets only exist in theory. Market failures are known to not only inhibit the proper functioning of the market, but also affect sustainability and thus a sustainability transition. In this regard, much attention has been paid to externalities or missing markets, even though these are not the only market failures. In this paper, we argue that market power and its relationship with sustainability has been neglected, despite the fact that, back in 1931, Hotelling indicated the connection between the two concepts. However, research that has been dealing with this connection has not been comprehensive and has only looked at one aspect of sustainability and market power. Due to the rising relevance of market power as well as of sustainability concerns, the connection between the two deserves thorough attention. Accordingly, we propose initiating a new interdisciplinary research agenda to comprehensively analyze the complex relationship between market power and sustainability.

What is that I hear? An interdisciplinary review and research agenda for non‐native accents in the workplace

SummarySpeaking with a non‐native English accent at work is a prevalent global phenomenon. Yet, our understanding of the impact of having a non‐native accent at work is limited, in part because research on accents has been multidisciplinary, fragmented, and difficult for scholars to access and synthesize. To advance research on accents in the workplace, we provide an interdisciplinary and integrative review of research on non‐native accents drawing from the communications, social psychology, and organizational sciences literatures. First, we briefly review the dominant approaches taken in each literature. Second, we organize and integrate extant research findings using a 2 × 2 framework that incorporates the two main theoretical perspectives used to explain the effects of accents—stereotypes and processing fluency—and the two primary categories of workplace outcomes examined—interpersonal (i.e., others' evaluations of speakers with non‐native accents, such as hiring recommendations) and intrapersonal (i.e., non‐native‐accented speakers' own evaluations and experiences, such as sense of belonging). To facilitate future research, we end by articulating a research agenda including theoretical and methodological expansions related to the study of accents, identifying critical moderators, adopting an intersectional approach, and studying group‐level and potential positive effects of speaking with non‐native accents.

Exploiting patent knowledge in engineering design: a cognitive basis for remodeling patent documents

The worldwide patent database remains one of the least utilized resources in engineering design practice. Analyzing individual patent documents may be particularly challenging. Emerging computational approaches may soon enable us to automatically remodel the information content of patent documents to make them easier to read. For these approaches to be effective in practice, there is an urgent need to understand how design engineers process multimedia documents and how best to present information to them. To this end, we model the cognitive processes involved in patent analysis in terms of two models: the TRACE model of goal-directed document processing, and the Cognitive Theory of Multimedia learning (CTML). These models provide a cognitive basis for understanding the difficulties that designers may face during patent analysis. It also facilitates the identification and testing of information design principles that can be used to remodel patent documents to make them easier to search and comprehend. By testing these principles, our goal is to establish requirements for a new generation of patent analytics tools that are consistent with the ways that engineering designers think. This work introduces a new interdisciplinary research agenda, bringing together research about engineering design, patent analytics, multimedia learning, document search, and information design.

Linking the Robo-advisors Phenomenon and Behavioural Biases in Investment Management: An Interdisciplinary Literature Review and Research Agenda


 
 
 Technological advancements bring continuous changes into the investment industry. The paper aims to provide insights on future research agenda based on a review of the current stance of research on the links between the Robo-advisors phenomenon and behavioural biases of individual investors. A qualitative investigation method has been applied for literature review on Robo-advisors and their impact on behavioural biases.
 The key findings indicate that Robo-advisors can help users to make better informed and less biased decisions. However, Robo-advisors activate the investors’ automatic system processes. The resulting passive investment approach could lead to alienation of the investors from the stock market, decreasing their understanding of the investment process that could widen a gap between different clusters of investors.
 The paper makes several contributions to the literature. First, it provides arguments on why a dual process theoretical framework in the relationship between financial advisory and investment behavioural biases is applicable. Second, it studies the Robo-advisor phenomenon and proposes a comprehensive definition of Robo-advisors. Third, the literature review suggests drivers of the Robo-advisors effect on the changes of behavioural biases as a future research direction.
 
 

Integrating Insights About Human Movement Patterns From Digital Data Into Psychological Science

Understanding people’s movement patterns has many important applications, from analyzing habits and social behaviors, to predicting the spread of disease. Information regarding these movements and their locations is now deeply embedded in digital data generated via smartphones, wearable sensors, and social-media interactions. Research has largely used data-driven modeling to detect patterns in people’s movements, but such approaches are often devoid of psychological theory and fail to capitalize on what movement data can convey about associated thoughts, feelings, attitudes, and behavior. This article outlines trends in current research in this area and discusses how psychologists can better address theoretical and methodological challenges in future work while capitalizing on the opportunities that digital movement data present. We argue that combining approaches from psychology and data science will improve researchers’ and policy makers’ abilities to make predictions about individuals’ or groups’ movement patterns. At the same time, an interdisciplinary research agenda will provide greater capacity to advance psychological theory.

AGR4BS: A Generic Multi-Agent Organizational Model for Blockchain Systems

Blockchain is a very attractive technology since it maintains a public, append-only, immutable and ordered log of transactions which guarantees an auditable ledger accessible by anyone. Blockchain systems are inherently interdisciplinary since they combine various fields such as cryptography, multi-agent systems, distributed systems, social systems, economy, and finance. Furthermore, they have a very active and dynamic ecosystem where new blockchain platforms and algorithms are developed continuously due to the interest of the public and the industries to the technology. Consequently, we anticipate a challenging and interdisciplinary research agenda in blockchain systems, built upon a methodology that strives to capture the rich process resulting from the interplay between the behavior of agents and the dynamic interactions among them. To be effective, however, modeling studies providing insights into blockchain systems, and appropriate description of agents paired with a generic understanding of their components are needed. Such studies will create a more unified field of blockchain systems that advances our understanding and leads to further insight. According to this perspective, in this study, we propose using a generic multi-agent organizational modeling for studying blockchain systems, namely AGR4BS. Concretely, we use the Agent/Group/Role (AGR) organizational modeling approach to identify and represent the generic entities which are common to blockchain systems. We show through four real case studies how this generic model can be used to model different blockchain systems. We also show briefly how it can be used for modeling three well-known attacks on blockchain systems.

Basic income, cognitive capacity, and the workplace: The role of I-O psychology in the interdisciplinary research agenda to reduce poverty

Basic income, cognitive capacity, and the workplace: The role of I-O psychology in the interdisciplinary research agenda to reduce poverty

Future directions for chatbot research: an interdisciplinary research agenda

Chatbots are increasingly becoming important gateways to digital services and information—taken up within domains such as customer service, health, education, and work support. However, there is only limited knowledge concerning the impact of chatbots at the individual, group, and societal level. Furthermore, a number of challenges remain to be resolved before the potential of chatbots can be fully realized. In response, chatbots have emerged as a substantial research area in recent years. To help advance knowledge in this emerging research area, we propose a research agenda in the form of future directions and challenges to be addressed by chatbot research. This proposal consolidates years of discussions at the CONVERSATIONS workshop series on chatbot research. Following a deliberative research analysis process among the workshop participants, we explore future directions within six topics of interest: (a) users and implications, (b) user experience and design, (c) frameworks and platforms, (d) chatbots for collaboration, (e) democratizing chatbots, and (f) ethics and privacy. For each of these topics, we provide a brief overview of the state of the art, discuss key research challenges, and suggest promising directions for future research. The six topics are detailed with a 5-year perspective in mind and are to be considered items of an interdisciplinary research agenda produced collaboratively by avid researchers in the field.

Climate change reception studies in anthropology

AbstractThe past decade has seen increased anthropological attention to understandings of climate change not only as a biophysical phenomenon but also as a discourse that is traveling from international policy making platforms to the rest of the planet. The analysis of the uptake of climate change discourse falls under the emergent subfield of climate change reception studies. A few anthropological investigations identify themselves explicitly as reception studies; others only mention the term with little explanation. Our review discusses a fuller range of anthropological studies and ethnographies from related disciplines that treat climate change as a discursive reality, which is not independent from how it is intimated through close observations of the environment. The following themes emerged: language and expertise; place and vulnerability; modernity, morality, and temporality; alterity and refusal. The review suggests that the interaction of observation and reception is still not well understood, and that there is scope for more systematic methodological and theoretical synthesis, taking lessons into account from geographies of reading and empirical hermeneutics. By exploring the hermeneutical problem of upholding scientific integrity while being open to other ways of knowing, climate change reception studies' emancipatory potential lie in opening up knowledge spaces for multi‐directional and democratic approaches to living (with) climate change. In closing, we propose an interdisciplinary research agenda highlighting the potential generativity of translation as an idiom for theory and praxis relating to how people come to know climate (change)—through both perceptual engagement with the natural world and interpretations of discursive manifestations.This article is categorized under: Social Status of Climate Change Knowledge > Sociology/Anthropology of Climate Knowledge

Advancing energy and well-being research

Energy and climate change mitigation analysis rooted in economic relationships alone is largely disconnected from the advancement of well-being. We propose an interdisciplinary research agenda that relates energy use to individual well-being through consumption by building bridges between the social sciences, energy–economic models and climate policy analysis. Through these linkages, we may better characterize the potential for less harmful and more meaningful consumption that improves human well-being while reducing carbon emissions. Research on energy and climate change mitigation is disconnected from the advancement of well-being. This Perspective proposes to relate energy use to individual well-being through consumption by bridging across social sciences, energy–economic models and climate policy analysis.

From Mao to McDonaldization? Assessing the rationalisation of health care in China.

China's 2009 health care reform agenda has been referred to as one of the most ambitious health policy programmes in modern history. Significant investment has combined with new structures, incentives, and regulations that have aimed to improve access, as well as gain greater control over a health care market much criticised for putting profit before patients. A range of health services research has been undertaken to analyse these efforts. Sociological perspectives have also been documented yet up to now a review and synthesis combining these various contributions has not been undertaken. By drawing on the lens of McDonaldization, the paper presents a narrative review that analyses the extent to which China's 2009 reform agenda has increased efficiency, calculability, predictability, and control over service provision. The review identifies elements of McDonaldization within China's 2009 reform agenda, however, notable gaps remain. In response to the limits of McDonaldization as a lens for understanding China's health care reform, the paper calls for alternative perspectives that are better able to understand the sociocultural dynamics shaping service provision, as well as an interdisciplinary research agenda that is able to generate new insights and understanding regarding health care in China.