Call for contributions. Retos Nº 29 (April 2025)

Ana Jiménez-Zarco
Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, Spain
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8980-6814

Asher Rospigliossi
University of Westminster, United Kingdom
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7356-9850

Kaiyang Zhong
Alpha University, Malaysia
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5575-0306

After a decade of economic stagnation following the Global Financial Crisis, the Covid19 Pandemic not only accelerated the ongoing digital transformation, it also highlighted the importance of resilience and the fragility of the complex globalized economy. Businesses must decide on what to do, while facing many challenges including social and political instability (fueled by the social media algorithms of the attention economy), mass migration and inequality and most pressingly the environmental crisis.

Digital Transformation offers an ever-growing array of emerging technologies, from the personalized digital communications and relationships available on the globally ubiquitous smartphone to the vast linking of systems enabled by the Internet of Everything or more virtually the metaverse. Some technologies seem to promise enormous change like artificial intelligence, while others are promoted without a clear use case, such as crypto currencies.

Businesses and organizations are no strangers to a reality where technology is omnipresent, enabling the integration of physical and digital environments.  Brands must accommodate personalization and fragmentation and learn to thrive with audiences that may love or hate them, or when people want to participate directly in business decisions, priorities and processes.

This special issue invites academics and practitioners to reflect on the challenges and opportunities that companies face in a context defined by post-globalization, where emerging technologies play an ever more important role. The aim is to foster critical debate to help in the design, evaluation, implementation and critique of innovative business strategies.

Topics to be discussed in this issue include (but are not limited to) the following:

• Emerging technologies, social change and new business models.
• Omnichannel customer value creation
• Role of technologies in mitigating the climate crisis
• Application of Artificial Intelligence in Business Management
• Brand management: personalization and customer relationships
• Sustainability and co-creation with the customer
• A metaverse without monopolies
• Technology assissted customer empowerment

We welcome submissions that take our collective thinking forward as we all prepare for a post globalized future.

In this regard, "Retos" Journal of Administration and Economics Sciences values and appreciates empirical contributions based on representative samples, robust statistical and predictive models, and a diversity of perspectives. These contributions should offer relevant insights on the central theme of the special issue, enriching academic debate and the state of the art.

Deadline: 13 january 2025
Date of publication: 1 april 2025