Search results

Organizations working in high-hazard environments contribute significantly to modern society and the economy, not only for the valuable resources they hold but also for the indispensable products and services they provide, such as power generation, transportation and defense weapons. Therefore, the main purpose of this study is to develop a framework that outlines future research on systems safety and provides a better understanding of how organizations can effectively manage hazard events.

In this research, we developed the high hazard theory (HHT) and a theoretical framework based on the grounded theory method (GTM) and the integration of three established theoretical perspectives: normal accident theory (NAT), high reliability theory (HRT) and resilience engineering (RE) theory.

We focused on the temporal aspect of accidents to create a timeline showing the progression of hazard events and the factors contributing to safety and hazards in organizations. Given the limitations of the previous theories in providing a coherent explanation of hazard event escalation in high-hazard organizations (HHOs), we argue that the highlighted theories can be more complementary than contradictory regarding their standpoints on disasters and accident prevention.

A proper appreciation of the hazard nature of organizations can help reduce their susceptibility to failure, prevent outages and breakdowns of systems, identify areas for improvement and develop strategies to enhance performance.

By developing HHT, we contribute to systems safety research by developing a new, refined theory and enrich the theoretical debate. We also expand the understanding of scholars and practitioners about the characteristics of organizations working in high-hazard environments.

High-reliability performance and high-hazard are intertwined in High-Reliability Organizations (HROs) operations; these organizations are highly safe, highly hazardous and highly significant for the modern society, not only for the valuable resources they have, but also the indispensable services they provide. This research intend to understand how HROs could produce high quality performance despite their challenging and demanding contexts. The research followed an emic approach to develop an organizational framework that reflects the contribution of the seeming traits of the organizations to the operations safety based on the workers point of views about the safety of workstations.

This research adopted mixed methods of in-depth interviews and literature review to identify the structural characteristics of high-reliability organizations (HROs) embedded in the organizations studies and developed a theoretical based structural framework for HROs. Furthermore, a systemic literature review was adopted to find the evidence from the organizations literature for the identified characteristics from the interviews from the first stage. The setting for this study is six Chinese power stations, four stations in Hubei province central China and two stations in the southern China Guangdong province.

The organizational framework is a key determinant to achieve high-reliability performance; however, solely it cannot explain how HROs manage the risks of hazard events and operate safely in high-hazard environments. High-reliability performance is attributed to the interaction between two sets of determinants of safety and hazard. The findings of this research indicate that HROs systems would be described as reliable or hazardous depending on the tightly coupled setting, complexity, bureaucracy involvement and dynamicity within the systems from one hand, and safety orientation, failure intolerance, systemwide processing, the institutional setting and the employment of redundant systems on other hand.

The authors developed an organizational framework of organizing the safety work in HROs. The applied method of interviewing and literature review was not adopted in any other researches.

The purpose of this chapter is to identify African financial management practices, highlight their origin and explain how they differ from their Western counterparts. The study identified indigenous African financial practices using literature review, archival sources and library research covering the five areas of Africa comprising Northern Africa, Eastern Africa, Central Africa Western Africa and Southern Africa. The study found out that pre-colonial indigenous African financial management features prevalent use of trade finance, trade credit management, investment management and accounting. While there is also evidence of modification of Western financial management practices to suit African contexts, it is on the whole scarce. This is suggestive of the fact that they were in existence in the first instance. The clear conclusion is that many indigenous African financial management practices pre-dated and foreshadowed their Western counterparts. Yet, it is confounding that this has been largely lost sight of, and both scholars and financial management practitioners depict the former as inferior. There is clearly a need to remedy this situation. Educators need to focus on incorporating ethno-finance concepts into the entire curricula chain from basic to higher education. The anchor point for such curricula is Ubuntu philosophy. Financial management practitioners, on their part, need to shed notions that the indigenous practices are inferior and seek to journalise their day-to-day work experiences to build a body of documented practice.

The exponential rise of digital payments has underscored the critical importance of digital payment security, particularly in payment gateway systems. This chapter delves into the vulnerabilities within these systems and proposes a comprehensive security enhancement framework to address them. Recent security breaches, such as those at SONY and Ontario’s birth registry, have emphasised the urgent need for improved protective measures. The proposed framework integrates advanced technologies like data encryption, next-generation firewalls (NGFWs), unified threat management (UTM), network traffic analysis, and multi-factor authentication (MFA). It aims not only to defend against current cyber threats but also to remain adaptable to future vulnerabilities, ensuring the integrity, confidentiality, and availability of transactional data. Moreover, aligning with regulatory standards such as the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) and the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is crucial for building trust and ensuring security in the digital transaction ecosystem. This chapter also highlights the importance of balancing security measures with user experience and advocates for user education and user-centric security solutions. Emerging technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) and blockchain are proposed for real-time fraud detection and maintaining immutable transaction records, offering innovative solutions to contemporary security challenges. Empirical analysis supports the efficacy of the proposed framework, showing improvements in data loss prevention, user satisfaction, and fraud mitigation. This framework, termed ‘Guardians of Trust’, represents a paradigm shift in payment gateway security, providing a scalable and forward-looking model that balances robust security protocols with user experience and compliance considerations. This chapter contributes significantly to the academic discourse on digital payment security.

In particular, it is worth mentoring new and more efficient solutions that can meet the increasingly specific needs of each company, especially in food management. A business intelligence (BI) solution can help your food company better understand and manage business processes more effectively. Management information is essential for all levels of an organisation to make quick and correct decisions. However, what exactly is BI, and what can it mean for a food company?

The PRISMA stands for (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses) and content analysis strategy used the SLR (systematic literature review) methodology to examine 151 papers published in peer-reviewed academic journals and industry reports between 2016 and 2023.

The findings show that artificial intelligence and digitalisation are linked to the UN 2030 Agenda. BI management ranks first (66%), followed by crop and land mapping systems (40%), agricultural machinery monitoring tools (39%) and decision support systems (31%). The road to digital transformation remains extended, with the main impediments being more compatibility between enterprise systems and a shortage of expertise.

The section relating to methodological perspective adopts the PRISMA methodology for systematic review. Interoperability is easily managed by assigning qualified teams to projects. The added value of a consulting firm with extensive project management experience in the food industry is closely related to the results achieved.

BI: What exactly is it, and why a data-driven culture is essential in the food and beverage industry?

This paper aims to investigate the zakat disclosure of Islamic banks at the global level. It is important for depositors and shareholders of Islamic banks to know whether the bank is paying zakat on their behalf or not. Additionally, disclosing the calculation method used is also necessary to eliminate uncertainties resulting from ambiguous reporting that can mislead the stakeholders. This issue becomes more obvious when considering that depositors and shareholders may have different accounts with different Islamic banks, which makes it quite confusing to have multiple ways of zakat calculation or different approaches on who is the party that pays it. This study analyzes the current practices across 13 countries and recommends best practices.

The objective of the paper objective is achieved through analyzing the annual reports of 34 Islamic banks in 13 countries for the years 2014 and 2019. It further quantifies the zakat disclosure by constructing a zakat disclosure index. This index considers the disclosure of four major constituents covering the amount and the responsibility for payment, the calculation method, the involvement of the Shariah board and the zakat duty on investment account holders. For further robustness, this study is further supported by content analysis measures using the zakat word count in annual reports.

The results indicate a major issue in zakat disclosure. The overall average of disclosure index is low. Most of the banks disclose limited information about zakat, such as the amount and the responsibility for payment, in their annual reports. Less than 40% of the examined banks disclose information about the role of the Shariah board in zakat calculation, and a very limited number of banks (9%) are found to disclose enough details about the zakat calculation method. Furthermore, none of the examined banks mentions the zakat due for the investment accounts. Overall, zakat disclosure of most of the banks, whether following Accounting and Auditing Organization for Islamic Financial Institutions or otherwise, are found to be not up to the expected best practices.

Among the limitations of this study is the sole dependence on annual reports of Islamic banks without considering other means that banks might be using to communicate zakat-related matters to stakeholders. Examples of such means include a website, social media and other direct or indirect marketing materials. Additionally, the results of this study shall not be overgeneralized regarding differences between countries because the sample does not include all Islamic banks in the selected country. Future research may use the proposed zakat disclosure index on a country-specific data sample.

The findings have significant implications as they raise a serious concern regarding the sufficiency of the Islamic banks’ disclosure about a core area of their responsibility, that is, the zakat. The index developed can be a tentative measure of zakat disclosure transparency pending further review. The result further suggests looking at the composition of members of Shariah boards to include at least one member with a sound accounting background. Zakat is a religious duty; therefore, a perceived lack of transparency on the amount, method of calculation and how the zakat is paid may affect the future injection of capital into Islamic banks.

An important contribution of this paper lies in the fact that the collected data is not provided in any available database. Rather, it is manually captured from the individual annual reports of reviewed Islamic banks. Further, this paper proposes an index to measure the zakat disclosure at bank and country levels.

In the current competitive world of business, it is important that every individual strives to be competitive to elevate his/her life status and creates a bright-looking future. The purpose of this study is to lay emphasis on the Jordanian hospitality industry in light of the investigation as to how organizational commitment, leadership style and organizational culture influence organizational citizen behavior (OCB) with the moderating role of job satisfaction in the relationship.

The study explores the determinants based on the responses obtained from the employees working in five-star hotels in Jordan. A small sample was exposed to SPSS software analysis for instrument validity, reliability and data normality.

The study validated the reliability of the instrument in conducting a preliminary study, obtaining reasonable normality and highly reliable coefficients of measures (0.753-0.938).

The study validated the effectiveness of the instrument that examined different specific antecedents of OCB.

Presently, there is a need for graduate students to be well prepared with accounting professional competencies (APCs) as the market is characterized by intensive activities and rare job opportunities. In relation to this is the significant role of student engagement (SE) practices and e-learning. Thus, the present study examined the mediating role of e-learning on the relationship between SE practices and APC, as well as the moderating role of student's demographics on the same relationship.

The study used a structured questionnaire distributed to 428 accounting students enrolled in institutions in Jordan and the obtained response rate was 65.84%. The formulated hypotheses were tested using structural equation modeling in PLS-SEM analysis Version 3.2.7.

On the basis of the results, there is a significant relationship between SE and e-learning and APC, with e-learning partially mediating the SE-APC relationship. The results also showed that students' demographics have a significant moderating relationship between the same.

The author recommends that universities employ advanced technologies with SE practices for the mobilization of accounting graduate students, with the prerequisite APC skills so they will become competitive and thrive in their professional and practical lives.

This study aims to investigate the factors that determine the customer adoption of Islamic banking in Pakistan.

This paper aims to use a sample of 540 Islamic bank customers located in the biggest city of Pakistan (Karachi). This study is based on the diffusion of innovation (DOI) theory and analyzed the role of five attributes (compatibility, relative advantage, complexity, observability and trialability) along with the consumer awareness about the customer adoption of Islamic banking. Additionally, the present research also considers Islamic banking as a new idea (innovation) in Pakistan under the framework of DOI theoretical assumptions. The exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses are applied to the sample data. The theoretical framework is then tested using structural equation modeling.

The findings of the study revealed that all five attributes of the DOI theory are positively and significantly related to the customer adoption of Islamic banking. The customer awareness also proved its importance in the hypothesized model by representing a positive and significant relationship.

The present study provides a useful guideline for the Islamic bank managers and the academicians to better understand the customer adoption of Islamic banking.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the influence of direct-to-physician promotion on physicians’ prescription behaviour. There were very few studies which have investigated to what extent the pharmaceutical promotion directed towards physicians influences physicians’ prescription behaviour in the Malaysian context.

A research framework has been developed based on the buyer behaviour stimulus-response model. A survey method has been used to collect data from 154 medical practitioners from private health-care facilities located at Klang valley in Malaysia. IBM SPSS and SmartPLS statistical programs have been used to analyse the data and validate the model.

This study found that personal selling is the most significant promotional tool for physicians’ prescription behaviour, whereas advertising is the least significant one. Sales promotion and public relations are the second and third most significant promotional tools. Direct marketing is found to be not significant.

This paper will help the pharmaceutical companies develop more effective plans to gain a competitive advantage for their business by having a guideline for pharmaceutical marketers as an input to the more efficient allocation of their promotional budgets.

This study has introduced a comprehensive understanding of all the factors in the pharmaceutical promotion that influence physicians’ prescription behaviour in Malaysia and how these factors are interrelated, influencing physicians’ prescribing medicines for patients.