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In this chapter, we propose a blended methodological approach (critical) educational ethnography, to address problems of education. The chapter includes a brief overview of critical and educational ethnography, which inform the methodology, followed by a discussion of the essential elements and pedagogical objectives that undergird and operationalize the methodology. The essential elements include articulating a critical context, defining and understanding culture, establishing relationships and embeddedness, and multiple ways of knowing. Rather than articulate a curriculum and content for teaching (critical) educational ethnography, pedagogical objectives are provided to support the development of novice researchers (i.e., doctoral students, researchers-in-training).

This study aims to investigate the impact of family management and ownership structure, including foreign ownership and business group ownership, on corporate performance.

Using an agency perspective and a quantitative research methodology, this study examines listed firms in Pakistan from 2009 to 2018.

The results suggest that family management and concentrated leadership constrain, whereas family leadership, foreign ownership and group ownership strengthen monitoring effectiveness and corporate performance. These findings imply that the shareholder governance logic offers optimal solutions in an emerging economy, as relational governance may activate agency problems.

The findings are consistent with the relevance of relational governance mechanisms in the form of family leadership. However, the results suggest that emerging economies require a hybrid governance model to address their unique agency problems, thereby underlining context relevance in corporate governance scholarship. Furthermore, this research adopts a thick view of institutions to clarify institutional embeddedness and corporate governance contextuality in an emerging economy.

The purpose of this study is to examine the impact of spiritual values (i.e. sense of community, sense of meaning and wisdom) on employee loyalty. Spiritual values are widely accepted by scholars and practitioners as a fundamental element for employee performance. This study explored and enriched the body of knowledge on spiritual and Islamic values, as it investigated the interactive effect of Islamic work ethic (IWE). The theoretical foundation of this research is based on social exchange theory.

A cross-sectional design with purposive sampling was used to collect data from the airline industry. A partial least square (PLS) second-generation structural equation modeling method (Smart-PLS software) was used to test the hypothesized relationship.

The study findings revealed that giving importance to spiritual values could add value to the performance of the organization. In addition, based on study findings, organizations should give high priority to Islamic orientations at work and promote IWEs in the true sense.

The scope of the study is one of the limitations. This study was unable to get a random sample due to the unavailability of a comprehensive and complete list of employees. In addition, from a methodological point of view, this research relied on a single source, which is subjected to bias. Future studies should replicate and test the applicability of the current framework in any other global context.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, no studies in past tested these relationships, which is a contribution to the literature. This research should be an avenue for further inquiries using more rigorous approaches.

Barge-type offshore floating wind turbine (OFWT) commonly exhibits an under-actuated phenomenon in an offshore environment, which leads to a potential vibration-damping hazard. This article aims to provide a new robust output feedback anti-vibrational control scheme for the novel translational oscillator with rotational actuator (TORA) based five-degrees of freedom (5-DOF) barge-type OFWT in the presence of unwanted disturbances and modeling uncertainties.

In this paper, an active control technique called TORA has been used to design a 5-DOF barge-type OFWT model, where the mathematical model of the proposed system is derived by using Euler–Lagrange's equations. The robust hierarchical backstepping integral nonsingular terminal sliding mode control (HBINTSMC) with an adaptive gain is used in conjunction with extended order high gain observer (EHGO) to achieve system stabilization in the presence of unwanted disturbances and modeling uncertainties. The numerical simulations based on MATLAB/SIMULINK have been performed to demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed model and control law.

The numerical simulation results affirm the accuracy and efficiency of the proposed control law for the TORA based OFWT system. The results demonstrate that the proposed control law is robust against unwanted disturbances and uncertainties. The unknown states are accurately estimated by EHGO which enables the controller to exhibit improved stabilization performance.

A new mathematical model of the 5-DOF barge-type OFWT system based on TORA is the major contribution of this research paper. Furthermore, it provides a new adaptive anti-vibration control scheme by incorporating the EHGO for the proposed model.

This paper aims to identify the key patronage factors that encouraged the public for investment in the Modaraba scam – a Ponzi scheme perpetrated in Pakistan with a whim of Sharīʿah-compliant business and intermediation of religious clerics.

In a qualitative research, semi-structured interviews were conducted with the investors of the scam followed by thematic analysis to conclude on the subject matter.

The results reveal numerous stimuli, thematically categorized as the monetary stimulus, religiosity stimulus and lubricants, which mobilized investment towards the scam. In general, a lucrative rate of return on investment and personality of the agents, being religious clerics, were the two prominent reasons, which convinced unanimously all investors. In particular, the religiosity stimulus (agents’ personality and Sharīʿah-compliant business) was a novel and eye-catching slogan of the scheme.

Keeping in view the amount of scam and number of victims, this research is a robust attempt to conclude on the determinants of investment decision in the Modaraba scam.

The unique characteristic of Islamic bank leads in governance and disclosure. Using stakeholder, signaling, and market discipline theory, governance and adequate disclosure may increase bank soundness. This study aims to investigate the relationship of sharia disclosure and Sharia Supervisory Board in influencing Islamic bank soundness in the different regulatory framework of the country. Using purposive sampling, the research covered 84 Islamic banks in 16 countries during the period 2013–2015 with lag data of Islamic bank soundness. The result shows sharia disclosure influences on Islamic bank soundness for management efficiency, capital adequacy ratio, asset quality, and liquidity. The results also show that sharia disclosure mediates the indirect effect of SSB on Islamic bank soundness. The regulatory framework (sharia accounting standard and SSB regulation) shows moderating effect of regulation framework proved on the association of sharia disclosure with management efficiency, capital, and liquidity. The effect is indirectly depending on the regulatory framework for proxy management efficiency, capital, and liquidity. The implication of the research suggests that sharia disclosure could increase the market discipline mechanism of Islamic bank stream. The Islamic bank can increase the transparency using sharia disclosure as a branding for increasing public trust, even though in the deficient Islamic bank regulation countries.

Conventionally, the marginalised population was considered to engage in child labour due to poverty, education or lack of other options, but indeed, a few children work voluntarily. However, a growing number of scholars, in recent years, have drawn their attention to the valuable question, “why children are engaged in child labour in the informal economy”. Even though a few studies have explored the motives of informal workers, to our knowledge not a single paper has explored the motives of child labourers working in the informal economy. The purpose of this study is to fill this gap by evaluating the motives of child labourers, through three competing theorisations of the informal economy.

In this study, face-to-face structured interviews of 45 child labourers were conducted, who worked in different automobile workshops in the city of Lahore, Pakistan. Respondents were selected using the snowball sampling technique as this strategy is suitable for researching sensitive issues and is feasible for small sample sizes.

The main finding is that no single explanation is universally applicable to all child labourers. Some (27 per cent) justify their participation in the informal sector as driven by necessity (structuralist perspective), majority (40 per cent) explain their participation in the informal economy as a rational economic choice (neo-liberal perspective) and finally, more than a quarter of respondents (31 per cent) engaged in child labour due to their own free will or voluntarily to work for their family (post-structuralist perspective). This study also revealed that entrepreneurial spawning is a key determinant of child labour as the majority of children, in our study, working in automobile workshops intended to start their own workshop business in the future.

This article shows that children early engaged in work with entrepreneurial intention/spawning. Entrepreneurial education is very important in a child’s life. Entrepreneurial education will be a ticket to fulfill their dreams and learn new things with entrepreneurial attitude.

Government should develop the vocational training institutes for children who left the schools.

This study contributes to the body of literature by providing a better understanding of why children work in informal employment, an occupation generally perceived as constituting exploitative working conditions. This study also contributes to the wider literature of entrepreneurship by exploring “entrepreneurial spawning” as one of the major reasons underlying the participation of children in informal work.