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The purpose of this paper is to explore the legislative framework that governs whistleblowing in the UAE.

The paper examines social perceptions and practical challenges related to the act of whistleblowing. It focuses on the effectiveness, limitations and implications of the current legal status of whistleblowing in the UAE.

The UAE does not have a unified legal framework that governs whistleblowing and whistleblower protections like in the case of the USA. Therefore, there is an urgent need for comprehensive federal regulations that will apply to all sectors across the entire UAE. Each emirate and economic zone can then model their whistleblowing regulations against the federal law to ensure consistency and uniformity in application. The UAE will also benefit from public awareness and education programs to address the conservative culture that discourages whistleblowing. Most importantly, corporate governance and culture are central to the success of existing laws considering the overreliance on organizations and employees.

The paper provides a robust and analytical discussion of the whistleblowing laws and regulations in the UAE to dissect current practices and implications for future practice.

The increasing size of the elderly population is emerging as a primary catalyst for the escalation of healthcare expenditure, and a sense of urgency is manifest. However, the complexity of the health- and elderly care systems provides challenges in improving system efficiency. Hence, the system-level understanding of the main obstacles to integration care needs further exploration. In order to better integrate health- and elderly care, the study needs to identify the actual misalignments underpinning the issue. This study provides the theoretical foundations for resource misalignments and provides empirical examples of these.

Semi-structured interviews with multiple stakeholders on various hierarchical levels were carried out to create a more complete view of the system and resources deployed in health- and elderly care. The application of user-centered design methods and co-creation with employees have also been crucial to the outcomes of the study.

Results show that health- and elderly care is a large-scale complex system. The overlapping and mutually reinforcing misalignments are: (1) regulation and policy differences, (2) stakeholder quantity and variation, (3) external control of health- and elderly care, (3) decreasing collaboration and (4) communication channels and IT development.

This qualitative study builds on institutional theory and resource integration theory and contributes with empirical descriptions of misalignments in the health- and elderly care system. These descriptions will serve as points of departure for systems design to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of health- and elderly care.

This paper aims to explore the current trends in corruption and investigate the characteristics of corporate gift policies and their role in preventing bribery.

This is a descriptive study based on primary data from a recent sample of Canadian companies’ codes of conduct and secondary data from recent corruption surveys published by non-governmental organisations.

This study shows that 25% of all private and public corruption cases generate financial damages of more than US$1m per case and that 50% of all investigated fraud cases are corruption cases (ACFE, 2022). Furthermore, the Western Europe and EU region is perceived as least corrupt, whereas Sub-Saharan Africa is perceived as the most corrupt region (Transparency International, 2022). However, bribery is fairly common in nine EU countries where 10% or more of public service users bribed public officials to influence their decisions (Transparency International, 2021). Results from primary data show that 9.3% of firms put a total ban on gifts given to governmental officials, whereas 35.2% require a superior’s approval and only 5.5% state a dollar limit for the gift. Results also show that not a single firm prohibits the giving of gifts to non-governmental stakeholders or the receiving of gifts from any type of stakeholder. This paper argues that gifts can bias the recipient’s judgement and improperly influence future business decisions based on the gift’s subjective value, nature and context.

This paper extends previous research by examining the characteristics of corporate gift policies. It also helps organisations improve their gift policies in an effort to reduce corruption.

It is the first paper to investigate the characteristics of corporate gift policies and their role in preventing corruption.

This study aims to explore the key challenges and drawbacks of smart contracts (SCs) and how they impact digital resilience within small and medium enterprises (SMEs). Whilst this type of technology is seen as a step forward in terms of traceability, transparency and immutability to increase digital resilience, we argue that it should be approached with trepidation.

In developing this paper, the authors conduct a systematic literature search using the Scopus database. Through this, we identified 931 relevant articles, of which 30 were used as the focus of this article. Thematic analysis was used as the analytical approach to develop themes and meaning from the data.

In this paper, there is an emphasis on the importance of understanding the potential risks associated with SC implementation, as well as identifying appropriate strategies for mitigating any negative impact. In our findings, we puts forward three key themes, namely legality, security and human error, which we argue are key smart contract challenges that impact SME digital resilience.

In this paper, we propose the notion of “centralised control in decentralised solutions”. This comes from the research highlighting SC weaknesses in digital resilience for SMEs. We argue that there is a need for standards, regulations and legislation to address these issues, advocating, ironically, a centralised approach to decentralised technology.

As cross-cultural mergers and acquisitions (M&A) have learning effects on organisations, assessing their impacts on corporate performance is crucial. This study aims to explore the impact of inter-firm cultural differences on long-term post-M&A stock market performance.

The authors select domestic M&A transactions of Chinese listed companies during 2010–2021 as the sample. Then, the authors use the partial least squares structural equation model (PLS-SEM) to construct the latent variable of cultural differences in four dimensions to explore long-term stock market performance.

Cultural differences first positively and then negatively impact post-M&A performance. Three transmissions mechanisms are identified: investor sentiment, takeover premiums and information disclosure quality. Further analysis reveals that acquirer stock performance improves with higher analyst coverage and non-local shareholders but worsens if there are business affiliations between the acquirer and target firms.

This study can help optimise information disclosure systems in M&A transactions for regulatory authorities and aid investors’ understanding of post-M&A performance changes. Furthermore, it can improve acquirers’ understanding of the risks and opportunities in cross-cultural M&A, thereby facilitating the adaptation of management practices to the im-pacts of cultural differences.

By integrating the theories of resource dependence and transaction costs, this study examines the reversal effect of cultural differences between merging companies on post-M&A performance. The authors use a PLS-SEM to empirically analyse the main effects and reveal three transmission mechanisms.

This study explores practitioners' perspectives on and definitions of sustainable supply chain management (SSCM), which are then compared to academic definitions to identify new implications for researchers, educators and practitioners.

An abductive, explorative and qualitative approach was followed in the form of a review and classification of 31 academic definitions of SSCM as well as 30 interviews with supply chain (SC) practitioners.

The practitioners' answers show a lack of awareness of upstream and downstream challenges as the practitioners' focus on practices within the practitioners' firms, where the economic and environmental dimensions prevail. However, the practitioners highlighted understudied topics in SSCM: human resources policies, leadership for sustainability and ethics.

This research stimulates discussion on how to teach an SSCM course and which directions to follow to ensure that research has an impact on practices. Practitioners' focus on the practitioners' everyday practices confirms that practice-based theories, amongst others, are relevant in the field and that more interdisciplinary research is needed to highlight the contributions of human resource management (HRM) and business ethics to SSCM.

The proposed framework clearly defines the scope of the practices and research (upstream or downstream of the SC or within the firm), which will allow practitioners to contribute to SSCM more holistically.

Educators and researchers have a crucial role to play in clarifying the meaning of SSCM for students who are future practitioners and consumers. Interacting more with practitioners could help.

This research is targeted not only to researchers and practitioners but also educators.

This paper aims to elucidate the responsiveness of China’s judicial system in addressing the challenges of identifying online illegal fund-raising crimes that have emerged in recent years. This study systematically evaluates the efficacy and potential pitfalls of legal guidelines contained in judicial interpretations, such as holistic determination, sampling verification and presumption of the nature of funds. In addition, the research endeavors to propose pertinent recommendations for refining the existing judicial rules.

This research mainly uses a doctrinal methodology, focusing on the principal judicial interpretations formulated by the Supreme People’s Court and other central judicial entities in China. The scope encompasses the realm of online illegal fund-raising crimes as well as other cybercrimes. The analytical framework involves a comprehensive examination of these authoritative judicial documents, coupled with a theoretical and critical analysis of relevant academic materials.

This research underscores that while judicial interpretations serve as an effective legal strategy to confront the challenges posed by online illegal fund-raising crimes, their implementation introduces a nuanced landscape. These legal guidelines, often emanating from diverse judicial departments and tackling specific issues, carry the inherent risk of giving rise to new complexities and fostering inconsistency. Judicial authorities shall exercise prudence in both the formulation and application of these guidelines, ensuring their harmonization with existing legal norms and fundamental legal principles.

This research constitutes a critical and comprehensive examination of judicial interpretations in China pertaining to online illegal fund-raising crimes. It offers valuable insights into the country’s judicial interpretation system and its legal responses to financial crimes. The paper serves as a valuable resource for academics, law enforcement professionals, policymakers, legislators and researchers.

Legal systems govern social behaviour. They attempt to regulate order, collective peace and harmonious developments in society. The external social behaviour that law deals with is also a part of internal human behaviour. This external and internal nature of human behaviour, needs to be consciously studied and interlinked when legal systems desire elements of justice, equality, liberty, fraternity, dignity, integrity and unity for social collectivity. These elements, that legal systems guarantee come from an integration of individual and collective life on matters of social, political, economic etc., of various levels. The individuality and collectivity on these matters and levels are deeply psychological and spirited in sense as human behaviour operates through stimulus from inside to leave external effects outside or vice-versa through a function of thought-emotion-sensation-body complex. Thus, we see, our behaviour gets shaped by a two-way process of inner motivation and outer circumstance, individual and collective dimensions on a given matter and level. At this juncture, a critical study on this two-way relation in human behaviour and a set of unifying values to be identified for progressive intersections seem to be the future of legal systems for achieving greater goals of humanity. Additionally, legal systems that deal with justice are now becoming more than social, economic and political justice as new knowledge is revealing interrelations of spirit-mind-body or thought-emotion-sensation-body complex leaving us to think of new dimensions in justice. Thus, spirituality, as an exercise of human experiment and experience, provides a new scope for legal systems to deal with human and social behaviour to achieve order, peace and development. At this juncture, one even finds another unknown dimension gaining grounds and sinking to integrate or bring holistic responses to human problems and social challenges of the collective is the actual linking of spirituality through or with psychology or vice versa. Law and legalities of the thoughts and norms are interspersed in between these two disciplines. This is indeed a welcome trend as the psychological human and the social collective have become the axis on which every wheel of knowledge is tested and allowed to represent as spokes for inclusive, sustainable and harmonious inter-relational movement of things. One might see, know, feel or even ought to bear this interconnection that very often come in the actual spiritual practices where psychological dimensions emerge leading to wholesome experience of the state of our own individual and socio-collective nature. Among many kinds of spiritual experiences and experiments, two of them stand out for our legal consideration. One, an experience of timeless, space-less and boundless consciousness-awareness beyond life and world with which we witness, observe and understand the movement of things inside life and world, without our participation into them. Two, an experience of consciousness-awareness as power and force operating and animating through thought-emotion-sensation-body complex with our active participation in the movement of life and world. The former experience prepares the ground to remain free from all fetters of self-aggrandizing individualization before wider collectivity and, the latter experience prepares us to re-enter into wider collectivity to contribute with a freed sense of individualization, not imprisoned by its ego-aggrandizement that cuts the individual from the collective. These two spiritual experiences, one of the consciousness-awareness of freedom and, another of the consciousness-awareness with all potentials, when allowed to animate inside the human, it gives crucial understanding of the challenges of life and, pro-activation of solutions for those challenges that are extremely crucial for law and legal systems. A power of understanding the knowledge using spiritual experience of these two states of consciousness-awareness along with rationality, reason and logic, a strength operating through concentration of the energies in body aiding movement of knowledge, a harmony releasing itself through motivating-empathy and mutual-collaboration using knowledge and strength and, finally a near-perfect action operating through strategies, stages and steps in organizing daily life, human capital and all kinds of the systems of the world using knowledge, strength and harmony become our positive tools of empowerment. The combination of these two spiritual experiences of consciousness-awareness is useful to legal systems that look for solutions to human crises using interactive nature of individuality and collectivity on all issues of life, world and society. The chapter attempts to demonstrate that this kind of spirituality and its applied processes thus provide us the clue and strategy to achieve what the human nature and social existences of all kinds all over the world seek and aspire in the form of individual as well as collective peace, joy and compassion. It is also argued that this peace, joy and compassion that is spiritual in nature are in fact the origin and source of inspiration and stimulation for social, political and economic equality, liberty and fraternity in law, and the harmony and perfection of these elements seen as the justice that balances everything. The chapter demonstrates how applied spirituality can be used in law in the sense of law-making, judicial-interpretation, executive-governance, legal profession and finally a grand introduction of spirituality and its values into legal academics and research that are waiting to be liberated from the clutches of mere analytical knowledge of life and world moving towards new enriching powers of radiant collective life and wonderful harmonious world.