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The purpose of this paper is to examine social sustainability effectiveness of eco-cities through the case of Masdar City’s strategy for urban sustainability in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates.

Using a case study approach, the paper is an exploratory, qualitative analysis, which investigates the social, environmental and economic performance of Masdar City, a purported carbon-neutral, zero-waste urban development.

Though Masdar City substantively contributes to innovation in sustainable urban development within environmental and economic contexts and has been effective in capital circulation in green technology markets, the impetus as a commercially driven enterprise is most evident. Successful sustainable urban development requires greater consideration for the social imperative.

Eco-city mega-projects, such as Masdar City, have the potential to fuse achievements in innovation, technology and economic enterprise with the social imperative of functional urban habitats.

Eco-cities are of increasing interest given the growing need for sustainable, energy-efficient living. This paper contributes through a novel case study, exploring how the concept of the eco-city has been developed and understood in the Masdar City context and discusses successes and deficits in its strategic implementation.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate challenges in balancing interoperability, food quality and customer satisfaction in halal food supply chains.

The study employed ethnography and grounded theory research methodologies. Research methods were ethnographic content analysis and document content analysis. The research framework encompassed a range of stakeholder groups connected with the halal food supply chain in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), focussing on Islamic jurisprudence, halal food sector analysis, import regulation compliance, halal food certification (HFC), food production, retailing and consumption.

The research found that supply chain intermediaries are challenged in balancing interoperability issues around non-unified global certification standards. Consequent variability in customer confidence in halal standards was found.

This research focussed on the internal supply chain in the UAE, with future scope in HFC systems among external supplier nations and wider market research on customer perceptions of halal food integrity.

Transferability of the findings is high; to other halal food markets in particular, as well as supply chain systems for halal products across other Islamic economy sectors, notably halal pharmaceuticals and cosmetics. Aligning the halal ecosystem with trends in healthy eating and environmentalism is also considered.

The paper uniquely explores the halal food sector from the perspective of variant stakeholder disciplines in halal sector governance and operation. It exposes vulnerabilities in halal supply chains in a nation with one of the most demanding and diverse agri-food supply systems in the world.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse three drivers of the Islamic economy: global Muslim demography; operational sectors and demand; and faith-based consumerism.

This paper follows a constructivist approach to the Islamic economy, undertaken through an exploratory study of global Muslim population, the growth in opportunities in the Islamic economy and plurality of religious thought across the diaspora.

The research finds four trends (t) positively impacting the growth of the Islamic economy: (t1) above-nominal increase in global Muslim population, with greater intra-religious interactions of varying Muslim cultures; (t2) an increasing demand for a diversity of Shari’ah-compliant and halal products and services; (t3) improving socio-economic status of Muslims in developed and emerging countries; and (t4) a widening perspective of faith understanding and rising interest in religious literacy.

This research serves to inform global businesses of opportunities in Islamic economy sectors, highlighting global demographic change and informing how business is impacted through the plurality of Muslim faith interpretation.

Based on this research, businesses can better align their services with the socio-economic environment and faith sensibilities of Muslim consumers.

The paper provides a first look at the activity across Islamic economic sectors and disaggregates their activity and potential for growth across Muslim-majority and Muslim-minority markets. In particular, three areas were examined – demography, emergent Muslim lifestyles and religiosity.

Strategies for teaching engineering in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) have been evolving over the past decades due to innovations in technology, as well as the development of educational methodologies. In the recent past, the focus for engineering faculty has been not only on promoting the skills needed to raise the level of employability of Emirati graduates, but increasingly on new educational methodologies, e-learning and wireless networked laptop technology. Students in the UAE exhibit certain characteristics emerging from a variety of cultural and historical traditions, as well as from methodologies of education used at the pre-tertiary levels. These characteristics include expecting to be passive recipients of taught information, and lack of independence in their approach to problem solving. In this paper I discuss the development of strategies to facilitate the transition of students from passive to active learning; examine the role of technology-driven educational methodologies in promoting independent and group-centered learning skills; and use a case study to explore the instruction of Engineering Design and Computer-Aided Design (CAD) and to examine how classroom management techniques have changed as a result of the growing use of technology.

Organisations utilise Business Continuity Management (BCM) to support sustained performance of electronic systems on which their core activities are based. These organisations require a tool that can be used to assess the maturity of their existing BCM processes. Through the examination of the banking sector of the United Arab Emirates, the purpose of this paper is to address the need for a BCM maturity model.

A tailored BCM maturity model was developed using a two‐stage approach; the first stage was developing a model based on the analysis of five existing models; and the second stage was validation of the developed model against the formulated objectives through the use of focus groups with ten UAE banks, comprising of three BCM experts for each bank.

The research found that the provision of a standard maturity model for BCM as a situational analysis tool for the banking sector is functional and can be the basis of a tool to address the gap in organisations in general to assess the maturity level of their BCM processes.

The developed model is limited to validation within a specific sector and geographically, with generic model validation being outside the scope of this research.

The framework provides different areas to which maturity can be assigned, various levels across quality and scope and how an overall BCM maturity of an organisation can be determined.

The development of a maturity model which could be used as a BCM self analysis tool is a significant addition to the BCM knowledge base.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the effectiveness of leadership and team processes in information technology (IT) projects in business environments. The paper contextualizes the study in the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

The paper addresses two central questions: what is the level of IT project team effectiveness in the UAE context? What is the maturity level of leadership in IT project management in the UAE? A tailored instrument, based on Cohen and Bailey's team effectiveness evaluation model, was used in this study of 42 project teams in the UAE across various sectors.

The findings demonstrate that IT projects in the UAE demonstrate a maturity level that is transactional, with task‐focused teams and people‐oriented leadership styles.

The implications of the paper can facilitate broader contextualized research on leadership and IT project team effectiveness, with particular emphasis on developing economies. This is important in addressing the issue of high failure rates in IT projects in general.

Understanding the role of leadership and its responsibility in facilitating teams in technical and high failure environments can impact on productivity and success rates in future projects.

This paper is unique in providing collated opinion about constructs within IT project team processes and leadership effectiveness in the context of businesses in developing economies. The use of a maturity structure addressing leadership, trust, teams and cohesion is distinctive.

This paper aims to provide an examination of the extent to which different leadership styles impact employee job satisfaction and organizational commitment in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) through a case analysis in the construction sector.

The research is based on a survey of three companies, one client organization, one consultancy firm and one contracting company. The useable survey comprised 251 individual responses from 600 distributed, giving a response rate of 41.83 percent.

The findings show that consultative and consensus leadership styles are prevalent in the construction sector in the UAE. Further, it was found that an employee's job satisfaction is strongly affected by leadership, with more than 50 percent of survey respondents stating that leadership strongly influences their job satisfaction. Leadership style was found to moderately to strongly affect organizational commitment of employees in the industry in the UAE.

The survey provides a useful instrument by which organizations across other sectors and within different cultural contexts can evaluate the significance of leadership style, job satisfaction and organizational commitment.

The work is unique in that it is an examination of the impact of organizational leadership style within a contemporary regional context. A number of studies have been carried out in the Arab world that suggest that leadership in Arab culture nurtures consultative and participative tendencies. These are all outdated by more than a decade and no recent study in the Arabian Gulf region exists and none which explore leadership styles' impact on employees.

Awarding the Olympic Games to a host city in the Muslim world would send a clear indication from member nations of the International Olympic Committee of a desire by the international community to engage with Muslim nations on a level that transcends sport. The purpose of this paper, therefore, is to answer the question: will a city in the Muslim world ever become host to the greatest sporting spectacle on Earth, and, if so, which is most likely to receive it, when and why?

To gauge the potential of cities in the Muslim world hosting the Olympics Games, the approach of the paper is to examine the merits of former host cities and then qualitatively comparing these with member countries of the Organisation of Islamic Conference which have a majority Muslim population.

The research findings indicate that there are five cities in the Muslim world, at least one of which is likely to be awarded one of the coming six Summer Olympic Games between the years 2020 and 2040.

The broader implications of the study are that, in examining Muslim nations of the world from the point of view of mega‐event management on a global scale, their development and advancement capability in the modern world can be probed.

In the absence of any other published study on the subject, this paper would open a discourse that would be of value to scholars and interested parties in diverse fields such as major programme management, Islamic studies, international politics, economics and international development.