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This introduction aims to set the context for the subsequent chapters that problematize various aspects of social justice, equity, and inclusion through particular lenses, and/or methodologies. This is done by presenting the ‘problem’ of social justice and equity in education, while simultaneously making links with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The term ‘social justice’ is appearing in numerous public texts and discourses within the education field, thus becoming a key concept in current education policy and practice. Moreover, the concept of social justice is crucial to theorizing about education and schooling, consequently being considered by politicians, policymakers, and practitioners in their thinking about the nature of education and the purpose of schools. Regrettably, education practitioners, researchers, and policymakers often utilize this umbrella term (social justice) while leaving out salient details about its social, cultural, economic, and political bearing. Notwithstanding the unanimous agreement on the desirability of social justice as an educational goal, this is complemented by a parallel contestation over its actual meaning and application in relation to schooling, that is, in relation to the formulation of policy and how it is to be included in practice. This chapter seeks to unravel the conceptual confusion around the terms social justice, equity, and inclusion in relation to schooling and education, through an exploration of the existing literature in the field.

The objective of this study is to construct a theoretical framework concerning wage determination, grounded in principles and supplemented by conventional theories. It discusses the Islamic perspectives on minimum wage and examines contemporary challenges and intricacies in its application.

This study uses thematic analysis to create the conceptual framework, drawing upon a review of pertinent literature such as academic papers, books and articles published up to 2023.

The framework encompasses various categories, namely, employee characteristics, job characteristics, market factors, compensation practices and Islamic principles. Each category consists of multiple variables. The resulting framework offers a holistic and ethically grounded methodology for wage determination, aligning with both Islamic and conventional perspectives. This study notes the absence of a universally agreed-upon minimum wage. Islamic economics faces challenges due to the unclear application of principles, limited awareness, legal constraints and a lack of empirical evidence on wage systems, along with complexities in their implementation.

The paper’s limited scope focuses solely on the Islamic perspective on wage determination, without comparing it to the conventional viewpoint. This may have implications for future research.

The insights on Islamic principles and wage determination guide scholars and policymakers interested in promoting just and equitable wages.

This study is distinct in its integration of various factors to propose an all-encompassing framework for wage determination, rooted in the Quran and principles, while also reinforcing the framework with conventional theories. Additionally, it adds to the growing body of literature by investigating the Quran’s stance and principles on minimum wage, as well as discusses the challenges involved in implementing an Islamic approach to wage determination, which has received limited attention in Islamic literature.

The purpose of this study is to examine the relationship between generational persona, adaptability tendencies and entrepreneurial behavior. The paper also aims at testing the mediating role of adaptability tendencies in the relationship between generational persona and entrepreneurial behavior among millennial entrepreneurs in an African setting.

The study adopts a quantitative methodological approach with a cross-sectional, questionnaire survey and correlational design where hypotheses were statistically tested using Structural Equation Modelling based on survey data (n = 382) from millennial entrepreneurs in Kampala Uganda.

Drawing on the sample of 382 millennial entrepreneurs in Kampala, findings show that both generational persona and adaptability tendencies are positively and significantly associated with entrepreneurial behavior. Results further indicate that adaptability tendencies partially mediates the relationship between generational persona and entrepreneurial behavior among millennial entrepreneurs.

This study focused only on millennial entrepreneurs in Kampala Uganda ignoring other equally important groups of entrepreneurs like the baby boomers, generation Xers, generation Y and others. As such, the findings of this research do not entirely apply to all entrepreneurs in the country and this may have affected the generalizability of the results. Therefore, future studies can be done on the entrepreneurial behavior focusing on all entrepreneurs from all generations. Also, the study used a quantitative approach, future studies should consider a mixed methodology, which may give a more holistic understanding of entrepreneurial behavior.

In practice, millennial entrepreneurs may use the results of the study to see how they can improve their performance for their businesses to benefit. Specifically, they ought to focus on adaptability, and generational persona to exhibit those entrepreneurial behaviors which will generally lead to the improvement of their businesses.

To the authors’ knowledge, this study provides a shred of initial empirical evidence on the relationship between generational persona, adaptability tendencies and entrepreneurial behavior using evidence from a low developed African country Uganda. Mostly, this study provides initial evidence of the mediating role of adaptability tendencies in the relationship between generational persona and entrepreneurial behavior. This study incorporates the Generational Cohort Theory and the Complex Adaptive Systems Theory into an applied theoretical framework that explains entrepreneurial behavior. More still, this study answers the call for more empirical studies on entrepreneurial behavior.

The main aim of this study is to investigate the impact of climate change and water salinity on farmer’s income risk with future outlook mitigation. Salinity and climate change are a threat to agricultural productivity worldwide. However, the combined effects of climate change and salinity impacts on farmers' income are not well understood, particularly in developing countries.

The response-yield function and general maximum entropy methods were used to predict the impact of temperature, precipitation and salinity on crop yield. The target minimization of total absolute deviations (MOTAD)-positive mathematical programming model was used to simulate the impact of climate change and salinity on socioeconomic and environmental indicators. In the end, a multicriteria decision-making model was used, aiming at the selection of suitable climate scenarios.

The results revealed that precipitation shows a significantly decreasing trend, while temperature and groundwater salinity (EC) illustrate a significantly increasing trend. Climate change and EC negatively impact the farmer's income and water shadow prices. Maximum reduction in income and water shadow prices was observed for A2 scenario (−12.4% and 19.4%) during 2050. The environmental index was the most important, with priority of 43.4% compared to socioeconomic indicators. Subindex amount of water used was also significant in study area, with 28.1% priority. The technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution ranking system found that B1 was the best climatic scenario for adopting climate change adaptation in the research region.

In this study, farmers' income threats were assessed with the aspects of different climate scenario (A1, A1B and B1) over the horizons of 2030, 2040 and 2050 and three different indicators (economic, social and environmental) in Northwestern region of Pakistan. Only in arid and semiarid regions has climate change raised temperature and reduced rainfall, which are preliminary symptoms of growing salinity.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the role external debt and foreign direct investment play in influencing financial development in Africa.

Annual data on external debt, foreign direct investment and financial development were extracted from the World Bank World Development Indicators from 2002 to 2015. The data employed were analysed within causal research design and the dynamic panel using generalized method of moment estimation approach.

The findings revealed that external debt and foreign direct investment have a significant positive relationship with financial development in African economies. Governments of the sampled economies should enact policies that would help attract high level of foreign direct investment as it contributes positively to financial development. Finally, governments of the sampled African economies should ensure foreign direct investment and external funds borrowed are channelled to productive sectors.

The paper analysed the relationship between external debt, FDI inflows and financial sector development. The paper is the first in terms of such analysis within the framework of the dual-gap framework, which is the first time in these kinds of studies. Previous studies have concentrated on the effect of financial sector on FDI and not the other way around.

Many mathematical models have been shared to communicate about the COVID-19 outbreak; however, they require advanced mathematical skills. The main purpose of this study is to investigate in which way computational thinking (CT) tools and concepts are helpful to better understand the outbreak, and how the context of disease could be used as a real-world context to promote elementary and middle-grade students' mathematical and computational knowledge and skills.

In this study, the authors used a qualitative research design, specifically content analysis, and analyzed two simulations of basic SIR models designed in a Scratch. The authors examine the extent to which they help with the understanding of the parameters, rates and the effect of variations in control measures in the mathematical models.

This paper investigated the four dimensions of sample simulations: initialization, movements, transmission, recovery process and their connections to school mathematical and computational concepts.

A major limitation is that this study took place during the pandemic and the authors could not collect empirical data.

Teaching mathematical modeling and computer programming is enhanced by elaborating in a specific context. This may serve as a springboard for encouraging students to engage in real-world problems and to promote using their knowledge and skills in making well-informed decisions in future crises.

This research not only sheds light on the way of helping students respond to the challenges of the outbreak but also explores the opportunities it offers to motivate students by showing the value and relevance of CT and mathematics (Albrecht and Karabenick, 2018).

The purpose of this study is to investigate the perceived effects between soft management practices, employee behaviours and the implementation of digital technologies in manufacturing plants, as well as how these relate to the emergence of digital waste.

This paper uses case-based research. Data was collected in two large manufacturing companies based in Norway and Sweden through semi-structured interviews with two management representatives and four shop-floor employees. The data was used to evaluate 29 variables describing lean- and total quality management (TQM)-associated employee behaviours and soft management practices, in light of digital transformation.

The results suggest that several variables were positively influenced by the digital transformation process. These were top management leadership, middle management involvement, employee education, corporate social responsibility focus, innovation, knowledge sharing, work-family balance, psychological capital, job satisfaction and career commitment. Training employees, creativity, discretionary effort, turnover intention and proactivity appear to be negatively influenced by digital transformation The findings also indicate that several soft management practices and employee behaviours were not only influenced by manufacturing digitalization but also themselves influenced the process. The potential for digital waste creation was also detected in several variables, including reward and recognition and training employees.

Managers, practitioners and academics may learn about the importance of certain managerial practices and employees’ behavioural needs during the digital transformation process. The findings may help in prioritizing TQM and soft lean management practices and certain employee behaviours during the digital transformation and in creating awareness of digital waste.

This study builds on several existing studies discussing the impact of digital transformation on soft management practices and employee behaviours. It provides insights from a lean and TQM angle and offers a means of prioritizing certain practices and behaviours during a digital transformation. This study also highlights the significance of digital waste.

In the purview of stress–turnover relationship, the present study aims to explore the endogenous and exogenous aspects of stress and employees' turnover intentions. Further, it also intends to evaluate the mediating role of perceived employee's exploitation between stressors and employee turnover intentions. For that matter, antecedents of stressors were identified and classified into endogenous and exogenous stressors: endogenous stressors relate to the employees' negative psychological contact within an organization and exogenous stressors are various macro-economic factors which have a considerable influence on employees' workplace behavior.

For the purpose of this study, this study choses private school teachers as respondents working in the economically depressed state of India. Thus, data for the present study has been collected from 628 private school teachers of J&K (India) which were randomly selected. In order to ensure valid and reliable statistical inferences from the study, data collected has been validated using confirmatory factor analysis and hypothesis testing has been carried out through structural equation modeling.

It was found that both types of stressors were contributing negatively toward employee's psychological state resulting in undesirable employee organizational relationships manifested as turnover intentions among employees. Moreover, perceived employee's exploitation was found to intensify the relationship of employee turnover as a dependent variable regressed on endogenous, exogenous and occupational stress by fully mediating the stress–turnover intricacies.

The implications of the study include the identification of employees' stressor needs in order to gauge the understanding of the mechanism by which employees react to their environment and develop attitudes toward their jobs. The present study includes a small sample size obtained from private educational institutions only. Therefore, there is a need to take a geographically diverse sample that is inevitable for universal inferences and validity.

Very little research has been conducted to explore endogenous, exogenous and unique stressors such as economic stress and perceived external opportunities which constitute the overall stress. Moreover, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study which tests the model empirically that examines the effect of stress–turnover relationship through perceived employee's exploitation in the teaching and educational sector.

This paper aims to propose a solution for detecting and grading diabetic retinopathy (DR) in retinal images using a convolutional neural network (CNN)-based approach. It could classify input retinal images into a normal class or an abnormal class, which would be further split into four stages of abnormalities automatically.

The proposed solution is developed based on a newly proposed CNN architecture, namely, DeepRoot. It consists of one main branch, which is connected by two side branches. The main branch is responsible for the primary feature extractor of both high-level and low-level features of retinal images. Then, the side branches further extract more complex and detailed features from the features outputted from the main branch. They are designed to capture details of small traces of DR in retinal images, using modified zoom-in/zoom-out and attention layers.

The proposed method is trained, validated and tested on the Kaggle dataset. The regularization of the trained model is evaluated using unseen data samples, which were self-collected from a real scenario from a hospital. It achieves a promising performance with a sensitivity of 98.18% under the two classes scenario.

The new CNN-based architecture (i.e. DeepRoot) is introduced with the concept of a multi-branch network. It could assist in solving a problem of an unbalanced dataset, especially when there are common characteristics across different classes (i.e. four stages of DR). Different classes could be outputted at different depths of the network.

The aim of this manuscript is to study the current scientific literature on food marketing and religion, by giving an overview of current knowledge and the possible future research opportunities once found the gaps.

This a classic literature review carried on by considering marketing, consumer behaviour and management journals as well as religion-focused ones.

Current literature highlights how faith impacts on food marketing and religious consumers choices (and not only). Most of the papers focus on Islam. Considering the globalised economy, the authors’ findings highlight also the relevance of religious certifications for less/not religious people, because of certified food is considered safe and healthy.

The paper joins and reviews two research fields whose connection is growing, so it is relevant to know the current status of scientific literature, which is updated compared to recent literature.