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This chapter discusses the extension of legal equality between male and female citizens in four states in North Africa – Tunisia, Egypt, Morocco and Algeria – through one specific lens: A married woman's legal capacity to initiate and obtain divorce without the husband's consent. Building on the works of Stein Rokkan and Reinhard Bendix on the expansion of citizenship to the ‘lower classes’, it is argued that amendments in divorce law by introducing in-court divorce for women, in addition to out-of-court divorce, is a significant institutional change that extends legal equality between men and women. The introduction of in-court divorce expands female citizenship by bolstering woman's juridical autonomy and capacity in state law. Changes in divorce laws are thus part of state centralization by means of standardizing rules that regulate family law through public administrative institutions rather than religious organizations. Two questions are addressed: First, how did amendments in divorce laws occur after independence? Second, in which ways did women's bolstered legal capacity in divorce have a spill over effect on reforms in other patriarchal state laws? Based on observations on sequences of change in four states in North Africa, it is argued that amendments that equalize between men and women in divorce should be seen as a key driver for reforms in other state laws, that reduce legal inequality between male and female citizens. In all four states, women's citizenship was extended in nationality law and criminal law after amendments in divorce law gave women unilateral legal power to exit a marital relationship.

As employed carers tend to experience work interruptions and conflict between work and care, especially women, this paper aims to assess the availability and accessibility of carer-friendly workplace policies (CFWPs) in Quebec workplaces.

An online survey was distributed to members of the Association of Human Resources Management Counsellors in Quebec. The authors used a validating quantitative data design. The data was collected between October 2019 and the end of February 2020 and the questionnaire yielded 122 valid responses.

Adult/elder care responsibilities remain systematically perceived less important than childcare or general work-life balance needs. The current distribution of CFWPs within Quebec workplaces is unlikely to ensure carers sufficient support to prevent or significantly mitigate negative repercussions. Notable differences were found between organization type and size.

There is a need for expanding CFWPs through increased support services, educational workshops, broader access to flexible work arrangements and manager training.

The results support recent research findings pointing that women with caring responsibilities face important opportunity costs and risk falling in precariousness. Carers should be able to maintain a social income from other sources to compensate a reduced activity on the labor market.

By investigating the availability of CFWPs in Quebec workplaces, this paper adds insights regarding the availability and access to CFWPs regionally and in small and medium size workplaces, rather than identifying best practice from workplaces across the globe. Workplace policies are analyzed for adult/elder care specifically.

Financial inclusion is broadly described as the ability of individuals and businesses to access useful and affordable financial products and services that meet their needs – transactions, payments, savings, credit and insurance – delivered in a responsible and sustainable way. It is considered a key driver of economic growth and financial well-being. Given the significance and relevance of this topic, the purpose of this note is to critically evaluate the ontological and epistemological stance of existing research on financial inclusion. Furthermore, this note examines the influence on the research design.

Beginning with a brief description of the key concepts, this note presents a conceptual framework and substantiates the recommended philosophical paradigm through a detailed appraisal of its appropriateness, relative strengths and limitations.

Drawing from a range of philosophical worldviews, which can at times seem indistinguishable especially in finance and economics, this note proposes that objectivism with a realist approach is foundational to academic research on financial inclusion. Furthermore, this note makes recommendations with regards to research design.

This note not only presents a comprehensive assessment of the problematics and the underlying metatheoretical assumptions proposed by Cunliffe (2011) but is also, to the best of author’s knowledge, the first to highlight its relevance to the formal financial system in general and to financial inclusion in particular.

Disruptive forces, such as the global pandemic and technological innovation, are leading to growing labor uncertainty. For organizations, being able to adapt is a key skill for employees, while adapting to different employment contexts is increasingly essential for career success. This study leverages career adaptability theory and integrated dynamic capabilities to isolate skills enabling career adaptation.

A qualitative study was conducted to develop a skills codebook using a Delphi technique to converge on career adaptation skills, which was validated against leading meta-skills frameworks and a purposeful sample of 15 occupational competency models.

The codebook phase identified 24 distinct meta-skills in 6 clusters: problem-solving, self-reliance, collaboration, communication, core literacies and core workplace skills. Findings confirmed that most of the skills identified by the experts were also present across the meta-skills frameworks.

This study highlights research opportunities, including a recommendation to extend the codebook by conducting a large sample empirical study of occupational competency models.

Adaptive individuals remain attractive in the job market. With the proposed framework, individuals can systematically reflect on ways to develop career adaptation skills. Other stakeholders should support the development of skills that facilitate an individual's capacity to adapt to diverse employment contexts.

This study contributes to resolving the debate on skills contributing to career adaptation by combining the career adaptability theory and integrated dynamic capabilities, to produce a harmonized meta-skills codebook including labels, definitions and synonyms. This study validates the codebook against leading skills frameworks and occupational competency models.

This study aims to integrate the theory of planned behavior (TPB) and the value-belief-norm (VBN) theory into a meta-analytic framework to synthesize green consumption literature.

By integrating the findings from 173 studies, a meta-analysis was performed adopting several analytical methods: bivariate analysis, moderation analysis and path analysis.

VBN- and TPB-based psychological factors (adverse consequences, ascribed responsibility, personal norms, subjective norms, attitude and perceived behavioral control) mediate the effects of altruistic, biospheric and egoistic values on green purchase intention. Further, inconsistencies in the proposed relationships are due to cultural factors (i.e. individualism-collectivism, power distance, uncertainty avoidance, masculinity–femininity, short- vs long-term orientation and indulgence-restraint) and countries’ human development status.

The authors selected papers published in English; hence, other relevant papers in this domain published in other languages might have been missed.

The findings are useful to marketers of green offerings in designing strategies, i.e. specific messages, targeting different customers based on countries’ cultural score and human development index, to harvest positive customer responses.

This study is the pioneering attempt to synthesize the TPB- and VBN-based quantitative literature on green consumer behavior to resolve the reported inconsistent findings.

Building on both the uncanny valley and construal level theories, the analyses detailed in this paper aims to address customers’ explicit and implicit attitudes toward various service robots, categorized by the degree of their human-like appearance, namely, mechanoids (low human-likeness), humanoids (medium human-likeness) and realistic robots (high human-likeness).

The analyses reflect a mixed-method approach, across three studies. A qualitative study uses focus groups to identify consensual attitudes. An experiment measures self-reported, explicit attitudes toward the three categories of robots. Another experiment explores customers’ implicit attitudes (unconscious and unintentional) toward robots, using three implicit association tests.

Customers express both positive and negative attitudes toward service robots. The realistic robots lead to both explicit and implicit negative attitudes, suggesting that customers tend to reject these robots in frontline service settings. Robots with lower human-likeness levels generate relatively more positive attitudes and are accepted to nearly the same extent as human employees in hospitality and tourism contexts.

Because customers reject, both consciously and unconsciously, very human-like robots in service encounters, managers should leverage this key finding, along with the more detailed results, to inform their strategic introduction of robots into hospitality frontline service settings.

The combined qualitative and quantitative studies specify and clarify customers’ implicit and explicit attitudes toward robots with different levels of human-likeness, in the real-world setting of hospitality and tourism services. Such insights can inform continued research into the effects of these service innovations.

In Brazil, over 4.7 million women enrolled in university in the year 2017. However, Brazilian women have been consistently overrepresented in humanities and care majors and underrepresented in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). Given that observed gender differences in math-intensive fields have lasting effects on gender inequality in the labor market, and that observed gender variations do not necessarily associate with differences in innate ability, in this paper we explore the paths of societal gender bias and gender differences in a Brazilian university.

We conduct a social experiment at a University in Southeastern Brazil, applying the gender-STEM Implicit Association Test.

We found that women in STEM are less likely to show gender-STEM implicit stereotypes, compared to women in humanities. The results indicate a negative correlation between implicit gender stereotyping and the choice of math-intensive majors by women.

The stereotype-congruent results are indicative of the gender bias in Brazilian society, and suggest that stereotypes created at early stages in life are directly related to future outcomes that reinforce gender disparities in Brazil, which can be observed in career choices.

Human capital is a portfolio of rich skills that the labour possesses. Human capital has attracted significant attention from scholars. Nevertheless, empirical findings on the utility of human capital have often been divided. To address the research gap in the literature, the authors attempt to understand how human capital plays a significant role in financial development and economic growth nexus.

The authors rely on secondary data published by the World Bank. The authors use econometric tools such as the autoregressive distributive lag (ARDL) model and related statistical tests to study the relationship between human capital, India's financial growth and gross domestic product (GDP) growth.

Study findings suggest that human capital and financial development contribute significantly to economic growth. Further, the authors found that human capital has a positive and significant moderating effect on the path of joining financial development and economic growth.

The study contributes to the human capital debate. Despite the rich body of literature, the study based on World Bank data confirms the previous findings that investment in human capital is always useful for the financial and economic growth of the nation.

This paper reveals some unique findings regarding effect of financial development and economic growth nexus which opens the window of new dimension to think about their nexus. It also provides a different pathway to foster the economic growth by using human capital and financial development as together, especially in India.

Service robots are expected to become increasingly common, but the ways in which they can move around in an environment with humans, collect and store data about humans and share such data produce a potential for privacy violations. In human-to-human contexts, such violations are transgression of norms to which humans typically react negatively. This study examines if similar reactions occur when the transgressor is a robot. The main dependent variable was the overall evaluation of the robot.

Service robot privacy violations were manipulated in a between-subjects experiment in which a human user interacted with an embodied humanoid robot in an office environment.

The results show that the robot's violations of human privacy attenuated the overall evaluation of the robot and that this effect was sequentially mediated by perceived robot morality and perceived robot humanness. Given that a similar reaction pattern would be expected when humans violate other humans' privacy, the present study offers evidence in support of the notion that humanlike non-humans can elicit responses similar to those elicited by real humans.

The results imply that designers of service robots and managers in firms using such robots for providing service to employees should be concerned with restricting the potential for robots' privacy violation activities if the goal is to increase the acceptance of service robots in the habitat of humans.

To date, few empirical studies have examined reactions to service robots that violate privacy norms.