On Making a Difference: Towards an Integrative Framework for Green IT and Green IS Adoption

Organizations and society nowadays face significant challenges. Organizations are required to fundamentally digital transform by assimilating Information Technology (IT) and Information System (IS) assets. Society faces an increasingly severe global climate disruption and needs to become more environmentally friendly. Green IT (GIT) and Green IS (GIS), as technologies and initiatives that seek to reduce the negative impacts of IT/IS on the environment, are a response to this. They can help organizations to gain a competitive advantage while also addressing broad-scale environmental issues. We undertake a literature review to frame the general GIT/GIS adoption process. We provide an overarching understanding by modeling a sequence of five cognitive adoption phases (outset, pre-adoption, adoption, post-adoption, and outcome) on four levels (environmental, societal, organizational, and individual). By recognizing that GIT/GIS adoption has multiple drivers and outcomes, we provide an extensive perspective on GIT/GIS adoption

Looking back and moving sideways:Following the Gandhian approach as the underlying thread for a sustainable science and education

Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Comparative evaluation of the MAZI pilots (version 3)

This deliverable is the third of three, reporting on the comparative evaluation of MAZI pilots (Deliverable 3.10). Across the course of MAZI, the pilots have engaged with communities in different ways, for different purposes. Common to all pilots has been the focus on using and developing the MAZI toolkit in order to facilitate Do-It-Yourself (DIY) networking. This has involved collaborations characterised by inter-disciplinarity, where academic and community partners have worked together to find effective ways of engaging the communities in meaningful ways. In the previous version of this deliverable (D3.9), we defined our analysis methodology, which builds on the logic set out in the first report (D3.8). In this report, we will discuss the results of using of Realist Evaluation (RE) to form case studies (characterised by context, mechanism, outcome configurations) and Activity Theory (AT) to characterise each pilot as a separate activity system. To identify the generative mechanisms, we investigated the tensions and conflicts between the technical and semiotic levels of the pilots’ activity systems. Evidence generated was presented alongside the insights from the MAZI handbook to inform best practice for supporting the MAZI toolkit. Comparing across the pilots’, we reveal tensions and conflicts between the technical and semiotic levels of the activity systems and the generative mechanisms used to meet the project and communities’ objectives. This emphasised the importance of understanding the context, e.g. by valuing the time spent with communities and the importance of learning their language and vocabularies, and respecting others capital. It revealed mechanisms for understanding location, the importance of stories and storytelling, designing collaborative activities and embracing opportunities for conversations. It also echoed the need to identify key roles, guises and actors for DIY networking and the importance of the principle of adding value rather than adding work

Not just playing: The politics of designing games for impact on anticipatory climate governance

Simulation games are increasingly popular tools for opening up future imaginaries, especially in the arena of sustainability policy-making and decision support. However, there is a lack of understanding regarding the potential power of games in anticipatory governance. We argue that the utility of simulation games in support of anticipatory climate governance can be greatly increased when game processes are consciously designed to impact present day planning and action. At the same time, game designers with the intention to support or intervene in governance and policy-making inevitably enter political arenas and bear responsibility for understanding and managing their influence at the science-policy interface. We present two case studies: a game simulating a sustainable food policy council with food system actors in Kyoto, Japan, and a game focused on the exploration and imagination of the global impacts of climate tipping points aimed at participants of the global climate negotiation community. Each case study represents a specific logic for translating game play into real-world impacts at different governance scales with distinct political implications. Based on these two case studies, we develop principles for the design and evaluation of simulation games that seek to impact anticipatory climate governance, based on five lenses: (1) purpose and positionality; (2) conceptions of the future and imaginaries; (3) beneficiaries, key stakeholders and participants; (4) the politics of game features and design; and (5) evaluation

Scaling behaviour change for a 1.5 degree world: challenges and opportunities

Sustainable behaviour change has been rising up the climate policy agenda as it becomes increasingly clear that far-reaching changes in lifestyles will be required, alongside shifts in policy, service provision and technological innovation, if we are to avoid dangerous levels of global heating. In this paper, we review different approaches to behaviour change from economics, psychology, sociology and political economy, to explore the neglected question of scalability, and identify critical points of leverage that challenge the dominant emphasis on individual responsibility. Although politically contentious and challenging to implement, in order to achieve the ambitious target of keeping warming below 1.5 degrees, we propose urgent structural interventions are necessary at all points within an ecosystem of transformation, and highlight five key spheres for action: a ‘strong’ sustainability pathway; pursuing just transitions (via changes to work, income and infrastructure); rebalancing political institutions to expand spaces for citizens vis-à-vis elite incumbents; focusing on high polluting actors and activities; and supporting social mobilisation. We call for a move away from linear and ‘shallow’ understandings of behaviour change, dominated by traditional behavioural and mainstreaming approaches, towards a ‘deep’, contextualised and dynamic view of scaling as a transformative process of multiple feedbacks and learning loops between individuals and systems, engaged in a mutually reinforcing ‘spiral of sustainability’

Social and Institutional Innovation in Self-Organising Cities

Today’s scenario is characterized by a global connectivity space where uninterrupted streams of information, people, and goods flow, through multi-scale socio-economic processes. All of this requires rethinking well-accepted mental frames as individual capabilities, businesses actions, social and spatial agglomerations evolve in a new and unceasingly changing landscape. This book contributes to the debate on how cities are redefined in relation to the global connective space and the so-called knowledge-based economy. The authors explore the variable set of functional changes, which are intrinsically linked to the multiplicity of multi-scale processes. The book contains the proceedings of the conference “New sciences and actions for complex cities (Florence, Italy 14-15 December 2017)”

Unraveling the capabilities that enable digital transformation: A data-driven methodology and the case of artificial intelligence

Digital transformation (DT) is prevalent in businesses today. However, current studies to guide DT are mostly qualitative, resulting in a strong call for quantitative evidence of exactly what DT is and the capabilities needed to enable it successfully. With the aim of filling the gaps, this paper presents a novel bibliometric framework that unearths clues from scientific articles and patents. The framework incorporates the scientific evolutionary pathways and hierarchical topic tree to quantitatively identify the DT research topics’ evolutionary patterns and hierarchies at play in DT research. Our results include a comprehensive definition of DT from the perspective of bibliometrics and a systematic categorization of the capabilities required to enable DT, distilled from over 10,179 academic papers on DT. To further yield practical insights on technological capabilities, the paper also includes a case study of 9,454 patents focusing on one of the emerging technologies - artificial intelligence (AI). We summarized the outcomes with a four-level AI capabilities model. The paper ends with a discussion on its contributions: presenting a quantitative account of the DT research, introducing a process based understanding of DT, offering a list of major capabilities enabling DT, and drawing the attention of managers to be aware of capabilities needed when undertaking their DT journey