From surviving to thriving in the gig economy: A research agenda for individuals in the new world of work

Kicking off a Gig Work Career: Unfolding a Career Learning Cycle of Gig Workers

We observe gig workers' retrospective sense-making of their career development, from creating an account on online labor platforms to managing gigs successfully. Our data reveals that gig workers advance through three career stages in their initial career learning cycle. We identify each stage as characterized by stage-specific emotions and that they react with specific behaviors to gig work challenges. Gig work challenges that occur in the platform environment are namely the newbie challenge, the positioning and relational challenge, and the balancing challenge, which workers need to overcome in order to transition to the next stage. In line with contemporary career and protean career theory on career learning cycles, gig workers need to build a set of specialized skills and meta-competencies to successfully navigate their careers. As an outcome of the here-described career learning cycle, gig workers develop an entrepreneurial identity aspiration, as they are empowered and can use the platform as a playground or stepping stone for entrepreneurial activities. Our paper, thus, develops an understanding of gig workers' initial career learning cycle by examining the factors that enable gig workers to kick off a career and allow them to thrive and advance on the platforms professionally.

The mediating role of psychological empowerment in perceptions of decent work and work immersion among Chinese nurses: A cross-sectional study

AIM

The purpose of this study was to explore the relationships among perceptions of decent work, psychological empowerment, and work immersion among nurses, hypothesizing that psychological empowerment mediates the relationship between perceptions of decent work and work immersion.

BACKGROUND

At present, there are many studies on nurses' perceptions of decent labor and work immersion in China, but the relationship between them has not been discussed from a psychological perspective.

METHODS

The sample consisted of clinical nurses in Jiangxi, Zhejiang, Hubei, and Guangdong provinces, China, and the nurses' general information, decent labor perception, psychological empowerment, and work immersion scores were assessed using the General Information Scale, Decent Labor Perception Scale, Psychological Empowerment Scale, and Work Immersion Scale, respectively. Pearson correlation analysis and structural equation modeling were used to analyze the data.

RESULTS

The total scores of nurses' perceptions of decent work, psychological empowerment, and work immersion were at a moderate level. The total nurse work immersion score and each dimension score were positively correlated with the total nurse decent work perception score and the total psychological empowerment score. Decent work perception and psychological empowerment directly and positively predicted work immersion; decent work perception also indirectly acted on work immersion through psychological empowerment.

CONCLUSIONS AND IMPLICATIONS FOR NURSING AND HEALTH POLICY

Nurses' work immersion was moderate, and this study explored the mechanisms by which perceptions of decent work affect nurses' work immersion from a psychological perspective, validating the mediating role of psychological empowerment. This study emphasizes that nursing managers should fully understand the importance of nurses' work immersion, continuously improve nurses' decent labor perceptions, enhance their psychological empowerment level, improve their work immersion, and enhance the quality of nursing services.

The relationship between working in the "gig" economy and perceived subjective well-being in Western Balkan countries

The combination of accelerated digitalization and the recent COVID-19 crisis has increased the number of remote workers worldwide to unimaginable proportions. Among the large number of remote workers that execute their projects from home, there is a significant number of permanently self-employed remote workers, usually referred to as freelancers. Despite the importance of this kind of business activity for modern project management society, perceived drivers of freelancing are still unknown. The goal of this paper was to shed some light on the general subjective well-being of freelancing activity and investigate differences concerning gender, age, and education. The study was performed in late 2020 and included 471 freelancers from Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Macedonia, and Montenegro that participated in an online questionnaire evaluating their subjective well-being while participating in the "gig" economy. Factor analysis was used as a primary statistical method and two major groups were identified: (1) Impact of working from home on a freelancer's personal life and health and (2) Fulfillment of expectations in the economic and professional sense. Gender was found not to be significant for overall work satisfaction. However, older freelancers proved to be more satisfied with the fulfillment of economic and professional expectations, which correlate with years of professional experience. Another conclusion is that more educated freelancers are generally less satisfied with both groups of drivers - fulfillment of personal life and professional expectations. Understanding how the combination of occupations, technological infrastructure, and demographic characteristics in the region has affected the well-being of freelancers may help policymakers and organization owners, as well as future entrepreneurs, better prepare for this model of work in the future. It also increases the possibility of exploring individual dimensions of wellbeing useful for targeting interventions at the level of each country separately. In line with this, the present study contributes to the existing body of knowledge and the impact of hybrid models of work on the subjective well-being of workers in the "gig" economy.

The real-time and carry-over effects of injustice on performance and service quality in a ridesharing driver scenario

The nature of gig work and its growth have important implications for organizational justice theory. Aspects of gig work, including the transactional compensation arrangement, strict algorithmic rating system, and power asymmetry between drivers and customers, have implications for understanding how dimensions of distributive, informational, and interpersonal injustice manifest and impact job performance in the gig context. An understanding of this topic can inform justice theory more broadly and help explain inconsistent findings in the literature. Here, we report the results of two studies examining the unique effects of these respective dimensions of injustice on emotions and, ultimately, the driving performance and service quality in a ridesharing service context. In Study 1, we modeled the passenger-driver interaction of the ridesharing context using a driving simulator in a laboratory setting to differentiate the real-time and carry-over effects of specific dimensions of injustice. The results from 99 participants showed that perceptions of interpersonal injustice increased anger and unhappiness during the ride, in turn impairing driving and service performance. Antecedent-focused emotion regulation strategies (ERS) reduced felt unhappiness. Moreover, unexpectedly, perceived distributive injustice as caused by the customer rating had opposite (direct versus indirect) effects on service performance in the subsequent ride. Study 2 was an online simulation vignette scenario with 294 participants. The results replicated the findings of Study 1 and revealed two moderators of the unexpected distributive justice-performance relationship.

Supplementary Information

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s12144-022-04215-3.

Digital work platform: Understanding platforms, workers, clients in a service relation

The rapid growth of digital economic activity had led to considerable scholarly interest in the phenomenon of platforms. Evidence shows how digital work platforms constitute one of the most relevant changes that have occurred in recent years and assume the condition of actors with an important presence in national and global work markets. However, these changes cannot be understood by focusing only on the work sphere, as the sphere of consumption is also central to this debate. In fact, the new ways of organizing, dividing and coordinating work on digital platforms are interconnected with specific modalities of consumption of the services made available by them. This article argues that a service relation approach allows an understanding of what is happening on digital work platforms, both in terms of the structural and conjunctural configurations of the interrelationships between platforms, workers and clients, as well as their social and economic consequences. This approach allows the analysis of the web of interdependencies between distinctive types of platforms, workers and clients, and to discuss how changes longitudinally within it are conditioned by the very transformations inherent to the platforms market. Thus, future research needs to explore the network of the voices of platforms, workers and clients in order to produce a robust analysis of these triangular relations as well as of the challenges regarding the differences and interconnections between algorithmic and human management.

Toward a sustainable career perspective on contingent work: a critical review and a research agenda

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to provide a synthesis of the contingent work field and to advocate a sustainable career perspective on contingent work.

Design/methodology/approach

Adopting a broader review approach allowed to synthesize the contingent work literature across contingent work types (temporary agency work, gig work and freelance work) and develop a sustainable career perspective on contingent work. The authors searched for empirical, conceptual and review articles published from 2008 to December 2021. In total, the authors included 208 articles.

Findings

The authors advocate a sustainable career perspective that allows for organizing and synthesizing the fragmented contingent work literature. Adopting a sustainable career perspective enables to study contingent work from a dynamic perspective transcending one single organization.

Originality/value

The field is suffering from fragmentation and most importantly from an oversight of how contingent work experiences play a role in a persons’ career. This paper addresses this problem by adopting a sustainable career perspective on contingent work.

One foot in the online gig economy: Coping with a splitting professional identity

As the online gig economy diffuses into professional fields, more workers now engage in online platforms alongside traditional offline practice. How do concurrent online and offline works challenge professional identity and how do workers cope with the challenges? This study inductively explores a qualitative dataset of lawyers who worked in online platform-based and conventional offline legal services at the same time. I found that the common features of online gig work (e.g. accessibility and affordability for customers, ratings, and reviews of workers) result in contradictions with traditional legal work in terms of work content and client relations. These differences caused an emerging split in lawyers’ professional identity—the coexistence of two somewhat contradictory sub-identities. The lawyers coped with the professional identity split in one of two ways: 1) alleviating the experienced severity of the split by using the tactics of framing and distancing from online work and tailoring online work content; 2) reconciling the split by reframing professional ideals based on their new understanding of being lawyers obtained from online work. Individual differences in professional identity constructed in traditional practice were found to underlie this identity dynamic: the lawyers’ expertise specialization and customer orientation explained the strength of professional split, and those who believed that the profession is highly dynamic and will experience dramatic future changes were inclined to reconcile professional identity split.

What Is on Your Gig Radar? Toward a Hierarchical Structure of Coping

Digitalized independent workers, known as gig workers, have been shown to work under high-pressure, with a lack of autonomy, a lack of feedback and perceived competence, and a high level of isolation. We conducted a literature review to investigate how gig workers cope with these sources of stress. We identified primary sources of psychological stress in gig work and the main strategies used by workers for coping with them. We show that focusing solely on identifying coping strategies depicts a fragmented literature, making it impossible to compare, link, or aggregate findings. We suggest a radar classification of coping based on the motivational action theory of coping and self-determination theory that defines coping as a process to adapt to the environment and maintain well-being. We argue that this framework is both relevant and necessary for developing research on gig-worker coping.

Measuring Well-Being of Migrant Gig Workers: Exampled as Hangzhou City in China

The consistent innovations and applications of information technology drive the vigorous development of the gig economy, and generate gig workers such as food delivery workers and couriers, and make a great contribution to stabilizing employment and increasing income. Gig workers, mostly made up of migrants, and suffer from job and status difficulties. Research on the well-being of migrant gig workers can reveal the practical problems and provide suggestions for narrowing the wealth gap to promote social fairness and justice. Taking Hangzhou city in China as an example, this paper explores the well-being of food delivery workers, couriers, and online car-hailing drivers as representatives of migrant gig workers. Firstly, the relevant data are acquired through the questionnaire. Secondly, the characteristics of this group are analyzed through descriptive analysis, namely: most of them are migrant workers aged between 20 and 39 with low occupation satisfaction due to insufficient social security coverage and limited well-being, despite relatively high income. Based on the analysis of differences in demographic variables and structural equation modeling, the factors affecting the well-being of migrant gig workers are studied, which mainly are occupation satisfaction, social interaction, and social security. The results show that occupation satisfaction is positively affected by family characteristics, social interaction, and social security. In addition, family characteristics and social security positively impact social interaction, but the former has no significant effect on well-being. Finally, this paper enriches the research on the well-being of specific migrant gig workers and gives policy suggestions for enhancing the well-being of migrant gig workers in Hangzhou city from the perspective of optimizing the mechanism, pilot construction, and platform provision.

Losing the benefits of work passion? The implications of low ego-resilience for passionate workers

Purpose

This research assessed the interactive effects of employee passion and ego-resilience (ER) on relevant work outcomes, including job satisfaction, citizenship behavior, job tension, and emotional exhaustion. The authors hypothesize that higher work passion is associated with less positive work outcomes when employees are low in ER.

Design/methodology/approach

The authors collected data from three unique samples (N's = 175, 141, 164) to evaluate the moderating effect across outcomes. The authors conducted analyses with and without demographic controls and affectivity (e.g. negative and positive). The authors used a time-separated data collection approach in Sample 3. The authors also empirically assess the potential for non-linear passion and ER main effect relationships to emerge.

Findings

Findings across samples confirm that high passion employees with elevated levels of ER report positive attitudinal, behavioral, and well-being outcomes. Conversely, high passion employees do not experience comparable effects when reporting low levels of ER. Results were broadly consistent when considering demographics and affectivity.

Research limitations/implications

Despite the single-source nature of the three data collections, The authors took steps to minimize common method bias concerns (e.g. time separation and including affectivity). Future research will benefit from multiple data sources collected longitudinally and examining a more comprehensive range of occupational contexts.

Practical implications

Passion is something that organizations want in all employees. However, the authors' results show that passion may not be enough to lead to favorable outcomes without considering factors that support its efficacy. Also, results show that moderate levels of passion may offer little benefit compared to low levels and may be detrimental.

Originality/value

As a focal research topic, work passion research is still in early development. Studies exploring factors that support or derail expected favorable effects of work passion are needed to establish a foundation for subsequent analyses. Moreover, the authors comment on the assumed “more is better” phenomenon. The authors argue for reconsidering the linear approach to predicting behavior in science and practice.

Construction of Mega Individuals Competency Model in Business Environment: A Grounded Theory Approach

The purpose of this research is to explore the new practices derived from the influences of information technology among a certain group, i.e., “mega individuals”. Based on Grounded Theory and interviews from 53 companies, which consist of responses from 56 domestic and international founders, entrepreneurs, professional managers, partners and business elites, this study expounds that “mega individuals”, who constantly develop individual attainment and ability under the influence of business ecosystem evolution, have broken the traditional employment relationship. Through Grounded Theory, the following conclusion can be drawn: “mega individuals” are composed of three key traits: compound ability, collaboration ability and personal intellectual property (IP) know-hows. This research takes the initiative to create the “mega individuals competency model” (MICM) and elaborates on the dynamic capabilities theory to interpret the MICM, dedicated to enriching the dynamic capabilities theory by merging the current rapid and continuous changes in the business world from the promising and potential individual’s perspective.

Conducting organizational survey and experimental research online: From convenient to ambitious in study designs, recruiting, and data quality

Conducting organizational research via online surveys and experiments offers a host of advantages over traditional forms of data collection when it comes to sampling for more advanced study designs, while also ensuring data quality. To draw attention to these advantages and encourage researchers to fully leverage them, the present paper is structured into two parts. First, along a structure of commonly used research designs, we showcase select organizational psychology (OP) and organizational behavior (OB) research and explain how the Internet makes it feasible to conduct research not only with larger and more representative samples, but also with more complex research designs than circumstances usually allow in offline settings. Subsequently, because online data collections often also come with some data quality concerns, in the second section, we synthesize the methodological literature to outline three improvement areas and several accompanying strategies for bolstering data quality.

Plain Language Summary: These days, many theories from the fields of organizational psychology and organizational behavior are tested online simply because it is easier. The point of this paper is to illustrate the unique advantages of the Internet beyond mere convenience—specifically, how the related technologies offer more than simply the ability to mirror offline studies. Accordingly, our paper first guides readers through examples of more ambitious online survey and experimental research designs within the organizational domain. Second, we address the potential data quality drawbacks of these approaches by outlining three concrete areas of improvement. Each comes with specific recommendations that can ensure higher data quality when conducting organizational survey or experimental research online.

Mental Illness of Management Educators: Does Holding Multiple Academic Jobs Play a Role? A Qualitative Study

Through addressing management educators in four public business schools in Egypt, the authors of this paper aim to uncover the impact of holding multiple academic jobs on the mental health of management educators. The paper asserts that management educators do not perceive the holding of multiple academic roles as a stimulant of any form of mental illness (e.g., anxiety, depression, stress) if it is accompanied by a sense of autonomy (proper teaching loads, rational time for supervising theses, reasonable requests for research production) a feeling of competence (relevant monthly salary, available training and learning opportunities) and a sense of relatedness (feeling of involvement, flexible work hours, option to work from home).

Platform riders' occupational stigma consciousness and workplace deviant behavior: the mediating role of self-depletion

Purpose

The study aims to analyze how occupational stigma consciousness affects workplace deviant behavior.

Design/methodology/approach

The authors used a time-lagged research design. Data from 354 riders working on the platform were gathered, and multiple regression and bootstrapping were used to test the hypotheses.

Findings

Based on the ego depletion theory and resource perspective, the study explores the relationship between the occupational stigma consciousness and workplace deviant behavior of platform riders in China. Occupational stigma consciousness promotes workplace deviant behavior; self-depletion mediates the positive relationship between occupational stigma consciousness and workplace deviant behavior and workplace mindfulness exerts a negative moderating effect on the relationship between occupational stigma consciousness and self-depletion.

Originality/value

The study provides a resource perspective to understand how occupational stigma consciousness is related to workplace deviant behavior and how workplace mindfulness alleviates resource depletion caused by occupational stigma consciousness. The research results provide practical information for managers to reduce deviant behavior, which helps to promote riders' performance on the platform.

Strangers in the Dark: Navigating opacity and transparency in open online career-related knowledge sharing

Given repeated upheavals in jobs and organizations, people increasingly share career-related knowledge in open online platforms. Dealing with career-related knowledge in an open online setting, though, is challenging. It requires people to balance between exchanging too much and too little career-related knowledge, e.g., to disclose and share the right knowledge without jeopardizing themselves. This study examines how participants achieve such delicate balance in open online processes. It investigates discussions in a career advice-focused online platform. Findings reveal how open online career-related exchanges include sequences of knowledge sharing, knowledge evaluating, and of diverting. They also include sequences of regulating openness that involve securing opacity for the people participating while also ensuring the transparency of the process. The study unpacks how participants in an open online setting navigate the dynamic balance between individual opacity and processual transparency. Findings hold implications for scholarship on open organizing, careers, and advice networks, as well as for practice.

How Gig Worker Responds to Negative Customer Treatment: The Effects of Work Meaningfulness and Traits of Psychological Resilience

The negative interpersonal interaction between customers and platform gig workers has become a problem for platform owners and government. This study investigates the role of negative customer treatment in the context of gig work and its impact on gig workers’ sabotage behavior. A questionnaire survey approach was used in the study, collected three-wave survey data from 258 Chinese gig workers including food-deliver platform workers and app-based ride-hailing drivers. Both effects of the mediation and moderation were tested, all of which find support, using hierarchical multiple regression by SPSS22.0. Results indicate that negative customer treatment can also predict gig workers’ service sabotage through work meaningfulness. Furthermore, positive customer treatment acted as an effective safeguard against the effects of negative customer treatment on employee service sabotage. Trait psychological resilience can also mitigate the effects of a low level of work meaningfulness. The manuscript’s focus provides an interesting angle to the previous research, especially the inclusion of work meaningfulness and trait resilience, on negative customer treatment in the context of gig work. This study contributes to further broaden the perspective of conservation of resource (COR) theory for individual intrinsic motivation analysis. Practical implications for platform management and government governance have also been discussed in this manuscript.

Seeking Purity, Avoiding Pollution: Strategies for Moral Career Building

This study builds theory on how people construct moral careers. Analyzing interviews with 102 journalists, we show how people build moral careers by seeking jobs that allow them to fulfill both the institution’s moral obligations and their own material aims. We theorize a process model that traces three common moral claiming strategies that people use over time: conventional, supplemental, and reoriented. Using these strategies, people accept or alter purity and pollution rules, identify appropriate jobs, and orient themselves to specific audiences for validation of their moral claims. People’s careers are punctuated by reckonings that cause them to reconsider how their strategies fulfill their moral and material aims. Experiences of gender and racial discrimination, access to alternate occupational identities, and timing of entry into the occupation also shape people’s movement between strategies. Over time, people combine these moral claiming strategies in different ways such that varying moral careers emerge within the same occupation. Overall, our study shows how people can build moral careers by actively revising purity and pollution rules while holding fast to institutional moral obligations. By theorizing careers as an ongoing series of moral claiming strategies, this research contributes novel ideas about how morals weave through and organize relationships between people, careers, and institutions.

Prospects of Integrating Gig Economy in the Saudi Arabian Health-care System from the Perspectives of Health-care Decision-makers and Practitioners

Background

Gig economy is an approach in the labor market which is characterized by the prevalence of short-term contracts or freelance work in contrast to permanent jobs. The gig workers are independent workers or temporary contract workers who enter into formal/informal agreements with on-demand companies to provide their services. Rather than employing full-time/permanent employees companies may utilize gig workers as per the demand and work burden, which can minimize the costs incurred in managing permanent employees. However, there is a lack of research on using gig economy in health care, its prospects and the issues involved.

Purpose

The purpose of this study is to identify and evaluate various prospects in integrating gig economy with the Saudi health-care system.

Methods

An online survey questionnaire instrument including 22 prospects under three categories including organizational competitiveness, resource management, and sustainable development was used for collecting data from 712 health-care decision-makers and practitioners in Saudi Arabia. Findings were analyzed using the statistical means and standard deviations for each item in the questionnaire for analyzing the role of each factor in depth, and t-tests were used for comparing the responses between the groups.

Results

T-tests revealed no significant differences among the experts and health-care workers in relation to organizational competitiveness and resource management; however, significant differences in opinions were identified in relation to sustainable development. Individual factors including motivation for Saudization program (mean=4.5, SD=1.15) and creating employment opportunities in rural areas (mean=4.5, SD=1.08), growth in economy (mean=4.4, SD=1.43), increased opportunities for women and disabled (mean=4.4, SD=1.28), and growth in employment (mean=4.3, SD=1.68) were the major prospects identified in relation to the use of gig economy in the Saudi Arabian health-care system.

Conclusion

Gig economy may offer a wide range of benefits in health care, especially sustainable development, effective resource management, and organizational competitiveness.

In search of alternatives for individualised workers: A comparative study of freelance organisations

This article contributes to the debate on the enterprise culture, which is characterised by the celebration of risk-taking and self-realisation, which in turn also implies self-responsibilisation and atomisation of the workforce. It does so by investigating organisations created with the aim of finding alternatives for freelancers, who epitomise the processes of individualisation typical of late capitalism. The organisations studied, both companies and cooperatives, aim to enable freelancers to combine autonomy in running their business with access to labour and social rights and inclusion in a collective. Drawing on a multiple case study conducted in France and Italy, the article investigates how organisations can counteract the processes of self-responsibilisation and atomisation of the workforce by enacting principles typical of alternative organisations. This study thus provides a twofold contribution to critical organisational theory and sociological literature on the individualisation of work and feasible alternatives to it. Our findings show, first, that the enterprise culture can be challenged through alternative organising even when freelancers – a category of workers embodying the contemporary processes of individualisation – are at stake. Second, the study of these emerging organisations also contributes to the flourishing debate on alternative organisations by adding an original empirical contribution to ongoing reflections on alternatives to market capitalism.

Productive employment and decent work: The impact of AI adoption on psychological contracts, job engagement and employee trust

This research examines the tension between the aims of the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goal 8 (SDG 8), to promote productive employment and decent work, and the adoption of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Our findings are based on the analysis of 232 survey results, where we tested the effects of AI adoption on workers' psychological contract, engagement and trust. We find that psychological contracts had a significant, positive effect on job engagement and on trust. Yet, with AI adoption, the positive effect of psychological contracts fell significantly. A further re-examination of the extant literature leads us to posit that AI adoption fosters the creation of a third type of psychological contract, which we term "Alienational". Whereas SDG 8 is premised on strengthening relational contracts between an organization and its employees, the adoption of AI has the opposite effect, detracting from the very nature of decent work.

Employee Engagement and Wellbeing in Times of COVID-19: A Proposal of the 5Cs Model

The COVID-19 pandemic has had an unprecedented impact on the labor market. The psychological pressure and uncertainty caused by the current changing workplace environment have led to negative consequences for workers. Considering the predictive relationship between employee engagement and wellbeing and in light of this unprecedented situation that affects workers of all the industries worldwide, this study aims to identify the key main drivers of employee engagement that can lead to employee wellbeing in the current context. Through a literature review, a theoretical model to strengthen engagement in times of COVID-19 is proposed. The main factors are conciliation, cultivation, confidence, compensation, and communication. Whereas prior to the pandemic, firms had already understood the need to achieve this, it is now considered a vital tool for staff health and wellbeing. This article makes two main contributions. First, it provides a model for boosting employee engagement, and therefore, wellbeing. Second, managerial suggestions are made to apply the theoretical model.

The Gig Economy: Current Issues, the Debate, and the New Avenues of Research

In the context of the debate on platform economy, on the one hand, and the gig economy, on the other, this paper delineates the conceptual boundaries of both concepts to query the gig economy research included in the Web of Science database. The initial search, cutoff date February 2020, targeting “gig economy” returned a sample of 378 papers dealing with the topic. The subsequent analysis, employing the science mapping method and relating software (SciMAT), allowed to query the body of research dealing with gig economy in detail. The value added by this paper is fourfold. First, the broad literature on gig economy is mapped and the nascent synergies relating both to research opportunities and economic implications are identified and highlighted. Second, the findings reveal that while research on gig economy proliferates, the distinction between “platform” and “gig” economy frequently remains blurred in the analysis. This paper elaborates on this issue. Third, it is highlighted that the discussion on gig economy is largely dispersed and a clearer research agenda is needed to streamline the discussion to improve its exploratory and explanatory potential. This paper suggests ways of navigating this issue. Fourth, by mapping the existing research on gig economy and highlighting its caveats, the way toward a comprehensive research agenda in the field is highlighted.