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The Islamic banking sector has been growing rapidly, particularly in the Gulf region. The purpose of this paper is to examine major barriers to service quality in Islamic banks in Qatar and the impact of demographic variables on the perceptions of these barriers.

A questionnaire based on the existing literature and particularly on the obstacles outlined by Jabnoun and the constructs influencing service quality gaps found by Parasuraman is developed and distributed to employees of Islamic banks in Qatar. Factor analysis is used to determine the dimensions of the questionnaire. One‐sample t‐test is then used to determine which of the resulting dimensions are significant barriers to service quality. Finally, one‐way ANOVA is used is to determine the impact of demographic variables on the perceptions of the barriers.

Factor analysis resulted in four dimensions: three of these dimensions, namely, lack of empowerment, centralization, and lack of transformational leadership, were found to be significant barriers to service quality in Islamic banks in Qatar while the “No” culture was not found to be significant. Expatriates perceived lack of empowerment to be a greater barrier to service quality than nationals did. This may be explained by the high power distance among nationals.

Conducting the study in more than one industry and more than one country would be desirable to determine common barriers to service quality.

Islamic banking has been growing steadily. Islamic banks currently operate in approximately 75 countries. This paper highlights barriers to service quality in Islamic banks in Qatar and provides practical recommendations to overcome these barriers. These recommendations can be useful to Islamic banks in general. The barriers found in this study happen to be related to the culture of power distance. The recommendations presented in this paper can therefore be useful in different service organizations where the culture of power distance is dominant.

This paper outlines barriers to service quality in Islamic banks in Qatar. These barriers are relevant to Islamic banks in other parts of the world, particularly in the Arab world. This paper contributes to the scant literature on barriers to service quality. It also suggests important future research on the relationship between barriers to service quality and national culture.

Healthcare is a highly competitive global industry. People accept to travel to remote parts of the world in order to receive the service quality they hope for. Patients usually prefer to go to private hospitals, hoping to receive high service quality. On the other hand, healthcare organizations operating in the public sector are undergoing pressure from governments and the general public to improve quality and compete effectively with their counterparts in the private sector. This paper compares the service quality rendered by private and public hospitals. A questionnaire based on SERVQUAL is developed and tested for this purpose. This questionnaire is found to have five dimensions; namely, empathy, tangibles, reliability, administrative responsiveness and supporting skills. These dimensions, as well as overall service quality, are compared between private and public hospitals. Finally the implications of the results are highlighted for healthcare managers.

Purpose: The chapter aims to discuss the importance of economic development tourism in the United Arab Emirates and the role of entrepreneurship in financial growth, as it is an important aspect in the business environment of tourism. Having said that, the UAE has made remarkable progress in sustaining its economic growth and tourism development over the past decades.

Methodology: To review the importance of the economic development tourism in the United Arab Emirates and the role of entrepreneurship in financial growth, the authors have explored journals from the Scopus, Science direct, Google scholar, and EBSCOHost databases. Furthermore, the Latest reports from UNO and UAE are also examined to find the tourism statistics of past years.

Findings: This study explored the contribution of the tourism industry in enhancing the economic development of the country. This chapter highlighted the past and current trends in tourism in the UAE. Entrepreneurship is considered to be one of the major important outcomes of increased tourism in the country. UAE has also focused on every subject linked to tourism. Furthermore, the country has noted entrepreneurship as a driving factor for tourism. Therefore, various steps have been taken to encourage tourism and entrepreneurship, such as developing infrastructure, along with the implementation of tourism and entrepreneurial education.

Limitations: Like other research studies, this study also has some limitations. The latest reports available were of 2017 to 2019; therefore, current year trends are not explored extensively. Also, due to the scarcity of literature on entrepreneurial tourism in the UAE, this study has reviewed limited articles from UAE.

Social Implications: A more “integrative destination-marketing” process should be promoted with a concerted focus on social identity, cultural sustainability, and religiosity. The overall objective would, therefore, be to develop positive perceptions of destinations such as Dubai that are consistent with its Islamic roots, indigenous peoples, and social and cultural bases.

Originality: To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this chapter is one of its own kind. There are no similar studies have been conducted in the context of the UAE. This study has opened the gates for future research in the tourism sector in UAE.

This paper seeks to analyze the manner in which an immigrant community (South Asian Shia Muslims) deploys religious institutions as a coping mechanism to survive in a demanding and culturally alien environment.

The analysis is derived from an ethnographic examination of a community of South Asian Shia Muslims in the United States.

The paper focuses on three elements of organizational coping. First, communities struggle with the promises and perils of transnationalism. Second, the coming of age of children, whose life experiences do not involve dislocation, produce interesting generational engagements. Finally, the community is often challenged by the nuanced task of political engagement with the broader society.

An in‐depth focus on employment‐related experiences of Shia Muslim diaspora in the West may be a fruitful area for future research.

Employers and governments ought to pay attention to internal heterogeneity of Muslims in understanding and managing diversity.

This is a seminar paper on Shia Muslim diaspora in the USA and relates the study to the realm of workplace diversity.

Marrakech is today the most important tourist destination in Morocco. Marrakech, however, is not only a key reference point for mass international tourism, but also the preferred choice for those hunting for an “authentic” experience in this North African country. The “Red City” is indeed often presented in literature and advertising alike as a place out of modern time where the real “soul” of Morocco can be found and unveiled (Minca, 2006). This chapter investigates how this “soul” was established—and is now, in Marrakech, constantly reenacted—through layers of colonial and postcolonial interactions between Europe and Morocco.

This paper aims to explore the effect of government support (short work allowances – SWA) on SME employees' job performance and employee motivation perceptions, during the COVID-19 pandemic in Turkey.

Survey data were collected from 2,781 employees working in SMEs registered to Small and Medium Enterprises Development Organization (SMEDO) in Turkey. The relationships were assessed through structural equation modeling with bootstrap estimation.

The results support the proposed framework illustrating the positive effect of government support on employees' perceived motivation and job performance. Findings indicate that employee motivation has exhibited a mediating effect between government support and job performance. Another important finding is that, contrary to the classical understanding of Herzberg's two-factor theory, SWA system was able to perform as a motivating factor during the pandemic by meeting the hygiene needs.

Since this is a cross-sectional research study, causal inferences cannot be derived from the research results.

There is a lack of empirical study on SME employees' perceptions on the government support during the pandemic, especially on the perspectives of emerging economies are infrequent. Turkey's case is unique in terms of providing insights on how perceived employee motivation is increased by the government supports (SWA) in Turkey, and how this motivation mediates the job performance perceptions. Besides, the impacts of government support are mostly studied at the firm or macro-levels, this study's unit of analysis is at individual level. Regarding the criticism from the motivation perspective of two-factor theory, COVID-19 context and its impact on the motivation needs have not been elaborated before. This article starts new discussions on how crisis contexts influence individual motivator factors.

The present situation of COVID-19 pandemic has put the health-care systems under tremendous stress and stringent tests for their ability to offer expected quality of health-care services, as it decides the sustainability and growth of health-care service providers. This study aims to deliver a quantitative framework for service quality assessment in the health-care industry by classifying the health-care service quality parameters into four balanced scorecard (BSC) perspectives.

To determine the service quality for the Indian health-care system, decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory and analytical network process are integrated in a fuzzy environment to contemplate the interaction among BSC perspectives and respective performance measures.

The results indicate “internal processes” perspective assumes the key role within BSC perspectives, while performance measures “nursing staff turnover” and “staff training” play the key roles. The results also signify that “patient satisfaction” is the most vital issue and can be strongly influenced by measures belonging to the “learning and growth” perspective. In “learning and growth” perspective, “staff training” is the most decisive criteria, very highly influencing “patient satisfaction”, highly influencing “profitability,” “change of cost per patient (both in and out patients)” and “outpatient waiting time” while moderately influencing “staff satisfaction,” “bed occupancy” and “nursing staff turnover”. Moreover, “staff training” criteria have a positive influence on “nursing staff turnover.”

The contributions of this study are in two folds in the domain of quantification of service quality for the health-care system. First, it delivers an assessment framework for Indian health-care service quality. Second, it demonstrates an application of the framework for a case situation and validates the proposed framework.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the factors that influence customers’ green consumption intention by integrating social cognitive theory (SCT) and the cognitive affective conative (CAC) framework.

Survey questionnaire was employed to collect data. Then, this study adopts artificial neural network (ANN) to check the robustness of partial least squares-structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM) empirical results.

The findings confirm that social media marketing and collectivism are potent external stimuli to promote green consumption intention. Significant variables identified in the PLS-SEM analysis were used for ANN models, demonstrating the robustness of the PLS-SEM findings.

The primary theoretical contribution lies in the application of SCT theory and the CAC framework in the context of green consumption, an area that has been relatively underexplored in previous studies. Additionally, the study provides managerial implications for marketers by emphasising the significance of social media marketing and collectivism in influencing consumers’ cognition and affect.

Studies on women’s entrepreneurship in Morocco are scarce, despite the potential of women for the country’s economy. This research takes place in a socio-cultural environment searching for a compromise between tradition and modernity. Families occupy a prominent place in Morocco, directly influencing women’s activities. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the role of family in Moroccan women’s entrepreneurial success.

The qualitative research is based on 60 interviews with women entrepreneurs in Morocco, including women business owners, women professionals and also women co-operators who have not been documented until now, due to data accessibility. It is diversified in terms of personal, family and professional characteristics. The analysis uses an intersectionality framework taking gender and social class into consideration.

The results highlight three categories of women entrepreneur: the “elite”, the “self-made women” and the “co-operators”. Each category is characterised by specific familial and professional realities, underpinned by differentiated dynamics in terms of gender and social class.

The study, from a practical point of view, contributes to a better understanding of the differentiated realities encountered in terms of women’s entrepreneurship, in the Moroccan context.

Studies in developing countries tend to consider women entrepreneurs as a homogeneous group. This research highlights the fact that family support, women entrepreneurs’ practices and their role in entrepreneurial success depend on the background situations in terms of gender and social class. It also contributes to the entrepreneurial success field, revealing different definitions and perceptions of success among women entrepreneurs.

The purpose of this paper was mainly to select one of the three types of coatings for protection of steel used as reinforcement in composite pipes (thin steel shell covered by cement-mortar) subjected to chloride exposure. To achieve this target, an attempt was made to develop a simple methodology for evaluating the performance of corrosion protection measures in terms of chloride threshold level (CTL) and corrosion initiation time (TI).

Bare, epoxy, red oxide and zinc primer-coated steel strips were embedded in cement mortar with sand/cement and water/cement ratios of 2 and 0.5 (by mass), respectively, to prepare the specimens which were exposed to chloride solution having a high concentration of 10 per cent NaCl. For determining the amounts of the water-soluble chloride diffused inside the specimens, powdered samples of mortar were collected from two different depths from the exposed surface of specimens on completion of each of the four different exposure times. The corrosion current densities were determined at two different stages. A step-by-step procedure for calculating CTL and TI using the measured chloride contents and corrosion current densities was established with the help of relevant information available in the literature.

Based on the comparison of the values of CTL and TI calculated for bare steel and steel with all three types of coatings, utilizing the experimental data and the proposed calculation procedure, the epoxy-coated steel was found to have the best performance.

This research has resulted into development of a simple methodology for evaluation of the performance of protective measures against corrosion of steel embedded in mortar or concrete exposed to chloride-bearing environment.