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Non-profit organizations (NPOs) are exposed to a highly competitive environment in which they are forced to grow their commercial activity to acquire additional financial resources. This study aims to create an understanding of how NPOs involved in textile reuse as a revenue-generating programme manage their reverse supply chains (RSC).

The research involves an embedded single-case study of NPOs in Finland involved in post-use textile collection. The main data sources are semi-structured interviews and participant observations.

This study is inspired by the microfoundations movement and identifies the underlying microfoundations of the NPOs’ capabilities for managing RSC for textile reuse. The study contributes to the literature by demonstrating NPOs’ lower-level, granular practices and their adaptations for achieving quality outcomes in textile reuse.

The findings have context sensitivity and apply to the NPOs which operate in a context similar to Finland, such as in other Nordic countries.

This study continues the discussion on the adoption of “business-like” practices in the NPOs’ pursuit of additional revenue streams to finance humanitarian work. The findings of this study can also be transferred to the growing area of domestic textile circularity.

Using the case of NPOs in textile reuse, the study illustrates how RSC management can serve a social, non-profit cause and transform unwanted textile products into a source of fundraising for humanitarian work.

This enriches the understanding of NPOs’ practices within the scope of revenue-generating programmes by examining one of them – textile reuse through charity shops from an RSC perspective.

Conflict and violence are the main drivers of globally escalating humanitarian needs. Local grassroots initiatives are pivotal in distributing humanitarian supplies in the acute response phase until more established humanitarian aid organizations can enter. Nevertheless, scant research exists regarding the role of grassroots associations in providing humanitarian assistance during a military conflict. The purpose of this paper is to understand the role of grassroots associations and identify important themes for effective operations.

This paper adopts a case-study approach of three Ukrainian grassroots associations that began operating in the immediate days of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The findings are based on analyzing primary sources, including interviews with Ukrainian volunteers, and are supported by secondary sources.

Grassroots associations have local contacts and a contextual understanding of population needs and can respond more rapidly and effectively than large intergovernmental agencies. Four critical themes regarding the operations of grassroots associations emerged: information management, inventory management, coordination and performance measurement. Grassroots humanitarian response operations during conflict are challenged by personal security risks, the unpredictability of unsolicited supplies, emerging volunteer roles, dynamic transportation routes and shifting demands.

Grassroots responses are central to humanitarian responses during the acute phase of a military conflict. By examining the operations of grassroots associations in the early months of the 2022 war in Ukraine, the authors provide a unique perspective on humanitarian logistics. Nonetheless, more inclusive models of humanitarian responses are needed to harness the capacities and resilience of grassroots operations in practice.

The purpose of the study was to determine the major criteria for a credible integrated development planning (IDP) process in Mbombela municipality, Mpumalanga Province, South Africa.

The study utilizes a combination of sequential exploratory and explanatory mixed methods. About 120 key informants participated in the structured questionnaire, and a further seven interviews were conducted as elite interviews. Four multistakeholder workshop sessions with up to sixty-six participants each were conducted.

To strengthen the integrated planning in local government, the study recommended “stakeholder participation and ownership,” “leadership and accountability,” “impact and outcome-based focus,” “a compact value chain” and “monitoring and evaluation.”

The IDP process is a tactical planning gadget designed to achieve transformation and introduce new systems of governance. IDPs currently tend to lack standard criteria to measure their performance in promoting public leadership and responding to community needs, which is a major challenge in many municipalities across South Africa. Since its introduction in 2000 to fast-track service delivery, concerns have been raised about why there are still constant protests alleged to be caused by poor service delivery.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the adjustment of government redistributive policies in Scandinavian and Mediterranean countries following changes in income inequality over the period 1980–2021.

The authors first modelled the time-varying dynamics between income inequality and redistribution and then used a non-linear framework to test for the existence of asymmetries and cointegration in their long-run relationship. The authors used two complementary measures of inequality – the share of total income accruing to top percentile income holders and the ratio of the share of total income accruing to top decile income holders divided by that accumulated by the bottom 50% – and computed redistribution as the difference between the two inequality indicators before and after taxes and transfers.

The authors found that the sign of the relationship between income inequality and redistribution is mostly positive and time-varying. Overall, the authors also found evidence that the impact of increases in inequality on redistributive measures is higher than that of decreases. Finally, the authors obtained a significant long-run relationship between both variables in all countries except Denmark and Spain. These results hold for both Scandinavian and Mediterranean countries.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first paper to account for the potential existence of non-linearities and to examine the asymmetries in the adjustment of redistributive policies to increases in income inequality using alternative income inequality metrics.

This study focuses to develop a common humanitarian supply chain process model (HSCPM) that enables effective enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems for NGOs, and the study also investigates the role of modularity as a dynamic capability that supports creating such model.

A multifocus group study was performed as part of a larger project, the Frontline Humanitarian Logistics Initiative, aiming to establish a common data model that would serve as the backbone of humanitarian ERP systems. Fourteen international humanitarian organizations (IHOs) participated in the process, reaching a consensus on the structure of the process model.

An HSCPM was proposed based on the consensus reached across IHOs. Four degrees of customization differentiating between “generic,” “tailored,” “specific,” and “unique” processes are presented and discussed.

The findings show modularity applied to process as a mean to create dynamic efficiencies and position the modular process model within the dynamic capabilities framework, supporting supply chain responsiveness and expanding the literature on supply chain management (SCM), dynamic capabilities, and humanitarian logistics.

This research proposes a consensus-based data model, facilitating the advancement of ERP systems in the humanitarian context and lays a foundation for interoperability among ERP systems across diverse IHOs.

First attempt to elucidate the specific characteristics and unique processes defining an HSCPM, this study reached an unprecedented consensus for the humanitarian sector, setting the base toward an industry standard.

Many countries around the world are facing great challenges from their ageing population with shrinking workforce, this will put more pressure on their financial system and will increase the public spending on care costs provided to older people. Egypt is in the phase of establishing a new law for older people care's rights, a law that will organise how older people in need for care would benefit from access to government financial support and how will families support their older relatives financially and how the care costs will be shared between the older people, their families and the government.

The paper examines the suitability two cost-sharing methods and applying them to assess the effect on the individuals and families' income strain.

The preferred approach can be used for sharing costs as it applies a gradual funding withdrawal by the government and provide more fairness and flexibility for application in different regions. Besides, the parameters of this approach can be used by policy makers to control the levels of funding.

The paper will be the first to discuss the intergenerational fairness from a financial perspective in Egypt to avoid forcing older people into poverty or resorting to poverty trade-off.

This paper aims to understand the discrepancy between Germany’s immediate positive response to the so-called “Europe 2015's refugee crisis“ and the strict asylum legislation adopted in Germany in the following year.

The discrepancy is attributed to external and internal forces. The external force is Germany’s obligation to adhere to the Common European Asylum System. The internal force is the role of the different policy actors. The paper focuses on the role of the media as an example of a private policy actor. Through adopting the theory of the social construction of target populations, the paper studies how the media constructs “asylum seekers”, the target of the new asylum legislation. The role of the media is analyzed using the methodology of qualitative content analysis of a selected number of newspaper articles.

The majority of the studied articles problematized receiving and hosting refugees and focused on the reason behind migration differentiating between asylum seekers fleeing conflict areas and all others who might be abusing the asylum channel. The findings of the content analysis, as such, resonate with the amendments that focused on facilitating the integration of accepted “refugees” but restricted further entry. As such, it could be argued that these findings explain the influence of the media on the amendments and as such provide an explanation to the discrepancy between the initial response and the amendments.

The analysis focused on one newspaper. The findings, as such, are not representative. The aim is only to provide an example of how the German media dealt with the refugee crisis and to suggest using the theory chosen by the paper to analyze the link between asylum legislation and the construction of asylum seekers. To understand how asylum legislation is influenced by how asylum seekers are constructed, more studies are needed. Such studies could analyze the role played by other media outputs and/or the role played by other policy actors in constructing the target of the policy.

The media’s response is based on analyzing a sample of newspaper articles published by a German newspaper following the so-called 2015 refugee crisis. Accordingly, the findings represent an original endeavor to understand how the media reacted to the crisis.

This study aims to help understand individual donors’ preferences over different designs of humanitarian–business partnerships in managing humanitarian operations and to help understand if donors’ preferences align with their actual donation behavior.

Choice-based conjoint analysis was used to understand donation preferences for partnership designs, and a donation experiment was performed using real money to understand the alignment of donors’ preferences with actual donation behavior.

The results show that partnering with the business sector can be a valuable asset for humanitarian organizations in attracting individual donors if these partnerships are managed well in terms of partnership strategy, partnership history and partnership report and disclosure. In particular, the study finds that the donation of services and products from businesses corporations to humanitarian organizations are preferable to individual donors, rather than cash. Furthermore, donors’ preferences are not necessarily aligned with actual donation behavior.

The results highlight the importance of presenting objective data on projects to individual donors. The results also show that donors value the provision of services and products by business corporations to humanitarian operations.

Partnerships between humanitarian organizations and business corporations are important for the success of humanitarian operations. However, little is known about which partnership designs are most preferable to individual donors and have the biggest chance of being supported financially.

This study aims to draw on cue utilization and irradiation theories to: determine the extent to which country-of-origin image and its sub-dimensions exert an aggregate and relative influence on consumer brand evaluations; and identify the contextual and methodological factors that account for between-study variance in the focal relationship.

A random-effects model was used to examine 166 empirical articles encompassing 499,563 observations, and 282 effect sizes from 1984 to 2020 using Comprehensive Meta-Analysis software.

Results show that country-of-origin image has a positive, moderate effect on consumer brand evaluations. Moreover, findings reveal that each dimension of country-of-origin image – general country image, general product country image, specific product country image and partitioned country image – significantly influences consumer brand evaluation, but the effect of general product country image is the largest. What’s more, the aggregate impacts of country-of-origin image on consumer brand evaluation – brand commitment, brand-specific associations and general brand impressions – show that the effect on brand commitment is the largest. Finally, findings show that contextual factors (brand source, product sector, culture [individualism vs collectivism], brand origin continents and respondents’ continent) and methodological factors (cues, sampling unit, publication year and sample size) significantly account for between-study variance.

This study provides the first meta-analytic review of the relationship between country-of-origin image and consumer brand evaluation to help clarify mixed findings and balance out the literature, which has only seen quantitative reviews on product evaluation and purchase decisions.

The article explores to what extent party politics has influenced the different trajectories in Spain and Italy in terms of gendered active social policies (ASPs) (i.e. ALMPs and WLBPs). Second, it investigates how social and political modernization in the two countries has facilitated or hindered party competition on gendered ASPs.

To investigate to what extent parties support gendered ASPs, the article relies on an original content analysis of party manifestos issued during the 2010s national elections. A total of 1387 quasi-sentences have been coded. The results were then quantified to graphically show how positions differentiate across parties and countries.

The content analysis of party manifestos displays that party politics matters: gendered ASPs are backed in a very different way by the Spanish and Italian parties. While in Spain all political parties have strongly championed ALMPs and WLBPs, this is not the case for the Italian parties. The research has also stressed that the specific path of social and political modernization is an important intervening variable that alters positively or negatively parties' support for gendered ASPs.

The article contributes to widen theoretically and empirically the literature on ASPs in the Southern European countries. Theoretically, it questions the supposed homogeneity of the Southern social model and investigated the alleged bifurcation between Italy and Spain, focusing on those policies – ASPs – that constitute the foundations of the Southern model: familialism and dualization. Furthermore, this bifurcation was analyzed adopting a gender perspective, and exploring adherence to or departure from the Southern model. Third, the article focuses on the politics of ASPs demonstrating that inspecting the political arena can contribute to explain policy change.