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The paper aimed to identify the extent of the implementation of merit criteria in the selection of senior bureaucratic officials in Egypt.

The design of the study is both descriptive in the theoretical part and quantitative in the applied one. The study is based on a literature review and adopts an analytical approach to clarify the related concepts. Besides, an empirical study to investigate the correlations in practice, based on a sample of 380 senior officials to obtain the primary data.

The results of the study reveal that there are no statistically significant differences between the respondents' perspectives towards the implementation of merit criteria in selecting senior officials. This means that merit criteria are not always applied, but sometimes. Moreover, the results showed no statistically significant differences between the respondents' perspectives towards the implementation of merit criteria attributed to gender and age, while there were differences attributed to educational qualification and experience. The study recommended the necessity of adhering to the provisions of the civil service system and reconsidering the procedures of competitive examinations and interviews.

With respect to the Middle East, very limited studies have focused on the implementation of the merit system in recruitment. There is a lack of research and academic articles on this topic (Budhwar and Mellahi, 2016; Afiouni et al., 2014). The study addresses this gap in research and provides several recommendations that may improve the implementation of the merit system in Egypt. Moreover, this study adds to the limited literature on this topic in the Middle East.

The purpose of this study to identify the role of women in political agenda at Azad Jammu Kashmir. The political parties are always considered main gatekeepers to women’s political representation. Existing scholarship highlights the significance of centralized political institutions (parties) with structured set up for the effective representation of women at different levels. However, the functioning of these institutions is greatly influenced by the social and cultural context of a country in which they operate.

This paper mainly analyzes social and cultural practices and those informal ways that operate within the exited democratic government setup and creates serious obstacles for women’s effective political representation at the party level. For this purpose, a qualitative research methodology is used to get the full insight of the issue at hand. The authors conducted 25 in-depth interviews with women members of three different political parties.

The results revealed that both (social context and political structure) have a significant impact on women’s nature and level of participation in the political processes in Azad Jammu and Kashmir.

Prevailing social and political context of Pakistan does not support a truly democratic and centralized political system. Parties are weak entities with the less democratic organizational structure, which ultimately have a negative impact on women’s political representation.

The aim of this study was to measure the readiness of science and mathematics supervisors to utilize technology and online learning platforms for teachers' plans and professional development, during and after the period of the COVID-19 pandemic.

To achieve this aim, the researchers developed a questionnaire comprising of 55 items based on the instruments used in pertinent studies. A mixed-methods research design was employed, whereby a quantitative online survey was supplemented by focus group discussions with selected supervisors. Survey data were subjected to one-way analysis of variance and t-test, while information obtained via focus groups was coded to identify common themes related to the obstacles and challenges supervisors face.

When completing the survey, the supervisors approached proficiency using technology; however, focus group discussions revealed misconceptions related to e-leaning and limitations in their abilities to use technology in schools, as well as obstacles imposed by the structure and management of the educational system. T

These findings indicate that supervisors need support in acquiring the competencies required for integrating technology in education, and that their support to teacher community needs to be grounded in clear and systematic approaches and best educational practices.

These findings indicate that supervisors need support in acquiring the competencies required for integrating technology in education, and that their support to teacher community needs to be grounded in clear and systematic approaches and best educational practices.

Acknowledging fiscal crises as critical junctures for policy makers, this paper investigates how the recent fiscal crisis has affected the paradigmatic approach to the design of an ongoing governmental accounting (GA) reform.

This paper analyses the Italian GA harmonization as a peculiar instance of an ongoing GA reform at the crisis outbreak. A longitudinal narrative analysis of official documents is complemented with semi-structured interviews with key policy makers and participant observations.

The fiscal crisis is found to play an indirect role in the Italian GA reform, which, promoting centralization of competencies in the fields of GA, determines the intensification of the approach adopted before the crisis outbreak.

This paper extends the knowledge on the nature of post-crisis reforms by highlighting how fiscal crises can work as catalysts for paradigmatic approaches to ongoing GA reforms. This paper analyses the designing of a GA reform, whereas the long-term adaptations and outcomes of the reform are not taken into consideration.

The tight link between GA and financial management issues featuring the current paradigmatic approaches to reforms suggests the need to design GA reforms consistently with fiscal and financial management policies.

Whereas the extant literature on the nature of post-crisis reforms analyses the latter as responses to the former, this paper enlarges the knowledge on the topic by focusing on a peculiar instance of a GA reform that was ongoing at the crisis outbreak.

Quality assurance (QA) in open and distance learning (ODL) has always become universal concerns of stakeholders. The quality of ODL has been confronted with challenges in terms of the diversity of inputs, processes, the complex supply chain management of ODL and recent paradigm shift into online learning. Assuring the quality of ODL are daunting tasks at individual, institution and system levels. Completed before the beginning of the COVID-19 outbreak, this study aims to better understand the implementation of QA system in three Asian open universities (OUs), namely University of the Philippines Open University (UPOU), Universitas Terbuka (UT), Indonesia and Allama Iqbal Open University (AIOU), Pakistan.

A qualitative method was employed involving analysis of documents of the three Asian OUs and focus group discussions and interviews with management and staff. Data collected were then analyzed to draw conclusions and possible recommendations.

Findings of this study presented good practices, challenges and rooms for improvement of the QA system in the three Asian OUs. Focusing on students and stakeholders in their QA effort, this study has revealed that quality begins with inner self and is multidimensional. QA is principally viewed as continuous improvement, as mechanism and assessment and as effort at exceeding expectations of students and stakeholders. The recent challenge for QA is to embrace a delicate process of ODL transformation into online digital system. The recent COVID-19 outbreak has further implications and challenged QA implementation in ODL in higher education into the next level of complexity.

This study revealed the diversities in how OUs met the societal needs of their respective stakeholders and addressed the challenges ahead for QA in ODL.

These findings were expected to enhance the understanding of the theory and practice of QA in ODL and to contribute to quality improvement of ODL programs.

Organizations in many domains generate a considerable amount of heterogeneous data every day. Such data can be processed to enhance these organizations’ decisions in real time. However, storing and processing large and varied datasets (known as big data) is challenging to do in real time. In machine learning, streaming feature selection has always been considered a superior technique for selecting the relevant subset features from highly dimensional data and thus reducing learning complexity. In the relevant literature, streaming feature selection refers to the features that arrive consecutively over time; despite a lack of exact figure on the number of features, numbers of instances are well-established. Many scholars in the field have proposed streaming-feature-selection algorithms in attempts to find the proper solution to this problem. This paper presents an exhaustive and methodological introduction of these techniques. This study provides a review of the traditional feature-selection algorithms and then scrutinizes the current algorithms that use streaming feature selection to determine their strengths and weaknesses. The survey also sheds light on the ongoing challenges in big-data research.

The publication oeuvre of a researcher carries great value when academic careers are assessed, and being recognised as a successful candidate is usually equated with being a productive author. Yet, how publications are valued in the context of evaluating careers is so far an understudied topic. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

Through a content analysis of assessment reports in three disciplines – biomedicine, economics and history – this paper analyses how externalities are used to evaluate publication oeuvres. Externalities are defined as features such as reviews and bibliometric indicators, which can be assessed without evaluating the epistemological claims made in the actual text.

All three fields emphasise similar aspects when assessing: authorship, publication prestige, temporality of research, reputation within the field and boundary keeping. Yet, how these facets of quality are evaluated, and the means through which they are assessed differs between disciplines. Moreover, research fields orient themselves according to different temporal horizons, i.e. history looks to the past and economics to the future when research is evaluated.

The complexities involved in the process of evaluating candidates are also reflected in the findings, and while the comparative approach taken effectively highlights domain specific differences it may also hide counter-narratives, and subtle intradisciplinary discussion on quality.

This study offers a novel perspective on how publications are valued when assessing academic careers. Especially striking is how research across different fields is evaluated through different time horizons. This finding is significant in the debate on more overarching and formal systems of research evaluation.

This article addresses recent calls in the literature for advancing our understanding of public affairs consultants and their role conceptions. By testing and further exploring self-perceptions of public affairs consultants the study aims to offer new insight into how consultants define and view their occupational role.

The study draws on a nationwide survey with public affairs consultants in Sweden.

Four main role conceptions were identified (advocate, do-gooder, expert and intermediary). Further, the study tests how personal and professional characteristics correlate with different role conceptions, by viewing professional experience and consultants' selection of clients. Data also suggest that consultants' background in politics does not promote any specific role perception. Finally, the findings also show that how consultants choose clients is a divider in the industry, where some act as passive intermediaries while other take a more active role in their choice of clients.

The findings enhance our understanding of public affairs as a field, and specifically about the modelling of professional roles amongst consultants. The empirical results in this study show how contemporary role typologies needs to be extended to better capture the specificities of consultants' roles in public affairs. By addressing the issue of how consultants choose clients the study engages with the complex debate of whether consultants ought to act as objective or subjective agents and hence join the conversation on ethics in public affairs.

This paper points out that common human resource manageement (HRM) research and practice have overlooked employee's class of origin. Workers' class of origin can be seen as “the elephant in the room” in current HRM, being that it significantly affects organizational decision-making with negative social (increased class-based inequality) and organizational (inefficient allocation of human re-sources) effects.

The paper summarizes the partial, fragmented and multi-disciplinary literature on HRM and employees’ social class of origin.

The paper shows how recruiting, selection, training and development practices systematically reinforce class-based inequality by providing high-class employees with more resources and opportunities compared to low-class employees.

The paper provides sustainable HR practitioners, educators and researchers with recommendations on how to address employees' social class of origin, improving organizational competitive advantage and reducing class-based inequality at the societal level.

The paper focuses on a topic which, in diversity management, is an elephant in the room (i.e. workers social class of origin).

To understand the context surrounding the sustainable supplier management (SSM) process (i.e. selection, development and evaluation), this paper aims to explore institutional logics existing in the Ecuadorian cocoa supply chain (SC). By considering local characteristics and sustainability practices, this study illustrates how competing logic influences SSM.

This paper uses a multiple-case study method for which the authors interviewed different cocoa SC members in Ecuador and used a ground-up approach to analyse the data and reveal singularities influencing sustainability management.

The analysis uncovered two main logics operating within the Ecuadorian cocoa SC SSM process: a commercial logic (e.g. potential for market access, product traceability) and a sustainability logic (e.g. local development and traditions/cultural issues). These logics address market demand requirements; however, some local producers’ needs that impact SSM remains unexplored such as the existence of a regional ancestral culture that poses sustainability as a dominant logic with meaning beyond the triple bottom line. While the two logics have influenced supplier sustainability performance, this paper finds that, of the three SSM sub-processes (selection, development and evaluation), supplier development was the most relevant sub-process receiving attention from SC managers in the studied context.

By understanding the differences in logic and needs, SC managers can better develop strategies for SSM.

The study highlighted in this paper investigated the underexplored topic of the effects that competing logic may have on SSM. This paper focusses on the supplier’s point of view regarding sustainability requirements, addressing a consistent research gap in the literature.