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Every year, millions of consumers around the world become victims of credit card fraud. These individuals have to appeal to their credit card companies to reverse unauthorized charges. This study aims to profile the American consumers’ experience when complaints to their credit card companies about unauthorized charges fail to produce a resolution. Using a large database of consumer complaint filings with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), the characteristics of these consumer complaints are identified, and the drivers of consumer financial hardship resulting from credit card fraud are determined.

A random sample of consumer complaints about their credit card companies’ perceived mishandling of cases, filed with the CFPB, is used to conduct content analysis. The resulting content analysis categories are used in a predictive model to determine the drivers of consumer hardship.

In nearly one-quarter of all complaint filings, the credit card company had blamed the complainant as the party responsible for the fraudulent charges or refused to open a fraud investigation altogether. Nearly 60% of complaint reports contain expressions of emotional distress and many mention financial hardship. Nearly half of all complainants consider the fraud department operations of their credit card company as lacking in service quality, many reporting inability to reach the department or to receive a returned call. Even after CFPB intermediation, only 15% of complainants receive some form of financial relief from their credit card company. The majority of the complainants report a lack of willingness by the credit card company to reverse unauathorized charges, leaving the complainant financially responsible for them.

This study focused on data collected from consumers. Future research can expand the scope of inquiry by surveying the staff and executives in the fraud investigation departments of credit card companies to determine the norms of fraud investigation used within the industry.

This study sheds light on the financial hardship and emotional pains that consumers victimized by credit card fraud experience in dealing with their credit card companies.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to empirically examine American consumers’ complaints about the fraud investigation operations of their credit card companies. Using data captured through the complaint filing system of a federal bureau (CFPB), the findings have implications for policymakers, regulators and credit card companies.

This research seeks to unpack a relevant, hitherto overlooked connection between employees' perception that family incivility is undermining their work and their displays of submissive behavior. The authors predict and test a mediating role of employees' work alienation beliefs and a moderating role of their ego resilience in this connection.

The research hypotheses were tested with survey data collected in three rounds, separated by three weeks each, among employees who work in the education sector in Pakistan. The statistical analyses relied on the PROCESS macro, which supports the simultaneous estimation of the direct, mediation and moderated mediation effects that underpin the proposed theoretical framework.

An important reason that victims of disrespectful treatment at home fail to fight for their rights at work is that they develop parallel beliefs of being disconnected from work. This intermediary role of work alienation beliefs is less prominent though when employees can rely on their personal resource of ego resilience.

For human resource (HR) managers, this research offers a critical explanation, related to a sense of being estranged from work, for why family-induced work hardships might cause employees to exhibit subservient behaviors at work. It further reveals how this process can be contained if employees have the capability to adapt flexibly to different situations.

This study contributes to extant research by explicating how and when family-induced work hardships might escalate into work responses that mirror employees' experiences at home.

Social welfare scholarship has not paid adequate attention to the phenomenon of single-parent women in Asia, especially in terms of their economic and social vulnerabilities. This study aims to explore the strategies employed by women who are single parents to secure their families from socioeconomic issues. It also delves into the experiences and viewpoints of families regarding the social institutions they turn to for assistance during times of hardship – whether it be the state, market, or informal networks.

The data were collected through 33 semi-structured interviews, with informants selected using the purposive sampling technique in South Sumatra Province, Indonesia, from February 2023 to July 2023. This number was obtained based on informants who were included in the criteria the researchers determined, which included “being a female single parent” and “being over the age of 17,” which is the minimum age for Indonesians to marry. Others included “having dependents to support, be they children and/or the respondent’s family” and occupying the main role as “household head” – all of which defined whether someone belongs to the “vulnerable group.”

The study highlights the significance of informal support for single mothers facing economic hardship. Still, overreliance on it can lead to concerns about the sustainability of the everyday social safety net they receive. Social exclusion is also problematic due to societal assumptions about divorce and widowhood. The last highlight is how 'deskilling' among single parents has complicated the challenges women face to re-enter the workforce.

This study’s outcomes provide crucial insights into analyzing the patterns of single-parent families in Indonesia and serve as a framework for further research on the resilience of single parents in developing countries.

The purpose of this study is to develop a new framework to measure waqif preference of waqf-based qardhul hassan financing in Malaysia.

Using a maqāṣid approach, this study’s data were drawn from 286 valid usable questionnaires to examine the effects of consumer, family, ummah and humanity factors on the preference.

The study found that the said factors sourced from Attia’s maqāṣid al-Shariah were instrumental in determining waqif preference to donate in waqf-based qardhul hassan financing.

Like others, this study’s findings are limited in terms of their generalisations and applications. The theory, context and variables used should be expanded in future works.

The results obtained are useful as a yardstick to enable the offered waqf-based qardhul hassan financing for improved mutual well-being among different classes of the wealth of societal groups in Malaysia. Furthermore, the results provide valuable insights into the direction for practitioners mainly managers involved in introducing waqf-based qardhul hassan financing as a new Islamic social financial instrument for poor and needy folks, at best.

This study is novel in terms of the proposed conceptual framework, where the waqif perspective comes into play.

The study explored how information institutions can support the resilience of parents of adolescents affected by the Russia–Ukraine war. Ukrainian parents are facing major challenges of supporting their teenagers through a difficult developmental phase while also “buffering” their war-related hardships. By supporting parents, information institutions can also support children.

Fifteen parents were interviewed about mental health challenges and resources that are helpful and/or missing from their support systems. Recordings of participant narratives were analyzed using the qualitative thematic analysis technique.

The findings indicate that both teens and parents rely on internal resilience skills, family, friends and community resources to support themselves. However, a number of additional resources could be offered by information institutions, including content for (1) teens on developing skills in communication, interpersonal relationships, problem solving and academic pursuits; (2) parents on child development and opportunities in their host countries; both groups on (3) both groups on mental health first aid and safe spaces to meet peers. The study recommendations will be of interest to information professionals working with families, especially families affected by disasters.

The study relied on a small convenience sample of participants.

Study recommendations would be of interest to information professionals who develop and provide services to families affected by natural and manmade disasters.

Study recommendations improve understanding of the (potential) role of information institutions and libraries in strengthening family and community resilience.

The study offers a rare insight into experiences of war-affect families and provides evidence-driven recommendations for information institutions to support family and community resilience.

This paper is one of the first studies to examine specificities, including limits of mindfulness at work in an African organisational context, whilst dealing with the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. It specifically addresses the role of organisational and managerial support systems in restoring employee wellbeing, social connectedness and attachment to their organisations, in order to overcome the exclusion caused by the ongoing pandemic.

The study uses a qualitative research methodology that includes interviews as the main data source. The sample comprises of 20 entrepreneurs (organisational leaders) from Ghana and Nigeria.

The authors found that COVID-19-induced worries restricted the practice of mindfulness, and this was prevalent at the peak of the pandemic, particularly due to very tough economic conditions caused by reduction in salaries, and intensified by pre-existing general economic and social insecurities, and institutional voids in Africa. This aspect further resulted in lack of engagement and lack of commitment, which affected overall team performance and restricted employees’ mindfulness at work. Hence, quietness by employees even though can be linked to mindfulness was linked to larger psychological stress that they were facing. The authors also found leaders/manager’s emotional intelligence, social skills and organisational support systems to be helpful in such circumstances. However, their effectiveness varied among the cases.

This paper is one of the first studies to establish a link between the COVID-19 pandemic and mindfulness limitations. Moreover, it is a pioneering study specifically highlighting the damaging impact of COVID-19-induced concerns on leader–member exchange (LMX) and team–member exchange (TMX) relationships, particularly in the African context. It further brings in a unique discussion on the mitigating mechanisms of such COVID-19-induced concerns in organisations and highlights the roles of manager’s/leader’s emotional intelligence, social skills and supportive intervention patterns. Finally, the authors offer an in-depth assessment of the effectiveness of organisational interventions and supportive relational systems in restoring social connectedness following a social exclusion caused by COVID-19-induced worries.

The purpose of this study is to unpack the relationship between employees’ perceptions of organizational politics and their counterproductive work behaviour, by postulating a mediating role of organizational disidentification and a moderating role of perceived external crisis threats to work.

The empirical assessment of the hypotheses relies on survey data collected among employees who work in a large banking organization.

Perceptions that organizational decision-making is marked by self-serving behaviour increase the probability that employees seek to cause harm to their employer, because they feel embarrassed by their organizational membership. This mediating role of organizational disidentification is especially prominent when they ruminate about the negative impact of external crises on their work.

This study details an important danger for employees who feel upset with dysfunctional politics: They psychologically distance themselves from their employer, which then prompts them to formulate counterproductive responses that likely make it more difficult to take on the problem in a credible manner. This detrimental dynamic is particularly risky if an external crisis negatively interferes with their work functioning.

This study adds to prior research by detailing an unexplored but relevant mechanism (organizational disidentification) and moderator (external crisis threats) by which perceived organizational politics translates into enhanced counterproductive work behaviour.

This study investigates (1) whether democratization drives sovereign credit ratings (SCR) changes (the “democratic advantage”) or whether SCR changes affect democratization, (2) whether the degree of democratization in sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries affects the associations and (3) whether the associations are significantly affected by resource dependence.

This study investigates the effects of SCR changes on democracy in 22 SSA countries over the period of 2000–2020 VEC Granger causality/block exogeneity Wald tests, and impulse responses and variance decomposition analyses with Cholesky ordering and Monte Carlo standard errors in a panel VECM framework.

The full sample impulse responses find that a SCR shock has a long-run detrimental effect on the democracy and political rights but only a short-run positive impact on civil liberties. Among the sub-samples, it is found that the extent of natural resource dependence does not affect the magnitude of SCR shocks on democratization mentioned above but it is found that a SCR shock affects long-run democracy in SSA countries that are relatively more democratic but is more likely to drive democratic deepening in less democratic SSA countries. The full sample variance decompositions further finds that the variance of SCR to a political rights shock outweighs the effects of all the macroeconomic factors, whereas in more diversified SSA countries, the variances of SCR are much greater for democracy and political rights shocks, which suggests that democratization and political rights in diversified SSA economies are severely affected by SCR changes. In the case of the high and low democracy sub-samples, it is found that the variance of SCR in the relatively higher democracy sub-sample is greater than in the low democracy sub-sample.

These results have three implications for democratization in SSA. First, the effect of a SCR change is not a democratically agnostic and impacts political rights to a greater extent than civil liberties. Second, SCR changes have the potential to spark a negative cycle in SSA countries whereby a downgrade leads to a deterioration in socio-political stability coupled with increased financial economic constraints that in turn drive further downgrades and macroeconomic hardship. Finally, SCR changes are potentially detrimental for democracy in more democratic SSA countries but democratically supportive in less democratic SSA countries. Thus, SSA countries that are relatively politically sophisticated are more exposed to the effects of SCR changes, whereas less politically sophisticated SSA countries can proactively shape their SCRs by undertaking political reforms.

This study is the first to examine the associations between SCR and democracy in SSA. This is critical literature for the Africa’s scholarly work given that the debate on unfair rating actions and claims of subjective rating methods is ongoing.