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The purpose of this paper is to investigate how resort managers respond to employment legislation (Law No. 02/2008).

The qualitative case study data from seven self-contained tourist resorts in the Maldives were used to investigate the managerial responses to employment legislation.

Resort managers’ responses ranged from passive compliance to active resistance, with decoupling through opportunism as the dominant strategy used to circumvent the legislation. Some human resource management (HRM) practices emerged from resort managers’ interactions with external stakeholders and employees. Strategic responses and HRM practices were driven by a search for legitimacy or efficiency and sometimes both. The findings show that there are differences between strategic responses and HRM practices by organisational subfield, local resorts and international hotel chains. The resorts’ market orientation also influenced resort managers’ responses and HRM practices.

The findings of this paper have limitations because it was limited to a single industry/sector and to a particular piece of legislation. However, it demonstrates the complexity of the relationship between institutional context and HRM.

This paper shows that responding to employment legislation entails a high level of interplay between the institutional environment and HR actors, and between stakeholders (e.g. employees) and HR actors. It demonstrates the difficulty of reconciling institutional requirements with the preferences of different stakeholders and organisational interests. HR actors actively make sense of institutional requirements and modify HRM practices to accommodate stakeholders’ varying perspectives and preferences. This suggests that in countries such as the Maldives, uneven institutional coverage (e.g. incomplete employment legislation) allows room for organisations to innovate – for better or worse.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the role of human resource (HR) actors in the design and implementation of HR practices. More specifically, the paper explores how interactions between various HR actors influence the design and implementation of HR practices in tourist resorts in the Maldives.

A qualitative, multiple case study approach was used. Data for this study were collected in seven tourist resorts in the Maldives through 49 semi-structured interviews conducted with managers with different functional roles, at various levels in the organisational hierarchy and with non-managerial employees. Field observations and a range of secondary sources supplemented the interview data.

The findings show that all HR actors influence the design and implementation of human resource management (HRM) practices in these resorts to some degree, although the extent of their involvement varies from actor to actor. Execution of HR practices necessitates interaction among HR actors as they contest and reconcile their interests and roles. High levels of social capital enhance the roles of HR actors as they overcome constraints to the implementation of HRM practices.

This study is a qualitative and exploratory study. Data are clustered at the sub-unit level and limited to a single industry. This presents limitations in generalising the findings. A more extensive study covering other industries is necessary to explore different configurations of the negotiated relationships among HR actors.

This study identifies various management strategies that could be used to enhance HR actors’ social capital. These strategies could be useful for managers in other organisational settings

There is a dearth of literature on the interactions between managers at different levels in organisational hierarchies and with different functional roles, and how these interactions affect the design and implementation of HRM practices in organisations. Using social capital theory, this research explores the interaction between HR actors in the design and implementation of HRM in the context of self-contained resorts in the Maldives, thereby shedding light on a context that has attracted little research to date.

The present study aims to summarize different non-invasive techniques for continuous glucose monitoring (CGM) in diabetic patients using glucose-oxidase biosensors. In diabetic patients, the self-monitoring of blood glucose (BG) levels through minimally invasive techniques provides a quick method of measuring their BG concentration, unlike conventional laboratory measurements. The drawbacks of minimally invasive techniques include physical pain, anxiety and reduced patient compliance. To overcome these limitations, researchers shifted their attention towards the development of a pain-free and non-invasive glucose monitoring system, which showed encouraging results.

This study reviews the development of minimally and non-invasive method for continuous glucose level monitoring in diabetic or hyperglycemic patients. Specifically, glucose monitoring using non-invasive techniques, such as spectroscopy-based methods, polarimetry, fluorescence, electromagnetic variations, transdermal extraction-based methods and using body fluids, has been discussed. The various strategies adopted for improving the overall specificity and performance of biosensors are discussed.

In conclusion, the technology of glucose oxidase-based biosensors for glucose level monitoring is becoming a strong competitor, probably because of high specificity and selectivity, low cost and increased patient compliance. Many industries currently working in this field include Google, Novartis and Microsoft, which demonstrates the significance and strong market potential of self-monitored glucose-oxidase-based biosensors in the near future.

This review paper summarizes comprehensive strategies for continuous glucose monitoring (CGM) in diabetic patients using non-invasive glucose-oxidase biosensors. Non-invasive techniques received significant research interest because of high sensitivity and better patient compliance, unlike invasive ones. Although the results from these innovative devices require frequent calibration against direct BG data, they might be a preferable candidate for future CGM. However, the challenges associated with designing accurate level sensors to biomonitor BG data easily and painlessly needs to be addressed.

This study aims to present a detailed investigation of Shariah audit research based on a systematic literature review.

A total of 53 studies were collected from the Scopus and Web of Science databases following a systematic methodology. These studies were analyzed and evaluated based on the theoretical perspective, geographical distribution, research settings and themes background.

The findings indicate an increase in the literature on Shariah auditing over time, especially in the Malaysian context, with a dearth of research in other contexts and institutions (Takaful). It has been also revealed that the existing literature is still unclear about the effectiveness and consequences of effective Shariah auditing, pointing the need for more work on these areas. The authors outline opportunities for future Shariah auditing research.

The synthesized findings are helpful for policymakers and managers to understand better how research in Shariah auditing is developing and how to translate research findings into practice. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first research to comprehensively synthesize the literature on this topic and identify the potential opportunities for future research directions.

On the backdrop of growing importance of Shariah compliant equity markets, the purpose of this paper is to study cross-country portfolio diversification benefits for investors with major trading partners of Saudi Arabia, namely, USA, China, Japan, Germany and India, who have already invested or tend to invest in Saudi Arabian stock market.

The authors have investigated time invariant, dynamic correlations at different investments horizons of the investors among Islamic asset classes by applying relevant econometric techniques like multivariate generalized autoregressive conditional heteroscedastic –DCC and continuous wavelet transforms. For robustness, this study also applied maximal overlap discrete wavelet transform.

The findings tend to indicate that the Saudi Arabian investors have portfolio diversification benefits with all major trading partners in the short-term investment horizon. Interestingly, Saudi Arabian market has the least portfolio diversification benefits with the Chinese market. However, in the long run, all markets are correlated, yielding minimum portfolio diversification benefits and most importantly Saudi Arabian investors have portfolio diversification benefits with the Indian Islamic equity market in almost all investment horizons. The findings are highly consistent across different econometric technique estimations.

The authors are only considering five major trading partners of Saudi Arabia. Also, the authors are using S&P and FTSE shari’ah index. Moreover, the time period of the study is constrained by the availability of shari’ah indices. Econometric limitations are also well documented in the literature.

The results could be beneficial for the investors, portfolio managers, hedge fund managers and institutional investors and also could be useful for the policy makers in their policy-making decisions.

Only very few studies have looked into the benefits of international portfolio diversification from the perspective of local investors as well as the portfolio diversification benefits with the major trading partners of Saudi Arabia. One of the novelties of the method is to make the stock investors, practitioners and policy makers aware of the portfolio diversification benefits available at different time scales such as 4, 8, 16, 32, 64 and 256 trading days as investment holding periods to unveil the true dynamics of co-movement between those different assets.

Even though Bitcoin has been often labelled as a safe haven asset class in the literature, the influence of economic policy uncertainty (EPU) on the diversifying opportunities offered by Bitcoin in relation to other assets needs to be investigated. This paper aims to investigate how the EPU affects diversification of commodity, conventional, Islamic and sustainable equity returns in relation to its impact on Bitcoin returns.

The authors use advanced time-series econometrics, namely, multivariate generalized autoregressive conditional heteroscedastic-dynamic conditional correlation and continuous wavelet transformation, for the analysis of the daily returns for the aforementioned assets between 01 August 2011 and 01 September 2019.

First, the authors found a strong evidence of Bitcoin’s mean reverting trend in the long run while its volatility has decreased significantly since 2013. After separating the EPU into two regimes (high and low), diversification opportunities with Bitcoin seems to disappear in a high EPU period, while the hedging opportunity tends to prevail in a low EPU period for all classes of assets. Importantly, the findings indicate that Bitcoin offers short-term diversification for sustainable and Islamic equity as well as energy stocks during a low uncertainty period. Consequently, in relation to the policy uncertainty, Bitcoin provides similar hedging opportunities than commodities like Gold and Silver. Overall, the study shows that EPU is remarkably important in explaining the average portfolio returns of Bitcoin, suggesting that this indicator can be perceived as a decent explanatory factor for portfolio diversification.

The study significantly extends the empirical literature of Bitcoin’s portfolio diversification by taking EPU into consideration. To the best of authors’ knowledge, this is one of the few studies to investigate the asymmetric effects of US EPU on Bitcoin’s hedging capabilities by taking into account major conventional equity, sustainable equity, Islamic equity, gold, silver and oil.

This study aims to explore the firm's specific, opacity and economy-specific variables to explain the variation in South Asian market returns and indicate that how the difference in adoption of accounting standards refers to the effect of the movement in stock returns.

Following the scope of the study, factor analysis, fixed effect, Driscoll and Kraay standard errors (DKSE) and Panel Corrected standard error (PCSE) models have been inducted to determine the influence of firm-specific, opacity and economy-specific variables on stock returns. The sample of study comprises 1,885 firms from five countries located in the South Asia region with the period 2005–2018. To ensure the reliability of data, firm-specific data have been collected from DataStream International, while an international country risk guide was used to compile the data for economy-specific variables.

This study concluded that firm-specific variables showed a consistent and significant association with stock return except for beta, accrual and momentum while earning aggressiveness was the only factor in opacity measure to capture the variation in stock return. The implementation of international accounting standards seemed to be significant and proves to be helpful to enhance the quality of accounting information.

The limitations of this study comprised the estimation error by avoiding the firm's observations with negative equity in case of earning opacity and majority (more than 50%) of the observation belongs to a single market as India out of final sample which leads to having biasedness in findings.

This study helps the investors to consider the firms with smaller market capitalization and lower book to market ratio and avoid the momentum strategy under firm specific factors. Moreover, earning aggressiveness under opacity domain capture the variation in stock return and must be considered while investing funds.

The influence of adoption of international accounting standards along with firm and economy specific variable in South Asian Equity Markets return was the major contribution. Moreover, the inclusion of DKSE and PCSE models to examine the relevance of the financial and economic informational environment was also considered as a part of major contribution of this study.

This paper aims to study the co-movement dynamics of Islamic equity returns to explain international portfolio diversification opportunities for investors having a heterogeneous stock holding period in light of Brexit.

The authors use the following three recent methodologies: the multivariate generalised autoregressive conditional heteroskedastic-dynamic conditional correlations, continuous wavelet transforms and maximum overlap discrete wavelet transform. Dow Jones Islamic country-based indexes are used from 2 September 2013 to 31 December 2019.

There is a high correlation between the United Kingdom (UK) Islamic stock market return with the Canadian, USA, Malaysian and Indian implying lesser diversification benefits for the investors. However, the results tend to indicate that UK Islamic stock market investors who have allocated their investment in Sri Lanka, Kuwait, Japan and Turkey have enjoyed diversification benefits. Besides, there is a declining correlation between UK Islamic stock markets and other selected markets aftermath of Brexit. Turkey seems the most volatile stock over the period, appealing to risk-lover investors to gain from price changes. When the shock occurs in the financial sector, the volatility is mean-reverting faster than other markets in Sri Lanka. On the other hand, Malaysia appears to have the least volatility implying a stable financial sector.

The results tend to shed light on effective portfolio diversification benefits in light of the recent shock (Brexit) between the UK Islamic stock index and other selected indexes that vary from country to country depending on investment horizons. This critically confirms the significance of heterogeneity in investment horizons and provides significant inferences for portfolio diversification strategies.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first study investigating the Brexit effect on Islamic stocks, guiding Shariah sensitive investors in their diversification strategies, providing information to investors to consider the implications of this incident on Islamic stocks for future shocks.

This study aims to propose a risk management framework for Islamic banks to address specific risks that are unique to Islamic bank settings.

A unique methodology has been developed first by exploring the dynamics and behaviors of various risks unique to Islamic banks. Second, it integrates them through a series of diagrams that show how they behave, integrate and impact risk, returns and portfolios.

This study proposes a unique risk-return relationship framework encompassing specific risks faced by Islamic banks under the ambit of portfolio theory showing how Islamic banks establish a steeper risk-return path under Shariah compliance. By doing so, this study identifies a unique “Islamic risk-return” nexus in Islamic settings as an explanation for the concern of contemporary researchers that Islamic banks are more risky than conventional banks.

The originality of this study is that it extends the scope of risk management in Islamic banks from individual contract-based to an integrated whole, identifying a unique transmission path of how risks affect portfolio diversification in Islamic banks.

As technology advances the demand for an analog-to digital converter has increased, as every application demands a converter as per its parameters. Currently, work is done on improvement of data converters at three levels of design – architectural, circuit and physical level. This paper aims to review the work done in the field of analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) at architectural and circuit level and discusses the achievements in this field. Furthermore, a new architecture is proposed, which works at higher resolution and provides optimum design parameters at low power consumption.

A hybrid architecture combining the features of synthetic approximation register and sigma-delta ADC is presented. The validity of the proposed design at architectural level is verified using MATLAB SIMULINK simulations.

The design simulation was tested for a sinusoidal wave of 1 V at the test frequency of 60 Hz. The design consumes least power, and is found to yield an error of the order less than 10–3 V, thus providing highly accurate digital output.

The design is applicable in many applications including biomedical systems, Internet-of-Things and earthquake engineering. This architecture can be further optimized to obtain better performance parameters.