Franklin University Switzerland

In response to the twin environmental crises of climate change and resource depletion, the circular economy has emerged as a key strategy to reduce waste, minimize the extraction of virgin materials, and promote reuse, repair, and recycling. However, the circular economy, as currently conceived, does not inherently support continuous economic growth in the conventional sense. At the same time, modern societies — grounded in ideals of progress, innovation, and rising living standards — rely on economic growth to sustain social stability, employment, and investment. In this paper, Focardi and Fabozzi argue that integrating qualitative economic growth with circularity offers a viable pathway to decoupling economic progress from the depletion of natural resources. Qualitative growth refers to economic progress driven by increased quality, functionality, and complexity of products, services, infrastructure, and institutions rather than the sheer output volume. To illustrate how qualitative growth and circularity can complement each other in practice, the paper highlights initiatives in Ljubljana, Slovenia, Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain, and Amsterdam, Netherlands, where circular economy strategies have been combined with urban greening, infrastructure regeneration, and resource-efficient policies to enhance both environmental sustainability and quality of life.

ABSTRACT Artificial Intelligence (AI) is reshaping Human Resource Management (HRM), as evidenced by POSCO’s case study from South Korea. This study examines the effects of AI-enabled Video Interviews (AIV) in the early hiring stages compared to traditional CV Screening (CVS) on recruiting and subsequent work performance. The results indicate that AIV can complement the traditional method of CVS by identifying diverse candidates with superior collaborative and problem-solving abilities. This suggests that integrating AI could significantly improve talent acquisition by fostering Collaborative Intelligence between AI tools and HR professionals.

The purpose of this study is to identify the factors impacting medical professionals’ adoption intention of AI-based innovative medical devices focused on the mediating role of trust. Drawing on the UTAUT model, we examined the mediating effect of trust in the relationships between these factors (performance expectancy, effort expectancy, facilitating conditions, and social influence). This study collected survey data through convenient sampling from 248 medical professionals working in medical institutions located in the metropolitan areas in Republic of Korea. The result showed that performance expectancy, effort expectancy, facilitating conditions, and social influence have a positive impact on trust, and this trust, in turn, has a significant influence on acceptance intentions. The results emphasize that the success of introducing innovative medical devices in institutions hinges not only on the devices' innovation level but also on the psychological factors of the professionals. By taking into account these factors and building trust, medical institutions can elevate service quality and efficiency, fostering greater acceptance of advanced medical devices.

Existing big-tech platforms have controlled the sovereignty of digital services and user data, limiting the opportunities for users to experience platforms. These platforms' control policies were no exception in the content area of the platform. Users can only engage with content by viewing, commenting, emoticons, and sharing. Users were limited to engaging with content in the functions and areas designated by the platform, which meant they could not interact with opinion leaders or content creators equally. Consequently, concepts of Web 3 and MyData have emerged with the idea that the sovereignty of platform users should be restored to the user, not the platform. However, many papers on blockchain and smart contracts that can implement these concepts are mostly engineering or focused on laws such as content copyright. This study examines two purposes as a case study of qualitative research methods for a content platform named A3I®. First, this study identified the feasibility of implementing a blockchain-based content platform with universal value. It refers to the universal value that anyone can access information (data) securely and transparently in a Web 3.0 environment, including the concept of MyData, which empowers users to control their data. Second, this study highlighted that the Article Value Evaluation Mechanism (AVEM), including reward and revenue sharing systems, can enhance digital content activation through automatic payment programs of smart contracts in the platform. Furthermore, the study found that A3I platforms based on blockchain and smart contracts have stronger performance on technical and user-centric factors than other platforms without these technologies. In addition, the A3I platform with innovative technologies and AVEM shows better digital content activation by increasing "feedback frequency" than other platforms that increase "content frequency." Therefore, this study has academic and social significance by reflecting the universal values of Web 3.0 in platform design. It also has industrial significance by presenting a feasible blockchain platform business model.

Starting from Irving Fisher’s equation of exchange ( ) at the basis of the quantity theory of money, we analyze from a theoretical macroeconomic-monetary perspective whether the increase of monetary aggregates M1 and M2 might have affected general prices. Moreover, we investigate why monetary aggregates have evolved differently for COVID-19 than in the global financial crisis (2007-2009). The article elaborates on data for the US from Q1/2020 to Q2/2022 and represents the first scientific contribution to the analysis of post-COVID-19 inflation by means of the equation of exchange. We find that money growth seems to have contributed to inflation supporting the “monetarist” view, but that non-monetary drivers such as supply shocks and increasing profit margins outweigh the monetary ones.

The use of party cues is a fundamental process of how voters adopt policy preferences. While research has shown that party identification is an important driver of political attitudes in general and policy positions in particular, we know little about how negative party identification (identifying as an opponent to a party) impacts voters’ political preferences. This article aims to fill this gap in the literature by combining an experimental and observational empirical analysis of the effect of negative party identification on voters’ issue preferences in the context of direct democratic decision‐making. First, we analyze a survey experiment conducted during a real‐world campaign on affordable housing for a popular ballot in Switzerland. Using continuous measures of party identification, we show a causal relationship between negative party identification and voters’ policy preferences. Second, we use longitudinal observational data of vote choice on direct democratic policy proposals and show that voters adopt policy preferences that contrast with the policy positions of parties they oppose. In sum, the two complementary designs show that voters tend to position themselves not only in alignment with their preferred parties but also in opposition to parties with which they negatively identify. Furthermore, the results indicate that, when adopting policy preferences, negative cues may carry as much weight as positive party cues. Our analysis has important implications for understanding voters’ adoption of policy preferences in general and specifically in the direct democratic context.

This book provides an original contribution to contemporary research surrounding the environmental, humanitarian and socio-political crises associated with contemporary capitalism. Reimagining Labor for a Sustainable Future is guided by the assertion that new systems are always preceded by new ideas and that imagination and experimentation are central in this process. Given the vast terrain of capitalism – processes, institutions, and stakeholders – Vogelaar and Dasgupta have selected labour as the point of engagement in the study of capitalist and alternative imaginaries. In order to demonstrate the importance of labour in rethinking and restructuring our world economy, the authors examine three diverse community projects in Scotland, India and the United States. They reveal the nuanced ways in which each community engages in commoning practices that re-center social reproduction and offer more expansive views of labour that challenge the neoliberal capitalist imaginary. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of sustainable economics, labour studies and sustainable development.

Literature on dehumanization by algorithms has grown substantially in recent years, making it a highly important topic also for a managerial and business ethics audience as it touches upon several interlinked ethical issues in the business and society nexus. However, scattering across di-verse disciplines makes algorithmic dehumanization challenging to approach. It stretches from his-torical terminological roots from colonialism, industrialization and post-colonialism and today is deeply rooted in technology studies and ethics. We review the literature on algorithms and dehu-manization (n=180 articles) and map existing knowledge across several clusters that reveal its under-lying characteristics. Based on the review, we derive a business-ethics informed definition: Algo-rithmic dehumanization is defined as: organizational actors integrating algorithms and data analytics that result in the intentional or unintentional treatment of individuals and/or groups as less than fully human, thus infringe on human rights and particularly the three foundational principles of liberty, equality and dignity. We find that algorithmic dehumanization applies particularly to employees and the future of work, managerial decision making, consumer ethics, hard- and soft-law regulation and basic values such as privacy or human rights of consumers. Further, from the review, we develop a dehumanization avoidance model, which may help researchers and business practitioners to deal with the ethical challenges raised by algorithmic dehumanization. The three stages of the model show that several research topics remain unaddressed so far. Unraveling these topics, we suggest a set of open questions and how future research and practice can build on the model to reflect about organizational processes and improve corporate capabilities and managerial decision-making to avoid algorithmic dehumanization, thus contributing to outline the emerging concept of Corporate Digital Responsibility.

ABSTRACT This article analyses the globalisation of Saemaul Undong, a South Korean rural development programme. While multiple actors promote contradictory versions of global Saemaul, suggesting strategic incoherence, all these initiatives are tied together by a coherent political economic agenda, namely the export of a will to compete in the developing world. By focusing on the interests of Saemaul’s globalisation, this article shows that for converging local and global actors, Saemaul is an instrument to enrol villagers in capitalist development and to enforce extended processes of primitive accumulation. Saemaul aligns with the neo-liberal agendas of development agencies: it fits the imperative of participatory development and its contemporary advocates emphasise its Schumpeterian qualities and its ability to promote social competition in rural communities. Saemaul also seeks to achieve social change by changing minds, while its globalisation also aligns with the World Bank’s recent behavioural agenda of transformation of the mind for capitalist purposes. This transformative endeavour reflects the coinciding materialist interests of global development agencies and the Korean state-chaebol nexus. By promoting the principle of agricultural value chain integration in Saemaul programmes, South Korean governments also use Saemaul to respond to the business interests shaping the country’s Official Development Assistance provision.