This research investigates the social challenges currently plaguing virtual environments because of the affordance of virtual reality technology and the design of the Metaverse interface. A qualitative, inductive approach has been employed in this research, allowing the research to leverage the benefits of themes to document social challenges as narrated by early adopters. Semi-structured research interviews have been conducted in both Rec Room and VRChat, and data analysis has been performed using NVivo software. The findings of this study suggest that harassment and discrimination are the most prevalent social challenges experienced in the metaverse, with less substantial themes for cyber-discomfort, virtual crime, and privacy concerns. The findings additionally suggest that the impact of social adversity is increased in virtual settings in comparison with traditional online spaces. In addition to this, suggestions towards the mitigation of social adversity in the metaverse included improved proximity controls and management, and increased education and awareness. In addition to these findings, the research additionally provides suggestions for early adopters of the metaverse, academia researching metaverse-related phenomena, and developers in the metaverse domain.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, South African organisations were forced to provide suitable working conditions for its employees.The increased reliance on technology while working from home resulted in technostress.This paper considers how technostress experiences have evolved under the newly adopted hybrid working model.It investigates the underlying causes of technostress experiences and how employees are currently coping with technostress under the hybrid model.Semi-structured interviews were conducted and supplemented with secondary data provided by respondents who are currently working under a hybrid model and who use ICTs for work purposes.The findings reveal several hybrid working specific causes of technostress, including instances of stressful workstation setups, office disruptions and power outage issues as a result of loadshedding (rolling power blackouts).Stresses related to loadshedding appear to be a specific South African issue.To deal with technostress, employees adopted reactive and proactive coping behaviours driven by problemfocused and emotion-focused coping strategies respectively.

Digital labour platforms have been critiqued for the ways in which their new business models have informalized labour through labour reclassification, dynamic pricing practices and algorithmic rating systems of work management and evaluation. This business model led to the transferal of risk and insecurity to the platform workers, contributing to the rise of what Guy Standing terms the 'precariat'- a social class whose employment and income are insecure, negatively affecting material or psychological welfare. This study presents findings from semi-structured, qualitative research conducted with ten (N=10) e-hailing drivers of UberGo – a new low-cost ride-hailing offering on the Uber platform in South Africa. The paper uses the lenses of precarity and the cognitive, relational approach for work-induced stress to highlight the livelihood vulnerabilities (loss of earnings and job security) and coping strategies necessitated by the imposition of the UberGo offering. We invoke the Fairwork principles to propose ways to realize a decent and fairer future of platform work.

Organisations worldwide are facing a market pressures which are forcing them to undertake digital transformation projects or initiatives.This research study set out to explore this in more depth, asking questions about the intention of South African (SA) retail organisations to adopt digital transformation and probing into the understanding and perception of digital transformation itself, as well as future intended use cases for available digital technologies.A case study approach was deemed to be an appropriate strategy given the paucity of existing academic research on the topic.Participants in the study had a good understanding of digital transformation and digital technologies, but perceptions were mixed.The most prominent digital transformation initiatives in the SA retail industry were the adoption of cloud technologies and data analytics.The factors identified in this study, using the Technology, Organisational, and Environmental (TOE) framework, can assist retailers in their decision-making process concerning digital transformation adoption.

In this paper, we provide an overview of the concepts and structure of cloud computing and then focus on Software as a Service (SaaS) because it is the most common cloud computing service model adopted by higher education institutions (HEIs) [29]. SaaS is a service model of cloud computing that has the potential to provide students with improved academic experience by providing them with anytime anywhere access to learning, communication and collaboration materials [28]. It has the potential to turn around the delivery and support of educational services [26]. In this paper, we review the literature on the use of SaaS by students in HEIs. A total of ninety eight recent articles on cloud computing/ SaaS in Higher Education were reviewed and twenty six of the articles were found to be relevant to this paper. This research used a systematic literature review by ensuring that the search terms included all the concerned areas of using cloud computing/ SaaS in HEIs. The contents of online electronic databases including Google Scholar, Elsevier Science direct, Springer Link and IEEE were searched for recent articles and a content analysis of all the identified papers was conducted. The aim was to identify the current state of student's use of SaaS in HEIs. To achieve this, the researchers conducted a systematic review of the relevant papers. This paper also explains SaaS in details and identified the benefits of SaaS as well as the perceived obstacles to student's use of SaaS in HEIs.