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This study aims to statistically verify the links of income and education with information and communication technology (ICT) diffusion across 191 countries of the world taking into account a total of 9 indicators best representing the socio-economic variables.

Multivariate regression analysis was used as a prime method to rigorously test the relationships of income and education with ICT diffusion across 191 countries. Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (V. 22) was used to analyze and predict patterns in the data.

The results support the hypotheses that income and education are positively related to ICT diffusion. The findings statistically confirm that poverty is a leading cause of digital divide worldwide.

Academic, policy and practice groups should work in collaboration to fight against digital divide. Present results also imply that digital divide shall never end but rather it can be controlled to an extent with multiple collaborative efforts.

Prior research assignments on the digital divide concentrate on exploring the links between few socio-economic and ICT variables in select few regions theoretically. The present work addresses this literature gap by developing and testing two hypotheses to statistically investigate the relationships between a broad set of socio-economic and ICT indicators.

This paper aims to explore how older people in developed and developing countries are affected by the grey digital divide. It argues country type and culture influence older people’s willingness to access and learn internet skills. Using the knowledge from researchers informs policy, funding and delivery of appropriate skilling to minimize this divide.

A systematic literature search using specific keywords to locate digital divide research, specifically pertaining to older people across country types.

Despite increased internet access and affordability, older people still face challenges in learning internet skills. Country type, economic challenges and cultural beliefs need to be considered in minimizing the grey divide. Governments recognize the importance of funding such teaching but evidence-based research must continue to inform policy to maximize funding and solve the many physical age and cultural issues affecting older people’s access to internet skills learning.

This paper argues that research in developing countries into minimizing the grey digital divide is a crucial undertaking. As the internet continues growing in developing countries, finding solutions that consider cultural and age differences issues is crucial to the success of having internet literate societies that have growing populations of older people seeking to use it.

This study aims to measure the level of public awareness about the threat of the emerging coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic among the Omani population. It also aims to investigate the mediating effect of the Omanis’ attitudes and behaviors with underlying conditions of COVID-19.

A cross-sectional study was conducted to collect data via an online survey of Omani citizens and residents from various geographic areas in Oman, 305 responses were received. SPSS and partial least square-structural equation modeling were used for data analysis.

The study revealed that public awareness regarding the COVID-19 pandemic was significantly influenced by people’s perceived risk, information source and health-related knowledge. Further, preventive behavior during the disease spread has a significant direct and indirect impact on their awareness. However, an insignificant mediation effect of public attitude was found between the source of information and public awareness.

This study is limited by the scarcity of related literature in the Omani context. It is recommended that future research complete an in-depth study of public awareness regarding COVID-19, using other constructs and/or other data collection techniques.

This research will provide governmental health authorities and policymakers with a guideline to establish more efficient pandemic containment strategies to control public behavior toward the COVID-19 pandemic and curb viral prevalence.

This research will help in improving prevention measures against COVID-19 are recommended to be more educated through a more effective mechanism to raise public attitude regarding pandemic prevalence positively.

The originality of this research can be drawn from key findings that indicate that people overall gained knowledge about how to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic and the accuracy of information significantly impacts public awareness.

Islamic finance and Halal product sectors are thriving successfully. This chapter is a general review of the perception of Asian consumers on Islamic finance and Halal sectors in the global Halal economy.

The first section will briefly describe the Halal concept in both Islamic finance and Halal industries, and the growth of both sectors in Asian countries. The second part highlights the review of Asian consumers’ perception towards Islamic finance products and Halal products.

The review found that the consumers’ perception towards the Islamic finance products and Halal products is distinctive. This is due to the diversity of Asian countries in terms of geography, religion, culture, ethnic, school of thoughts (madzahib), income per capita and government’s involvement.

The third part of the chapter concentrates on planning towards Halal marketing, which involves the move and future challenges in different layers of industries to gear up and strengthen the Halal economy.

This study aims to investigate the cybersecurity awareness manifested as protective behavior to explain self-disclosure in social networking sites. The disclosure of information about oneself is associated with benefits as well as privacy risks. The individuals self-disclose to gain social capital and display protective behaviors to evade privacy risks by careful cost-benefit calculation of disclosing information.

This study explores the role of cyber protection behavior in predicting self-disclosure along with demographics (age and gender) and digital divide (frequency of Internet access) variables by conducting a face-to-face survey. Data were collected from 284 participants. The model is validated by using multiple hierarchal regression along with the artificial intelligence approach.

The results revealed that cyber protection behavior significantly explains the variance in self-disclosure behavior. The complementary use of five machine learning (ML) algorithms further validated the model. The ML algorithms predicted self-disclosure with an area under the curve of 0.74 and an F1 measure of 0.70.

The findings suggest that costs associated with self-disclosure can be mitigated by educating the individuals to heighten their cybersecurity awareness through cybersecurity training programs.

This study uses a hybrid approach to assess the influence of cyber protection behavior on self-disclosure using expectant valence theory (EVT).

The United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO) (2017, pp. 14–15) identified that “industrialization is the seedbed for entrepreneurship, business investment, technological progress, the upgrading of skills, and the creation of decent jobs.” This placed studying different industrial sectors and their respective clusters, which are key drivers for economy, innovation, and knowledge creation (Slaper, Harmon, & Rubin, 2018), at the forefront of research. This chapter tackles the automobile industrial cluster in Egypt that possesses promising potential yet faces some challenges. It aims to provide an overview of the cluster, alongside underpinning its strengths and obstacles facing it. Moreover, the chapter displays the importance of the labor dimension in increasing the labor competitiveness of the cluster and showcases this through two cases of German automobile manufacturers that pioneered in venturing into the market through employing technical and vocational education and training. In conclusion, recommendations are provided to help in steering the cluster toward success.

This study aims to examine the micromechanisms of how knowledge culture fosters human capital development.

An empirical model was developed by using the structural equation modeling method based on a sample of 321 Polish knowledge workers employed in different industries.

This study provides direct empirical evidence that tacit knowledge sharing supports human capital, whereas tacit knowledge hiding does not, and this hiding is considered a waste of knowledge. If tacit knowledge does not circulate within an organization, it is a severe waste of an organization. The findings indicate that shame from making mistakes might impede the sharing of knowledge gained from making those mistakes, and in such cases, the knowledge remains hidden.

Leaders aiming to ensure human capital growth should implement an authentic learning culture composed of a learning climate and mistakes acceptance components that enable open discussion about mistakes on each organizational level.

The knowledge culture is found to be an essential element of building human capital but, at the same time, not sufficient without a learning culture, and its mistakes acceptance component. A permanent organizational learning mode that supports a continuous organizational shared mental model reframing is an antidote to tacit knowledge hiding.

This study aims to investigate the integration of corporate social responsibility (CSR) at a functional level and examine its impact on company performance.

Using data from 435 Indonesian manufacturing companies, 11 hypotheses were tested on direct, indirect and total effects of the relationship between functional CSR integration and its impact on company performance. The stakeholder and contingency theories were applied.

The findings of this study reveal that functional CSR integration has a significant impact on customer, employee, operational and financial performances. The findings show that the relationship between functional CSR integration and financial performance can be mediated by customer, employee and operational performances. The results of this study also highlight that functional CSR integration has a stronger total effect on both customer and financial performances in environmentally non-sensitive industries than in environmentally sensitive ones.

This study expands the prior studies by providing a theoretical framework for the relationship between CSR integration and company performance, as well as testing the framework using quantitative research.

The findings can encourage managers to effectively integrate CSR into business functions to achieve superior social and financial performance, particularly in a developing country context.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is one of the first to empirically investigate the performance implications of integrating CSR into business functions and reveals new findings on how such integration can substantially improve company performance.

With the aid of bibliometric analysis, this study aims to show the state-of-the-art of research on the digital divide and identifies new areas for further investigation.

Performance analysis and science mapping were used in the study to analyse a sample of 3,571 studies that were published between 2018 and 2022. The “Title-Keyword-Abstract” search option was used to collect the anticipated publications data from the Scopus database. The gathered data were analysed using the common bibliometric indices to evaluate the research landscape. The science mapping tactics made use of the VOSviewer and Biblioshiny software.

The performance and science mapping analysis shows that recent research on the digital divide has not been sufficiently exposed and examined. The analysis discovered emerging topics, prolific authors and nations, affiliations, a network of collaboration among authors, countries and institutions, bibliographic coupling and keyword co-occurrence.

This work presents a state-of-the-art that has significant theoretical and practical ramifications for the existing digital divide literature. The methodologies and database used in the current study are more extensive.