Search results

For the Muslim faithful, the Islamic week indirectly derives from an act of “divine revelation” for the Prophet Muhammad that directs them to use Friday as a congregational day of prayer.⁷ The Koran is strict about this prescription and presents it as an obligation to the faithful. Verses 9 to 11 from chapter 62 provide the social context and religious meaning of the peak day of the Islamic week.⁸ 9. O you who believe, when the call is sounded for prayer on Friday, hasten to the remembrance of Allah and leave off traffic. That is better for you, if you know. 10. But when the prayer is ended, disperse abroad in the land and seek of Allah’s grace, and remember Allah much, that you may be successful. 11. And when they see merchandise or sport, they break away to it, and leave thee standing. Say: what is Allah is better than sport and merchandise. And Allah is the Best of Providers.The exegesis of verses 9 and 11 reveals or implies that the day of congregation is a work day and that Muslims, upon hearing the call for prayer, must leave all their earthly activities – commerce, sport, or any other – and attend the gathering (Juma’a) at the mosque. So work is permitted before the congregational prayer. Verse 10 also indicates that after prayer, one may return to work, confident that entrepreneurial activities may be successful because of the grace of Allah. Friday thus is parceled out in three distinct moments according to the Koran: the half-day’s work in the morning, the prayer time around noon, and the later half-day’s work in the afternoon. It is the only day of the week that is thus fractured.

This paper aims to examine the influence of the gender diversity in the corporate board on the decision of announcing a firm acquisition on Friday. Prior evidence found the phenomenon of investor inattention.

A sample of 252 cash-financed acquisitions conducted by listed Spanish firms from 2004 to 2018 is analysed. Probit regressions are used.

Firms with greater gender diversity on the board are less likely to make acquisition announcements of listed targets on Friday, thus avoiding investor inattention. Women directors seem to provide higher quality information and are more concerned about investors.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study that analyses the role of women directors in the publication of information on Friday, so it complements studies on the disclosure of quality information by listed companies. The Spanish market is an adequate scenario to analyse the impact of women's participation in business decision-making because Spain was one of the first countries to legislate on gender diversity.

Este trabajo analiza si la participación de mujeres en el consejo de administración puede influir en el anuncio de adquisición empresarial en un memento de poca atención (viernes) o en otro día de la semana.

Se analiza una muestra de 252 anuncios de adquisiciones en efectivo realizados por empresas españolas cotizadas en el periodo de 2004 a 2018. Se utiliza el análisis probit.

Las empresas con mayor porcentaje de mujeres consejeras tienen menos probabilidad de anunciar la adquisición de una empresa cotizada en viernes, evitando así la inatención del inversor. Los resultados sugieren que las mujeres consejeras comunican información de mayor calidad y tienen una mayor preocupación por los inversores.

Hasta donde sabemos este trabajo es el primero que analiza la influencia de las mujeres consejeras en la publicación de información en viernes y refuerza los estudios sobre la calidad de la información publicada por las empresas cotizadas. El mercado español es el contexto ideal para el estudio de la participación femenina en la toma de decisiones empresariales pues España fue uno de los primeros países en establecer cuotas de género en los consejos de administración.

The purpose of the present study is to explore the collective consumption rituals associated with Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, and one of the largest shopping days in the USA.

The research design for this study followed the approach of psychological phenomenological interviewing. Over a two‐year period, the authors, along with trained research assistants, conducted interviews with experienced female Black Friday shoppers.

Qualitative data from 38 interviews indicated that Black Friday shopping activities constitute a collective consumption ritual that is practiced and shared by multiple generations of female family members and close friends. Four themes emerged from the data: familial bonding, strategic planning, the great race, and mission accomplished. The themes coalesced around a military metaphor.

The findings of this study indicate that Black Friday shoppers plan for the ritual by examining advertisements and strategically mapping out their plans for the day. Recommendations for retailers are presented.

This exploratory investigation of Black Friday as a consumption ritual offers new insight into the planning and shopping associated with this well‐known American pseudo‐holiday. Findings also extend theory and research on collective consumption rituals.

The worldwide environmental crisis has also influenced the field of literary studies. Posthumanism and ecocriticism is a new way of reading in which the anthropocentric approach and the binary oppositions such as human/non-human, wild/tame and natural/cultural are overcome. Posthumanism pays attention to all sorts of non-human life, animals, for sure, but aliens and robots are included too, while ecocriticism is concerned with the role and function of nature in literary texts. The chapter offers an ecocritical approach of Robinson Crusoe (Defoe) and Friday (Tournier). Rereading these novels we see that nature, or the elements, make up an ‘actant’ equal to the human characters and a special interest is created in the mutual conflicts which arise between nature and the human characters.

Robinson Crusoe (Defoe, 1719) is considered by many as an appropriate book to allow pupils to escape from or be shielded from the negative influence of civilization. Like Robinson on his island pupils should learn from experience. Defoe’s work was so popular it inspired a whole series of imitations called ‘Robinsonnades’ and many of them were edited specifically for children. But is Robinson Crusoe a valuable book from an ecological point of view? How does Robinson relate to nature? Does the novel focus on nature or rather on the human hero seeking to control and tame the environment?

In 1967, the French author Michel Tournier reworked the Crusoe myth in Vendredi ou les limbes du Pacifique (Friday or the Pacific Rim), followed by a parallel text for children Vendredi ou la vie sauvage (Friday or the Wild Life, 1971). In both novels Robinson’s black servant, Friday, initiates his colonial master into alternative ways of living, dismantling civilization and restoring nature. That same deconstruction of the idea of Western superiority fits well with the postcolonial philosophy that attacks the logic of domination and its hierarchical dichotomy: white above coloured.

It is a well held belief that the full moon period and the date Friday 13th has an impact on the number of emergency call outs for emergency services. The purpose of this paper is to critically explore that belief. It also examines the versatility and richness of response records, and demonstrates the effectiveness of combining data sets.

The work takes four varied data sets, from four rescue agencies along with the International Search and Rescue Database and compared the average number of calls on a full moon night, non-full moon and full moon period (the full moon night, the day before and day after). The average number of incidents on Friday 13th was also investigated. It uses a statistical approach to test the difference between “normal” dates and those dates traditionally believed to be busier.

Although there were differences between Friday 13th, full moon nights, full moon periods and “normal” days, the differences were in general extremely small, not significantly significant and in most cases actually dropped during the supposedly unlucky period. The exception to this is a very small increase in the average number of responses during full moons for most data sets, although this was not statistically significant. This paper concludes that there is no evidence in the data for any impact of the full moon upon rescue teams’ activities.

This research deals with a small set of responses, from the UK only, and addresses an issue that is clearly not the most pressing. However, it does demonstrate evidenced-based management in practice, in that resources have incorrectly been assigned in the past to these dates.

This work shows that preconceptions exist within the emergency services and that, without evidence-led management, resources can be allocated on hearsay. This shows that widely available software and techniques can be applied to organisational data and used to make management decisions more appropriate.

Rescue organisations are almost exclusively charity or public sector organisations, meaning that their budgets are sourced from donations or the tax-payer. Putting to bed misconceptions over resources for certain dates will ultimately benefit society in those terms.

There has been very little work on this phenomenon, although some works on A&E department admissions have taken place. This is the only work to date to combine data in this way for this purpose.

For this study, the authors document day-of-the-week trading patterns of individual investors using a unique data set of NYSE-listed firms and discuss their influence on the Monday effect. It is found that Monday stock returns are generally lower than those of other weekdays and, on average, negative. Unlike previous researchers, the authors use actual trading data for individual investors rather than proxies to measure individual investor activity, such as the percentage of odd-lot trading. The results demonstrate that the trading activity of individual investors on Mondays is lower than previously documented. This finding contradicts the long-held belief that individual investors are most active on Mondays. In addition, the authors find that individual investors’ trading activity during the week broadly follows corporate announcement patterns. The least amount of firm-specific information is released on Friday, followed by Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Wednesday. Accordingly, individual investors trade the least number of shares on Friday, followed by Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Wednesday, strengthening the argument that individual investors trade on attention-grabbing stocks. Taken together, the authors’ findings challenge those of previous studies that hold individual investors responsible for the Monday effect. The paper aims to discuss this issue.

The authors use actual trading data for individual investors rather than proxies to measure individual investor activity, such as the percentage of odd-lot trading, to study the existence of Monday effect in stock prices.

The results show that the trading activity of individual investors on Mondays is lower than previously documented. This finding contradicts the long-held belief that individual investors are most active on Mondays. In addition, the authors find that individual investors’ trading activity during the week broadly follows corporate announcement patterns.

The authors find that individual investors’ trading activity during the week broadly follows corporate announcement patterns. The least amount of firm-specific information is released on Friday, followed by Monday. Accordingly, individual investors trade the least number of shares on Friday, followed by Monday, strengthening the argument that individual investors trade on attention-grabbing stocks. Taken together, the authors’ findings challenge those of previous studies that hold individual investors responsible for the Monday effect.

Financial advisors.

The authors find that individual investors’ trading activity during the week broadly follows corporate announcement patterns. The authors challenge the commonly hold view that individuals often make trading decisions during weekends and thus trade on Mondays, and find that the least amount of firm-specific information is released on Friday, followed by Monday. Accordingly, individual investors trade the least number of shares on Friday, followed by Monday. Taken together, the authors’ findings challenge those of previous studies that hold individual investors responsible for the Monday effect.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the proximity of study centres to the students of College of Distance Education, University of Cape Coast (CoDE/UCC) and whether further studies of distance learners who were teachers and employees could lead to absenteeism in their workplaces.

A sequential explanatory strategy was used. A self-administered questionnaire and unstructured interviews as well as observation guides were employed to collect data from 2,077 students pursuing business and education programmes of CoDE in all study centres across Ghana. Data were analysed with descriptive statistics and pattern matching of content analysis.

The study found that few teachers and other workers pursuing the distance education do absent themselves from the workplace or classroom on Fridays preceding their face-to-face session because they embarked on their journey to the study centres on Friday morning. Some teachers also absented themselves from work on Mondays after face-to-face sessions for a lack of means of transport on Sunday after lessons. The absenteeism of these respondents directly and indirectly affected their employers, students and customers.

It was therefore recommended that management of CoDE/UCC should open more study centres in all the regions especially Western, Ashanti, Upper East, Northern and Upper West Regions to reduce number of hours spent by students to their study centres and consider introducing the business programmes at the existing district centres to reduce average distance covered by these students to commute from their places of work to their respective centres in the regional capitals. It was also recommended that online/electronic learning and audio versions (impersonal communication) of the study modules should be introduced so that students would not necessary have to travel to the study centre to participate in lectures/face-to-face sessions.

The findings of this study will help managers and administrators of both public and private distance educational providers. In addition to providing basis and areas for establishing study centres for geographical proximity, findings of the study should prove helpful for designing and delivering electronic and audio versions of distance education modules to reduce the level of absenteeism in workplace for the students.

Suggestions for improvements in service quality in hospitality operations frequently advocate the use of empowerment as a strategy for the management of employees. Analysis of employer initiatives that claim to empower employees needs to distinguish those initiatives labelled empowerment and those which are empowering. At root, empowerment should develop a sense of personal efficacy in employees. TGI Fridays is an organization that makes a service offer to customers that can be described as “mass customisation”. The successful service encounter requires employees to provide customers with both advice and counselling in the way they construct their meal experience, and a personalised service performance. To make this happen, employees are managed through a cluster of approaches which are defined as “empowerment through involvement”. That is, they include some development of personal efficacy and engagement in service performance, but which involves limited decision making apart from that required of their role in service performance.

The purpose of this paper is to examine whether or not driver life, carrier performance, and customer service can be improved as a result of the use of a technique called yard‐stacking in the truckload trucking industry. The technique seeks to find ways to provide level freight availability during normal weekly cycles in an effort to seek improvement relative to all constituencies.

Simulation is used to examine the use of yard‐stacking on Fridays to provide additional freight on weekends, which is generally much less available than on weekdays. In this technique, before being dispatched on Friday for a long‐haul, a driver initially picks up a load to make a short “dray” move from the customer site to the carrier's closest terminal yard. During the weekend, another driver picks up the drayed load. In this research, we evaluate the potential of weekend yard‐stacking under a variety of scenarios.

The paper shows that a carrier's adaptation of weekend freight leveling can be beneficial to both trucking companies and their customers, while remaining relatively neutral to drivers.

Carriers may be able to utilize Friday yard‐stacking to improve their cost efficiency, driver satisfaction and customer performance.

This research extends the knowledge base of truckload freight imbalance problems. It was industrially motivated by J.B. Hunt Transport, Inc., one of the world's largest truckload carriers, who provided freight data and conceptual guidance.

Intraday volatility characteristics throughout the trading week are examined at the emerging Borsa Istanbul (BIST) stock exchange. Using five-minute (and 15-minute) intervals, accentuated intraday volatility patterns at the microstructure level are examined during the stock market open and close in the morning and in the afternoon sessions. Volatility is highest when markets open in the morning. The second highest is during the afternoon open. The third highest is before the market closes for the day. Volatility before the market close has increased in recent years. These characteristics are seen every trading day. There are also differences: Monday returns are lowest, Friday returns are highest, and Monday morning volatility is highest of the entire trading week. Day-of-the-week and intraday accentuated volatility smile anomalies are jointly investigated using the longest intraday sample period in the emerging country stock exchange literature. Investment companies and professionals can utilize the results for risk management and hedging by avoiding highly volatile opening and closing periods. Arbitrageurs, speculators, and risk takers should trade during these highly volatile periods. Heightened volatility is increased difficulty in price discovery, thus inefficiency. Market participants, exchanges, and public prefer efficient markets. The research presents evidence of trading days, and periods during the trading day, when the exchange becomes more efficient. This is the first research that explores day-of-the-week effect from intraday volatility perspective in an emerging market, and provides useful recommendations in designing risk management strategies at market microstructure level.