INTEGRITY, SUSTAINABILITY, AND INTELLECTUAL CAPITAL CHALLENGES IN MANAGEMENT EDUCATION IN THE ERA OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

This paper seeks to discuss challenges for management education and integrity capital promulgation in innovative ways in the era of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in education and business practice. The authors present some examples of innovative strategies in the new educational era characterized by globalized AI. How will the AI co-instruction affect the acquisition of intellectual capital? Building on previously published articles and ongoing new research, and maintaining that lack of sustainable management practices, corruption in management leads to social exclusion. The paper presents innovative methods of organization's ethics and integrity branding management in diverse organizations focusing on intellectual capital management and sustainability. It proposes that the facilitation of social inclusion can be considered an innovative approach in both business management and management education. It is an opening and invitation to further exploration for finding better means for management education, integrity competencies and intellectual capital, teaching, sharing in business and society in the era of AI in educational institutions and business organizations. In addition, it seeks to build corruption preventative contexts to construct corruption-free organizations that benefit their owners, shareholders, and community stakeholders. A particular focus is on higher educational institutions in this research.

Waste Management Reform In Regions Of The Russian Federation: Implementation Issues On The Way To Sustainable Development

Disposal of production and consumption waste is a worldwide problem. Despite the experience of foreign countries, waste disposal practice in the Russian Federation remains at the level of the 1970s. The method of waste burial at landfill sites prevails, leading to a loss of secondary resources and the appearance of sites of accumulated environmental damage, which is connected with the lack of a clear legal framework for waste management activities. Analysis of waste accumulation standards for apartment buildings in 20 regions of the Russian Federation showed that the difference in accumulation standards can vary by 2.32 times (from 0.125 m3 in the Kursk region to 0.279 m3 in the Voronezh region). At the same time, the difference in the cost of solid waste removal services can be varied by 2.74 times from 51.55 rubles in the Altai Territory (on average in the region) to 141.45 rubles in the Tyumen region. At the same time, the share of the population with incomes below the subsistence minimum in different regions reaches 7 - 36%. This is largely due to the critically low recovery of secondary materials (about 7%). The capacity of landfills in the regions of the European part of Russia (where more than 2/3 of the population lives) is almost exhausted. Many landfills of solid waste are objects of accumulated environmental damage. The decision to introduce the «institute» of “regional environmental operators”, which was adopted at the level of the Russian Federation to implement the waste management reform, has not, yet had any positive effect. Given the constant deficit of the consolidated budgets of most regions, the high level of poverty and the lack of state support, the prospects for waste management reform indicate the need for additional efforts on the part of the state, business and society

Stakeholder Engagement: Past, Present, and Future

Stakeholder engagement has grown into a widely used yet often unclear construct in business and society research. The literature lacks a unified understanding of the essentials of stakeholder engagement, and the fragmented use of the stakeholder engagement construct challenges its development and legitimacy. The purpose of this article is to clarify the construct of stakeholder engagement to unfold the full potential of stakeholder engagement research. We conduct a literature review on 90 articles in leading academic journals focusing on stakeholder engagement in the business and society, management and strategy, and environmental management and environmental policy literatures. We present a descriptive analysis of stakeholder engagement research for a 15-year period, and we identify the moral, strategic, and pragmatic components of stakeholder engagement as well as its aims, activities, and impacts. Moreover, we offer an inclusive stakeholder engagement definition and provide a guide to organizing the research. Finally, we complement the current understanding with a largely overlooked dark side of stakeholder engagement. We conclude with future research avenues for stakeholder engagement research.

Investigating Business Potential and Users’ Acceptance of Circular Economy: A Survey and an Evaluation Model

Circular economy is gaining attention in business and society to advance sustainability. This paradigm is particularly relevant for energy-consuming products such as washing machines, where alternatives to linear economy such as pay-per-use and refurbishment are gaining ground. To succeed, these business models should achieve consensus and acceptance among users. However, little attention has been paid to customers’ interest for circular economy business models so far. This paper aims to compare the economic and environmental impacts of pay-per wash and refurbishment business models, while investigating the degree of users’ acceptance and factors influencing it. A survey has been designed to collect users’ data regarding washing machine consumption patterns and acceptance rates of the circular business models. An evaluation model was developed to assess the economic and environmental impacts of pay-per-wash and refurbishment against a traditional linear model, fed with data from 279 Italian households collected through the survey. Finally, logistic regressions were carried out to investigate the influence of different customer, product, and usage factors on the acceptance rates of the two circular business models. Results show that, on average, pay-per-wash business models and washing machine refurbishment can guarantee environmental savings. However, only refurbishment generates economic savings for users. Moreover, only around half of the users’ sample shows a positive degree of acceptance of such alternatives. Respondent age has been found as a significant factor influencing the interest towards a refurbishment model, while the washing machine failures experienced by users and the relevance of the environmental gains achievable influence the acceptance rate of pay-per-wash models. Thus, when offering pay-per-wash schemes, suppliers should emphasize the information on the environmental benefits of this alternative, and that with such models they take over the responsibility and costs for maintenance and repair. On the other hand, providers of refurbished products should target younger consumers, who are less affected by a bias against second-hand goods.

Useful Servant or Dangerous Master? Technology in Business and Society Debates

This review argues that the role of technology in business and society debates has predominantly been examined from the limited, narrow perspective of technology as instrumental, and that two additional but relatively neglected perspectives are important: technology as value-laden and technology as relationally agentic. Technology has always been part of the relationship between business and society, for better and worse. However, as technological development is frequently advanced as a solution to many pressing societal problems and grand challenges, it is imperative that technology is understood and analyzed in a more nuanced, critical, and comprehensive way. The two additional perspectives invite a broader research agenda, one that includes questions, such as “Which values and whose interests has technology come to emulate?”; “How do these values and interests play out in stabilizing the status quo?”; and, importantly, “How can it be contested, disrupted, and changed?” Any research that endorses green, sustainable, environmental, or climate mitigating technologies potentially contributes to maintaining the very thing that it seeks to change if questions such as these are not being addressed.

Digital business model innovation: toward construct clarity and future research directions

In times of unprecedented change related to the ongoing digital transformation of business and society at large, a pressing contemporary management challenge is recognizing and translating these changes into digital business model innovation (DBMI). Academia potentially has much to offer in aiding this managerial challenge, yet research in the field remains vague with regard to what DBMI is. We detect conceptual ambiguity among scholars as a bottleneck that prevents advancements in the field of DBMI research. In this article, we aim to trace the foundation of key attributes of the DBMI concept and propose a novel definition. Our insights are based on a targeted, state-of-the-art literature review of 57 publications. We conclude with an exploration of avenues for future research, which we closely link to the broader fields of strategic management, information systems, and organization studies, thereby exposing the issue of DBMI to a wider audience. Overall, we aim to make a significant step toward construct clarity in DBMI research.

Understanding the Design Elements Affecting User Acceptance of Intelligent Agents: Past, Present and Future

Intelligent agents (IAs) are permeating both business and society. However, interacting with IAs poses challenges moving beyond technological limitations towards the human-computer interface. Thus, the knowledgebase related to interaction with IAs has grown exponentially but remains segregated and impedes the advancement of the field. Therefore, we conduct a systematic literature review to integrate empirical knowledge on user interaction with IAs. This is the first paper to examine 107 Information Systems and Human-Computer Interaction papers and identified 389 relationships between design elements and user acceptance of IAs. Along the independent and dependent variables of these relationships, we span a research space model encompassing empirical research on designing for IA user acceptance. Further we contribute to theory, by presenting a research agenda along the dimensions of the research space, which shall be useful to both researchers and practitioners. This complements the past and present knowledge on designing for IA user acceptance with potential pathways into the future of IAs.

Digital Literacy Training

The new information age technologies influence and shape the social and business life of individuals. Technological changes and their impact on business and society are also seen in cities, countries, and even on a global scale to use resources efficiently and to increase social welfare. As the internet is a fast and convenient communication tool, it is important to make correct decisions by distinguishing functional information while adapting to this change. In the process of digitalization, it is necessary to cooperate with libraries and other memory institutions to interact with digital cultural heritage in obsolete or inaccessible formats. From this point of view, the smart cities are seen as the reflections of digitalization on social life; then the difficulties and opportunities encountered in the process are mentioned in this chapter. In this way, information awareness which can directly affect the level of the ability to use information effectively is expected to increase in the digitalization process.

Promoting Sustainability through Corporate Social Responsibility

The current study aims to explore if effective corporate social responsibility leads to corporate sustainability in medium-sized manufacturing enterprises. Using the factors, an exploratory examination was performed to assess their suitability in Indian context and data was collected from 121 manufacturing companies using a structured questionnaire based on pretested scale and the proposed relationships were tested through partial least square structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM). The results show overall model fit, and empirical examinations support causal relationships between effective corporate social responsibility and corporate sustainability (CS). The results indicated that effective CSR mediated the relationships between corporate sustainability and integration of CSR into corporate policy and priority of the board towards CSR. The results of this study are useful for medium-sized enterprises to establish a formal approach towards CSR and meet the needs of business and society in the twenty-first century.