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The purpose of this research is to study the influence of five critical factors on service quality in the insurance sector. Having studied the influence of these critical factors, an attempt has been made to obtain a generic solution to enhance the quality of service by proposing a holistic framework of learning organization. As globalization and IT revolution have made the insurance sector highly knowledge‐intensive, customer expectations and perceptions have also grown exponentially. Hence, this research is timely and goal‐focused.

The research is based on system dynamics methodology, which involves sequential phases including: problem identification, conceptualization, model formulation, simulation and validation, and policy analysis and implementation. Meta‐analysis of existing literature and rationalization are also a part of the framework development.

The results have indicated that the key parameters, e.g. past experience, personal needs, external communication, word of mouth, and active clients have significant influence on service quality of the insurance sector.

The outcome of this study can be directly implemented in the insurance sector to enhance the quality of service, as it provides a means to convert the tacit knowledge in the organization into an explicit form. The knowledge managementsystem, as a component of the learning organization, acts as a central repository of organizational knowledge and enables the service providers to minimize the “service quality gap” as best practices, past experience, and solutions to problems of common occurrence will be available for common use.

This research is unique in the sense that it uses a system dynamics approach to service quality enhancement in the insurance sector. The research has immense value to the insurance sector, as its growth is a function of service quality.

Introduction: The frequency and complexity of cyber assaults have grown in recent years. Consequently, organisations have increased their expenditures in more robust infrastructure to protect themselves from these cyber assaults. These organisations’ assets, data, and reputations are at risk due to rapidly increasing cybercrimes. However, complete protection from these many and ever-changing threats is very challenging as a result. To deal with them, companies are taking steps to reduce risks and limit company losses in their occurrence.

Purpose: Progressively, the insurance sector organisations are including digital protection as a component of the board’s general danger technique. Protection enterprises, then again, depend on accurately expecting risks, while a significant number of them depend on normalised approaches. Because of the exceptional attributes of the digital assaults, transporters now and again depend on subjective strategies dependent on master decisions. There is an unmistakeable absence of observational information on digital protection, specifically subjective examinations planning to comprehend and depict necessities, impediments, and cycles applicable for digital protection.

Methodology: There are various unanswered inquiries and worries about the oversight and legitimate and administrative assessment of network safety weaknesses in the protection business. In the wake-up of looking over all these worries and issues, steps to alleviate them are laid out after an extensive literature survey and secondary data sources. In this study, the authors have principally viewed the executive parts of the associations as the danger. While considering network protection, their insight of needs was taken as one among a few dangerous treatment systems, just as the necessities of the organisations’ protection in assessing the danger level of likely customers.

Findings: This section analyses past research in network safety and information security in the protection market. The danger of the executives’ strategies, the numerical models, and the forecasts of digital occassions are illustrated in this section. Lastly, the future headings are likewise expressed momentarily.

Practical implications: This review might be valuable for additional examination and logical discussion, yet additionally for down-to-earth applications. Moreover, it could be gainful to organisations as a supportive instrument for better agreement on what digital protection is and how to get ready to take on network safety and information security procedures in the association.

Significance: These associations’ resources, information, and notoriety are in danger because of quickly expanding cybercrimes. Cybercriminals are utilising more refined approaches to start digital assaults. Digital protection was anticipated to affect security conduct before any proof was gathered. Progressively, organisations are including digital protection as a feature of their general danger to the executive system. Because of the exceptional attributes of the digital assaults, transporters as often as possible depend on subjective methods dependent on master decisions. Thus, this space of network safety and information security is vital uniquely in the protection market.

The purpose of this study is to identify the role of social media in implementing effective organizational change. The study illuminates how social media applications support the antecedents of organizational change in the workplace.

The study followed an interpretive approach based on qualitative design and grounded theory using 41 non-directive and semi-structured interviews with change leaders and change recipients. These respondents were chosen using purposive sampling and thematic analysis was then performed using NVivo 11-Plus software.

This research highlights how social media applications can be used to overcome the challenges of organizational change implementation. The findings of the study illuminate various emerging themes such as social media applications are beneficial for fostering knowledge sharing about change processes and enhancing effective communication during change formulation and implementation. It can increase the level of trust and participation in decision-making and decrease the level of resistance to change. Also, it can enhance the level of support for change acceptance in the workplace.

Social media application (SMAs) are helpful to foster informal, constructive and relevant discussion with respect to routines organizational tasks, employee concerns about new changes, information about job security and financial and non-financial benefits after change implementation. The effective and efficient use of SMAs helps organizations to foster knowledge amongst employees and they can address various critical issues i.e. employee uncertainties about change initiatives, social consensus on the solution of problems and interactive communication among social actors within a network.

The study represents an effort to explore seldom-researched aspects such as the role of social media in the context of change formulation and implementation at the workplace. Social media applications have become popular across the world and the speed of their usage is rising day by day, but their real contribution toward organizational change has not yet been fully understood.

Here the author proposes the Mutual Insurance Model with Incentive Compatibility (MIMIC). MIMIC is a model for deposit insurance that mimics the incentives and practices of a private sector, mutual, insurance organisation. The main features of MIMIC are: fully risk‐based premiums, payments by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) to the US Treasury Department (the Treasury) for its line of credit and ‘catastrophe insurance’, rebates to banks when the reserve ratio exceeds a risk‐based ceiling, surcharges on banks when the reserve ratio dips below a risk‐based floor, dilution fees on deposit growth to maintain reserve ratio and refunds to banks to maintain reserve ratio when their deposits shrink.

Following the COVID-19 outbreak, there are concerns whether economies are becoming farther from equality and competency. While this matters to every economy, it is more crucial for developing ones who already suffer from income inequalities and lack of competency. The purpose of this paper is to address this issue.

This study uses an administrative data from the Iran's Social Security Organization (ISSO) that provides insurance to workers entitled to the Labor Law of Iran. The data contain more than 7,000,000 workers. The authors assess heterogeneous impact of the first wave of the pandemic by firms' size and average payment.

The authors’ estimation results indicate that, following the initiation of the pandemic, the workers whose corresponding firms are smaller, overall, are more prone to the pandemic and are more likely to submit a request for unemployment benefits. However, the relation is neither homogeneous across sectors nor linear among micro-sized firms. Few sectors indicate a positive relationship between size and likelihood of request submission, including cultural activity, shoemaking and clothing sectors. Besides the size, the authors investigate whether pay grades could explain the probability of becoming unemployed after the pandemic. Results show that workers whose corresponding firms pay less are more likely to submit a request. This is robust within different sectors.

The ISSO dataset is not a panel, so the authors cannot employ methods of causal inferences. The authors’ results should be seen as correlation; however, due to exogeneity and sharpness of the pandemic the result infers to some degree of causality. The data does not cover the informal sector, so the estimates are at lower boundary.

Administrative data on unemployment benefits during COVID-19 show that the pandemic interferes with competition by forcing low-paid workers and small firms to exit the market. This is an alarm for the competition in every economy, specially developing ones.

This paper aims to examine how and why integrated reporting (IR) as a managerial technology is diffused in Sri Lanka, an emerging South Asian (South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation) nation, from an expansion diffusion perspective.

The study followed two analytical steps. First, the adopter groups of IR of the country’s stock exchange were identified based on their annual reports. Second, the key stakeholders (both internal and external) in the process of IR diffusion in the country were interviewed. Thereafter, a content analysis of these semi-structured interviews was carried out based on the demand-pull and supply-push sides of the diffusion theory of innovation.

The temporal trend of IR suggests that the country is currently in the diffusion stage with many first time adopters are likely to join the bandwagon of IR. In the primary stage, its early adoption has been driven by the efficient-choice perspective. However, in the diffusion stage, most of the adopters are driven by fashion setting, which is mainly attributable to the active propagators in the supply side of IR diffusion. IR has been mainly a transition evolving through the incremental changes in sustainability reporting. Many firms have not internalized the IR principles with the danger of IR becoming a mere reporting mechanism.

The application of both demand-pull and supply-push sides of the diffusion theory of innovation is still limited, particularly in the case of new reporting mechanisms. The study provides new insights into how these two forces contribute to creating a “practice-reporting portrayal gap” in IR.

The use of volunteers is one of the approaches to capacity building, preparedness and the response of the health system in disasters. Appropriate management of volunteers during disasters and emergencies is essential. This study aimed to explain the challenges of volunteer management in the Pandemic COVID-19 in Iran.

Qualitative research was conducted using the content analysis based on the Graneheim method. The participants' selection was done based on purposeful sampling and theoretical sampling until data saturation. Direct field observation and 26 interviews were applied to collect data.

Four categories and 15 sub-categories emerged to describe the challenges of volunteer management during the COVID-19 crisis including policymaking barriers (including legal barriers, insurance and support coverage and risk governance), managerial barriers (including planning, coordinating and organizing, training and awareness, command and leadership and information management and documentation), socio-cultural barriers (personal safety attitude and culture, attitudes and expectations of the community and perspectives on volunteers) and executive-operational barriers (monitoring and evaluation, cost and needs assessment).

It is essential to increase managers', officials' and volunteers' perceptions of COVID19 risk through education and information. Preparing a database for volunteers' information, including non-governmental organization and governmental organization volunteers, planning for needs assessment, establishing a mechanism for recruiting volunteers and using their capacities and appropriate organizing, tracking and monitoring of volunteers can be among effective strategies.

The purpose of this paper is to provide the first empirical assessment of the persistence and predictability of earnings within the Georgian private sector entities.

The sample comprises of all the Georgian private sector entities who, according to the new Law of Georgia on Accounting, Reporting and Auditing (2016), had to submit their audited financial statements by 1 October 2018. Financial data has been officially withdrawn from the Ministry of Finance of Georgia and the descriptive data has been obtained by the use of Link Klipper and ScrapeStorm tools through the official “Reportal” website. The final sample consists of 450 large Georgian private sector entities. The study uses a simple, one-year-lagged earnings auto-regression to detect the persistence and predictability within the next series of earnings. A weighted least square method has been used as a statistical procedure.

The results reveal that current earnings persist within the next year’s series of earnings at less than 25%, while the reliance on current year’s earnings enables us to predict the next year’s earnings only with a chance of 20%. Further analysis has witnessed that cash flows from operations persist at less than 40% and are able of predicting the next year’s cash flows at below 35%. Overall, the properties of earnings and cash flows within the private sector of Georgia are of relatively poor quality, with the latter demonstrating higher properties compared to earnings.

The general finding on a relatively low property of earnings raises potential investors and creditors’ awareness on the valuation-usefulness of provided financial information within the private sector of Georgia. The fact that earnings are significantly less persistent and predictable compared to cash flows from operations, hints on accruals’ problematic functioning. The results presented in this paper should be of interest to a local regulator (SARAS), charged with the responsibility of successfully running a currently ongoing accounting reform of Georgia.

This is the first study that examines the persistence and predictability of earnings and cash flows from operations among the private sector entities of Georgia.

This study aims to explore the challenges to knowledge sharing (KS) in the context of public sector universities in developing countries. Furthermore, it explores why knowledge hoarding behaviour is flourishing even when employees are encouraged to share their knowledge in organisations and are rewarded for doing so.

Research data were collected from vice chancellor, registrar, professors, assistant professors and lecturers using an interview technique. They shared their knowledge, expertise, experiences and understanding about issues relating to KS practices in public universities. These interviews were thematically analysed using the NVivo 11-Plus software and different themes emerged.

The results reveal that hoard knowledge to gain power, authority, influence, promotion opportunities and employee favouritism negatively influence KS practices. Furthermore, an unsupportive culture and a poor linkage between KS and rewards negatively influence KS practices in public sector universities.

The present study aids academic leadership in designing policies and strategies to enhance KS among faculty staff and to create a supportive KS culture. These results are useful for top management officials of public sector universities, especially in developing countries, and for policy makers, who can plan and execute effective policies to foster KS behaviour.

The originality can be viewed as a new window open towards the motivation of the university staff to hoard their knowledge instead of sharing it. This study gives the novel conceptual model based on why people do not share their knowledge and how KS practices can be fostered among the employees in public sector universities. Few studies have been conducted to explore KS issues in the real context of developing countries, and specifically in the Asian culture.

To analyze more deeply and in a systemic perspective food system outcomes, and the contribution that small farming can give to the achievement of those outcomes, a detailed analysis of food systems is required, which highlights its components, activities and dynamics. Thus, this chapter deepens the analysis of the food system. We first reflect on the complexity of the concept of food system, discussing the abundance of different conceptualizations proposed in the scientific and political debate on the base of different disciplines and perspectives. Then, a comprehensive representation is shown, which is then unpacked. The food system actors, assets and functions are explored, with an eye on power relations among actors and on the main drivers of change. Governance (that also includes actors external to the food systems) is called ‘reflexive’, as long as it characterizes a system that is able to reflect upon the conditions and the forms of its own functioning, to detect and analyze threats and to change accordingly, with the involvement of actors external to the food systems. This analysis, which represents the focus of this section, provides the base for the description of the food system vulnerability developed in Chapter 4. Drivers of change and governance emerge as key categories to consider.