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The practice of consanguinity has been culturally preferred in most Arab countries, including Morocco. This behavior leads to an increase in genetic abnormalities, such as hypertension and diabetes. This paper examines the prevalence and determinants of first-cousin marriages and their impact on diabetes among offspring.

Data on 882 couples were collected through face-to-face interview via a pre-established questionnaire based on the variables selected within the objectives of this study. The authors used the multiple logistic regression modeling procedure in this study.

The results of the study indicate that the prevalence of first-cousin marriages were 15% among students’ parents. From the multiple logistic regression modeling, the authors found a significant effect of paternal and maternal grandparents’ first-cousins marriage on that of parents (aOR = 3.27 and aOR = 3.36, respectively). However, an 11-fold higher risk of first relative marriages among parents once the paternal and maternal grandparents were first-cousins and the father was illiterate (aOR = 11.01). Moreover, the authors reported a diabetes risk of more than 14 times when the effects of first-cousin maternal grandparents and parents and the hypertension among mother or her sibling were combined (aOR = 14.48) or when the effects of first-cousins maternal grandparents, first-cousin parents and mother’s age at marriage between 21 and 29 years were combined (aOR = 14.56).

First-cousin marriage depends on the father’s illiteracy and the consanguinity of grandparents’ factors. The cumulative effect of first-cousin marriage among grandparents, parents and a family history of hypertension among mother or her sibling increase the risk of diabetes among these mothers.

This study aims to try and understand under what cultural conditions entrepreneurship will thrive and prosper, whether under shame or guilt cultures.

The authors use basic game theory to model the conditions under which entrepreneurship will thrive. The authors anticipate that guilt cultures allow for the development of a rules-based culture that allows for the development of impersonal exchange, whereas shame cultures, which are relationship-oriented, focus on strong ties and hence lack the means to expand firms from small and medium family/clan-based businesses.

Empirical results are completed to see whether guilt-dominating cultures are more conducive to having larger firms and whether guilt-dominating cultures have less informality. The authors find support for the latter but lack the right data to test the former.

The authors use a new measure of culture to see how it impacts entrepreneurship.

Albania's commitment to safeguard and protect Roma minority rights, and integrate this community in society is expressed in its regular broad-based efforts and continuous policy dialogue to adopt its domestic legislation to find durable solutions to expand social coexistence. Its valuable contribution to shape diversity at local and national level combined with the fight against discrimination has fostered the development of national strategies on Roma minority inclusion and encouraged the implementation of various action plans to deconstruct prejudicial structures and stereotypes. Jointly sharing responsibility with various Roma and non-Roma civil society organizations through a cooperation model, the Albanian government has supported socio-economic empowerment of the Roma minority and promoted its equal access to education, health care, housing and employment. In line with the European Union enlargement process, Albania adopted Poznan Declaration setting clear goals to achieve full integration of this community.

Despite various efforts made to reduce the gap between the Roma and the Albanian population, limited progress has been achieved in the social inclusion of the Roma minority. In general, the institutional capacity to coordinate Roma-related policies is weak. Low socio-economic standards of this community including the lack of digital skills to unlock individual opportunities, segregation in schools, low health insurance coverage and poor access to technology hinder the acceleration of its inclusion (European Commission, 2022, pp. 36–37). This chapter will be mainly focused on education of Roma children in Albania highlighting some of the challenges they face and indicating some positive models to address them at local level.

This study employs Stein Rokkan's methodological approach to analyse state formation in the Greater Middle East. It develops a conceptual framework distinguishing colonial, populist and democratic pacts, suitable for analysis of state formation and nation-building through to the present period. The framework relies on historical institutionalism. The methodology, however, is Rokkan's. The initial conceptual analysis also specifies differences between European and the Middle Eastern state formation processes. It is followed by a brief and selective discussion of historical preconditions. Next, the method of plotting singular cases into conceptual-typological maps is applied to 20 cases in the Greater Middle East (including Afghanistan, Iran and Turkey). For reasons of space, the empirical analysis is limited to the colonial period (1870s to the end of World War 1). Three typologies are combined into one conceptual-typological map of this period. The vertical left-hand axis provides a composite typology that clarifies cultural-territorial preconditions. The horizontal axis specifies transformations of the region's agrarian class structures since the mid-19th century reforms. The right-hand vertical axis provides a four-layered typology of processes of external intervention. A final section presents selected comparative case reconstructions. To the authors' knowledge, this is the first time such a Rokkan-style conceptual-typological map has been constructed for a non-European region.

The legalization of same-sex marriage changed the parenting landscape for LGBTQ parents in a variety of ways. Parenthood is presumably different now that same-sex marriage is officially legal. Experiences among LGBTQ couples in the post-legalization of same-sex marriage era raise questions about the context of growing recognition and cultural acceptance of same-sex relationships. I conducted in-depth interviews with LGBTQ parents to learn how they navigate parenting and the construction of parenting roles in the context of a society that has legalized same-sex marriage, yet still is rooted in heteronormative notions of family and parenthood. Specifically, I ask: How do LGBTQ couples construct and make sense of their roles as parents, particularly within the contemporary context of the legalization of same-sex marriage? Understanding the contexts that shape LGBTQ parents’ experiences aids in not only understanding the lives of LGBTQ parents and their families better, but also developing a deeper understanding of contemporary parenting identities and experiences more broadly.

In this chapter, I uncover the jail diaries of a revolutionary woman of the 20th century Pakistan, Akhtar Baloch. Although feminism in Pakistan has oscillated between liberal and postcolonial camps, through reading Akhtar's diaries, compiled as Prison Narratives (2017), I center Akhtar's own struggles for Sindh, along with the resistance of the women she met in the prison convicted for the murders of their husbands, to better theorize Marxist Feminism in Pakistan that overturns the structures that commodify women through love and revolution. My article will show the commodification of women's bodies; the “sale” of women through marriage as the goal of this commodification; the lovelessness and alienation women experience in commodified marriages; the unexpected fall in love with someone whom it is subversive for the commodified wife to love; the subversion of this unexpected event that leads to the attempted resolution of this tension through murder; the separation of the lovers through the incarceration of the woman by the capitalist-patriarchal state; and finally, the unexpected outcome (albeit the most common one) that the male lover abandons his female lover once she's jailed, but the defiantly brave female lover finds platonic love in jail through close female friendships with other women who are similarly brave in both love and in revolution. Through this exposition, I show that Akhtar's diaries provide a way for us to build on Marxist Feminist theory through a theory of love and revolution from a Sindhi feminist perspective.

This paper aims to examine how an alternative accounting system developed by a marginalised group of women enables them to counter oppressive systems built at the intersections of gender, class and race.

The authors draw on diary notes taken over a period of 13 years in France and Senegal in the context of the first author's family interactions with a community of ten Black immigrant women. The paper relies on Black feminist perspectives, namely, Lorde's work on difference and survival to illuminate how this community of women uses the creative power of its “self-defined differences” to build its own accounting system – a tontine – and work towards its emancipation.

The authors find that to fight oppressive marginalising structures, the women develop a tontine, an autonomous, self-managed, women-made banking system providing them with cash and working on the basis of trust. This alternative accounting scheme endeavours to fulfil their “situated needs”: to build a home of their own in Senegal. The authors conceptualise the tontine as a “situated accounting” scheme built on the women's own terms, on the basis of sisterhood and opacity. This accounting system enables the women to work towards their “situated emancipation”, alleviating the burden of their marginalisation.

This paper gives visibility to vulnerable women's agentic capacities through accounting. As no single story captures the nuances and complexities of accounting, further exploration is encouraged.

This paper contributes to the counter-accounting literature that engages with vulnerable, “othered” populations, shedding light on the counter-practices of accounting within a community of ten Black precarious women. In so doing, this study problematises these counter-practices as intersectional and built on “survival skills”. The paper further outlines the emancipatory potential of alternative systems of accounting. It ends with some reflections on doing research through activist curiosity and the need to rethink academic research and knowledge in opposition to dominant epistemic standards of knowledge creation.

Drawing on indigenous theory of Ibn Khaldun, the rise and fall of States, this paper explores the agency of women entrepreneurs in family business in Bahrain and the underlying enablers in supporting and facilitating the exercise of this agency. This study attempts to move beyond the Western-centric studies to reflect and bring to light the unique institutional settings of the Gulf States.

The research builds on a rich qualitative single case of a family business based in Bahrain. The single case study methodology was motivated by the potential for generating rich contextual insights. Such an approach is particularly valuable to gain a more holistic and deeper understanding of the contextualized phenomenon and its complexity.

In this study the authors show how women entrepreneurs take two different paths to enter and become involved in the family business, the barriers they are subjected to and the active role they play in dismantling the challenges to the extent that they become the main mediators between the family business and central institutions in society.

By incorporating indigenous theory with Western family business concepts, the study extends existing understanding of women entrepreneurs in family business by underscoring the agency that women entrepreneurs have in “doing context” and the role that women play in strengthening common cause and destiny within the family and the business by building and drawing on different forms of loyalty.

The purpose of this qualitative study is to identify and highlight the challenges faced by the dual-career couples with one or multiple child/children in maintaining their work–family balance based on family systems theory.

The author purposely selected 26 families (52 participants) in Bangladesh where both husbands and wives work on a full-time basis having one or multiple child/children. The author used focus group discussion (FGD) technique to identify the challenges encountered by them.

After summarising the FGD results, the study identified several challenges faced by those dual-career couples, such as inability to differentiate between professional and family lives, lack of quality time for partners/children, challenges to raise children, lack of childcare centres and lack of professionalism of care workers; and tension and anxiety for their child/children while at offices.

The author expects the results of this qualitative study to be conductive as groundwork for upcoming research studies concerning dual-career couples with child/children. The author also hopes that such results will assist the human resource managers in efficiently crafting and executing some policies regarding dual-career couples with one or multiple child/children.

Drawing on the stakeholder theory, the purpose of this study is to examine relationships between family identity, emotional attachment and binding social ties, and commitment of family firm owners to the family enterprise in the context of an emerging economy. Furthermore, this study examines whether the strength of the above relationships significantly vary between the founder generation and the subsequent generation of owners.

A set of hypotheses is tested by applying partial least squares structural equation modeling on a sample of 357 family-owned manufacturing companies in Bangladesh. Deploying SmartPLS (v. 3.2), the path model is analyzed through bootstrapping procedure. The moderating effect is tested through multigroup analysis.

The findings suggest that the relationships between emotional attachment and family identity and commitment are positive and significant, whereas the association between binding social ties and commitment was not significant. Furthermore, a multigroup analysis revealed that there is a significant difference between the founder generation and their next generation in terms of influence of binding social ties and family identity on commitment, whereas there appears to be no difference in terms of emotional attachment and commitment between the two generations.

This study shows that compared to the founder generation, the next generation prioritizes family identity and social bonds, which leads to greater levels of collective commitment to the organization. Such knowledge may provide clues to incumbent family-firm leaders by identifying the areas where they need to emphasize in generating greater levels of commitment among their successors.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, this appears to be the first such study that provides a nuanced understanding of how family generation in control of the family firm influences the relationships between psychosocial components of socioemotional wealth and collective commitment of the owners of family firms in the context of an emerging economy.