Indonesia’s banking sector faces digital transformation challenges, with mobile banking growth of 52% projected for 2025, while digital literacy gaps (49.68% financial literacy) and cultural barriers threaten workforce engagement. This study investigates how Indonesian bank leaders foster meaningful work during digital transformation by examining technology factors, workforce readiness, and growth acceleration strategies within Otoritas Jasa Keuangan regulatory oversight and collectivist cultural contexts. Using qualitative methodology, in-depth interviews were conducted with 10 senior executives across 8 Indonesian banks representing government-owned, private, foreign, and digital institutions between December 2022 and February 2023. Data analysis followed the Gioia methodology, progressing from first-order concepts to theoretical themes and aggregate dimensions. The findings reveal six critical leadership practices enabling meaningful work creation: agile leadership promoting experimentation and psychological safety, tech-forward leadership integrating AI strategically, emotional intelligence managing virtual teams, recognition systems celebrating innovation, regulatory–ethical balance maintaining compliance while enabling innovation, and co-creation approaches involving customers. These practices operate across micro (individual), meso (team), and macro (organizational) levels, requiring sophisticated leadership orchestration rather than simple technology adoption. The study contributes theoretically by extending the human–individual–technology–organization–process framework for Indonesian contexts, refining meaningful work theory for digital environments, and developing an integrated leadership typology. Practically, the research provides evidence-based frameworks for banking leaders and transformation officers implementing human-centered digital transformation that preserves relationship-oriented values while enabling technological innovation within regulatory frameworks.

“Diplomacy at Work: The South African Worker, U.S. Multinationals, and Transnational Racial Solidarity” examines the history of corporate reform and anti-apartheid activism through the lens of South African labor and global worker movements. It argues that Black workers in apartheid South Africa repurposed U.S. corporate codes—especially the Sullivan Principles—as instruments of resistance. The labor movement transformed reformist rhetoric into tools for collective action and transnational worker solidarity. Drawing on oral histories, trade union archives, corporate reports, and government records in both the United States and South Africa, the dissertation reveals how workers used weak corporate reforms to pressure multinational companies, connect with U.S. labor allies, and challenge the violence of apartheid from the shop-floor. In doing so, it bridges business, labor, and diplomatic history to show that workers helped shape global debates over corporate ethics and U.S. foreign policy in the late Cold War era. Diplomacy at Work thus recasts South African labor as a central force in the transnational struggle against apartheid.

Previous studies have primarily advocated enhancing the deterrent effects of sanctions against offending firms to prevent organizational environmental violations. However, despite stricter regulatory environments, violations that cross the ‘red line’ remain pervasive. Limited research has delved into the factors that influence an organization’s ability to learn from environmental sanctions imposed on others. To address this gap, inspired by social learning theory, we examine whether environmental sanctions imposed on violating firms deter environmental governance among their industry and regional peers using a sample of Chinese-listed firms from 2008 to 2021. Our findings indicate that increasing the frequency and severity of penalties for offending firms – particularly those leading firms and state-owned-enterprises or those with close ties – can affect the environmental governance practices of their peers, both in terms of process and outcome, underscoring the critical role of peer influence in enforcing environmental regulations. Additionally, the current article also concludes that the general deterrence effect on peers is more pronounced in competitive industries and regions with underdeveloped legal frameworks.

Developing Consumers: A History of Wants and Needs in Postwar South America offers a comparative social and economic history of South America’s developmental decades, from the 1950s to the mid-1970s. In the aftermath of World War II, Argentina, Brazil, and Chile implemented state-led strategies to secure economic sovereignty, raise living standards, and expand domestic markets. These policies made durable goods such as refrigerators, automobiles, and televisions increasingly available, yet access remained uneven across class, gender, and racial lines. By the 1960s, these commodities had become powerful symbols of modern well-being.

The dissertation examines how people experienced this transformation and how new forms of consumption reshaped ideas of welfare, citizenship, and inequality. By the decade’s end, it was clear that the developmental state could not deliver social mobility or universal access to modern comforts, leading to widespread frustration. Policy makers, marketing experts, and intellectuals debated how to “rationalize” consumption—deciding which needs should be guaranteed for all and which reflected elite privilege.

We model the time-varying probability of consumption disasters with international risk interactions and estimate the model using national accounts data of 42 countries back to 1833. The estimated world and country-specific disaster probabilities accord well with historical macroeconomic disasters. A match of the equity premium requires a relative risk aversion coefficient of approximately 5, which is significantly lower than previous estimates. Furthermore, the model provides notably better fits for equity volatility compared with alternative rare-disaster models. Finally, the disaster probability index estimated from the model demonstrates significant out-of-sample predictive power over long horizons, performing well not only over time but also across countries.

We use negative durability shocks from vehicle discontinuations to study asset-backed lending and income-based lending (IBL) in auto finance. Discontinuations lead to increased down payments, higher loan-to-value ratios, and larger post-default personal recoveries. These results all indicate that economically disadvantaged consumers are relatively more reliant on unsecured IBL, in stark contrast to corporate financing patterns. Vehicle recoveries on discontinued cars are lower for borrowers who purchase after discontinuations, implying that depreciation is partially borrower-dependent. Our findings suggest that lower-income borrowers, in particular, benefit from technologies that facilitate IBL, such as income monitoring.

Legal waivers embedded in corporate settlement agreements are commonly framed as neutral devices of dispute resolution. They promise finality, prevent double recovery and manage litigation risk. Yet in practice, waivers function as structural tools of accountability avoidance. This article examines the use of legal waivers within operational-level grievance mechanisms, focusing on three dimensions: the UNGPs’ procedural formalism, the cost dynamics of corporate settlements, and the opacity created by confidentiality provisions. It argues that the UNGPs’ emphasis on process legitimacy neglects the substantive consequences of waivers, that cost volatility incentivises their routine use, and that confidentiality provisions entrench information asymmetry while obstructing judicial oversight. The article concludes by advancing a hybrid regulatory model which prohibits blanket confidentiality of terms governing settlement agreements and advocates for greater transparency through a differentiated disclosure regime and increased judicial scrutiny by domestic courts.