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The purpose of this paper is to check the feasibility of using biomaterial such as of Phragmites-Australis (PA) in cement paste to achieve sustainable building materials.

In this study, cement pastes were prepared by adding locally produced PA fibers in four different volumes: 0%, 0.5%, 1% and 2% for a duration of 180 days. Bottles and prisms were subjected to chemical shrinkage (CS), drying shrinkage (DS), autogenous shrinkage (AS) and expansion tests. Besides, prism specimens were tested for flexural strength and compressive strength. Furthermore, a mathematical model was proposed to determine the variation length change as function of time.

The experimental findings showed that the mechanical properties of cement paste were significantly improved by the addition of 1% PA fiber compared to other PA mixes. The effect of increasing the % of PA fibers reduces the CS, AS, DS and expansion of cement paste. For example, the addition of 2% PA fibers reduces the CS, expansion, AS and DS at 180 days by 36%, 20%, 13% and 10%, respectively compared to the control mix. The proposed nonlinear model fit to the experimental data is appropriate with R2 values above 0.92. There seems to be a strong positive linear correlation between CS and AS/DS with R2 above 0.95. However, there exists a negative linear correlation between CS and expansion.

The PA used in this study was obtained from one specific location. This can exhibit a limitation as soil type may affect PA properties. Also, one method was used to treat the PA fibers.

The utilization of PA fibers in paste may well reduce the formation of cracks and limit its propagation, thus using a biomaterial such as PA in cementitious systems can be an environmentally friendly option as it will make good use of the waste generated and enhance local employment, thereby contributing toward sustainable development.

To the authors best knowledge, there is hardly any research on the effect of PA on the volume stability of cement paste. Therefore, the research outputs are considered to be original.

This study investigates the role of market concentration and efficiency in banking system stability during the COVID-19 pandemic. We empirically test the hypothesis that market concentration and efficiency are significant determinants of bank performance and stability during the time of crises, using a sample of 575 banks in 20 countries in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA).

The main sources of bank data are the BankScope and BankFocus (Bureau van Dijk) databases, World Bank development indicators, and official websites of banks in MENA countries. This study combined descriptive and analytical approaches. We utilize a panel dataset and adopt panel data econometric techniques such as fixed/random effects and the Generalized Method of Moments (GMM) estimator.

The results reveal that market concentration negatively affects bank profitability, whereas improved efficiency further enhances bank performance and contributes to the banking sector’s overall stability. Furthermore, our analysis indicates that during the COVID-19 pandemic, bank stability strongly depended on the level of market concentration, but not on bank efficiency. However, more efficient banks are more profitable and stable if the banking institutions are Islamic. Similarly, Islamic banks with the same level of efficiency demonstrated better overall financial performance during the pandemic than their conventional peers did.

The main limitation is related to the period of COVID-19 pandemic that was covered in this paper (2020–2021). Therefore, further investigation of the COVID-19 effects on bank profitability and risk will require an extended period of the pandemic crisis, including 2022.

This study provides information that will enable bank managers and policymakers in MENA countries to assess the growing impact of market concentration and efficiency on the banking sector stability. It also helps them in formulating suitable strategies to mitigate the adverse consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic. Our recommendations are useful guides for policymakers and regulators in countries where Islamic and conventional banking systems co-exist and compete, based on different business models and risk management practices.

The authors contribute to the banking stability literature by investigating the role of market concentration and efficiency as the main determinants of bank performance and stability during the COVID-19 pandemic. This study is the first to analyze banking sector stability in the MENA region, using both individual and risk-adjusted aggregated performance measures.

Given the remarkable increase in entrepreneurial activities initiated by women in the Egyptian context in addition to the scarcity of empirical studies on digital self-employment there, the authors of the present paper aim to identify what motivates women to engage in digital entrepreneurship, and to identify how those women establish their digital entrepreneurial activities.

The authors employed a qualitative research method through semi-structured interviews with 30 women entrepreneurs who own and manage digital businesses. Thematic analysis was subsequently used to determine the main ideas in the transcripts.

The authors have found that enjoying absolute independence, securing more time for family, guaranteeing an independent source of income in addition to the ease of accessing extensive online markets are the main motives behind the engagement of women in the Egyptian context in digital entrepreneurship activities. Moreover, the authors have also asserted that the minimal training and government support stimulate women entrepreneurs there to start and continue their digital business activities informally.

This paper contributes by filling a gap in entrepreneurship studies in which empirical studies on establishing and managing digital entrepreneurship among women in developing economies has been limited so far.

The aim of this paper is to discuss a selection of policy strategies, regional initiatives and market approaches to uncover the realities of twenty-first-century building energy performance. A position that market-based approaches, human influence and policy interventions are part of an ecosystem of building energy performance is presented.

An exploratory search of secondary sources spanning the last three decades was conducted. Both peer-reviewed and grey literature were included to capture a broader understanding of the discourse in literature. Research questions guided the literature search, and a data extraction tool was designed to categorise the literature. The primary limitation of this study is that only a few applications could be discussed in a condensed format.

Several challenges about the current status quo of building energy performance were identified and summarised as follows. (1) Inconsistencies in measurement and verification protocols, (2) Impacts of market approaches, (3) National policy priorities that are at variance with regional targets and (4) Ambiguous reporting on environmental impacts of energy efficiency (EE) technologies.

The practical implications of the findings in this paper for practice and research are that as part of the building energy performance ecosystem, national responses through government interventions must become adaptive to keep up with the fast-paced energy sector and social trends. Simultaneously, before market-based approaches overcome the messiness of socio-economic dynamics, institutional conditions and cultural nuances, they ought to transparently address environmental impacts and the infringement of several SDGs before they can become viable solutions to building energy performance.

This paper presents building energy performance as an ecosystem comprising human influence, market-based approaches and policy interventions which form interdependent parts of the whole. However, evidence in the literature shows that these aspects are usually investigated separately. By presenting them as an ecosystem, this paper contributes to the discourse by advocating the need to re-align building energy performance to socio-economic-political dynamics and contextually viable solutions.

This study aims to investigate whether organizational complexity (hereafter firm complexity) increases audit report lag (ARL) in a unique environment of GCC countries.

The research study uses a panel data set of 6,084 firm-year observations of nonfinancial firms from GCC economies from 2009 to 2022. First, the study uses an ordinary least square estimator to examine the association of firm complexity with ARL. Second, for robustness purposes, the study applies the propensity score matching technique.

This research study finds that the firms’ complexity increases ARL. Supporting the argument that auditors respond to firm complexity with increased effort, the authors find a positive relation of firm complexity with ARL. This relationship is augmented by auditor change, auditors’ tenure, auditor-qualified opinion and adoption of IFRS. In addition, the authors also find that Big-4 and audit firm industry specialization curtail the positive impact of firm complexity on ARL.

Firms in the GCC have less time to complete their audit and complex firms are likelier to have bigger ARLs. This study provided evidence regarding the curtailing effect of audit quality in GCC. Our findings suggest policymakers and reformers choose improved audit quality to reduce the possibility of larger ARL.

This study enriches the scholarship by presenting a mechanism for reducing the ARL of complex firms through higher audit quality. This study contributes to agency theory by emphasizing audit quality’s important role in emerging markets.

Despite some academic recognition that leadership is particularly significant in reshaping the oil and gas industry’s contributions to global economic development and the sustainability of global energy supplies at affordable prices (Sharma et al., 2022), the attendant problem of how the industry’s leadership contributes towards the preservation of global environment and the maintenance of ecosystems’ balance, among other sustainability challenges, remains an academic lag. This calls for the urgent need for oil and gas companies to practice effective sustainable leadership approach at multiple organisational levels to address global environmental, economic and social challenges.

This paper adopts an interpretivist/constructivist philosophical stance, where findings have been extracted from in-depth thick descriptive qualitative research in Bahrain oil and gas industry. Companies operating within Bahrain oil and gas industry were identified as the unit of analysis. Empirical data are gathered through semi-structured interviews from senior management and analysed using thematic analysis. This paper is structured as follows: introduction, contextualisation of the UNSDGs in the oil and gas industry, literature on network leadership, research methods used to gather and analyse data from Bahrain oil and gas industry findings, contributions, limitations and trajectories for further studies.

The study’s participants argued that the emergence of transformational and Sustainable Network Leadership is essential to successfully and sustainably implementing the UN SDGs. In other words, the Sustainable Network Leadership is a contribution to the single, leadership competences approach of previous scholarship (Weber et al., 2022; Kumalo and Scheepers, 2021) partly because it evolves around the notion of positioning different network and change actors based on their capacity to lead, exchange their knowledge, effectively communicate the need to comply with SDGs and the skills to establish high density within a complex network of actors.

This study recognises its limitations in the sense that it is based on the single context of Bahrain oil and gas, and data were collected from senior management and executives only. Gathering data from a broader swathe of employees may have provided greater levels of leadership and organisational member nuances in both single and collective differences of leadership attributes.

Transformational and Sustainable Network Leadership provides a new construct in the perception (the “what”), instrumentalisation (the “how”) and theoretical re-conceptualisation of leadership within organisational change settings needing radical rethink for sustainable and successful change. The practical implications of transformational and Sustainable Network Leadership expose the way a variety of highly challenged organisational change contexts are interconnected to highlight not only their different sets of challenges but also their opportunities and the resolution mechanisms they present for organisational leaders and staff alike.

This paper identified the single, leadership competence approach as the dominant discourse in organisational change, leadership studies and presented an alternative collective set of leaders’ attributes. The less utilised network leadership concept was drawn upon to contribute network leadership attributes as a way of addressing the challenges faced by Bahraini oil and gas company leaders. Therefore, this study contributes to both network leadership, transformational leadership by expanding both domains to include organisational transformation and the leadership-of-risky change. This was done by identifying attributes and characteristics of Sustainable Network Leadership, then showing their significance as an approach to successfully and sustainably implementing the UNSDGs.

The number of construction dispute cases has maintained a high growth trend in recent years. The effective exploration and management of construction contract risk can directly promote the overall performance of the project life cycle. The miss of clauses may result in a failure to match with standard contracts. If the contract, modified by the owner, omits key clauses, potential disputes may lead to contractors paying substantial compensation. Therefore, the identification of construction project contract missing clauses has heavily relied on the manual review technique, which is inefficient and highly restricted by personnel experience. The existing intelligent means only work for the contract query and storage. It is urgent to raise the level of intelligence for contract clause management. Therefore, this paper aims to propose an intelligent method to detect construction project contract missing clauses based on Natural Language Processing (NLP) and deep learning technology.

A complete classification scheme of contract clauses is designed based on NLP. First, construction contract texts are pre-processed and converted from unstructured natural language into structured digital vector form. Following the initial categorization, a multi-label classification of long text construction contract clauses is designed to preliminary identify whether the clause labels are missing. After the multi-label clause missing detection, the authors implement a clause similarity algorithm by creatively integrating the image detection thought, MatchPyramid model, with BERT to identify missing substantial content in the contract clauses.

1,322 construction project contracts were tested. Results showed that the accuracy of multi-label classification could reach 93%, the accuracy of similarity matching can reach 83%, and the recall rate and F1 mean of both can reach more than 0.7. The experimental results verify the feasibility of intelligently detecting contract risk through the NLP-based method to some extent.

NLP is adept at recognizing textual content and has shown promising results in some contract processing applications. However, the mostly used approaches of its utilization for risk detection in construction contract clauses predominantly are rule-based, which encounter challenges when handling intricate and lengthy engineering contracts. This paper introduces an NLP technique based on deep learning which reduces manual intervention and can autonomously identify and tag types of contractual deficiencies, aligning with the evolving complexities anticipated in future construction contracts. Moreover, this method achieves the recognition of extended contract clause texts. Ultimately, this approach boasts versatility; users simply need to adjust parameters such as segmentation based on language categories to detect omissions in contract clauses of diverse languages.

This study aims to analyse the existing literature on factors motivating higher education institutions to disclose their Sustainability Development Goals initiatives.

This study used an interdisciplinary systematic review to develop a review protocol for Sustainability Development Goals and higher education institutions-related literature. Thematic analysis was performed using NVivo Release 1.4 to generate the theme related to the motivating factors of disclosure and further analysed using content analysis.

The study identified five clusters relating to Sustainability Development Goals and higher education institutions. The main subcategory consists solely of motivating factors as the main child note. The four main factors that motivate Higher Education Institutions to disclose their Sustainability Development Goals practices are the curriculum, research activities, human resource management and collaborations in research and operations.

This paper provides an overview of factors that contribute to Sustainable Development Goals disclosure among higher education institutions with regard to their primary functions of pioneering research, providing education, exercising governance and providing external leadership. Several implications in light of multiple stakeholders are provided in the paper.

This study is among the few studies that develop a review protocol for Sustainability Development Goals and higher education institutions-related literature. The review provides international overview of the current academic debate on the topic of Sustainability Development Goals disclosure.

This study aims to explore how institutional quality impacts private capital participation in large-scale infrastructure development, particularly in public–private partnership (PPP) projects, aiming to enhance incentives for private sector involvement.

Building on new institutional theory, a triangular theoretical framework was constructed to analyze the high participation of private capital in PPP projects, focusing on seven key institutional factors. Data from 1,319 PPP projects across 36 Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) countries from 2015 to 2020 were then analyzed using a combination of necessary condition analysis (NCA) and fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) to evaluate the combined impact and interactions of these factors.

Results indicate that high private capital participation does not hinge on a single institutional quality factor but results from the synergistic influence of multiple factors. The paths leading to high private capital participation can be categorized as regulatory-led, normative-cognitive synergistic, regulatory-normative synergistic and institutional failure-led. Among these, regulatory quality plays a central role in the regulatory-led; the synergy between political stability and voice and accountability is pivotal in the normative-cognitive synergistic, and the rule of law, in combination with voice and accountability, is essential to the regulatory-normative synergistic.

This research systematically examines the multidimensional impact of institutional quality, revealing how different institutional factors interact to influence private capital’s willingness to participate and behavior. It enriches applied research in institutional economics within PPP projects and provides a new theoretical perspective and methodological framework to the scholarly community.

The well-being of employees is very crucial, especially for the survival and sustainability of the mobile telecommunication industry and thus, the deployment of flexible working arrangements becomes paramount for managers and industry practitioners to implement. This research aimed to assess the impact of flexible working arrangements on employee well-being within the mobile telecommunication industry.

Utilizing multiple linear regression analysis, the research tested hypotheses to examine the significance of the relationships. Grounded in the Border Theory of Balanced Work, the study sought to explore the relationship between flexible working arrangements, including flextime schedules, compressed workweeks and telecommuting and various dimensions of employee well-being.

The results of the study demonstrated a statistically significant positive effect of flexible working arrangements on employee well-being within the mobile telecommunication industry. It concluded that flexible working arrangements that are measured with a flextime schedule, a compressed workweek and telecommuting improve employee well-being through psychological well-being, social well-being and workplace well-being.

This research contributes to the existing body of knowledge by establishing a positive connection between flexible working arrangements and employee well-being in the context of the mobile telecommunication industry. Managers of telecommunication firms should continue with the implementation of flexible working arrangements to enhance the well-being of their employees. The study provides valuable insights for both scholars and industry practitioners, emphasizing the significance of continued implementation of flexible working arrangements to promote and sustain the well-being of employees.