Aurelio Ravarini

As Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) tools become increasingly integrated into clinical practice, their anthropomorphic features raise important questions about their role, reliability and implications for human-centred care. This discussion article examines the concept of anthropomorphic GenAI, highlighting how its human-like traits may influence trust, professional judgement and the dynamics of patient care. While such technologies can enhance efficiency and support clinical decision-making, their design often blurs the line between simulation and authentic human understanding. This paper identifies key gaps in the existing literature, particularly around emotional intelligence, ethical reasoning, specialisation-specific adoption and the long-term impact of AI on clinical practice and proposes a structured research agenda to guide future inquiry and responsible innovation. By drawing attention to the promises and pitfalls of anthropomorphic AI in healthcare, this discussion invites interdisciplinary reflection on how such systems should be designed, evaluated and integrated into healthcare and clinical contexts.

Purpose – This manuscript explores the evolving roles of HR professionals amidst global megatrends and organizational transitions, focusing on the Italian context, which has experienced disruptive adoption of new forms of work such as remote and hybrid work. In this challenging scenario, our research aims to uncover if and how HR professionals are transforming their roles or maintaining the status quo in navigating organizational changes, dealing with the upcoming working scenario, and challenging conventional perceptions of HR practitioners. Design/methodology/approach – The study employs the social-symbolic work lens, that contributes to a deeper understanding of how HR professionals work to construct organizational life, the identities of employees, and the societal norms and assumptions that provide the context for organizational action. This perspective highlights HR professionals' personal efforts, consisting of the emotional labor entailed in steering organizational transformations and, eventually, maintenance in a context where remote work has become prevalent. Data was collected through 16 online focus groups involving 76 HR professionals from Italian organizations. Findings – Our research offers two interrelated contributions to HR literature. First, we provide pieces of evidence on how HR practitioners act as agents of change in two emerging roles: the " Wannabe Hero " and the " Ordinary Hero ". This challenges the prevailing rhetorical discourse about the so-called HR business partner. Secondly, we delve into the persistent obstacles that hinder HR professionals from making a substantial impact in addressing radical changes. These findings will provide useful insights into effectively engaging HR practitioners as agents of change in organizational transformation, shedding light on praxis, structures, and their emotional work. Originality/value – The paper analyzes HR professionals’ social-symbolic work, which offers an original contribution to the comprehension of the activities they carry on in practice and the emotions they have been experiencing. These influence both the way HR professionals play their role and the organizational and institutional environment.

This paper explores the implementation of Game-Based Learning (GBL) in higher education, with a particular focus on the dual role of students as developers and players of educational games. In particular, the study investigates the extent to which GBL leverages intrinsic motivation, fosters engagement, consolidates prior knowledge, and cultivates essential 21st-century skills in undergraduate students that designed, developed, and played interactive digital gamebooks on STEM disciplines. A mixed method based on surveys and focus groups was leveraged to assess the diverse learning outcomes and the educational impact of the project. Findings highlightsthat theGBL approach significantly increased student engagement, fostered deeper learning in IT-related skills, and provided valuable experiences in competences such as project management and teamwork. However, the integration of advanced academic content in Mathematics and Statistics was perceived as less effective, posing challenges to knowledge acquisition and consolidation. This study shows that while GBL is highly effective in promoting motivation and skill development, further refinement is needed to align content complexity with learning objectives.

International organizations promoting economic growth and global development are increasingly requesting higher education systems to prepare students with the fundamental attitude and skills to be competitive in the future workplace. After conducting two separate literature reviews on active learning strategies and on the most demanded competencies in the future of work, the paper proposes a comprehensive framework of 31 competencies pivotal for future professionals to thrive in an innovative work landscape. In the effort to nurture these skills, it further explores the contributions of the most popular active learning methodologies and delves into the role of digital technologies in enhancing the learning experience. Significantly, the paper reveals that active learning not only develops technical and methodological competencies but also enriches social, personal, and particularly digital skills, positioning students to effectively navigate and contribute to the digital economy. The emergent pedagogies underscore the importance of fostering lifelong learning, self-agency, and the adept use of diverse tools and resources, essential for the professionals of today and tomorrow.

I cambiamenti dirompenti che caratterizzano lo scenario attuale sono al centro di un profondo ripensamento del significato del lavoro e della relazione tra persona e organizzazione. In questo contesto, le competenze di organizzazione e gestione dei variegati rapporti di lavoro si stanno dimostrando centrali per governare le necessarie trasformazioni secondo logiche di sostenibilità sociale ed economica. Flessibilità e virtualizzazione del lavoro, digitalizzazione dei modelli di business, pervasività dell'Intelligenza Artificiale sono solo alcune delle sfide che le organizzazioni si trovano ad affrontare. Questi mutamenti generano variabilità e complessità crescenti nell'organizzazione dei lavoratori e del lavoro, proprio gli ambiti di azione degli HR Professional, protagonisti di una trasformazione del proprio lavoro, occasione per (ri)dare valore strategico e sociale alla professione.

Like most companies, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) have become reliant on digital technology for their day-to-day business operations. While valuable, this comes with challenges; one of which is the rise in cybercrime. In terms of their cybersecurity resilience and risk, SMEs are among the most vulnerable and least mature. This article addresses a gap in the literature that has neglected cybersecurity readiness in SMEs. The study proposes a CyberSecurity Readiness Model for SMEs (CSRM-SME) based on a Socio-Technical view of organizations. The model was applied to three SMEs to assess their cybersecurity readiness and further understand the environment and strategies adopted to prevent and manage cyber-attacks.

In the last decades, new ways of job organization, like remote working, have been introduced to satisfy the need to rethink, redefine and redesign the organization of work in terms of nature, content, and responsibilities. In 2020, due to the pandemic emergency generated by SARS-CoV-2 (commonly known as Covid-19) and the policies to limit the mobility to contain the contagion, the diffusion of these new forms of work accelerated considerably. The evolution of work practices provides an exemplar use case of social and technical disruption. The principles of a Socio-Technical System (STS) are a compass to interpret the transformation of technology, processes, tasks, organizational culture, goals, and people. Adopting a STS approach, this paper aims to shed light on the impact of remote working (often called agile or smart working) in Public Administrations (PAs). A multi case analysis is conducted by coding diaries written by heads of staff and IT executives involved in the process of remote working implementation in three Italian PAs. Aspects related to organization, job design, tasks, and workers’ behavior have been analyzed.

In this work, we provide an overview of contemporary perspectives of design that may challenge the traditional design of IT and socio-technical systems. Our starting metaphor is that of 'wicked problems', where the singularity, incompleteness and intrinsic uncertainty of real world settings foregrounds how the worldview that designers offer to practitioners may be optimal in theory but useless in practice. To go beyond traditional notions of design and designer, we intercepted insights coming from minoritarian voices in both theoretic and practice-based design fields. 'De-design' is a term we coined to encompass this wide spectrum of approaches that make more resilient and sustainable information artifact, de-emphasize design as a theoretical construct, and reconsider practice as the leading principle of digital innovation. This paper is a narrative review of voices in an extensive array of fields: from Information Systems to Human-Computer Interaction, from End-User Development to Critical Design, from Software Design to Design Studies. Our contribution retraces the motivational roots of de-design and tries to characterise de-design by filling relational gaps between disparate approaches and by bringing them back to IT and socio-technical design, to make digital artifacts sustainable in all of the new environmental, organisational and cultural spaces near to come.