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The purpose of this paper is to explore the critical interrelationships between poverty, culture and knowledge-based community development.

The traditional approaches to the management of poverty such as infrastructure, literacy and economic aid have failed to deliver and ameliorate the lot of common people. The current paper engages in critical constructivist discourse on poverty as unfolding in the era of knowledge economy and seeks to propose a community focussed knowledge-based development model of human economic and social uplift. This model has three dimensions: community knowledge focus, interactions of local, regional and global knowledge shaping and influencing poverty management and finally collective responsibility (collective commitment) of groups to rid them of poverty trap.

First, this paper looks at the social interconnections of poverty, culture and knowledge-based development in a critical discourse context. Second, it discusses the alternative worldviews of economic development. Third, it questions current epistemological and sociological assumptions of development paradigm.

The paper looks at the issues of poverty, culture and economic development from a critical pluralistic epistemological standpoint. It also questions some of the prescriptive methods of development by poverty experts. It also proposes to effectively explore and integrate different cognitive styles in development discourse and their usefulness and relevance to global development discourse.

Economics laboratories have become the primary locations of experimental economics research by the 1990s. They were a result of a decade long development from ad hoc opportune places to dedicated, purpose designed spaces. The distinctive feature of the economics laboratory and its key instrument became networked computers running custom-built software. However, the history of the economics laboratory is not just a history of evolving technology. I argue in this article that it is mainly a history of learning how to build an experimental economics community. Only a functioning community was able to change a physical place to a laboratory space. The distinction between place and space originates in the work of Michael de Certeau and I use it to analyze the evolution of economics laboratories. To this end, I analyze the case of Austin Hoggatt’s Management Science Laboratory at Berkeley in the 1960s as it illustrates the indispensability of creating a community centered on the laboratory. In contrast, the laboratories in Arizona and at Caltech since the 1980s, and in Amsterdam since the 1990s have become successful spaces, because, unlike Hoggatt, they focused equally on community building as on infrastructure and technology. This gave rise to social infrastructure and division of labor in the laboratory space.

E‐learning is becoming a major component in academia today. Therefore, the success of e‐learning online communities is crucial in order to ensure their permanency and effectiveness. There is a need for formalized guidelines in e‐learning that instruct the designer (course instructor) on how to design, maintain, and manage a course. Some research has been done on the subject, but none proposes formalized guidelines, and none draws the results from the users’ perspectives. The users, students in this case, should be at the heart of the design and their thoughts, wishes, and needs should be implemented in the user‐centered design. In this study, through an iterative testing approach, the researchers formalized and validated a set of design heuristics that instruct an online educator on how to design, manage, deliver, and nurture an e‐Learning online community.

This study aims to understand the linkage among sustainability initiatives (SIs), community development (CD) and community well-being (CW) in tourism.

The exploratory sequential methodology consists of expert interviews, a questionnaire survey and the model verified with analysis of moment structures 22.

This study shows that the direct relationship between community-level SIs and CD and CW is significant and positive. The direct relationship between CD and CW is significant and positive. CD partially mediates the relationship between community-level SIs and CW in Indigenous tourism business operations.

This study assumes significance in developing Indigenous tourism destinations and calls for an integrated development strategy at the community level to enhance CW. This study provides a path for examining the contribution of grassroots-level sustainable business initiatives, their development and the community’s well-being. This study was confined to protected area-based destinations and focused on CD and well-being as a result of local-level SIs.

This study extends the scope for further research in measuring other perceived linkages of SIs with Indigenous community’s quality of life.

This study provides a path for examining the contribution of grassroots-level sustainable business initiatives and their development contributions and the ‘community’s well-being.

This exploratory research examining the relationship among community-level SIs, CD and CW hitherto unexplored in tourism among grassroot-level communities.

The purpose of the paper is to better understand the relation between information technology (IT) affordances and donor motivations in charitable crowdfunding.

This paper reports the findings from a comparative case study of two charitable crowdfunding campaigns.

The affordances of crowdfunding platforms support types of donor motivation that are not supported effectively, or at all, in offline charity.

For future researchers, the paper provides a theoretical model of the relation between IT affordances and motivations in the context of charitable crowdfunding.

For practitioners in the charity space, the paper suggests why they may wish to consider the use of charitable crowdfunding and how they may go about its implementation.

Based on field research at two charitable crowdfunding campaigns, the paper provides a new theoretical model.

The purpose of this paper is to extend the notion of strategic leadership, that which has been primarily applied to for profit organizations, to nonprofits, specifically the church setting.

The research employs a case study methodology and draws primarily upon qualitative data collected from interviews and observation.

The findings reveal that over the past several years, the organization and its members have undergone a number of incremental and more radical changes. Much of this change has been attributed to the vision and leadership style of the current leader. Four key themes illuminate the processes and content of change under this strategic leader, including unsettlingly the status quo, model of shared leadership, shared vision and culture of community and learning.

The findings are based upon one case study site and this limits the generalizability of the research. In addition, exposure to the organization was limited to short periods of time on-site and the sample size was relatively small.

Achieving success in nonprofits requires leaders to have an intimate understanding of the complex nature of stakeholder relations and measuring success needs to be multi-dimensional in nature and linked directly to the mission and context of the organization, rather than based solely on generic measures.

There is limited research to date that examines the applicability of leadership theories that have been traditionally applied to for profit and public sector organizations to nonprofits. The research extends the notion of strategic leadership from the for profit setting to nonprofit organizations generally, and more specifically to the church setting.

Community centers play a socio-economic and urban role of combining different communal necessities, that serve inhabitants, at different neighborhoods in cities. Their role emerged in importance as being a hub for improving and customizing quality of life experiences of the public. This research presents a code-based risk assessment tool for evaluating fire safety measures that can be adapted in the context of community centers. It also provides an exemplary case study to demonstrate its application.

The study identified the factors that render community centers as a high-risk type of facilities in fire events. Various fire codes and standards were reviewed to describe the relevant fire safety measures. A code-based fire risk assessment tool was developed and implemented, through a case study. A set of recommendations were developed to improve the fire safety conditions of the case study facility.

Several violations to fire safety were identified in the case study building. The findings led to identifying a set of recommendations to improve its fire safety conditions.

This research introduced a systematic approach to raise awareness about fire incidences and consequences in community centers, and provides facilities managers with a tool, to assess compliance based on international fire code requirements.

In fire events, community centers are considered as high-risk facilities that may lead to significant losses of human lives and damages to assets. It is significant to study the causes of fire, for ensuring effective prevention and safe operations.

The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) has been experiencing extensive development in the fields of architecture and planning in recent decades, which has included developing community centers in neighborhoods. These community centers have significant impacts on the social, cultural, recreational and economic lives of the inhabitants. The study has looked into the concept of modeled and non-modeled community centers among 114 neighborhoods. Moreover, the study aims to suggest that decision-makers should make efficient decisions to uphold amenities through the centers at the neighborhood level after considering the evaluation techniques included in this paper to ensure a sustainable urbanization.

The authors collected both qualitative and quantitative information through structured and un-structured interviews in the city of Jeddah. Afterward, the authors evaluated the centers with a summarized grading point based on qualitative judgments. Note that the online questionnaire survey was prepared to distribute in approximately 100 neighborhoods. However, 71 neighborhoods took part in the survey, with a total number of 402 responses. Moreover, the authors made a subjective evaluation of the studied neighborhoods to understand the quality of services offered by the community centers.

The obtained results reveal that the community centers in the city of Jeddah are playing important roles for socialization, allowing younger people to interact in a positive way, providing services to the communities and supporting volunteer work in and around the neighborhoods. Consequently, the research paper emphasizes the future needs of these important social infrastructures as part of a neighborhood design tool in the context of Jeddah city, KSA.

This research attempts to document the need for community centers in the city of Jeddah. Consequently, the study evaluates 26 different community centers to understand whether the improvements are required for supporting community activities. Indeed, few research works have made an effort to study community centers’ role in urban life in a unique geographic context. Through this research project, the authors have highlighted the implications of community centers in urban life in the city of Jeddah.

Drawing on the results of the previous chapters, this chapter looks at current progress in terms of climate disaster risk incorporation into development planning and practice at three levels (national government, municipalities, and communities) and analyzes gaps, challenges, and opportunities. The chapter also discusses potential factors for enhancing local disaster risk management (DRM) capacity by collaborating with three levels of stakeholders.

The abandonment of governmental development projects either after completion or midway completion at the taxpayer’s expense in Ghana could be attributed to lack of effective community engagement (CE). Thus, this study aims to assess CE in development projects by comparing government-sponsored projects to private-sponsored projects.

A qualitative approach was adopted where a multiple case study design was used as a research strategy. Data was collected from selected districts in the Central Region of Ghana by using a semi-structured interview guide and analyzed using the thematic and comparative analysis techniques.

The results reveal that CE in government-funded projects was low, while CE in projects funded by private organizations was high. Three levels of engagement (consultation, participation in decision-making and consent) were also identified. Furthermore, the roles of public participation, including knowledge sharing, collective sense of ownership, among others, were ascertained. Finally, resources constraints, competing interests, lack of information flow, public attitudes toward change and central government/political interference are challenges of CE in development projects.

This study has provided an empirical basis for government and other development agents to draft a policy on CE to serve as a guide, spell out the role of CE, mitigate the challenges of CE and ensure strict compliance to the three levels of engagement.