Search results

Increasing competitive pressure over the past 20 years has forced many companies to re‐evaluate their value‐added systems. This re‐evaluation has greatly amplified the managerial attention focused on purchasing. Indeed, many firms have begun to emphasize purchasing in their attempts to improve their competitive positions. Two advanced sourcing practices have been particularly important: global and JIT sourcing. This paper: 1) reviews the literature pertaining to these two sourcing practices, 2) considers potential competitive impact, 3) explores issues of compatibility, and 4) presents future research directions.

This chapter discusses how assistive technology (AT) has been used in Saudi inclusive schools. It also synthesises issues and challenges that play significant roles in using AT with students with disabilities in inclusive education. These topics include Kingdom of Saudi Arabia regulation and legislation for AT, teachers' attitudes and knowledge of AT, professional development, AT specialists to support AT use in inclusive education and integrating AT in students' Individual Education Plans. Moreover, the chapter explains how the education section in the Saudi Vision 2030 focusses and discusses the enhancement of AT use among students with disabilities in the inclusive education.

This research seeks to reveal the mediating role of work engagement and affective commitment as individual aspects that have the potential to bridge the effect of empowering leadership on the task performance of Correctional Service counselors in Indonesia, especially due to the limited literature on these two aspects in the context of public organizations.

Quantitative research was conducted on 350 counselors throughout Indonesia. The data was collected by distributing questionnaires online. The collected data were then analyzed using Structural Equation Modeling to test the seven research hypotheses.

Empowering leadership significantly strengthens task performance, work engagement and affective commitment. For indirect effects, this study found that affective commitment partially mediates the effect of empowering leadership on task performance. Meanwhile, work engagement failed to act as a mediator because it did not significantly impact strengthening task performance.

Notably, the unexpected result of work engagement's inability to significantly boost task performance deviates from the prevailing trends observed in previous empirical research, thereby adding a novel dimension to the findings of this study.

This chapter aims to shed light on some aspects of instructional collaboration with the purpose of providing further understanding of how teachers collaborate and what hinders their collaboration in Saudi inclusive and mainstream schools. Instructional collaboration among teachers in Saudi educational settings has not been thoroughly reviewed, nor has it been adequately considered as an essential component in assuring the implementation of inclusive education. The voice of two special education teachers and two college professors are presented and discussed in order to explain and clarify aspects of instructional collaboration. The last part of the chapter delineates proposed changes that may motivate teachers and aid them in developing a clear understanding of how to practice instructional collaboration in inclusive and mainstream settings, namely, provision of professional development for special and general education teachers, endorsement of legislation and regulations to promote instructional collaboration, and development of teacher education programs.

This paper aims to examine firm characteristics and ownership structure determinants of corporate social and environmental voluntary disclosure (CSEVD) practices in Saudi Arabia to address the paucity of research in this field for Saudi listed firms.

The paper uses manual content and regression analyses for online annual report data for Saudi non-financial listed firms over the period 2016–2018 using CSEVD items drawing on global reporting initiative-G4 guidelines.

Models show that Saudi firm CSEVD has increased over time compared to previous studies to an average of 68% disclosure due to new corporate governance regulations and IFRS implementation. The models show that firm size, leverage, manufacturing industry type and government ownership are positive determinants of CSEVD, while family ownership is the negative driver of CSEVD. However, firm profitability, audit firm size, firm age and institutional ownership have no impact on the level of CSEVD.

Using legitimacy and stakeholder theories, the paper determines the influence of firm characteristics and ownership structure on CSEVD, identifying implications for firm stakeholders and providing some evidence on the impact of corporate governance regulation and IFRS implementation on such disclosure. The paper provides additional evidence on progress towards Saudi’s Vision 2030.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between earnings management (EM) and corporate social responsibility (CSR) in Saudi Arabia. It is one of only a small number of studies to examine this relationship outside the US market, and the first in the Middle East and Arab region, particularly in Saudi Arabia.

The paper uses content analysis to extract the CSR disclosure items from annual reports of Saudi firms. A CSR disclosure index was then constructed. For EM, the residuals from Kothari et al.’s (2005) model are considered. Multivariate analysis was performed using pooled OLS-regression models to examine the direct relationship between EM and the CSR index.

Using panel data from all Saudi public firms listed on the Saudi Stock Exchange (Tadawul) over the 2015-2016 period, the authors find that CSR is positively and significantly related to EM practices as proxied by discretionary accruals. This implies that Saudi firms undertaking CSR actions are more likely to manipulate their earnings.

The findings of this paper have important policy implications for policy-makers, regulators, auditors and investors in their attempts to constrain EM practices and enhance the quality of financial reporting in Saudi Arabia.

This paper contributes to the body of accounting literature by providing the first empirical evidence in the Middle East and Arab region on the positive association between EM and CSR in Saudi Arabia.

Drawing upon the norm of reciprocity and social exchange theory, the purpose of this study is to propose and empirically test a model on the relationship between empowering leadership and employees' work-related outcomes during the COVID-19 pandemic. In this model, safety climate was theorized as an intervening mechanism between (1) empowering leadership and organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) and (2) empowering leadership and risk-taking behavior.

Using a cross-sectional research design, data were gathered from a sample of 228 full-time staff working in the healthcare sector in Palestine. Data were analyzed using partial least squares-structural equation modeling to examine the proposed hypotheses.

The results show that empowering leadership is related to extra-role behaviors in a time of crisis. Furthermore, the results suggest that safety climate fully mediates the relationships between (1) empowering leadership and OCB and (2) empowering leadership and risk-taking behavior.

Healthcare administrators are invited to train their supervisors to foster the empowerment philosophy, especially during crisis times, and select leaders with empowering mentality. Besides, healthcare administrators are called upon to consider the critical role of maintaining a safe climate since it is related to employees' outcomes.

In this study, the authors contribute to leadership literature in crisis times by highlighting the critical role of leadership in sharing power and control with employees to encourage their OCB and willingness to take risks for the organization's interest. Moreover, to the researchers' best knowledge, this study is among the few studies that examine the consequences of empowering leadership in crisis times.

The purpose of this paper is to describe a new approach to sentence representation learning leading to text classification using Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) embeddings. This work proposes a novel BERT-convolutional neural network (CNN)-based model for sentence representation learning and text classification. The proposed model can be used by industries that work in the area of classification of similarity scores between the texts and sentiments and opinion analysis.

The approach developed is based on the use of the BERT model to provide distinct features from its transformer encoder layers to the CNNs to achieve multi-layer feature fusion. To achieve multi-layer feature fusion, the distinct feature vectors of the last three layers of the BERT are passed to three separate CNN layers to generate a rich feature representation that can be used for extracting the keywords in the sentences. For sentence representation learning and text classification, the proposed model is trained and tested on the Stanford Sentiment Treebank-2 (SST-2) data set for sentiment analysis and the Quora Question Pair (QQP) data set for sentence classification. To obtain benchmark results, a selective training approach has been applied with the proposed model.

On the SST-2 data set, the proposed model achieved an accuracy of 92.90%, whereas, on the QQP data set, it achieved an accuracy of 91.51%. For other evaluation metrics such as precision, recall and F1 Score, the results obtained are overwhelming. The results with the proposed model are 1.17%–1.2% better as compared to the original BERT model on the SST-2 and QQP data sets.

The novelty of the proposed model lies in the multi-layer feature fusion between the last three layers of the BERT model with CNN layers and the selective training approach based on gated pruning to achieve benchmark results.

Despite the widespread use of mobile government (m-government) services in developed countries, the adoption and acceptance of m-government services among citizens in developing countries is relatively low. The purpose of this study is to explore the most critical determinants of acceptance and use of m-government services in a developing country context.

The unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (UTAUT) extended with perceived mobility and mobile communication services (MCS) was used as the theoretical framework. Data was collected from 216 m-government users across Bangladesh and analyzed in two stages. First, structural equation modeling (SEM) was used to identify significant determinants affecting users' acceptance of m-government services. In the second stage, a neural network model was used to validate SEM results and determine the relative importance of the determinants of acceptance of m-government services.

The results show that facilitating conditions and performance expectancy are the two important precedents of behavioral intention to use m-government services, and performance expectancy mediates the relationship between MCS, mobility and the intention to use m-government services.

Academically, this study extended and validated the underlying concept of UTAUT to capture the adoption behavior of individuals in a different cultural context. In particular, MCS might be the most critical antecedent towards mobile application studies. From a practical perspective, this study may provide valuable guidelines to government policymakers and system developers towards the development and effective implementation of m-government systems.

This study has contributed to the existing, but limited, literature on m-government service adoption in the context of a developing country. The predictive modeling approach is an innovative approach in the field of technology adoption.

This paper aims to analyze the effect of environmental performance (EP) on environmental disclosure (ED) and determine whether environmental costs (ECs) moderate this relationship. This paper extends legitimacy theory that focuses on the commonly assumed interaction between companies and community, with the effect of quantitative information that can summarize a large amount of narrative disclosure and its effect on narrative ED.

This paper uses regression analysis on 492 unbalanced panel data of emerging Asian countries' publicly listed companies between 2006 and 2019.

Results show that EP has a positive effect on ED. EC weakens the effect of EP and ED.

Extending the incentives to signal EP through disclosure, this cross-country study tests how quantitative EC information can summarize the narrative and reduce the level of disclosure. This paper also proves the summarization effect of environmental cost diminution in countries with low market sophistication.