Unveiling the Smart City Concept: Perspectives from an Emerging Market via the Social Representation Theory

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

I enjoyed this piece greatly. Although, at some points, it is speculative (as expected due to the nature of the questionary), the analysis is robust and follows a typical framework for social studies. 

Probably I'd suggest some aesthetic remarks, like changing the green colour in Figure 6 for something easy to read for the colour-blind audience; or finding a way that the text 'Technology' and 'Sustainability' do not overtake the border of the circles in Figure 5. 

Author Response

Thank you for your remarks.

We present below our responses.

In cases in which we beg to differ with some comment made by you, a rebuttal is provided.

Once again, thank you for your feedback.

The Authors.

I enjoyed this piece greatly. Although, at some points, it is speculative (as expected due to the nature of the questionary), the analysis is robust and follows a typical framework for social studies. 

Thanks for your comment.

Probably I'd suggest some aesthetic remarks, like changing the green colour in Figure 6 for something easy to read for the colour-blind audience; or finding a way that the text 'Technology' and 'Sustainability' do not overtake the border of the circles in Figure 5. 

Thanks for your comment.

The colors of Figure 6 were changed for a better visualization and the captions 'Technology' and 'Sustainability' in Figure 5 were repositioned. See the figures in the revised version of the paper.

Thanks again for your feedback and your thoughtful comments, which help us very much to improve our article.

Reviewer 2 Report

Thank you for giving me an opportunity to review the paper entitled: “Unveiling the Smart City Concept: Perspectives from an Emerging Market via the Social Representation Theory”.

 

There are several suggestions given for the improvement of the paper:

 

1.     The current version of the abstract is not well written. My suggestion of the abstract as follows: At first, author could start with the main aim of the study and then explain the novelty of the study. What is so unique as compared with past studies? This followed by the research method. Then end with the key findings and implications of the study. What’s new to this study?

2.     Overall, the introduction is well written. However, the contribution of this study is very weak. Authors need to provide stronger justification to support this thought. How this study contributes to the issues? What is the research gap of this study? Authors could provide and discuss several similar studies. What are the findings discovered by past studies? From there, authors may be able to shows the uniqueness of the study. How your study stands uniquely as compared with others? I also want to see how these variables relate to issue and how the gap link it to issue.

3.     Authors should provide more literature review discussion so that reader has a better understanding about the smart cities in other developed countries.

4.     Who is your target respondent? Any criteria to select the respondents? How to consider them as respondents? All these must be explained clearly.

5.     What sampling technique used to select respondent? How do you select the sample? Next question is how do you ensure the generalizability and representativeness of the sample toward the targeted population? Any selection criteria? How do you select the respondent for your study? Any procedure of selection? Please justify.

6.     The procedure of data collection is very limited. Should provide more information about how authors collect the data, how to approach the respondent, how to identify them to participate in the survey? Try not to exaggerate it and the explanation should be more reasonable and logic.

7.     Did you translate the questionnaire to other language? If yes, which translation method used to translate the questionnaire items.

8.     What software used to analyse the data? Should provide explanation as well.

9.     Why was data collection conducted online instead of face to face?

10.  The demographical profile statistics should be more details. Authors should improve the figure 3-Sample Summary Profile.

11.  The discussion and conclusion section structure should be revised as follows:

Discussion of key findings

Theoretical Implications

Practical/Managerial Implications

Limitations and Future Research

Conclusion

12.  Should have a section called implications. How do you imply these findings and compared with past study’s findings? I would also suggest author to provide implications based on the current practices and policies.

13.  Should have a section for limitations and future research. Identify any possible weakness of this study.

14.  Conclusion is required to ensure it is reflecting the introduction and objective of the study.

Author Response

Thank you for your remarks.

We present below our responses.

In cases in which we beg to differ with some comment made by you, a rebuttal is provided.

Once again, thank you for your feedback.

The Authors.

 

Thank you for giving me an opportunity to review the paper entitled: “Unveiling the Smart City Concept: Perspectives from an Emerging Market via the Social Representation Theory”.

There are several suggestions given for the improvement of the paper:

1. The current version of the abstract is not well written. My suggestion of the abstract as follows: At first, author could start with the main aim of the study and then explain the novelty of the study. What is so unique as compared with past studies? This followed by the research method. Then end with the key findings and implications of the study. What’s new to this study?

Thanks.

The Abstract was revised accordingly. See the revised version of the paper.

Thanks again.

2. Overall, the introduction is well written. However, the contribution of this study is very weak. Authors need to provide stronger justification to support this thought. How this study contributes to the issues? What is the research gap of this study? Authors could provide and discuss several similar studies. What are the findings discovered by past studies? From there, authors may be able to shows the uniqueness of the study. How your study stands uniquely as compared with others? I also want to see how these variables relate to issue and how the gap link it to issue.

Thank you very much.

The Introduction section was revised to meet your thoughtful remarks. See the revised version of the paper.

Thanks again.

3. Authors should provide more literature review discussion so that reader has a better understanding about the smart cities in other developed countries.

Thanks for your comment.

We added at the Introduction section more literature reviews so that the reader has a better understanding about the smart cities in other developed countries. See below:

Sinkiene, J., Grumadaite, K., & Liugailaite-Radzvickiene, L. (2014). Diversity of theoretical approaches to the concept of smart city. In Proceedings of the 8th international scientific conference “Business and Management (pp. 15-16).

Winkowska, J., Szpilko, D., & Pejić, S. (2019). Smart city concept in the light of the literature review. Engineering Management in Production and Services, 11(2).

Camero, A., & Alba, E. (2019). Smart City and information technology: A review. cities, 93, 84-94.

Wahab, N. S. N., Seow, T. W., Radzuan, I. S. M., & Mohamed, S. (2020). A systematic literature review on the dimensions of smart cities. In IOP Conference Series: Earth and Environmental Science (Vol. 498, No. 1, p. 012087). IOP Publishing.

Zhao, F., Fashola, O. I., Olarewaju, T. I., & Onwumere, I. (2021). Smart city research: A holistic and state-of-the-art literature review. Cities, 119, 103406.

Gerli, P., Navio Marco, J., & Whalley, J. (2022). What makes a smart village smart? A review of the literature. Transforming government: people, process and policy, 16(3), 292-304.

Zheng, C., Yuan, J., Zhu, L., Zhang, Y., & Shao, Q. (2020). From digital to sustainable: A scientometric review of smart city literature between 1990 and 2019. Journal of Cleaner Production, 258, 120689.

Echebarria, C., Barrutia, J. M., & Aguado-Moralejo, I. (2021). The Smart City journey: a systematic review and future research agenda. Innovation: The European Journal of Social Science Research, 34(2), 159-201.

Thanks again.

4. Who is your target respondent? Any criteria to select the respondents? How to consider them as respondents? All these must be explained clearly.

Thanks for your remarks.

All requested information can be found in subsection 4.1 - Sample.

In addition, Figure 3 shows the sociodemographic characteristics of the respondents.

Thanks again.

5. What sampling technique used to select respondent? How do you select the sample? Next question is how do you ensure the generalizability and representativeness of the sample toward the targeted population? Any selection criteria? How do you select the respondent for your study? Any procedure of selection? Please justify.

Thanks for your remarks.

All requested information can be found in subsection 4.1 - Sample.

In addition, the survey assumes that all respondents must reside in an urban area and be familiar with the smart city concept, which allows us to infer the suitability of the selected sample in relation to the target population of the research (see subsection 4.1 - Sample, and Figure 3).

However, the sample used does not fully represent the population of the cities where data was collected, as the respondents needed to be aware of the smart city concept. Thus, the poorest population - who have no idea what a smart city is - was not considered in this work, which is a limitation of the research (see Research Limitations subsection at the Conclusions section of the revised version of the article).

Thanks again.

6. The procedure of data collection is very limited. Should provide more information about how authors collect the data, how to approach the respondent, how to identify them to participate in the survey? Try not to exaggerate it and the explanation should be more reasonable and logic.

Thanks for your remarks.

All requested information can be found in subsection 4.1 - Sample.

We hope to have clarified the data collection process in a parsimonious way.

Thanks again.

7. Did you translate the questionnaire to other language? If yes, which translation method used to translate the questionnaire items.

The questionnaire was developed and applied in Portuguese, as all citizens were Brazilians living in cities in Brazil.

That was explained in subsecti0n 4.1. – Sample.

Thanks again.

8. What software used to analyse the data? Should provide explanation as well.

Once the evoked expressions were tabulated, the authors manually performed the respective categorization process with the help of the software EVOC, which resulted in 162 categories (see section 3). This categorization may have some bias, being, therefore, a limitation of the research explained in the Research Limitations subsection at the Conclusions section.

Besides, the similitude and content analyses - including the Descending Hierarchical Classification (DHC) - were performed using the software Iramuteq. See section 3.

 

For more information about how the abovementioned software was used, we included new references.

 

9. Why was data collection conducted online instead of face to face?

Data collection took place online, due to the social isolation imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic in Brazil - see section 3 – being this a limitation of the work as explained at the subsection Research Limitations at the Conclusions section.

10. The demographical profile statistics should be more details. Authors should improve the figure 3-Sample Summary Profile.

All information about the respondents collected by the authors is shown in Figure 3.

Thanks.

11. The discussion and conclusion section structure should be revised as follows:

Discussion of key findings

Theoretical Implications

Practical/Managerial Implications

Limitations and Future Research

Conclusion

Thanks for your remarks.

We kept the section “Discussion of Key Findings” apart from the last section of the work. Besides, we revised the final section of the article – “Conclusions” – adapting it to the aforementioned structure.

Thanks again.

12. Should have a section called implications. How do you imply these findings and compared with past study’s findings? I would also suggest author to provide implications based on the current practices and policies.

Thanks.

 

We created a subsection 6.1 named 6.1 “Implications for Theory and Practice”, where we addressed the requests above.

 

Thanks again.

13. Should have a section for limitations and future research. Identify any possible weakness of this study.

It was done.

Please, see Research Limitations subsection.

Thanks.

14. Conclusion is required to ensure it is reflecting the introduction and objective of the study.

It was done.

Please, see the C0nclusi0ns secti0n.

Thanks.

Thanks for your thoughtful comments, which help us very much to improve our article.

Reviewer 3 Report

The theme of smart cities must be identified to gain a common understanding. The definition of a smart city must be a consensus of various scientists.

 

However, the author must make a journal that has published papers about smart cities within a certain period (for example, ten years). Thus, the authors can identify trends in the meaning of smart cities from each published paper.

 

So, the publication period and certain journal publishers are essential in gathering "trends" from the definition of smart cities. For example, all papers come from the Sustainability Journal within ten years (2010-2020).

 

Public opinion can also be taken as a source of answers. However, the respondents are experts because the writer wants the correct definition. Respondents may not be the general public. After all, it will cause bias in understanding because it is influenced by experience, level of education, number of books read, and so on.

Author Response

Thank you for your remarks.

We present below our responses.

In cases in which we beg to differ with some comment made by you, a rebuttal is provided.

Once again, thank you for your feedback.

The Authors.

The theme of smart cities must be identified to gain a common understanding. The definition of a smart city must be a consensus of various scientists.

However, the author must make a journal that has published papers about smart cities within a certain period (for example, ten years). Thus, the authors can identify trends in the meaning of smart cities from each published paper.

Thanks for your comment.

It is important to emphasize that the objective of the article was not to follow the evolution of the smart city concept in the academic literature over time, but rather to investigate how citizens perceive, make sense of and understand this concept. This becomes clear in the article's research question: "What is the social representation of smart city according to Brazilian citizens?". For this reason, we did not adopt a longitudinal approach to develop the article, but instead tried to obtain a snapshot (transversal approach) of how citizens have perceived the smart city concept (i.e., investigate the social representation of this concept for this population). The obtained social representation of smart city is then compared with the academic literature on the subject – which is why we created Figure 1.

However, based on the reviewer's comments, we addressed the peculiarities of Figure 1 (i.e., the various dimensions related to the smart city concept over time) and added a new reference* that conducted a scientometric study of the smart city concept over time in top-tier journals.

(*) Zheng, C., Yuan, J., Zhu, L., Zhang, Y., & Shao, Q. (2020). From digital to sustainable: A scientometric review of smart city literature between 1990 and 2019. Journal of Cleaner Production, 258, 120689.

So, instead of focusing our investigation on a single journal, we analyzed the smart city concept, over time, in several top journals.

Thanks for your observation.

So, the publication period and certain journal publishers are essential in gathering "trends" from the definition of smart cities. For example, all papers come from the Sustainability Journal within ten years (2010-2020).

We cited articles on smart city published in Sustainability (see the References section). However, we needed a larger critical mass. Thus, other journals (mainly in the IS area) were also surveyed. In addition, as already mentioned, we added a new reference (Zheng et al, 2020), which developed a scientometric study of the smart city concept over time in top journals.

Thanks again.

Public opinion can also be taken as a source of answers. However, the respondents are experts because the writer wants the correct definition. Respondents may not be the general public. After all, it will cause bias in understanding because it is influenced by experience, level of education, number of books read, and so on.

It is important to emphasize that the objective of the article was to investigate how citizens perceive, make sense of and understand this concept. This becomes clear in the article's research question: "What is the social representation of smart city in according to Brazilian citizens?". The SRT prescinds that the respondents project their perceptions of the given theme, not influenced by previous answers, being able to express the words that better explain the social phenomenon collectively. The authors do not influence the answers whatsoever. The obtained social representation of smart city is then compared with the academic literature on the subject – which is why we created Figure 1.

Furthermore, as the research assumes that respondents must live in an urban area and have some familiarity with the smart city concept, one can infer the adequacy of the selected sample vis-à-vis the target population of the work.

However, it is true that the sample used does not fully represent the population of the cities where the data were collected, as the respondents needed to have some notion of what a smart city was. Thus, the poorest population – who have no idea what a smart city is – was not included in this work, which is a limitation of the research (see subsection Research Limitations in the Conclusions section of the revised version of the article).

Thanks for your thoughtful comments, which help us very much to improve our article.

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

I am happy to see the revised version of the manuscript. I have no further comments.