Industry 5.0 places human-centricity, sustainability, and resilience at the core of next-generation enterprise systems. Blockchain has been increasingly recognized as a potential enabler of this transition due to its decentralized architecture, transparency, and trust-enhancing capabilities. Yet, existing literature on enterprise systems remains fragmented in positioning blockchain’s role in enabling these foundational pillars. To address this knowledge gap, we screened and examined 11 peer-reviewed journal articles published between 2019 and 2024 using a scoping review methodology. We adopted the three pillars as our analytical lens. Results showed that blockchain, to some extent, can enable enterprise systems transitions to fulfill the core values of Industry 5.0. Two exemplar success stories, one in maritime logistics and one in healthcare, demonstrate feasibility but underscore unresolved scalability limits. Also, the results reveal issues needing further research and development, such as energy–latency trade-offs that hinder green transitions, underdeveloped governance models for human-in-the-loop decision-making, and fragile cross-chain interoperability that threatens operational resilience. Future research on the adoption of blockchain in enterprise systems must consider energy-efficient consensus protocols, standardized blockchain-IoT interfaces, and ethically grounded governance frameworks. Also, future research should include the development of ethical frameworks to ensure transparency, fairness, and explainability. Drawing on these insights, we outline a research agenda to move the discourse from conceptual promise to industrial practice.

Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) is a subject of intense interest among researchers and practitioners in the public sector, offering the prospect of transforming public administration through automation and improved efficiency. However, there is a lack of comprehensive synthesis of the growing body of literature exploring this technology's multifaceted impact on the sector. To contribute to the growing discourse and bridge the existing literature gap, this research undertook a synthesis of 25 recent studies, analysing the potential benefits, challenges, and strategies for effective GenAI implementation in public organisations. The result of our study indicates that while GenAI offers opportunities to streamline bureaucratic processes, improve service delivery, and enhance decision-making, organisations face various challenges as they implement GenAI. The most common challenges include ethical concerns, regulatory compliance, data privacy, workforce resistance, and transparency issues. These findings call for robust AI governance frameworks, human oversight of GenAI systems, organisational readiness strategies, and continued investment in AI literacy. Future research is necessary to further our understanding of GenAI and how public organisations can realise its benefits. To this end, we propose longitudinal studies evaluating specific GenAI applications and their long-term impact, governance framework development, and methods to enhance GenAI explainability and mitigate bias in public administration contexts.

This study examined whether users’ negative emotions of fear could be positively associated withtheir satisfaction with immersive virtual reality (VR) sports and how exercise intensity modes of VRsports moderate this relationship at the individual leisure player level. The proposed hypotheseswere examined using user-generated reviews (N ¼ 57,047) generated by individual leisure playersabout their VR sports usage experiences, collected from the Meta Oculus platform. Sentiment ana-lysis and fixed-effects ordered logistic regression were applied to test the hypotheses. The resultsshow that fear affects user satisfaction positively, and exercise intensity modes of VR sports mod-erate the positive effect. This suggests that incorporating elements designed to evoke users’ nega-tive emotions of fear within VR sports can contribute to enhanced user satisfaction under certainconditions (such as exercise intensity). The findings also provide practical guidelines for VR sportspractitioners to improve immersive VR sports design.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly adopted in public organisations to advance Digital Government Transformation (DGT). However, their deployment in non-English contexts raises critical concerns about digital sovereignty and the legitimacy of AI within local cultural, political, and bureaucratic environments. This study investigates the initial design and use of SVEA, a Swedish-language AI assistant developed under AI Sweden’s national initiative for regional governments and municipalities. Using an in-depth case study approach, we collected data through stakeholder interviews, meetings, surveys, and document analysis. The findings reveal that initial adoption has been slow, although users regarded the assistant as a legitimate alternative to commercial AI tools. Three key challenges emerged during development: (1) technical-contextual mismatches, including file size limitations and incomplete Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) capabilities; (2) legitimacy-versus-capability trade-offs, wherein a secure, localised design enhanced legitimacy but lagged behind commercial models in performance; and (3) limited organisational readiness, affected by privacy concerns, learning curves, and evolving governance frameworks. This study contributes to e-government research by demonstrating how contextual factors—such as language, culture, and bureaucratic norms—shape both the design and perceived legitimacy of AI tools in public administration. It also offers practical strategies for localising LLMs, enhancing digital sovereignty, and strengthening organisational readiness amid global AI adoption.

Purpose: Humanoid social robots (HSRs) are an innovative technology revitalizing various service sectors, such as the hospitality industry. However, limited research has explored how anthropomorphic features of HSRs influence user satisfaction with the services delivered by HSRs. To address this, a research model was proposed to evaluate how three distinct anthropomorphic features: appearance, voice and response, impact the perceived values (i.e. utilitarian, social and hedonic values) of HSRs, which, in turn, influence user satisfaction. Design/methodology/approach: Data from an online survey of hotel customers was utilized to test the research model (N = 509). Findings: The results indicated that appearance, voice, and response affect perceived utilitarian, hedonic and social values differently. The response feature of HSRs demonstrated the strongest impact on perceived utilitarian, social and hedonic values. In addition, voice affected all three perceived values, while appearance only affected perceived utilitarian and social values. Furthermore, perceived utilitarian, hedonic and social values showed positive impacts on user satisfaction, with hedonic value being the most influential factor. Originality/value: This study contributes to the literature on HSRs and anthropomorphism by explaining how different anthropomorphic features affect users’ value perceptions and user satisfaction with HSR services by utilizing the stimulus-organism-response (SOR) framework.

Purpose – To improve the academic integrity of online examinations, digital proctoring systems have recently been implemented in higher education institutions (HEIs). The paper aims to understand how digital proctoring has been practised in higher education (HE) and proposes future research directions for studying digital proctoring in HE.

Design/methodology/approach – A systematic literature review was conducted. The PRISMA procedure was adapted for the literature search. The topics were identified by topic modelling techniques from 154 relevant publications in seven databases.

Findings – Seven widely discussed topics in literature were identified, including solutions for detecting cheating and student authentication, challenges/issues of uptakes and students' performance in different proctoring environments.

Research limitations/implications – This paper provides insights for academics, policymakers, practitioners and students to understand the implementation of digital proctoring in academia, its adoption by HEIs, impacts on students' and educators' performance and the rapid increase in its use for digital exams in HEIs, with particular emphasis on the impacts of the systems on digitalising examinations in HE.

Originality/value – This review paper has systematically and critically described the state-of-the-art literature on digital proctoring in HE and provides useful insights and implications for future research on digital proctoring, and how academic integrity in online examinations can be enhanced, along with digitalising HE.

This study investigates the impact of Robotic Process Automation (RPA) on the development of routine capabilities and practice changes within public organizations. Drawing on the theoretical lens of technology as routine capability, we conducted case studies at two Swedish public universities. Our findings reveal that the implementation of RPA, conceptualized as a routine capability, fostered the emergence of automation practices within these institutions despite their differing implementation experiences. We identified practice changes across four key dimensions: design, execution, diffusion, and shift. This paper contributes to the existing body of knowledge on RPA by offering detailed empirical insights into how it has advanced practices, induced organizational changes, and identified challenges that require further exploration. This research offers practical implications for public organizations managing RPA-triggered organizational transformations towards automation.

Purpose – The paper aims to evaluate the Digital Government Collaborative Platform (DGCP), which facilitates collaborations between the citizens and the government to address environmental issues in Sri Lanka. The DGCP is an artifact developed by the value-sensitive design (VSD) approach.

Design/methodology/approach – The DGCP is evaluated following the Framework for Evaluation in Design Science Research (FEDS). Two hundred and twenty-four citizens participated in the survey based on the User Experience Questionnaire (UEQ) and open questions about human values embedded in the design. Fifteen government officers were interviewed to enhance the evaluation. 

Findings – The DGCP received positive evaluations from the citizens and government officers. The platform is attractive, novel and pragmatic, also generatinghedonic experiences for the citizens. The users believed that human values are reflected in the DGCP. Further, they shared a few suggestions to improve it.

Originality – The paper contributes knowledge to evaluating digital government systems, especially in developing countries. The human-value-centered DGCP was evaluated using multiple methods of quantitative (i.e., UEQ Survey) and qualitative(i.e., qualitative interviews with stakeholders) techniques. Further, the systematic process of DGCP evaluation produces a case-based guideline for evaluating related and similar digital government systems using FEDS.

Digital technologies are changing how and where we live, work and socialize. Rural areas are distinctive spaces and places but in the current debates of new digital phenomena, digital spaces and practices risk not being contextualized with sensitivities to rural geographies. This study aims to map how digital has been examined to date in rural-focused studies, and accordingly present propositions for how rural-digital studies can be sensitive to the distinctive and diverse character of rural spaces and places. We conduct a two-stage/scale literature review, combining 1) computational topic modelling from a Global Dataset (459 article abstracts) with 2) qualitative content analysis from a sub-dataset focusing on the Nordic region (Nordic Sub-Dataset, 17 full articles). We begin with a topic modelling analysis generating ten major themes (topics) leading to an overview of how research areas are connected to the meaning of rural context. Turning to the Nordic region, as an in-depth example, we illustrate the complexity of rural digital geographies, through a qualitative content analysis. This demonstrates that digital in rural contexts are primarily positioned outwardly as social/regional development and business/economy, and less situated inwardly through individual experience and community building. Combined we show a wide spectrum of rural-digital relations but demonstrate that rural contexts in rural-digital relations need more attention. We propose three propositions to invite deeper rural contextualizations in future digital studies to uphold the importance of rural spaces and places through, by and with digital geography.

Privacy is one of the key challenges to the adoption and implementation of online proctoring systems (OPS) in higher education. To better understand this challenge, we adopt privacy as contextual integrity theory to conduct a scoping review of 17 papers. The results show different types of students’ personal and sensitive information are collected and disseminated; this raises considerable privacy concerns. As well as the governing principles including transparency and fairness, consent and choice, information minimization, accountability, and information security and accuracy have been identified to address privacy problems. This study notifies a need to clarify how these principles should be implemented and sustained, and what privacy concerns and actors they relate to. Further, it calls for the need to clarify the responsibility of key actors in enacting and sustaining responsible adoption and use of OPS in higher education.