Toward inclusive and sustainable digital growth: linking e-commerce, social capital, and community development

A Study on Sustainability in E-Commerce and Digital Retail

The rapid ascent of e-commerce has revolutionized global labor and economic structures, offering unparalleled convenience while manifesting critical sustainability challenges. This study provides an in-depth analysis of the environmental, social, and economic implications of digital retail, synthesizing current peer-reviewed research to evaluate its holistic impact. Key findings identify significant hurdles in the environmental footprint of logistics, packaging, and data centers; however, the research asserts that optimized supply chains hold the potential to decrease energy consumption and urban congestion (Schultz, 2025; Reinartz et al., 2019). From a social perspective, the paper examines shifts in consumer behavior and labor rights, while the economic analysis explores the e-commerce paradigm's effect on Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) and market structures (Burt & Sparks, 2003). The study concludes that sustainable outcomes can only be achieved through an integrated framework that interweaves the three pillars of sustainability—environmental, social, and economic—using digital innovations like the SEER rating system to bridge the "attitude-behavior gap" (Islam et al., 2023; Escursell et al., 2021). Furthermore, it provides strategic direction for industry executives, policymakers, and consumers, charting a definitive map toward a resilient and equitable future in the digital retail landscape.

Bridging the Social Gap Between Circular Economy and Human Development: A Semi-Systematic Review Through the Lens of Capability Approach

**Cultural and Social Value Drivers of SME Performance: A Bibliometric Review

This study maps research on cultural and social value drivers of small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) performance using a bibliometric approach. A structured search of Scopus-indexed journal articles published between 2016 and 2024 yielded 325 records. Keyword co-occurrence analysis was conducted in VOSviewer using full counting and all keywords, with a minimum occurrence threshold of four and selection of the top fifty keywords based on total link strength. The resulting network indicates a dense conceptual core centered on social capital, performance, innovation, organizational culture, and competitiveness, suggesting that cultural and relational value constructs are most often discussed through the lenses of capability-building and competitive advantage. Beyond this core, connected themes emphasize entrepreneurship and leadership, knowledge management and sharing, and sustainability-oriented concepts, indicating that performance is increasingly framed in terms of more than purely financial outcomes. The review also shows that local wisdom appears as a connected but less dominant stream, while digitally oriented and resilience-related themes are becoming more visible in recent publications. Overall, the findings provide a clear overview of the field's thematic structure, highlight underexplored conceptual boundaries, and identify future directions for improving construct clarity, measurement consistency, and comparative research across sectors, countries, and institutional settings. These insights can support more targeted theory development and evidence-based SME policy design.

Mapping the Digital Divide: A Bibliometric Analysis of Global Research Trends from 2006 to 2025

Global research on the digital divide from 2006 to 2025 is mapped using bibliometric analysis of publications indexed in Scopus to highlight underexplored issues such as the experiences of marginalized groups, the offline impact of digital exclusion, and new challenges posed by AI, IoT and metaverse.

Digital Social Innovation and Sustainability: Theory, Practice, and Debate

Digital social innovation (DSI), the use of digital technologies by citizens, civil society organizations, social enterprises, and public institutions to develop novel solutions to social and environmental problems, has evolved over the past decade and a half as a distinct field of research and practice at the intersection of technology studies, innovation studies, and sustainability science. Current study explores the interdisciplinary literature on DSI and its relationship to sustainability, in its triple-bottom-line sense of environmental, social, and economic dimensions. It traces the conceptual roots of DSI in the broader social innovation literature and in information-systems research on digital innovation, reviews the major theoretical frameworks, including a nascent multidimensional framework spanning digital technology, innovation process, and sustainability focus to connect digital innovation to sustainable development, and examines empirical evidence on how digitally enabled initiatives, from open data commons and citizen science to platform cooperatives, civic technology, telemedicine, and precision agriculture, contribute to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The research engages critically with the limits of DSI's contribution, including the digital divide, the environmental footprint of digital infrastructure itself, the phenomenon of data colonialism, and the tendency toward technological solutionism, before setting out a twelve-pathway research agenda and highlights practical implications for practitioners, policymakers, and researchers. DSI offers a genuine, if bounded and unevenly distributed, set of tools for advancing sustainability, and its future contribution depends less on the sophistication of the technology involved than on the governance arrangements, funding ecosystems, and power relations within which that technology is embedded.

Exploring the Effects of Corporate Digital Transformation: A Bibliometric Analysis and Future Research Agenda

This study uses a hybrid methodology of bibliometric analysis and systematic review to critically review the existing research on corporate digital transformation (CDT) effects published between 2018 and 2025. Descriptive analysis shows that this research field was still in its infancy before 2022 and experienced an explosive growth period thereafter. China takes the lead in publication volume, while Finance Research Letters emerges as the most prolific journal and research results are predominantly concentrated in domains such as finance and economics. Keyword and thematic analysis indicate that “digital transformation” is the core keyword, and research themes have gradually expanded from basic dimensions like firm performance to diverse areas including ESG, supply chain management, and risk management. The evolution of CDT effects research proceeds along the lines of technological determinism, organizational adaptation, and social construction. This study advances a systematic understanding of the CDT effects by developing a bibliometric overview of relevant research and illustrating the field's conceptual framework and thematic interconnections. The findings offer empirical insights to guide managers in formulating differentiated digital strategies and assist policymakers in constructing supportive ecosystems for digital transformation.