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This study aims to examine the relationship between sustainable activities and financial performance under the moderation of the Shariah supervisory board (SSB) of Islamic banks (IBs).

The sample consists of IBs in Asia from 2015 to 2018. Sustainable activities were collected from sustainability and annual reports, while additional data were sourced from Orbis, Thomson Reuters, and Euromonitor. Weighted content analysis measures sustainable activities, and general least square regression was used to test the hypothesis.

Sustainable activities are positively correlated to IBs’ financial performance in the current and following year. However, the SSB cannot strengthen this relationship.

IBs should integrate sustainable financing or green banking into their strategies and operations, as shareholders are increasingly drawn to investing in banks that demonstrate strong social and environmental responsibility.

First, policymakers can improve guidelines related to sustainability in IBs in line with Islamic concepts and perspectives. Second, regulation can optimize the role of SSB in terms of sustainability based on maqasid shariah.

This study examines sustainable activities per the concept of maqasid shariah. Financial performance testing is carried out not only in the current period but also in one subsequent year. Limited research exists in this area, especially with a large sample in the Asian region.

This study aims to test a moderated mediation model of the relationship between neurodiversity and team performance, mediated by social cognitive integration and positively moderated by horizontal cognitive differentiation.

The authors used neurodiversity survey data from 40 intact organizational teams, including data from all team members and their leaders, and tested the moderated mediation model using bootstrapping. Neurodivergent conditions, horizontal cognitive differentiation (i.e. the distribution of knowledge and expertise among team members, expanding the range of available cognitive resources) and social cognitive integration (i.e. a collaborative process of knowledge sharing, evaluation and elaboration) were evaluated by team members, and team performance was evaluated by the leaders.

The results show that neurodiversity fosters social cognitive integration in teams only when horizontal cognitive differentiation is high. Moreover, social cognitive integration mediates the association between neurodiversity and team performance, whereas the remaining main effect of neurodiversity on team performance is positive and significant.

This study contributes to the limited body of knowledge that examines neurodiversity in organizational settings and presents one of the first empirical tests of the relation between neurodiversity and team outcomes, building on the combination of cognitive differentiation and integration.

The purpose is to investigate how the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic changed relocation behavior in an advanced economy. We compare manufacturing relocations before and during the pandemic to identify differences and similarities over time and between offshoring and backshoring.

We use an exploratory longitudinal trend survey approach with data from two surveys, the first before the pandemic, 2010–2015, and the second during the pandemic, 2020–2022. Both rounds were targeted to the entire population of Swedish manufacturing plants with 50 or more employees. We captured the same set of data for offshoring and backshoring projects in both surveys.

The pandemic did not stop manufacturing relocations. The extent of offshoring decreased, but the extent of backshoring increased. Labor costs remained a key driver for offshoring, but a trade-off versus lead time, flexibility and risk were observed, suggesting a tension between labor cost and a strive for creating shorter supply chains for offshoring. Lead time, logistics costs, market proximity and risk formed a new backshoring construct, with an emphasis on short supply chains, and that increased significantly in importance. At the same time, the importance of quality decreased, creating a need to balance quality against the pursuit of short supply chains for backshoring. Thus, local supply chains seem to be a desired outcome for any manufacturing relocation, suggesting a move towards a multi-local supply chain setup for the global manufacturing footprint.

This is the first longitudinal survey study that captures offshoring as well as backshoring before and during the pandemic. The results offer unique insights into the COVID-19-induced impacts on manufacturing relocations as the same total population was sampled before and after the pandemic, and it provides empirical evidence that neither offshoring nor backshoring are “steady-state” concepts but changes over time.

Recent legal psychological research has highlighted shortcomings in asylum interviews; however, few studies have examined how the interview participants (interviewer, interpreter and asylum seeker) experience and perceive the interviews. The purpose of this study was to explore how these interview participants experience rapport and communication within asylum interviews, as well as to investigate how well interviewers’ and interpreters’ views align with empirical evidence regarding best-practice interviewing.

Interviewers (n = 62), interpreters (n = 63) and asylum seekers (n = 49) answered an online survey with mainly closed questions about preparation, rapport, interview content, interpretation and overall experiences of the interviews. Interviewers and interpreters reported experiences from interviews conducted in 2021, whereas asylum seekers referred to their interview experiences from 2016 to 2022. Data were explored descriptively.

The views of interviewers and interpreters were mostly aligned with evidence-based interviewing recommendations. However, contrary to recommendations, interpreters reported favouring closed questions over open prompts. Most asylum seekers reported feeling nervous or afraid during the interviews, and three-fourths reported difficulties in sharing their experiences and disclosing personal information. This indicates that more work on how to build rapport in cross-cultural, interpreter-assisted interviews is needed. The interpreters’ preference for using closed questions presents a risk to interview quality that should be mitigated through training for interpreters as well as improved collaboration between interviewers and interpreters.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to explore experiences of asylum interviews from the perspectives of interviewers, interpreters and asylum seekers.

Many individuals start a new firm each year, mainly intending to become independent or improve their financial situation. For most of them, the first years of operations mean a substantial investment of time, effort and money with highly insecure outcomes. This study aims to explore how entrepreneurs running new firms perform financially compared with the established ones and how this situation influences their well-being.

A questionnaire survey was completed in 2021 and 2022 by a representative sample of N = 1136 solo self-employed and microentrepreneurs in the Czech Republic, with dependent self-employed excluded. This study used multiple regressions for data analysis.

Early-stage entrepreneurs are less satisfied with their financial situation, have lower disposable income and report more significant financial problems than their established counterparts. The situation is even worse for the subsample of startups. However, this study also finds they do not have lower well-being than established entrepreneurs. While a worse financial situation is generally negatively related to well-being, being a startup founder moderates this link. Startup founders can maintain a good level of well-being even in financial struggles.

The results suggest that policies should focus on reducing the costs related to start-up activities. Further, policy support should not be restricted to new technological firms. Startups from all fields should be eligible to receive support, provided that they meet the milestones of their development. For entrepreneurship education, this study‘s results support action-oriented approaches that help build entrepreneurs’ self-efficacy while making them aware of cognitive biases common in entrepreneurship. This study also underscores that effectuation or lean startup approaches help entrepreneurs develop their startups efficiently and not deprive themselves of resources because of their unjustified overconfidence.

This study contributes to a better understanding of the financial situation and well-being of founders of new firms and, specifically, startups. The personal financial situation of startup founders has been a largely underexplored issue. Compared with other entrepreneurs, this study finds that startup founders are, as individuals, in the worst financial situation. Their well-being remains, however, on a comparable level with that of other entrepreneurs.

This study aims to explore how to structure an energy organization to be more agile in the context of digitalization and find the common success factors and challenges the organizations face to transform.

A qualitative multiple-case study of an energy company and an online market company, both from the Nordic countries, was conducted in 2023. Data were collected through in-depth individual interviews with 16 participants.

This research provides valuable insights into the challenges and critical success factors crucial for a successful digital transformation. The study illuminates the interplay between technological advancements and organizational shifts, the adoption of agile methodologies, the importance of inclusive leadership and the integration of autonomous teams in realizing digital transformation goals. The research emphasizes the profound impact of these factors on the transformational journey within organizations. In particular, the adoption of agile methodologies takes on heightened significance in the swiftly evolving business landscape of today, calling for a transition from project-centric approaches to more adaptive and sustainable product-centric models.

The study contributes to the practice and enhanced understanding of organizing business and technology teams in energy companies to achieve fast flow. The analysis and discussion of various empirical findings shed light on the success factors and challenges of digital transformation – issues that many organizations are currently or will likely soon be grappling with. The impact of different organizational structures on agility in an organization has yet to be thoroughly studied.

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic caused significant disruption to the global labor market, resulting in a rapid transition toward remote work, e-commerce and workforce automation. This shift has sparked a considerable amount of public discussion. This study aims to explore the online public's sentiment toward remote work amid the pandemic.

Based on justice theory, this paper examines user-generated content on social media platforms, particularly Twitter, to gain insight into public opinion and discourse surrounding remote work during the COVID-19 pandemic. Employing content analysis techniques such as sentiment analysis, text clustering and evolutionary analysis, this study aims to identify prevalent topics, temporal patterns and instances of sentiment polarization in tweets.

Results show that people with positive opinions focus mainly on personal interests, while others focus on the interests of the company and society; people's subjectivities are higher when they express extremely negative or extremely positive emotions. Distributive justice and interactional justice are distinguishable with a high degree of differentiation in the cluster map.

Previous research has inadequately addressed public apprehensions about remote work during emergencies, particularly from a justice-based perspective. This study seeks to fill this gap by examining how justice theory can shed light on the public's views regarding corporate policy-making during emergencies. The results of this study provide valuable insights and guidance for managing public opinion during such events.

In additive manufacturing (AM), “complexity for free” is often cited as a major technological benefit. This generalized view has been found inaccurate by several authors dealing with the evaluation of part complexity. However, the term “complexity” is not defined uniformly. The reasons for this are the various AM processes and different evaluation factors used by the respective authors. This is critical because build time heavily depends on the impact of complexity on the additive process through the processing tool (point-to-point-, line- and mask-based) defining competitiveness. This study aims to define appropriate complexity indicators and evaluate the impact on productivity of PBF-LB/P (laser sintering).

An assessment methodology for geometric complexity is developed for point-to-point-based processes using the PBF-LB/P process. First, an overview of part characteristics and their interrelationships with the generation process is provided. In this way, relevant factors, e.g. part volume and perimeter length, are identified. Subsequently, these are used to create a metric to select and manufacture test samples to quantify the impact on build time.

The results indicate a strong impact of geometrical complexity on build time and build-up rate. Consequently, optimizing the geometry in the early design stage and adjusting process parameters during production planning allow to influence the build-up rate.

This paper demonstrates the effects of geometric complexity using manufacturing jobs. As a result, the suitability of existing methods and KPIs is shown to be insufficient. Hence, meaningful indicators for laser sintering, such as contour length vs hatch length, contour length vs part volume and number of hatches vs part volume, are defined and verified.

This study aims to analyse the impact of economic infrastructure on economic growth in seven sister states in North Eastern India, covering the period 2005–2019.

The authors analysed the data using fixed, random and feasible generalised least squares (FGLS) methods to assess the impact of economic infrastructure, which includes roads, per capita availability of power, electricity transmission losses, commercial banking and gross irrigation, on economic growth.

Based on the results derived from FGLS estimates, the increase in road length, per capita availability of power, commercial banks and gross irrigation affected economic growth positively. In addition, economic growth decreased with the rise in electricity transmission losses, population and infant mortality rate.

The future scope of this study can be extended by the inclusion of social infrastructure, which includes the education and health sectors in these states. In addition, the causality between economic infrastructure and economic growth can be assessed in the long run. Finally, the channels through which a relationship exists can be taken into account. This study underlines the need for substantial investment in infrastructure such as roads, power, irrigation, banking and transport in North Eastern India to drive economic growth. It highlights the importance of targeted policies to address infrastructure gaps and enhance regional connectivity with Southeast Asia. Emphasising cross-border collaboration and leveraging local resources can stimulate economic development and innovation. These efforts are crucial for overcoming regional disparities and integrating the North East into broader economic frameworks.

This study highlights significant socioeconomic benefits by showing how improved infrastructure, such as roads, power availability, irrigation and banking can drive economic growth in North Eastern India. It suggests that better infrastructure leads to increased productivity, job creation and improved living standards. In addition, this study emphasises that reducing infrastructure gaps can help reduce regional disparities, integrate the region into larger economic networks and foster inclusive development. These benefits have far-reaching impacts, contributing to overall socioeconomic advancement in the area.

This study offers a unique contribution by empirically analysing the role of infrastructure in promoting economic growth at the sub-national level, i.e. North East India. Using advanced econometric techniques of fixed/random effects and FGLS panel models, it mitigates issues of measurement errors and omitted variables to some extent. In addition, this research introduces previously unexplored variables, including roads, power, electricity transmission losses, irrigation and banking, providing new insights into the infrastructure landscape. These findings offer crucial guidance for policymakers to improve and invest in infrastructure, fostering sustainable economic development.

The study investigates how sustainability reporting constructs a narrative about an organization that provides its members with a reality they can accept, with the consequence of producing organizational stability.

The article reports a research engagement concerning the “backstage” of sustainability reporting in one Spanish savings bank, which the researchers engaged with for more than three years.

The article describes how sustainability reporting operates as a boundary object occupying the space between the organization’s loosely coupled systems and facilitating the cooperation of members with different interpretations of the organization. Different translations of discourses and actions ensure that the sustainability report conveys a ductile narrative that can be tailored to specific interpretations. At the same time, the editing inherent in sustainability reporting ensures that any narrative that may challenge the organization’s dominant perspective is ignored and marginalized. In this way, sustainability reporting produces a discourse that inscribes a narrative of the organization and eventually ensures organizational inertia.

The article highlights the relevance of investigating sustainability reports by exploring the backstage of their production rather than solely the final document.

In contrast to prior research that has been concerned with exploring the extent to which sustainability reporting is associated with organizational change, this study applies different lenses to show how and why sustainability reporting is implicated in the construction of the organization and the maintenance of its stability and inertia.