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Digital investment and the successful selection and implementation of technology is crucial to local government success and yet there is a dearth of research evaluating how these decisions are made. And yet there is a dearth of research evaluating how Boards and executives of all kinds make these decisions and the role they play in influencing asset deployment in the digital space. In this regard, government, and especially local government is not only sparsely investigated as part of the existing body of knowledge but does not function neatly when compared to commercial organizations and the profit motive. This paper addresses the shortfall by investigating the interplay between elected members and Boards of local government in terms of complex decision-making processes surrounding technology investment. Empirically, this research adopts a case study approach and qualitative questioning of key elected and appointed actors allowing us to dissect the phenomenon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As COVID-19-related social distancing measures have been adopted and look likely to remain in place for a significant period, robotics experts now question whether the current scenario might spur investments into total blue-collar robotization in manufacturing. This paper focuses on the context of SMEs which play a major role in national economies and industrial value chains worldwide. Adopting multiple case studies, we collect data through seven interviews with SME managers in Germany, UK and Sweden during first and second quarter of 2020. Our analysis reveals administrative, technical, and economic issues impeding robotization of SMEs, but these barriers are lowered by the pandemics. The SME managers reported on the changed attitudes towards data access, remote networking and collaboration, and the early experiments to adopt robots to compensate the staff shortage on shop floors. We theorize on these impacts with a conceptual model predicting SME robotization from contingent resource-based view perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]