The global halal economy is projected to surpass USD 5 trillion in the coming years, creating an increasing demand for transparent, traceable and trustworthy financial systems across halal supply chain ecosystems. Although Blockchain Technology (BT) has significant potential to enhance transparency, security and traceability, its adoption within Halal Supply Chain Finance (HSCF) remains constrained by several technological, organisational and regulatory challenges. This study identifies and analyses the critical enablers of BT adoption in HSCF using an integrated Interpretive Structural Modelling (ISM), Matrice d'Impacts Croisés Multiplication Appliquée à un Classement (MICMAC) and Decision-Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory (DEMATEL) approach. Eleven enablers were identified through literature review and expert consultation. ISM establishes their hierarchical relationships, MICMAC classifies their driving and dependence power, and DEMATEL determines the strength and direction of causal relationships.The findings identify halal finance standardisation and regulatory support, government policy and incentives, financial and IT infrastructure and shariah endorsement as key driving enablers. MICMAC analysis further identifies these enablers as the key driving factors, whereas transaction transparency and immutability, digital halal certification and halal finance traceability are positioned as dependent enablers. DEMATEL further confirms halal finance standardisation and regulatory support, government policy and incentives, skilled human capital and shariah endorsement as the cause-group enablers, while halal finance traceability emerges as the most prominent dependent outcome. The results highlight the critical role of institutional readiness, regulatory harmonisation and technological capability in facilitating blockchain adoption within HSCF. The integrated ISM-MICMAC-DEMATEL framework provides a complementary understanding of the hierarchical structure, driving-dependence relationships and causal influence among blockchain adoption enablers in HSCF. The findings offer valuable insights for policymakers, halal certification authorities, financial institutions and industry practitioners seeking to promote blockchain-enabled transparency, trust and traceability within halal financial ecosystems.
This study examines whether the productivity association of digitalization varies with how digital adoption is distributed across firm processes. It conceptualizes process-level digital misalignment as uneven digital adoption across front-end and back-end activities, using this gap as an observable proxy for potential alignment problems across interdependent processes. Using firm-level data from the World Bank Firm-level Adoption of Technology survey for 9066 firms in primarily developing and emerging economies, the analysis finds that digitalization is positively associated with revenue-based labor productivity, but that this association weakens as the front–back digitalization gap widens. The pattern remains broadly similar across stricter fixed-effects specifications, trimmed samples, an alternative commercial–operation gap, same-sample comparison-gap tests, richer firm-level controls and more granular local fixed effects. The estimates are less precise under country-level clustered inference and the corresponding wild-cluster bootstrap, while the exploratory IV results are less stable. Additional analyses provide suggestive evidence that the moderating pattern may be stronger among larger firms. Overall, the findings suggest that the productivity association of digitalization depends not only on the overall level of digital adoption, but also on how digitalization is distributed across interdependent organizational processes. The study therefore qualifies aggregate digital-intensity explanations and extends alignment-complementarity reasoning by highlighting the importance of internal process configuration in digital transformation.
Digital technologies have profoundly reshaped gig work as a core form of labor organization in the digital economy. While research on platform labor has grown rapidly, it remains fragmented across disciplines and lacks a systematic understanding of its intellectual structure, thematic development, and sociotechnical mechanisms. This study addresses this gap by conducting a bibliometric and integrative review of 751 articles (2018–2026) from Web of Science Core Collection, cross-checked with Scopus, using CiteSpace as the main analytical tool. The study examines publication trends, collaboration structures, keyword co-occurrence, and burst terms to trace the evolution of the field and identify its major research streams. The findings identify three evolutionary stages and six dominant themes: digital platforms as sociotechnical workplaces, algorithmic management, health and precarity, work experience, differentiated groups, and AI-driven governance. Beyond mapping, the study develops a mechanism-based sociotechnical framework that shows how digital technologies are embedded in platform infrastructures, reconfigure labor processes, generate differentiated worker outcomes, and give rise to governance responses under specific boundary conditions. This review contributes an integrated perspective to digital business research and highlights future directions for algorithmic fairness, labor well-being, and sustainable platform governance.
Micro-, small-, and medium-sized enterprises play a central role in employment, local development, and economic resilience in emerging economies, yet their digital transformation is often constrained by limited resources, informal processes, uneven digital skills, and restricted access to advanced technologies. Existing digital maturity models provide useful assessment frameworks, but many were designed for larger firms and assume levels of infrastructure, governance, and technical specialization that are rarely available in smaller enterprises.This study develops and validates a novel digital maturity index for micro-, small-, and medium-sized enterprises, a context-sensitive instrument designed to assess digital maturity through accessible and capability-based criteria. The instrument was derived from existing maturity frameworks, refined through expert evaluation and pilot testing, and empirically validated with data from 260 firms in Norte de Santander, Colombia, using a stratified split-sample procedure for exploratory and confirmatory analyses.The results support a multidimensional and hierarchical interpretation of digital maturity, showing that the proposed structure better represents the data than a unidimensional model. The empirical application revealed that most firms were concentrated in intermediate maturity levels, with relatively higher mean scores in leadership and strategy and comparatively lower mean scores in process optimization. However, the differences among the six dimension scores were not statistically significant.By conceptualizing digital maturity as an integrated organizational capability rather than as a purely technological condition, this study contributes to research on digital transformation in smaller enterprises and emerging regions. The proposed index offers a decision-support tool to guide feasible, inclusive, and context-sensitive digital transformation strategies.
Through token-based systems, blockchain games shift value creation, delivery, and capture from the linear developer-controlled process of goods-dominant logic to a circular flow shaped by the broader community. This paper terms this shift community-mediated value logic, an extension and synthesis of service-dominant logic and platform ecosystem theory under tokenized, partially decentralized conditions. Under this model, tokens tie co-creation to value capture, while redistributing some of the architectural control from the developer to the community. The Business Model Canvas (BMC), built around firm-centric linear value flows, does not capture this dynamic, and recent extensions of the BMC remain additive or configurational, retaining its underlying linear logic. This study uses sixteen semi-structured interviews with team members, players, investors, and ecosystem partners, analyzed through the Gioia methodology, to develop a Blockchain Business Model Canvas (BBMC) designed around circular value flows rather than retrofitted from a linear value chain. The BBMC reframes the four domains of the BMC: the Customer Interface becomes a Participatory Community Interface; Infrastructure Management becomes Hybrid Infrastructure; Financial Aspects are reconstructed as an Economic System; and the Product is repositioned as an Emergent Product shaped through community participation rather than predetermined solely by the developer. A typology of operational, governance, and symbolic decentralization applies as an analytical lens at every block, making visible how the degree of community mediation depends on design. The study offers the BBMC as a theoretically grounded analytical framework for blockchain gaming ecosystems and a provisional reference for researchers and practitioners studying adjacent token-native ecosystems.
