The European Union (EU) has embraced the “twin transition” – the simultaneous pursuit of digitalisation and ecological transformation – as a cornerstone of its industrial policy. EU lawmakers argue that digital technologies can advance environmental protection by enhancing environmental monitoring, optimising resource use, and enabling data-driven sustainability efforts. However, this vision tends to overlook the environmental costs of digitalisation, including rising energy and water consumption, intensive resource extraction, and the proliferation of electronic waste. This article critically examines whether EU law is adequately equipped to support a twin transition, drawing on a black-letter analysis of EU legal provisions, as well as insights from science and technology studies and critical environmental law. It posits that, while environmental law plays a significant role in the datafication of the environment and the digitalisation of society, it falls short in regulating digital technology and data in ways that advance sustainability. For the twin transition to evolve beyond a political slogan and deliver real ecological benefits, substantial legal reforms would be required. The regulation of digital technology would have to move beyond corporate self-regulation and disclosure-based models of environmental governance. Data governance should be reoriented to emphasise freedom of access and a more deliberatively restrained approach to data generation.

This paper develops a theoretical framework to examine the technology adoption decisions of insurers and their impact on market share, considering heterogeneous customers and two representative insurers. Intuitively, when technology accessibility is observable, an insurer’s access to a new technology increases its market share, no matter whether it adopts the technology or not. However, when technology accessibility is unobservable, the insurer’s access to the new technology has additional side effects on its market share. First, the insurer may apply the available technology even if it increases costs and premiums, thereby decreasing market share. Second, the unobservable technology accessibility leads customers to expect that all insurers might have access to the new technology and underestimate the premium of those without access. This also decreases the market share of an insurer with access to the new technology. Our findings help explain the unclear relationship between technology adoption and the market share of insurance companies in practice.

The rise of online voicing and campaigns empowered by digital technologies and online social media is rejuvenating retail investor activism that has been mostly ignored in the traditional offline setting. This article argues that online activism that is initiated by retail investors will affect managerial attention intensity and attention priority on environmental issues, thus promoting green innovation. Using a Chinese-listed companies database with 13,795 firm-year observations over the period from 2011 to 2018, our results confirm that online environmental activism induces corporate green innovation. Online activism is more effective when the retail investor base holds larger shares in total and presents questions with a more intensely negative tone. Additionally, the above-mentioned moderating effects are stronger in digital firms. Our study offers insights into the online patterns of shareholder activism in the digital era and highlights the role of minority voicing in promoting corporate sustainable transformation.

Despite the important role of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) in government policy implementation, there is a lack of research on how SOEs owned by different government entities differ. We draw on an attention-based view (ABV) to understand how central government-owned (called central SOEs) and local government-owned enterprises (called local SOEs) differ in their response to digitalization, a major state objective in China in recent years. The two types of SOEs differ in the foundational feature of attention structure – the rules of the game (as embodied in their different goals, identities, and evaluation of top executives) – as well as important features such as governance structures and resources. These features can trigger more attention in central SOEs to digitalization. Given the interdependence of these features in shaping the structural distribution of attention, we further propose how governance structures and resources can influence strategic attention differently in SOEs with different rules of the game. The arguments are tested using data from all Chinese-listed manufacturing SOEs between 2009 and 2020. The study reveals different responses to national strategy between central and local SOEs due to their distinct attention structures designed by the state. It also extends the ABV and research on corporate digital transformation.

Given the increasing use of technology and the digitalization of international trade through electronic documents, there is a need for a globally harmonized standard that caters for the legal aspects of digitalization. The Model Law on Electronic Transferable Records (MLETR) is one such law. Yet, it has not been adopted in Nigeria or several other jurisdictions. This article considers the possibility of Nigeria adopting the MLETR. To do this, the article considers the meaning of electronic transferable documents and the legal implications of digitalizing them. The article also examines the barriers and challenges to digitalizing electronic transferable records. It then considers some of the laws in Nigeria that would support electronic and digital trade transactions. Subsequently, the article highlights the benefits, challenges and hindrances to the adoption of the MLETR in Nigeria. It recommends an approach to adopting the MLETR, drawing from jurisdictions that have adopted it.

Music entrepreneurs are by nature intrinsically involved in the music industry due to lifestyle and business reasons. This study investigates the use of lifestyle entrepreneurship behaviours by taking a gender perspective about how music entrepreneurs develop commercial activities. This includes focusing on how international relationships relate to meaningful music entrepreneurial experience based on the use of social capital. Drawing on interview data from 12 female music entrepreneurs the findings highlight lifestyle identification responses to entrepreneurship as central constituents. Moreover, the study shows how female music entrepreneurs tap into their lifestyle connections based on their gender and social interests. The article contributes to the development of the music, gender, lifestyle, and digital entrepreneurship work by identifying a more interdisciplinary perspective. The practical implications for the music industry evolve around helping more female entrepreneurs break into the sector by harnessing their creative potential.

This research aims to unpack how digital technologies can facilitate the flourishing of circular business practices in small- and medium-sized enterprises by structuring a detailed going circular path that explains businesses’ evolution toward circularity. In doing so, it outlines how the observed organizations have adopted – or are adopting – circular economy principles thanks to business digitalization. Following an inductive approach based on a multiple case study methodology, we investigated 16 small- and medium-sized enterprises operating in industries that put considerable pressure on the environment (e.g., manufacturing, chemical, construction, fashion, food, and beverage). Our findings confirm how digital technologies, as well as Industry 4.0 structures, play a fundamental role in shaping, enabling, enhancing, and refining circular products and processes development. Accordingly, we outline a generalizable step-by-step process to pursue circular economy by employing digital technologies. The present study represents a practical handout for guiding companies through their going circular path.

Rapid and radical digitalization and the “fourth industrial revolution” are generally associated with progress, but also pose significant risks to privacy rights and democracy. This article proposes a public law reading of the South African Constitution to respond to the dangers posed by disruptive technological change, in light of the constitution's rights-orientated and rule-of-law-centred approach to interpreting the right to privacy. It examines the legal resources available in the South African legal system and, specifically, its constitution. The article emphasizes the way South African privacy jurisprudence infuses the right to privacy with the value of dignity, and how this allows an interpretation that sees privacy as a public, as well as private, right. The article concludes that this rights jurisprudence, alongside the constitutional principles of proportionality, subsidiarity and supremacy, has established a working foundation to articulate the right to privacy in a way that is suitable in the digital age.

The unprecedented suspension of cultural events across Europe in March 2020 had a profound impact on the performing arts. Alongside the proliferation of digital and hybrid modes of theatre-making, the Covid-19 pandemic has also precipitated a substantive shift in how theatres operate at both institutional and organizational levels in an attempt to respond to the volatile economic impact of the pandemic on the culture sector. This has provided a decisive moment for the reinterpretation of the theatre landscape, raising fundamental questions relating to institutional transformation that challenge precarious working models and entrenched hierarchical divides. Drawing on wider transnational research as part of the ‘Theatre after Covid’ project, this article examines the institutional effects of the pandemic on theatre and performance in the United Kingdom and the German-speaking countries. It details the findings of a wide-ranging survey conducted in 2022 with theatre workers and organizations that address how the industry is adapting and transforming in response to the crisis. Using this new data as a starting point, it analyzes how new forms of artistic innovation have emerged during Covid-19. By focusing on these institutional and aesthetic developments, the article argues that the pandemic has produced a paradigm shift that has crucially reinscribed how theatre is created, programmed, and understood.

Globalization and robotics (globotics) are jointly transforming the world economy at an explosive pace. While much of the literature has focused on rich nations, the changes are quite likely to affect developing nations in important ways. The premise of the paper – which should be regarded as a thought-piece – is based on an extreme thought experiment. What does development look like when digital technology has rendered manufacturing jobless and many services freely traded? Our conclusion is that the service-led development path may become the norm rather than the exception; think India, not China. Since success in the service sector is based on quite different factors than success in manufacturing, development strategies and mindsets may have to change. This is an optimistic conclusion since it suggests that developing nations can directly export the source of their comparative advantage – low-cost labour – without having first to make goods with that labour.