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The purpose of this paper is to present the educational computer emergency response team (EduCERT) framework, an integrated response mechanism to bolster national cybersecurity through collaborative efforts in the higher education sector. The EduCERT framework addresses this gap by enhancing cyber security and mitigating cybercrime through collaborative incident management, knowledge sharing and university awareness campaigns.

The authors propose an EduCERT framework following the design science methodology. The framework is developed based on literature and input from focus group experts. Moreover, it is grounded in the principles of the technology-organization-environment framework, organizational learning and diffusion of innovations theory.

The EduCERT has eight components: infrastructure, governance, knowledge development, awareness, incident management, evaluation and continuous improvement. The framework reinforces national cybersecurity through cooperation between universities and the National Computer Emergency Response Team. The framework has been implemented in Jordan to generate a cybersecurity foundation for higher education. Evaluating the EduCERT framework’s influence on national cybersecurity highlights the importance of adopting comprehensive cyber-security policies and controls. The framework application shows its relevance, effectiveness, adaptability and alignment with best practices.

Despite the impact of applying the framework in the Jordanian context, it is essential to acknowledge that the proposed EduCERT framework’s practical implementation may encounter challenges specific to diverse international educational environment sectors. However, framework customization for global applicability could address varied educational institutions in other countries.

Furthermore, the proposed EduCERT framework is designed with universal applicability that extends beyond the specific country’s context. The principles and components presented in the framework can serve as valuable design advice for establishing collaborative and resilient cybersecurity frameworks in educational settings worldwide. Therefore, the research enhances the proposed framework’s practical utility and positions it as an invaluable contribution to the broader discourse on global cybersecurity in academia.

This paper enhances national cybersecurity in the higher education sector, addressing the need for a more integrated response mechanism. The EduCERT framework demonstrates its effectiveness, adaptability and alignment with best practices, offering valuable guidance for global educational institutions.

Female entrepreneurship is a growing segment in the context of developing countries and has the potential to become a driving force for economic development. However, research suggests that females are less inclined toward entrepreneurship when compared to their male counterparts. This fact is related to a complex mix of causes such as the belief that entrepreneurship is a male domain, certain conditions within the economic and social environment and a general lack of confidence with regards to succeeding in such activities. Barriers to female entrepreneurship are prevalent in the patriarchal Arab world. The purpose of this paper is to measure the perceptions of female Jordanian business students with regards to the socio-cultural barriers to entrepreneurship. It also looks at the conduciveness of the education they are receiving in terms of new venture creation.

A sample of 254 female business students from two universities in Jordan was asked to evaluate various factors within the entrepreneurial ecosystem, including the business education they are currently receiving. A factor analysis has been performed to show which relevant elements may prevent young women from engaging with entrepreneurial activities. A comparison of perceptions about the educational system has also been presented to understand how a supportive educational environment may affect the previous analysis.

The results indicated that a strong supportive education system to some extent may reduce the perception of potential barriers for entrepreneurship but the overall impact can be limited. Conversely, an educational system lacking a supportive environment and concrete initiatives can deeply affect and worsen the fears of engaging in entrepreneurship amongst female students.

The role of women in the Arab world is quite marked and the reluctance of women to take a more decisive engagement in entrepreneurship may be reinforced by conservative, societal traditions. A supportive education system has the potential to act as a catalyst to encourage active female participation in the entrepreneurial domain, thus helping to spur economic development in the region.

The paper aimed to identify the extent of the implementation of merit criteria in the selection of senior bureaucratic officials in Egypt.

The design of the study is both descriptive in the theoretical part and quantitative in the applied one. The study is based on a literature review and adopts an analytical approach to clarify the related concepts. Besides, an empirical study to investigate the correlations in practice, based on a sample of 380 senior officials to obtain the primary data.

The results of the study reveal that there are no statistically significant differences between the respondents' perspectives towards the implementation of merit criteria in selecting senior officials. This means that merit criteria are not always applied, but sometimes. Moreover, the results showed no statistically significant differences between the respondents' perspectives towards the implementation of merit criteria attributed to gender and age, while there were differences attributed to educational qualification and experience. The study recommended the necessity of adhering to the provisions of the civil service system and reconsidering the procedures of competitive examinations and interviews.

With respect to the Middle East, very limited studies have focused on the implementation of the merit system in recruitment. There is a lack of research and academic articles on this topic (Budhwar and Mellahi, 2016; Afiouni et al., 2014). The study addresses this gap in research and provides several recommendations that may improve the implementation of the merit system in Egypt. Moreover, this study adds to the limited literature on this topic in the Middle East.

This paper aims to offer a wider examination of the research concerning entrepreneurship characteristics in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region via a review of recent studies relevant to this topic. Research publications concerning entrepreneurship within the MENA region evidence growing interest in this field of study, with the potential to boost and drive future economic development and growth. This focus within entrepreneurship research is because of the economic development in the region, which is becoming increasingly important for policymakers and businesses.

The author performed a systematic literature review to produce robust information about entrepreneurship in the MENA region, followed by a thematic analysis to identify key research themes within each category.

Despite the growth in entrepreneurship research in the MENA region, research on certain factors is lacking. An analysis of 271 studies published between 2009 and 2019 identifies 9 main research categories, within which 30 themes have attracted significant academic attention. Female entrepreneurship and gender, youth entrepreneurship and entrepreneurship behaviour and orientation are the three key categories influencing perspectives on entrepreneurship in the MENA region. This study highlights research gaps and provides recommendations to guide future research on the sustainable development of entrepreneurship in the MENA region.

This paper highlights trends in entrepreneurship research amongst scholars within the MENA region and suggests paths for future research efforts.

This reflective paper offers an overview on how refugee women's entrepreneurship scholarship evolved, and suggests research directions for the future development of the field.

A reflective approach encompassing the evolvement of the field of refugee women's entrepreneurship research.

Whilst refugee women's entrepreneurship scholarship and research, and its interlinks with resilience, empowerment, gender, and livelihoods theoretical framings have flourished in recent years, it remains a relatively young scholarship area, evolving from a broad social science multi-disciplinary base including refugee studies, economics, and development, rather than mainstream business disciplines.

Refugee women's entrepreneurship offers a novel approach and contribution to the broader and established gender and entrepreneurship field. Nevertheless, critical research questions and gaps remain within the growing refugee women's entrepreneurship scholarship regarding the potential of entrepreneuring to empower refugee women socially, economically, and politically.

This paper aims to analyze and give directions for advancing research in stock market volatility highlighting its features, structural breaks and emerging developments. This study offers a platform to research the benchmark studies to know the research gap and give directions for extending future research.

The author has performed the literature review, and, reference checking as per the snowballing approach. Firstly, the author has started with outlining and simplifying the significance of the subject area, the review illustrating the various elements along with the research gaps and emphasizing the finding.

This work summarizes the studies covering the volatility, its properties and structural breaks on various aspects such as techniques applied, subareas and the markets. From the review’s analysis, no study has clarified the supremacy of any model because of the different market conditions, nature of data and methodological aspects. The outcome of this research work has delivered further magnitude to research the benchmark studies for the upcoming work on stock market volatility. This paper has also proposed the hybrid volatility models combining artificial intelligence with econometric techniques to detect noise, sudden changes and chaotic information easily.

The author has taken the research papers from the scholarly journal published in the English language only and the author may also consider other nonscholarly or other language journals.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, this research work highlights an updated and more comprehensive framework examining the properties and demonstrating the contemporary developments in the field of stock market volatility.

Using the holistic approach to migrant exclusion, the purpose of this paper is to examine the refugee crisis as a preparation stage for future exclusion in the host countries. In previous migration analyses, the preparation stage involved only the country of origin, where people were becoming acclimatized to casual and low-status work and an ethos of survival. In the refugee crisis, this important stage spans across three spaces: the country of origin, Turkey as an intermediate stage and the hotspots of Greece.

This is a qualitative research that was based on 22 semi-structured interviews with refugees from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan who live in the hotspot of Moria which is situated in Lesvos, Greece.

The research shows that in the first two countries of the preparation stage, refugees have become accustomed to casual and low-status jobs, which results in the loss of their labor identity and the development of instrumental work orientations. Similarly, the living conditions at the hotspots are so problematic that refugees are becoming desperate to escape this environment. These can have serious consequences for integration in the host countries, as refugees become pacified and at the same time strongly inclined to enter casual and low-status employment. Both developments can drastically undermine the refugees’ relation to the societies of the host countries.

The paper suggests that, given the preparation stage in these three settings, migration policy in the host countries should focus on recognizing long marginalization processes, immediately decongesting the hotspots and pay particular emphasis on the acknowledgment or creation of skills that can distance refugees from casual and low-status work.

Women and disadvantaged minorities within emerging and developing economies often resort to business activity within the informal economy as a way to overcome various barriers and challenges to formal workforce participation. This paper aims to explore the characteristics, motives, barriers and challenges of female engagement in informal business activities in Jordan.

The qualitative analysis used in this paper is based upon empirical findings from semi-structured, in-depth interviews with 14 female informal entrepreneurs in Amman, Jordan.

The study revealed that informal female entrepreneurs tend to be both opportunity- and necessity-driven. Generating profit and contributing to the household income seems to be their main motive. Their businesses were funded either through personal savings or from their social network (e.g. husband, family and friends). Promotion of the business relied mostly on word-of-mouth or social media. High inflation, high competition, time pressures and lack of business skills were cited as the biggest challenges. Besides being content with the status quo, lack of knowledge about the procedures for registering a business and fear of bureaucracy were among the main reasons for not legalizing their activities.

There are very few studies that analyse informal micro-entrepreneurship in the Arab world, particularly in the Jordanian context, which is of growing interest due to low number of women in the workforce and the growing number of refugees in the country. This study therefore presents new knowledge around women’s informal micro-entrepreneurship in Jordan and provides recommendations for further research and policy-making.

The purpose of this paper is to review the literature on women’s entrepreneurship in emerging economies. This is a thematic review to identify patterns and trends to better understand this literature. From the analysis, this study offers ideas for useful and theoretically informed research. In addition, this paper proposes the concept of restricted agency that helps to explain the practice.

This study identifies the nature, what is interesting, what it sees as important and considers what is neglected in this literature. The analysis sought important issues, interesting directions and the potential for useful future work. Thematic analysis is ideal for messy and unstructured material such as the literature used in this study as the data set. The process is qualitative, iterative and inductive but ontologically appropriate for the socially produced knowledge of the literature.

This paper finds the literature tends towards descriptive papers. Few papers make substantial contributions to theory. Many papers reported the barriers women to encounter, reporting general and typical processes of responding to obstacles and the implications for practice. Interestingly this study perceives overcoming and sometimes using, the cultural and physical restraints of gendered entrepreneurship. This paper proposes the concept of restricted agency explaining the gendering of entrepreneurs and explains what they can do. Moreover, the concept helps explain why and what. Most promising theoretically, is how the application of this agency is slowly and contextually differently changing the rules of the game.

This study covers a large and extensive literature, so might have missed themes.

This paper starts with the notion of the “otherness” of women’s entrepreneurship. The literature is good at explaining both how and why women’s entrepreneurship is different and in effect, marginalised. This study conceptualises this gendering process as a restricted agency. Moreover, the concept helps explain why and what. Most promising theoretically, is how the application of this agency is slowly and contextually differently changing the rules of the game. It may be the mechanism for emancipation.

The aim of this paper is to confirm whether the factors that act as enablers of team effectiveness in professional context are also relevant for team effectiveness in higher education.

From a review of the factors that act as enablers of team effectiveness in professional contexts, this paper explores whether they are also relevant in learning environments, in particular, in higher education. After conducting a literature analysis, a Delphi study was conducted to obtain a consensus proposal of a set of input factors that can act as enablers of team effectiveness; next this paper explored, via questionnaire, in a specific context the perceptions of lecturers and students involved in teamwork.

A set of factors reached by consensus that seem to be enablers of team effectiveness in the specific context analyzed is presented. These factors can be the basis of future studies to generalize their validity.

There are many studies that identify the factors that act as enablers of team effectiveness in professional environments. The set of input factors that emerged in this study would be a useful starting point for making higher education institutions and lecturers aware of the importance of taking these factors into account when using teamwork as an educational methodology. Fostering these factors will help higher education institutions to generate shared team mental models (TMMs); these TMMs, in turn, influence team effectiveness.