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The purpose of this chapter is to provide a practical review of topical developments in corporate social responsibility (CSR) perspective within Pakistani business environment.

To investigate the concept of CSR in Pakistan, this chapter primarily draws on secondary sources including extant literature on CSR, government reports, publications of international agencies, industry reports, companies’ CSR/sustainability reports, and newspaper articles.

The findings of this research reveal that the concept of CSR is relatively underdeveloped in Pakistan. There is a general perception among business practitioners in Pakistan that CSR relates to altruism or philanthropic activities. However, only few large local companies and multinational enterprises hold a well-defined CSR policy. Small and medium enterprises limit their CSR engagement to comply with codes of conduct set by foreign buyers.

The discussion in this chapter is based on the secondary data, therefore the empirical research is needed to validate the findings of this study. Further, this chapter presents a generic reflection about how CSR is practiced and perceived in Pakistani business environment. Thus, industry-specific research would illustrate a much clearer picture on how different sectors in Pakistan are promoting CSR principles.

The findings of this research would help businesses and policy makers to recognize the current state of CSR progress and potential CSR challenges in Pakistan. These findings may assist the government, private sector, and civil society to devise future CSR agenda in Pakistan.

The authors contend that this is one of the few studies in Pakistani context which attempts to provide a comprehensive overview of CSR-related developments in Pakistan.

The customer experience (CX) in the field of tourism and hospitality has captured new heights. The study aims to understand how CX has been studied in the tourism and hospitality field history using bibliometric analysis. A total of 188 research articles in the Web of Science (WoS) database were selected for bibliometric analysis using VOSviewer from 2008 to 2021. The citation analysis highlighted the most influential journals published in CX within the tourism and hospitality field. Bibliographic coupling along with content analysis helps to categorize intellectual structure in six clusters: (1) Customer experience in the physical environment, (2) Technology-oriented customer experience, (3) Customer experience as driver of well-being, (4) Emotional value in the consumption experience, (5) Behavioral intentions-oriented customer experience, and (6) Total customer experience. Even though bibliometric analysis has gained attraction in business research and growing trends of the experience economy, CX within the tourism and hospitality field was not yet explored comprehensively. The current study was an effort to fill this gap by examining how customer experience in the tourism and hospitality context has been evolved historically. Theoretical, social, and practical implications are presented to establish future research directions.

The twenty-first century has been characterized by the intensification of concerns related to tourism safety and security. These issues are playing an increasingly significant role over recent years, due to the increase of terrorist attacks in several countries, political instability, natural disasters, epidemics and, more recently, the COVID-19 pandemic. Understanding tourist safety and security in the tourism context is, thus, critical to increasing the competitiveness and attractiveness of tourist destinations.

Through the bibliometric methods of performance analysis and science mapping, this study aims to contribute to the advancement of knowledge on tourist safety and security at the destination.

A total of 445 records published between 1989 and 2021, covering 191 academic journals and 1,000 authors from 91 different countries, were analysed.

The main findings show that this research field has attracted a substantial and growing interest of researchers, institutions, journals and countries. Opportunities for future research are related to decision making, tourist behaviour, risk perception, tourism safety, destination image, safety engineering and sustainable development.

In the post-pandemic context, this research field can be critical to providing a set of tailored strategies to improve tourists' safe destination environment and increase tourism destinations' competitiveness and attractiveness.

One of the central themes of education for all (EFA) for the last two decades has been empowerment through access to education. The history of EFA, however, can at best be termed as checkered. EFA has been relatively successful in drawing world attention and improving access to education. However, the question whether world attention and improved access has resulted in empowerment of people in the developing world still remains unanswered.

In this paper we argue that the limited success of EFA can best be examined and analyzed by paying close attention to tension between demands of the global capital and labor market place and nationalist agendas of the developing (post-colonial) state. These tensions affect the EFA agenda in the developing countries in complex ways.

Taking empirical-educational data from Pakistan we demonstrate that demands of the global capital and the labor market had resulted in an increased attention on institutions and programs of study that cater to the needs of the global capital and labor pool. Access to these institutions is limited to certain strata of the society. On the other hand the mass education program in Pakistan is largely defined by the nationalistic agenda of the post-colonial undemocratic state. A net impact of the interplay of these global and national dynamics is that not only the EFA's aim of mass education is hampered but also more importantly education in its present state is not empowering the recipients.

Salinity is one of the major problems in the coastal region of Bangladesh that contributes to 20% of the total land area. About 53% of the coastal region is affected by different degrees of salinity. Salinity intrusion in this area is mainly derived through climate change as well as anthropogenic factors that make this region more vulnerable. Hence, salinity intrusion has adverse effects on water, soils, agriculture, fisheries, ecosystem, and livelihoods of this region. To ensure the availability of food as well as drinking water, this chapter highlights how individual and community people have endeavored several adaptation measures to minimize salinity effects. Moreover, it further discloses governmental and other development organizations’ actions toward salinity to reduce its impacts.

Social entrepreneurship has played a significant role in reducing unemployment and poverty, fixing other social issues and environmental concerns. Although there is an increasing concern on social entrepreneurship by the public sector, practitioner and scholars, there are still limited studies on predicting the intention to become a social entrepreneur. Thus, investigating social entrepreneurship intention using a systematic literature review (SLR) approach is crucial due to the lack of systematisation and categorisation in this field. Therefore, this study aims to conduct a SLR to identify the antecedents of social entrepreneurial intention (SEI) used by the previous research. In this sense, this chapter carries out a systematic review of the literature on social entrepreneurship intentions. The review is guided by the PRISMA Statement (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic reviews and Meta-Analyses). After the identification and screening process, only 56 articles were qualified for further analysis. This SLR focused on articles that are using quantitative research and in the English language published in Scopus. Although there is no limitation in the timeline, the search string results found that the related articles were published between 2010 and 2020. From the thematic analysis, nine main themes were found. The themes are categorised based on the antecedents of SEI used by previous research. There are nine antecedents found: (1) perceived desirability and feasibility, (2) attitude, subjective norms and perceived behavioural control, (3) prior experience, (4) emotional factors, (5) self-efficacy, (6) personality, (7) support systems, (8) skills and competencies and (9) motivational factors. Further analysis of the themes has resulted in ten sub-themes. This chapter's contribution includes offering a clearer picture of the antecedents of social entrepreneurial intention that is still at its infancy stage. Additionally, this chapter managed to identify the research gaps and proposed future research agenda.

This chapter investigates the presence of a difference in the systemic risk level between Islamic and conventional banks in Bangladesh. The authors compare systemic resilience of three types of banks: fully fledged Islamic banks, purely conventional banks (CB), and CB with Islamic windows. The authors use the market-based systemic risk measures of marginal expected shortfall and systemic risk to identify which type is more vulnerable to a systemic event. The authors also use ΔCoVaR to identify which type contributes more to a systemic event. Using a sample of observations on 27 publicly traded banks operating over the 2005–2014 period, the authors find that CB is the least resilient sector to a systemic event, and is the one that has the highest contribution to systemic risk during crisis times.

This discussion essay provides an overview of teacher preparation programs in South Asia, detailing current innovative practices, challenges and trends regarding teacher education in the region. The chapter presents initiatives in several South Asian countries in terms of the design and implementation of in-service teacher trainings, pre-service teacher education programs, and distance education programs in South Asia. The main concept of the essay is to provide a comparative perspective to learn from field-based initiatives with the aim of improving the quality of the programs. It also highlights new trends such as the English education programs and ICT-based teacher training programs. It acknowledges that culture and context form a large part of the success for any education initiative. While doing so, a more holistic approach to improving teacher quality is emphasized. Finally, the essay concludes by sharing some ideas on developing conducive teaching–learning environments in the schools to support teachers. This essay should benefit policy makers and practitioners to: (a) obtain an overview of teacher quality programs in South Asia; and (b) comparatively learn from the experiences of countries in South Asia that have both numerous similarities and some differences.

The COVID-19 pandemic is having an unprecedented impact on schools and schoolchildren across the globe. There is still a dearth of studies that investigate this recent phenomenon in a developing country context, and this is true of Pakistan. Much of the population in Pakistan resides in rural settings and a lack of technology and of online provision of teaching for more than one year must have had huge negative impacts on students’ learning. The school dropout rate was already high in rural settings (Geven & Hasan, 2020) and, with school closures, this will likely have increased further, and cause some schoolchildren to lose interest in going back to school. However, no current data appear to exist to corroborate this. Due to the lack of available current quantitative and qualitative data, this study seeks to explore the impact of COVID-19 on schoolchildren’s education in Pakistan by examining recently published related studies. This study employs a literature review technique that gathers data to ascertain the potential overall impact on schoolchildren during the pandemic. The findings reveal that there remains a lack of detailed studies on this important topic and that urgent attention is needed from researchers to assess the scale of the impact. In addition, the review found that many children from rural communities had little to no school engagement due to technology poverty and their families being unable to support home-schooling, either due to family and/or work constraints or a lack of prior education and/or skills. Themes that emerged were that families, especially mothers, struggled to balance both caring and home-schooling duties, pupils from private schools had a better experience than those from public school backgrounds, and many of these reported that online provisions helped students develop new skills. This study may help to improve the understanding of the impact on the lost learning of schoolchildren during the pandemic by guiding practitioners as well as policymakers.