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E-learning environments and services (ELES) adoption and success rates challenge ELES designers, practitioners and organisations. Enterprise decision makers continue to seek effective instruments in launching such systems. The purpose of this paper is to understand users’ perceptions of ELES effectiveness and develop a theoretical framework which improves understanding of success factors for adoption.

Grounded theory method is used to reflect on the relationships between changing users’ requirements and expectations, technological advances and ELES effectiveness models. A longitudinal study collecting data from social media blogs over four years was authenticated based on the context evaluation, language structure and conversational constructs.

Identification of a new core dimension named “Concept Functionality” which can be used to understand the relationships between e-learning effectiveness factors including the relationships with other domains such as security. The findings are also used to validate major existing models for the success of ELES.

The new framework potentially improves system design process in the fields of education technology, enterprise systems, etc.

Concept functionality dimension can offer more insights to understand ELES effectiveness and further improve system design process in a variety of domains including enterprise systems, process modelling and education technology.

This study aims to identify blockchain-related innovation trends that can improve trust networks in a smart city's transport and supply chain networks. Trust networks are crucial in building and maintaining the trust of citizens in smart cities. By promoting transparency and accountability, facilitating collaboration and innovation, enhancing citizen participation and protecting privacy and security, trust networks can help to ensure that smart cities are developed and implemented in a responsible and sustainable way. A systematic literature review identifies 60 conceptual and empirical studies. This research focuses on the current problems and developing procurement and supply chain strategy and the potential benefits of using blockchain in these areas. It suggests ways for the smart city's transport and supply chain networks to utilise blockchain to improve operations and supply chain strategy and identifies innovation trends related to blockchain. The study also includes a systematic literature review and Blockchain Transformation and Influence model as the basis to enhance trust networks in the supply chain.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate motivations of team members to source knowledge and how the sourced knowledge increases their reuse and creation outcomes.

A model based on knowledge sourcing perspective is proposed and tested to link knowledge sourcing methods in teams to their performance outcomes. The hypotheses are tested on data collected from a survey of 341 project teams.

The findings show the critical role of team members’ learning orientation in increasing knowledge sourcing, reuse and creation; group knowledge sourcing and repositories are more appropriate to increase knowledge reuse; the Internet is more effective to increase knowledge creation; and knowledge reuse increases knowledge creation among team members with a strong learning orientation.

Further studies can replicate the model presented in this paper and introduce group characteristics to improve its explanatory power. Also, use of self-reported measures in data collection may lead to biases; future research should collate different measures longitudinally or use separate primary and secondary observations.

Team leaders should enhance team effectiveness by ensuring diversity of knowledge and skills. Current research emphasizes that team leaders can integrate a crowdsourcing or “users as co-creators” approach to increase knowledge creation by team members. Team members’ learning orientation can be increased by promoting a climate that encourages open discussion of problems, mistakes and errors.

This research highlights that knowledge sourcing methods produce different performance outcomes regarding knowledge reuse and creation. These insights can be useful to team leaders and researchers to better understand what motivates team members to source knowledge and how it increases their reuse and creation outcomes.

This study examines the impact of ownership structure on firm financial performance, for 146 manufacturing firms listed at the Pakistan Stock Exchange (PSX) for the period 2003–2012.

The theoretical background of the present study is based on the agency theory. Ownership structure is measured by institutional shareholdings, insider shareholdings, foreign shareholders and government shareholdings, while return on assets (ROA), return on equity (ROE), market-to-book ratio (MBR) and Tobin's Q (TQ) are used as proxies of corporate financial performance. The dynamic panel generalized method of moments (GMM) method is employed to cater for the issue of endogeneity.

We find that institutional ownership exerts a significant positive impact on ROE and MBR, which suggests that institutional investors play a significant role in improving the financial performance of the sample Pakistani. Furthermore, the results reveal a significant positive relationship of insider ownership with ROA, ROE, MBR and TQ, which is consistent with the prediction of agency theory that concentration of insider ownership aligns the interest of shareholders with those of the managers and hence improves performance. A significant positive association of government shareholdings with ROA and ROE was also found. Therefore, policymakers may encourage government ownership in firms, which can help to improve corporate financial performance.

The present study contributes to the existing literature on ownership structure and corporate financial performance in an emerging market like Pakistan. It is worth mentioning that the institutional setup and corporate governance structure in Pakistan is yet at an evolving stage. Findings of this study may provide useful insights to corporate managers and investors about the relationship between ownership structure and financial performance of firms from the manufacturing sector in Pakistan.

The construction industry struggles in environmental and economic performance due to waste generation. Several studies have measured this waste in the construction industry of developing countries like India, Brazil, China, Nigeria and Iran, and proposed strategies to enhance the overall efficiency. But no such work exists in Pakistan's context. The construction industry of Pakistan contributes significantly to the country's gross domestic product (GDP). And with several mega projects in progress to overcome the energy crises and improve the infrastructure of the country, the absence of proper waste management policies and plans calls for empirical research. Therefore, this study quantifies and benchmarks material waste in the local context, its impact on project cost and the effect of multiple subcontracting arrangements on waste generation. It also proposes a conceptual waste management plan (WMP) for local conditions which can be generalized for developing countries.

This paper uses a mixed research approach by leveraging Saunders's research onion model. To benchmark the current wastage practices, quantitative data of material waste in the Pakistani construction industry are gathered through document review of accounting systems, inventory and payment records of 40 completed building projects. Using the data, the waste rate of different materials is measured along with their impact on cost. Additionally, the role of subcontracting arrangements in waste generation is also investigated. Also, semi-structured interviews are conducted with project managers of high- and low-performing construction organizations to propose a conceptual WMP for the local industry and developing countries.

The highest wasteful materials by quantity are wood, sand and concrete blocks, and those by cost are wood, bricks and steel. By quantity, 123% more material was used on average than the actual productive work. Also, the labor only (L-O) subcontracting arrangement causes maximum waste. Moreover, the difference between the highest (155%) and lowest wasting company (104%) is 51%, highlighting the proactive and resistive waste management culture and approach by the worst- and best-performing companies. Further, the impact of waste quantities is more than 2% of the project cost. Finally, a conceptual model consisting of measures at the project, industry and national levels is also proposed as a guide for developing countries.

The findings of this benchmarking study can help improve the project planning, execution and monitoring, and control practices by providing a better understanding of the material waste potential. This will help economize the construction industry and improve its sustainability.

This is the first benchmarking study that quantitatively measures material waste in the construction industry of Pakistan. It highlights that costly as well as sustainability-implicating materials are frequently wasted in the local construction projects. Also, this study correlates the wastage with subcontracting arrangements. Additionally, an original conceptual WMP is proposed that could help the industry improve its performance. The findings could help the construction professionals identify the loopholes in their material management practices and not only save money but also ensure better sustainability.

This study unpacks the relationship between violations of organizational promises, as perceived by employees and their job performance, considering the mediating effects of job-related anxiety and moderating effects of psychological contract type.

Multi-source, multi-wave data were collected from employees and their supervisors in Pakistan.

Feelings of organizational betrayal may reduce job performance due to the higher anxiety that employees experience in their daily work. This mediating role of enhanced job-related anxiety in turn is stronger to the extent that employees believe that their psychological contract contains relational obligations but weaker when it contains transactional obligations.

The study gives organizational decision makers pertinent insights into how they can mitigate the risk that employees who are angry about broken organizational promises stay away from performance-enhancing work activities, namely, by managing the expectations that come along with psychological contracts. In so doing, they can avoid imposing dual harms on employees, from both a sense that they have been betrayed and the risk of lower performance ratings.

This study offers expanded insights into the process that underpins the translation of psychological contract violations into diminished job performance, by pinpointing the simultaneous roles of experienced job-related anxiety and beliefs about employer obligations.

The main aim of this study is to investigate the impact of climate change and water salinity on farmer’s income risk with future outlook mitigation. Salinity and climate change are a threat to agricultural productivity worldwide. However, the combined effects of climate change and salinity impacts on farmers' income are not well understood, particularly in developing countries.

The response-yield function and general maximum entropy methods were used to predict the impact of temperature, precipitation and salinity on crop yield. The target minimization of total absolute deviations (MOTAD)-positive mathematical programming model was used to simulate the impact of climate change and salinity on socioeconomic and environmental indicators. In the end, a multicriteria decision-making model was used, aiming at the selection of suitable climate scenarios.

The results revealed that precipitation shows a significantly decreasing trend, while temperature and groundwater salinity (EC) illustrate a significantly increasing trend. Climate change and EC negatively impact the farmer's income and water shadow prices. Maximum reduction in income and water shadow prices was observed for A2 scenario (−12.4% and 19.4%) during 2050. The environmental index was the most important, with priority of 43.4% compared to socioeconomic indicators. Subindex amount of water used was also significant in study area, with 28.1% priority. The technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution ranking system found that B1 was the best climatic scenario for adopting climate change adaptation in the research region.

In this study, farmers' income threats were assessed with the aspects of different climate scenario (A1, A1B and B1) over the horizons of 2030, 2040 and 2050 and three different indicators (economic, social and environmental) in Northwestern region of Pakistan. Only in arid and semiarid regions has climate change raised temperature and reduced rainfall, which are preliminary symptoms of growing salinity.

The main aim of this study was to examine the effect of the components of intellectual capital on the organizational performance of SMEs operating in tourism sector at Azad Jammu and Kashmir Pakistan.

In this empirical study, survey approach was used and primary data were collected through structured questionnaire. A total of 300 structured questionnaire survey forms were distributed through purposive sampling technique. Two hundred and twenty usable questionnaire survey forms were returned. Six research hypotheses were constructed to achieve the objective of this study. Smart Partial Least Square (PLS) 3 was used to test the proposed research hypotheses.

The findings showed that two out of six hypotheses were supported. Precisely, customer capital has appeared as one of the most important components of intellectual capital in model. The results showed that the overall intellectual capital has effect on the organizational performance of SMEs. Results shed more light on the effects that the components of intellectual capital have on organizational performance of SMEs, particularly in the context of Pakistan.

This research is limited to SMEs in tourism sector in Pakistan and the data were gathered through questionnaire which used mostly subjective measures. Subsequently, findings may not be applicable to other industries. The research contributes to the development of intellectual capital literature focused on the organizational performance in the perspective of SMEs in emerging economies. Future research needs to reach beyond the boundaries and understand the effect of intellectual capital on the performance of organizations.

This study extended the knowledge about the prominence of intellectual capital and its effect on the organizational performance of SMEs. Moreover, this study identified the level of existence and measurement of the six components of intellectual capital in SMEs which enables practitioners to develop adequate strategies to better manage it. To author's best knowledge, this study can be the first empirical study which investigates the impact of intellectual capital on the organizational performance of SMEs operating in tourism sector in Pakistan.

In most developing countries like Pakistan, the gap between rich and poor has widened over time. This polarization in the society hinders economic growth and acts as a barrier for development and well-being. The proportion of income distribution varies across the population sub-groups in Pakistan. Therefore, it is important to study the income distribution effects across the four provinces of Pakistan.

This study attempts to explore the root causes of income inequality and its changes in a dynamic context across the four provinces of Pakistan over a decade (2005–2006 to 2015–2016) by using a regression-based inequality decomposition method.

Age, gender and higher education are the most prominent factors explaining the level of inequality across the four provinces of Pakistan. Higher education enhances the level of inequality in all provinces but contributes negatively to its changes except for Balochistan. Skilled agricultural and fishery workers in Balochistan have contributed significantly to reducing the level of inequality over the decade but not to its changes. Healthy contribution of the unpaid family workers in economic activities has reduced the level of inequality in Punjab and Balochistan and contributed positively to the change in income inequality. Employer or self-employed workers enhance the level of income inequality but contribute negatively to its changes for Punjab and Balochistan.

To date, inequality literature on Pakistan focuses on economic growth and poverty. A handful studies focus on the determinants of income inequality in a static context. This study goes beyond the static decomposition tools and attempts to explore the determinants of inequality in a dynamic context.

The peer review history for this article is available at https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/IJSE-09-2021-0573.