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The intellectual capital of a nation (or a region of nations) requires the articulation of a system of variables that helps to uncover and manage the invisible wealth of a country. Most importantly, an emphasis on human capital allows for a better understanding of the hidden values, individuals, enterprises, institutions, and communities that are both current and potential future sources of intellectual wealth. This paper endeavours to address the five research questions. The main outcomes of this paper are the development of a national intellectual capital measurement methodology and index. The NICI is also used within a structural equation model to test several hypotheses related to national intellectual capital development.

This paper aims to highlight the importance of examining sub‐cultural attitudes when assessing the animosity of individuals from one nation toward the products of other nations.

The context chosen, Arab and Jewish Israelis' attitudes toward the UK and Italy, provides a strong setting to test the influence of animosity on product judgments and willingness to purchase products from these nations. Attitudes toward British and Italian products were collected in shopping malls and community centers in middle class neighborhoods in Northern Israel. A total of 112 Arab Israeli and 111 Jewish Israeli consumers were sampled.

Both animosity and consumer ethnocentrism led to a decreased willingness to purchase a nation's products. Arab Israelis felt more animosity toward the UK than Jewish Israelis, which negatively impacted their product judgments of British products.

Previous research on the impact of animosity on foreign products has generally looked at nations as a whole, examined contexts where animosity was fairly distant (e.g. Chinese animosity toward Japan from the second world war), and found that animosity does not affect product judgments. The paper examines a more immediate context (current attitudes among Arab and Jewish Israelis), highlights the importance of considering subcultures when studying animosity, and finds that animosity can and does affect the product judgments of foreign products when felt animosity is strong.

The Arab world is made up of 22 countries in the Middle East and North Africa. These countries are subjected to many social, economic, political and geographical vulnerabilities contributing to increased risks or ineffective emergency and disaster management. This paper examines these vulnerabilities, how they may impact the country's ability to face disasters, and how they can improve disasters' overall management.

The author selected Qatar, Oman to represent the Arab oil-rich countries, while Jordan, Egypt and Morocco to represent non-oil rich countries. The research was conducted in a qualitative, inductive systematic literature review based on a well-established systematic literature review methodology. Selected literature was based on its recency and the countries in question.

The review reveals population gaps that could threaten the social system in the event of a disaster in countries like Qatar and Oman. The majority of the countries lack community engagement and pre-planning for emergency preparedness due to social and cultural barriers. Other nations like Jordan, Egypt and Morocco are prone to long-lasting economic challenges due to lack of resources, mismanagement or corruption. The paper also highlights the need to raise the educational attainment among citizens to understand disaster risk reduction.

This study utilized the research method developed by Williams et al. (2017) to present a comprehensive systematic and comparative review of disaster management in the Arab world. Considering that disaster and emergency management has remained disproportionately unexplored in the Arab world, this paper reviewed several vulnerabilities and how those vulnerabilities may affect disaster and emergency management efforts in the Arab countries.

While most West European nations were formed around pre-existing entities that could be called “countries” before the modern age, this was not the case in the Middle East. Some entities, like Egypt, did have a clear political and cultural identity before colonialism, others, like Algeria, did not. This chapter discusses the four states of the Maghreb: Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Libya, through the perspective of “country creation” going into and coming out of colonial rule. We can see here two “models” of fairly similar types of historical development, one showing a gradual process through a protectorate period to relatively stable modern nations, another through violent conquest and direct colonization ending in violent liberation and military and wealthy but fragile states. The article asks whether these models for the history of country creation and the presence or absence of pre-colonial identities can help explain the modern history and nature of these states in the Arab Spring and the years thereafter. Then, a more tentative attempt is made to apply these models to two countries of the Arab east, Syria and Iraq. While local variations ensure that no model can be transferred directly, it can show the importance of studying the historical factors that go into the transition from geographical region to a country with people that can form the basis of a nation.

This study aims to investigate whether perceptions about female workplace participation in a number of Arab countries has changed during or after the Arab Spring.

Data are from the representative harmonized cross-sectional World Values Survey. Descriptive measures and regression approaches are applied. Different dimensions of perceptions about female emancipation are presented, while also a composite index derived from these dimensions is analysed.

There was some change for the better (job and education gender equality), but not uniformly across countries, e.g. generally good development in Egypt and Iraq, but a standstill in Jordan, and backsliding was seen in Morocco. Applying the composite index of female emancipation using regressions confirm these results – even when male and female respondents are analysed separately.

More Arab nations in the study would have been good such that the extent and consequences for an even larger part of the Arab world could be presented. Unfortunately, these data are not available. This implies that the representativeness of the results for the whole of the Arab world is perhaps reduced.

The results can inform policymakers and non-governmental organizations, etc., regarding areas where more focus is needed such that women’s rights will not merely be statements on paper but also mean that females are also emancipated in practice.

New evidence is presented based on comparable data for Arab nations analysing the possible effects of the Arab Spring on perceptions about female emancipation.

To explore the implications of internationalisation for guanxi and wasta and the role of trust, family and favours in underpinning these traditional models of networking. The paper also draws some implications for management development professionals and trainers.

The argument is based on relevant literature and cases, and the authors' own knowledge acquired through research in China over 8 years and the Arab World over 25 years. The Chinese research involved analysis of company reports, informal conversations and semi‐structured interviews conducted with almost 100 interviewees including Western expatriate managers and local Chinese managers between 1998 and 2005 in Shanghai, Beijing, Suzhou and Wuxi. The Arab research also involved analysis of company reports and informal conversations, as well as interviews and surveys conducted throughout the Middle Eastern region, including the GCC states, Algeria, Jordan, Libya, Palestine and Yemen.

The research finds differences in the continuing relevance of guanxi and wasta and suggests that while guanxi is adapting to internationalisation, wasta remains traditional in its influence on business and social life.

The paper suggests the need for increased training of international managers to adjust to culture‐specific networking in China and the Arab World and provides some practical guidelines to managers to assist their intercultural effectiveness in these two regions of the world.

The research is important in that it extends knowledge of traditional networking practices in exploring the Arab World which is hitherto under‐researched and in undertaking comparative examination of China and the Arab World which is also a new area of research.

The purpose of this paper is to address issues relating to the United Nations Millennium Development Goals (UNMDG) in the Middle East, analysing socio‐cultural issues having direct relevance to the region's progress toward “Promote Gender Equality and Empower Women”.

The authors employ meta‐analyses with data from the United Nations, the Arab Human Development Report, and various sources of measurement of national means for Hofstede's five‐dimensional model of cultural value.

The authors find that the percentage of women in employment, excluding the agricultural sector, in their sample of Middle East countries has declined since 2000, while in the samples of other Muslim‐majority and all other countries the percentage employed has increased.

The limitations of the authors' research are that complete sets of data for women in employment are not available for all years for all countries in their samples.

Implications for practice for governments and businesses in Middle East countries are that women are a valuable economic resource which is being excluded from contribution and for the past decade the change in the Middle East has been in a negative direction.

The economic contributions and rights of women in the Middle East lag behind most of the developed and developing nations, including other Muslim‐majority nations.

This study provides empirical evidence from publicly available data concerning the employment status of women in Middle Eastern nations. The authors found no similar empirical studies in the literature. The study is of value to planners and policy‐makers in business, government, and non‐governmental organisations.

This paper aims to provide a comprehensive overview of existing research on stigma in Arab countries.

A rapid review approach was used, leveraging the Scopus database to identify relevant articles. This streamlined method allows for timely assessments of the current state of knowledge, identifies research gaps and is particularly relevant given the social and cultural dynamics in Arab countries.

This study identified a growing interest in stigma-related topics in Arab countries, with a notable increase in the number of publications and citations over the past decade. Research focused on various aspects of stigma, including mental health, HIV, COVID-19 and diverse health conditions, shedding light on the prevalent challenges faced by different populations. Additionally, comparative studies highlighted the influence of culture and gender on the expression of stigma in the region.

To combat stigma in Arab countries, this study suggests the need for culturally sensitive interventions, integration of mental health services into health-care systems and the development of public health campaigns. These measures should be designed to protect vulnerable populations and prioritize educational initiatives for both the younger generation and health-care professionals.

Reducing stigma in Arab countries is crucial for fostering greater social cohesion, equality and overall well-being. The study underscores the importance of collaborations to adapt successful strategies to the unique Arab context.

This paper fills a crucial research gap by investigating stigma in Arab countries, emphasizing the need for culturally sensitive interventions, education integration and international collaboration to combat it effectively.

This paper aims to address the reasons behind the varying levels of volatile conflict and peace as seen during the Arab Spring of 2011 to 2015. During this time, higher rates of conflict transition occurred than normally observed in previous studies for certain Middle Eastern and North African countries.

Previous prediction models decrease in accuracy during times of volatile conflict transition. Also, proper strategies for handling the Arab Spring have been highly debated. This paper identifies which countries were affected by the Arab Spring and then applies data analysis techniques to predict a country’s tendency to suffer from high-intensity, violent conflict. A large number of open-source variables are incorporated by implementing an imputation methodology useful to conflict prediction studies in the future. The imputed variables are implemented in four model building techniques: purposeful selection of covariates, logical selection of covariates, principal component regression and representative principal component regression resulting in modeling accuracies exceeding 90 per cent.

Analysis of the models produced by the four techniques supports hypotheses which propose political opportunity and quality of life factors as causations for increased instability following the Arab Spring.

Of particular note is that the paper addresses the reasons behind the varying levels of volatile conflict and peace as seen during the Arab Spring of 2011 to 2015 through data analytics. This paper considers various open-source, readily available data for inclusion in multiple models of identified Arab Spring nations in addition to implementing a novel imputation methodology useful to conflict prediction studies in the future.

The purpose of the current study is to examine the empirical research conducted on the Arab region as reported in the top 46 business journals over the past 23 years (1990-2013). After identifying patterns over time (focal country and methodologies), the identified methodological challenges that scholars have reported in their published research are presented.

The Arab region in this study comprised all 22 member-countries in the Arab League. We also added three other countries that are very much tied to the Arab region and are usually included in the Middle East: Turkey, Israel and Iran. Following the recommendations of previous authors (DuBois and Reeb, 2000; Nicholls-Nixon et al., 2011; Martinez and Kalliny, 2012), published articles are reviewed, but not book chapters, book reviews and dissertation abstracts from our sample, as they do not meet the sample selection criteria (Inkpen and Beamish, 1994; Samiee and Athanassiou, 1998).

As Table I indicates, the Arab region has not received much attention in the top business journals as evidenced by the number of articles published from 1990 to 2013. No papers were published in many of the top management journals such as the Academy of Management Review and Strategic Management Journal. Few found publication in other top management outlets such as the Academy of Management Journal, the Administrative Science Quarterly, the Journal of Management and the Journal of Management Studies. Our sample also revealed a similar result in the field of marketing where there are also no papers published in some of the top marketing journals such as the Journal of Marketing Research, Journal of Consumer Psychology and Marketing Science. There was one paper published in the Journal of Marketing and one in the Journal of Retailing. Bearing in mind that this literature review covered a span of 23 years, these results indicate an under-representation of the Arab region as an empirical context. This trend has started to change after the eruption of the Arab Spring. Academic business research on the Arab region has increased significantly since then. Another significant finding is the lack of investigation of the firm and country factors in studying the region.

As the world becomes increasingly connected and the fates of countries and regions become more intertwined, it is imperative that scholars and practitioners acquire a deeper understanding of individual countries and regions, particularly those that have been relatively understudied in the extant academic research (i.e. the Arab region). While there is a substantial body of Asian management research, as well as several comprehensive literature reviews of other regions (Bruton and Lau, 2008), a systematic review of Arab and Middle Eastern business research has not been undertaken. Despite much regional attention in political science research due to the Arab – Israel conflict, management research has lagged behind.