Search Results (231)

This article rereads Akira Kurosawa’s 1960 film The Bad Sleep Well as a modern Hamlet that relocates Shakespeare’s crisis of action from dynastic succession to postwar bureaucratic and corporate modernity. It shifts attention away from plot fidelity and toward how Hamletian functions—staged revelation, damaged legitimacy, obstructed revenge, and the demand for narrative afterlife—are adopted into a corporate world that delegates authority downward, a reworking the article calls structural-political adaptation. Drawing on Carl Schmitt’s account of sovereignty and the political taboo that gives tragic form its density, it argues that Kurosawa adapts the relation between tragedy and what cannot be directly represented. The film’s highest authority is heard on a telephone and never seen. The power of decision has receded behind a bureaucratic apparatus, where neither the avenger nor the camera can follow it. Death and its consequences change accordingly. Nishi dies without a survivor who can perform Horatio’s public function. The institution records his death as an accident and absorbs it into administrative routine. This article argues that The Bad Sleep Well shows how Hamletian action and death survive under faceless institutional power and are shaped by political taboo. Full article

The news media in Gulf countries are among the most important institutions shaping the public’s understanding of climate action. This study aims to explore the longitudinal developments, thematic framing, and sentiment tones of Omani English-language newspapers’ sustainability discourse during the period 2015–2025. The study applied a multi-stage computational method to analyze a deduplicated corpus of 709 news articles from two English-language dailies of Oman: Times of Oman and Oman Daily Observer for a time period from 2015 to 2025. Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic modeling was used to group topics into five types of macro frames. Results show that the focus of the Omani media is very localized, and the dominant frames are “Corporate ESG, Business & Green Investment” and “Clean Energy Policy, Research & Institutional Governance”. Furthermore, a sentiment analysis of headlines using VADER showed clearly defined sentiment polarity; domestic economic transition headlines were characterized by high positive polarity, while global climate crisis headlines had a higher negative polarity. The study concludes that the press in Oman is in a strategic process of “nationalizing” the climate change issue, moving from the conventional disaster discourse to making sustainability a local opportunity for economic diversification, technological modernization, and national resilience. Full article

The Post Office Horizon scandal represents one of the most severe miscarriages of justice in modern British legal history, rooted in the deployment of a defective IT system and the institutional suppression of evidence that exposed its unreliability. This paper provides a systematic analysis of the scandal through the combined lenses of cyber security, digital forensics, and IT governance, drawing directly on the Post Office Horizon Public Inquiry dataset—including witness testimony, technical documentation, audit records, and internal communications spanning more than two decades. While many of the technical and procedural failures discussed have been documented in prior scholarship, the paper’s principal contribution is the systematic mapping of those failures against recognised governance frameworks and the Legally Accountable Digital Systems (LADS) proposal this mapping motivates. We identify and analyse five interconnected failure categories: software defects and poor system design; deficient patch governance; inadequate audit logging and compromised evidence integrity; investigative failures and prosecutorial conflict of interest; and a systemic absence of technical expertise and independent oversight. Each category is mapped against nine governance framework documents, including ISO/IEC 27001, NIST SP 800-53 Rev. 5, NIST SP 800-218 (SSDF), COBIT 2019, ISO/IEC 27035, NIST SP 800-61, and ISO/IEC 27036, with ISO/IEC 27037 applied additionally to evidential handling failures and NIST SP 800-92 to log management failures. A counterfactual analysis indicates that compliance with these frameworks could plausibly have detected, exposed, or substantially reduced most of the documented failures, though this claim is necessarily inferential and conditional on good-faith implementation. The scandal was therefore not caused primarily by the absence of adequate frameworks but by their wholesale non-application and by institutional incentives, examined later in the paper, that can undermine even fully compliant controls. However, the analysis also surfaces a governance gap that no existing framework addresses: the institutional failure mode in which the organisation responsible for system integrity holds active incentives to suppress evidence of failure rather than remediate it. To address this gap, we propose the concept of Legally Accountable Digital Systems (LADS)—a governance category for systems whose outputs are used as evidence in legal proceedings—and outline three supplementary pillars: technical independence, institutional independence, and forensic admissibility governance. We draw a parallel with the Sarbanes–Oxley Act of 2002, arguing that the Horizon Inquiry dataset provides an equivalent empirical foundation for the statutory reform of digital evidence governance. Finally, we outline the substantial research opportunities the Inquiry dataset presents across IT systems analysis, cyber security, forensic accounting, social network analysis, and legal informatics—a resource comparable in significance to the Enron materials that shaped a generation of corporate governance reform. Full article

Modern healthcare systems, grounded in the logic of Western natural science, compartmentalize the mind and body, thereby privileging physical phenomena while excluding non-scientific or metaphysical understandings of illness. Within this context, Taiwan’s flourishing body–mind–spirit movements represent an important counter-discourse that challenges biomedical reductionism by reasserting the unity of corporeal and spiritual. Drawing on ethnographic research of the contemporary Taiwanese spiritual organization GW (pseudonym), this study examines how its teachings and practices articulate an alternative ontology of illness and healing. GW interprets certain ailments as manifestations of karmic or spiritual disturbances, and advocates meditative discipline, and bodily training as a means of restoring balance. The group’s framework situates the body not as a passive object of treatment but as an active site of transformation, reviving the Chinese tradition of self-cultivation. The analysis argues that GW exemplifies a modern revival of the tradition of self-cultivation within a scientifically oriented society. Full article

This study used an institutional perspective to analyze corporate social responsibility (CSR) practices in Vietnam, which is a developing country with institutional voids and competing normative systems. Data were collected using a survey of 463 managers of 463 Vietnamese companies. Then, a PLS-SEM model was used to assess the roles of individual-level (IND) variables and the organizational context (ORG) in CSR, as well as the influence of the external social context (EXT). The results showed that ORG is the internal factor most strongly associated with CSR (β = 0.258; p < 0.001). IND exhibits a weak negative association with CSR (β = −0.074; p = 0.033), contrary to theoretical expectations. EXT positively moderates the IND–CSR relationship, with governance and tradition being more significant than modernity. The implications suggest that CSR in transition economies may be hybrid and that there is an institutional hierarchy. Full article

Retaining population is a core condition for the long-term sustainability of rural communities, yet rural out-migration is often treated merely as evidence of local development failure. Agriculturally productive regions may continue to lose population even when output, corporate activity, and local services improve, which raises the question of what kinds of rural development are demographically sustainable. This study examines that puzzle in Akmola, Kazakhstan, a major grain-producing region surrounding Astana. It asks how corporate social responsibility (CSR), rural amenities, economic vitality, and agricultural dependence are associated with net migration across rural districts. The question is important because CSR and agricultural modernization are frequently expected to support rural communities, yet their demographic implications depend on whether they generate broad local opportunities or mainly improve services and production capacity. Using an unbalanced district-level panel of eight rural districts from 2010 to 2023, the study estimates PLS-SEM models under alternative measurement specifications and compares the results with fixed-effects panel estimates and PPML (Poisson) gross-flow models. The findings show that economic vitality is associated with population retention or attraction, while agriculture-oriented development is associated with out-migration. Amenities generally support the retention-oriented interpretation, and CSR is more consistently associated with amenity provision than with migration directly. These patterns suggest that the sustainability of rural communities depends less on agricultural output or CSR-funded services in isolation than on economic diversification and enhanced local livability. Full article

As climate governance and low-carbon transition continue to advance, environmental information disclosure (EID) has become an important tool for strengthening corporate environmental accountability. Based on a sample of Chinese A-share listed firms from 2008 to 2023, this study constructs a firm-level FinTech index by employing a BERT large language model and examines its relationship with EID via a two-way fixed effects model. The results show that FinTech development is positively associated with EID levels, with stronger effects observed in non-high-tech and non-manufacturing firms. In addition, mechanism tests suggest that FinTech may enhance EID by promoting internal green innovation and reducing external information asymmetry. Further analysis indicates that stronger environmental regulation and higher internal control quality may reinforce the positive relationship between FinTech and EID. These findings provide empirical evidence for understanding how FinTech supports the modernization of corporate environmental governance. Full article

The collaborative transformation of digitalization and greening has become a core trend for modern enterprises to build sustainable development systems. As a typical voluntary environmental regulation in China, green factory certification plays an important role in promoting the integration of digital technology and green production. Based on the unbalanced panel data of Chinese A-share listed companies from 2012 to 2022, this paper adopts a multi-period difference-in-differences model to empirically investigate the impact, internal mechanisms and heterogeneous characteristics of green factory certification on corporate digital-green collaborative transformation. The results show that green factory certification can significantly boost the level of corporate digital-green synergy, with an average policy effect of 2.07%. Mechanism tests confirm that this policy realizes the dual transformation through four core paths: stimulating green technological innovation, raising public environmental awareness, improving corporate environmental, social, and governance (ESG) performance and easing financing constraints. Heterogeneity analysis indicates that the promotion effect varies distinctly across regions, enterprise life cycles, pollution types and executive backgrounds. This study reveals the systemic logic of voluntary environmental regulation enabling digital-green collaborative transformation, and provides empirical support and targeted policy suggestions for enterprises and governments to accelerate the integrated development of digitalization and greening. Full article

Resource-based cities in Northwest China face increasing ecological, geotechnical, and socio-economic challenges caused by long-term mining, including subsidence, slope instability, waste rock accumulation, soil erosion, industrial decline, and settlement deterioration. Post-mining land reuse is constrained by geological safety, foundation stability, slope safety, drainage capacity, erosion risk, and waste rock dump stability, yet existing restoration studies often separate engineering remediation from landscape reuse, industrial pathway selection, and long-term governance. Taking a mining area in City A, Gansu Province, as a case study, this paper develops a geotechnical constraint-based ecology–landscape–economy framework for post-mining land reuse and sustainable human settlement improvement. Unlike conventional reclamation approaches that mainly emphasize engineering remediation, vegetation recovery, or single-function land reuse, this study integrates geotechnical constraints, land-unit classification, pathway-specific compatibility assessment, and capital–space coupling into a planning-scale decision-support framework. Post-mining land was classified into five units, and their compatibility with three restoration plus industrial pathways was assessed using five indicators: geological safety, ecological sensitivity, land-use availability, landscape and cultural value, and industrial operation potential. The results indicate that backfilled mining voids and reclaimed platforms are most suitable for modern agriculture, tailings ponds and subsidence waterbodies for cultural tourism and wellness, and waste rock dump platforms and other stable, low-sensitivity open land for new energy development. A capital–space coupling mechanism is further proposed to link restoration, support, and development zones with government funds, corporate capital, social capital, green finance, and industrial income. This framework provides a planning-scale engineering-suitability screening tool for sustainable post-mining land transformation. Full article

This study examines the relationship between corporate financial technology (FinTech) disclosure and environmental, social, and governance (ESG) reporting performance among non-financial firms listed on the Saudi Stock Exchange (Tadawul), with a focus on the post-COVID period from 2021 to 2024. Using an ESG Disclosure Index (ESGDI) constructed from annual reports and a textual measure of FinTech adoption, the analysis provides market-level evidence on the evolution of digital transformation and ESG disclosure in Saudi Arabia. Descriptive results indicate that ESG reporting among Tadawul firms is moderate yet heterogeneous, with governance disclosure consistently stronger than environmental and social components. Correlation analysis indicates a positive association between FinTech disclosure and overall ESG disclosure, particularly within the environmental pillar. Regression results further show that the firms with stronger FinTech disclosure tend to report higher ESGDI scores. The two-way fixed effects (TWFE) model yields statistically significant results, and the direction of the relationship remains consistent with theoretical expectations. Pillar-level analysis suggests that digital transformation is most closely aligned with environmental reporting. Taken together, the results indicate that sustainability disclosure and digital capabilities appear to co-develop in the Tadawul market. Businesses may improve their ability to track, organize, and disseminate ESG-related data by investing in digital reporting systems, analytics, and technology modernization. In this way, FinTech serves as a governance-supporting instrument that improves transparency and reporting discipline in addition to being a financial innovation. This study adds to the expanding body of knowledge by providing important emerging-market-level evidence from the Saudi capital market and highlighting how FinTech can support sustainability-driven growth in an institutional context undergoing rapid transformation. Full article

A transition to sustainable development and circular economy (CE) principles requires an interdisciplinary understanding of industry-specific technological characteristics and a strategic rethinking of priorities. Given the oil and gas industry’s critical role in socio-economic development, tightening environmental regulations, growing resource consumption, waste generation, and environmental impacts, the aim of this research is to identify industry-specific directions for implementing CE principles and to assess their contribution to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). A multi-stage methodology was applied, including an expert evaluation for the identification of key directions for CE implementation; a literature review of related technological practices; subsequent analysis of linkages between each of 12 identified directions and CE principles within the “10R” circularity framework; and qualitative analysis and systematization of their contribution and potential impact on relevant SDGs. Based on these findings, foundational management principles for the oil and gas industry, aligned with sustainability priorities and the circular transition, were formulated. The results obtained provide a methodological basis for strategic management and corporate planning that integrates CE principles and SDGs, which can be further developed to obtain quantitative instruments for assessing the compliance of the companies with CE principles and can be used to improve the sustainability reporting procedure in the oil and gas enterprises. The findings can also be applied to support the modernization of industry standards and justify government support measures. Full article

In the modern world, hybrid and fully remote work formats are becoming increasingly widespread. The volume of digital communication continues to grow, and the need to exchange documents and information through email, corporate messengers (such as Microsoft Teams), and collaborative workspaces is rising. Personal data is often involved in these exchanges, which increases the risk of unintentional disclosure. To comply with GDPR requirements and ensure information security, it is necessary to implement methods for the automatic detection of personal data. This task is particularly relevant for low-resource languages, such as Latvian, for which existing tools often operate with limited accuracy and efficiency. This work proposes a hybrid approach to the automatic detection of personal data in Latvian texts from Microsoft Teams messages, emails, and documents, combining a transformer-based NER model with rule-based detection of structured identifiers. The approach builds on a multilingual NER model, supplements it with Latvian-specific rules and structured-identifier detectors, and demonstrates the potential of adapted solutions to improve the accuracy and robustness of personal-data detection in real-world workflows. Full article

Artificial intelligence (AI) serves as a vanguard technology in the modern epoch, playing an essential part in fostering ecological and sustainable progress. By utilizing longitudinal data from Chinese A-share corporations between 2014 and 2023, this inquiry empirically explores how AI integration affects the green innovation bubbles of firms along with the governing mechanisms. Our evidence reveals that AI adoption exerts a significant inhibitory effect on such bubbles; for every one-standard-deviation uptick in AI utilization, there is a corresponding decline in green innovation bubbles of approximately 0.108 standard deviations. This finding remains robust across multiple robustness checks. Mechanism analysis shows that AI mitigates green innovation bubbles by enhancing green total factor productivity and reducing excessive managerial expenses. Furthermore, the expansion of the digital financial landscape and the exploitation of information assets bolster the repressive influence of artificial intelligence. Analytical tests for heterogeneity demonstrate that this influence is more significant for state-controlled corporations, businesses operating in non-polluting industries, and those headquartered within the eastern regions of China. Overall, the findings provide robust empirical evidence that AI adoption contributes to the governance of inefficient and inflated green innovation activities, while the causal interpretation of the results should remain cautious given the observational nature of the data and the limitations of the identification strategy. Full article

In Türkiye, working life operates within a hybrid structure in which modern production relations and traditional gender roles intertwine. The automotive sector, in particular, where hegemonic masculinity and conservative values are reproduced, creates a breeding ground for discriminatory practices and safety issues affecting LGB employees. This study aims to analyze the psychosocial and organizational mechanisms underlying LGB individuals’ decisions to disclose or conceal their identities in the context of neoconservative social pressure and industrial masculine culture in Türkiye. Using a qualitative research design grounded in the social constructivist paradigm, semi-structured interviews were conducted with 15 LGB individuals working at different levels of the sector. Data were analyzed using reflective thematic analysis. The findings revealed themes of controlled openness, emotional labor, defense mechanisms, organizational silence, micro-solidarity, and ordinary visibility. It was determined that identity management is experienced as “strategic risk management” rather than an act of liberation, that hierarchical advancement increases the “glass closet” effect, and that employees constantly exhaust their cognitive capacity in a state of “hyper-vigilance”. In conclusion, the study examines the divergence between multinational corporations’ global inclusion policies and local practices and explores the structural factors that sustain organizational silence. Full article

Environmental information disclosure is a critical pathway for manufacturing enterprises to advance the modern environmental governance system. Using the New-Generation Artificial Intelligence Innovation and Development Pilot Zones (NAIDP) as a quasi-natural experiment, this study employs panel data of Chinese A-share listed manufacturing firms from 2011 to 2023 to investigate the effect and underlying mechanism of the NAIDP on corporate environmental information disclosure. The results indicate that the NAIDP significantly enhances enterprises’ environmental information disclosure, and this positive effect is more salient for non-state-owned, superior digital infrastructure, and non-heavy-pollution enterprises. Mechanism tests demonstrate that the NAIDP functions by mitigating information asymmetry and enhancing internal control. Further analysis of the moderating effect suggests that management’s environmental awareness and regional environmental regulation intensity positively strengthen the promotional effect of the NAIDP. This study not only supplements micro-level empirical evidence for the environmental governance effect of artificial intelligence applications but also provides practical insights for policy optimization to facilitate the green transformation of the manufacturing industry. Full article