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Does Smart equal Sustainable? Coupling, Decoupling, and the Sustainability Performance in Cities
... The conception of the Smart City as an ecosystem of new innovation opportunities for large and small regional companies, pointed out by Hollands (2008), is still valid (Lee et al., 2014), regardless of whether it is understood that a Smart City has other purposes beyond the economic development of the city. In this sense, Friedrich et al. (2021) describe a Smart City as a hybrid organization composed of competing institutional logics: the market logic versus the social welfare logic. In this sense thanks to the so-called smart computing technologies, an innovation habitat is generated (Entrepreneurship for Sustainable Development, 2018), enabling the exploration and exploitation of new opportunities and business models not exclusive limited to ICT sector Barba-Sánchez et al., 2019). ...
Smart City initiatives across the globe have spurred increasing demand for high-skilled workers. The digital transformation, one of the main building blocks of the Smart City movement, is calling for a workforce prepared to develop novel business processes. Problem-solving, critical and analytical thinking are now the essential skills being looked at by employees. The development of the so-called STEM curriculum, Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics is being given a lot of attention by educational boards in response to preparing young generations for the Smart City work market. Based on the IMD Smart City Index, PISA, and World Bank reports, we develop a model for assessing the impact of the IT secondary school capacities on Smart-City business developments. The model reveals the relationship between the technological capacity of the secondary-school, and the business activity of a Smart City. Moreover, the study shows the existence of a positive relationship between the IT capacity of secondary schools and the resulting entrepreneurial activity of the city. Our results are of interest to decision-makers and stakeholders responsible for designing educational policies and agents involved in the digital transformation and development of Smart Cities initiatives.
This paper presents a comprehensive review of literature on most widely used urban sustainability assessment tools. The aim of this paper is to understand the similarities and differences in existing urban sustainability assessment tools and identify the gaps so as to find out whether these are capable of and suitable for addressing multiple issues of urban sustainability in multiple contexts, including settlements in diverse geo-climatic and ecologically sensitive regions such as the Himalayan hill regions of India. Qualitative Content Analysis (QCA) is employed in this study to identify various themes/categories associated with various dimensions of sustainability. A total of 2594 articles were selected, of which 105 have been analysed in detail. The research reviews six most widely used urban sustainability assessment tools i.e., Building Research Establishment Environmental Assessment Method (BREEAM)for Communities, Comprehensive Assessment System for Built Environment Efficiency (CASBEE) for Urban Development, Green Building Index (GBI)for Township, Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) for Neighbourhood Development that are used in other countries, and Indian Green Building Council (IGBC)for Green Townships and Green Rating for Integrated Habitat Assessment (GRIHA) for Large Development which are used in India. Analysis of these assessment tools reveals that most of them view sustainability from different perspectives by laying more emphasis on some aspects like infrastructure and resource management while ignoring others like cultural, business and innovation. The findings of the analysis highlight that certain aspects are given more importance in all the urban sustainability assessment tools reviewed and certain other aspects are given much lower or no consideration in all tools reflecting an incomprehensive understanding of urban sustainability on one hand; most tools reviewed do not address all context-specific aspects on the other. Further, it is observed that these tools are unable to address the complex relationships among various criteria and categories and each criterion is assessed in isolation irrespective of the fact that it can influence or be influenced by other criteria.
This paper contributes to the understanding of hybrid organizations by refining the concept of decoupling as a strategic response to conflicting objectives and institutional expectations (Meyer and Rowan in Am J Soc 83:340–363, 1977). In today’s popular responsibility discourse one notes a hopeful “win–win” ideal that invites attempts, by companies in particular, to realize and balance conflicting values and to strive to fulfil both profit objectives and responsibility objectives. Although institutional theory has long acknowledged the strategic response of decoupling in organizational contexts, the potential of exploring and refining how this concept may be used to analyse strategic responses in the contemporary era of market-embedded morality has yet to be explored (Shamir in Econ Soc 37:1–19, 2008). There are good reasons to do so as the present-day discourse on the relation between the economy and morality offers a new set of options and challenges for legitimately responding to institutional demands. This paper draws on an explanatory, rich ethnographic and longitudinal case study of a Swedish fully state-owned company operating in the post 1990s gambling market. We suggest that contemporary hybrid organizations positioned at the crossroads of bureaucratic and market schemes of organizing, may find themselves in a particularly tight spot and seek legitimacy by decoupling—not only by adopting certain legitimizing structures, but also and increasingly with reference to market-embedded morality, a commoditizing of responsibility in their contested market setting. Based on the case findings, we suggest a distinction between organization-based decoupling and market-based decoupling and propose that market-based decoupling may be attractive to hybrid organizations owing to it being less sensitive to scrutiny and accountability claims. But at the same time, our findings indicate that market-based decoupling poses a risk to hybrid organizations, as it does not offer the same degree of legitimacy with key stakeholders/the general public as organization-based decoupling does.
This paper reports on the first two decades of research on smart cities by conducting a bibliometric analysis of the literature published between 1992 and 2012. The analysis shows that smart-city research is fragmented and lacks cohesion, and its growth follows two main development paths. The first one is based on the peer-reviewed publications produced by European universities, which support a holistic perspective on smart cities. The second path, instead, stands on the gray literature produced by the American business community and relates to a techno-centric understanding of the subject. Divided along such paths, the future development of this new and promising field of research risks being undermined. For while the bibliometric analysis indicates that smart cities are emerging as a fast-growing topic of scientific enquiry, much of the knowledge that is generated about them is singularly technological in nature. In that sense, lacking the social intelligence, cultural artifacts, and environmental attributes, which are needed for the ICT-related urban innovation that such research champions.
THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER'I see [Raworth] as the John Maynard Keynes of the 21st Century: by reframing the economy, she allows us to change our view of who we are, where we stand, and what we want to be.' George Monbiot, Guardian'This is sharp, significant scholarship . . . Thrilling.' Times Higher Education'[A] really important economic and political thinker.' Andrew MarrEconomics is broken. It has failed to predict, let alone prevent, financial crises that have shaken the foundations of our societies. Its outdated theories have permitted a world in which extreme poverty persists while the wealth of the super-rich grows year on year. And its blind spots have led to policies that are degrading the living world on a scale that threatens all of our futures.Can it be fixed? In Doughnut Economics, Oxford academic Kate Raworth identifies seven critical ways in which mainstream economics has led us astray, and sets out a roadmap for bringing humanity into a sweet spot that meets the needs of all within the means of the planet. En route, she deconstructs the character of ‘rational economic man’ and explains what really makes us tick. She reveals how an obsession with equilibrium has left economists helpless when facing the boom and bust of the real-world economy. She highlights the dangers of ignoring the role of energy and nature’s resources – and the far-reaching implications for economic growth when we take them into account. And in the process, she creates a new, cutting-edge economic model that is fit for the 21st century – one in which a doughnut-shaped compass points the way to human progress.Ambitious, radical and rigorously argued, Doughnut Economics promises to reframe and redraw the future of economics for a new generation.'An innovative vision about how we could refocus away from growth to thriving.' Daily Mail'Doughnut Economics shows how to ensure dignity and prosperity for all people.' Huffington Post
This article explores how hybrid organizations, which incorporate competing institutional logics, internally manage the logics that they embody. Relying on an inductive comparative case study of four work integration social enterprises embedded in competing social welfare and commercial logics, we show that, instead of adopting strategies of decoupling or compromising, as the literature typically suggests, these organizations selectively coupled intact elements prescribed by each logic. This strategy allowed them to project legitimacy to external stakeholders without having to engage in costly deceptions or negotiations. We further identify a specific hybridization pattern that we refer to as "Trojan horse," whereby organizations that entered the work integration field with low legitimacy because of their embeddedness in the commercial logic strategically incorporated elements from the social welfare logic in an attempt to gain legitimacy and acceptance. Surprisingly, they did so more than comparable organizations originating from the social welfare logic. These findings suggest that, when lacking legitimacy in a given field, hybrids may manipulate the templates provided by the multiple logics in which they are embedded in an attempt to gain acceptance. Overall, our findings contribute to a better understanding of how organizations can survive and thrive when embedded in pluralistic institutional environments.
Hybrid organizations that combine multiple organizational forms deviate from socially legitimate templates for organizing, and thus experience unique organizing challenges. In this paper, we introduce and develop the concept of hybrid organizing, which we define as the activities, structures, processes and meanings by which organizations make sense of and combine multiple organizational forms. We propose that social enterprises that combine the organizational forms of both business and charity at their cores are an ideal type of hybrid organization, making social enterprise an attractive setting to study hybrid organizing. Based on a literature review of organizational research on social enterprise and on our own research in this domain, we develop five dimensions of hybrid organizing and related opportunities for future research. We conclude by discussing how insights from the study of hybrid organizing in social enterprises may contribute to organization theory.
Explores ways that the tragedy of the commons can be avoided by people who use common-property resources