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Islamic science was originally viewed as mere translator and transmitter of Greek, Indian and pre‐Islamic Persian science. Recent research has shifted our understanding of Islam's contribution to what is now called “the exact sciences.” We now know that Islamic science “was even richer and more profound than we had previously thought.” A substantial amount of genuine science was done in Islam, it predated similar discoveries in the West, and it also impacted upon the Renaissance. For example, in the late 1950apos;s, E. S. Kennedy and his students at the American University of Beirut discovered an important work of a fourteenth century Muslim astronomer by the name of Ibn al‐Shatir. This discovery showed that Ibn al‐Shatir's astronomical inventions were the same type of mechanism used by Copernicus a few centuries later,” and may have played a key role in the Copernican revolution. Consequently, an unprecedented acceleration of research into Islamic science started from the 1950s onwards. Recently, historian of Islamic science George Saliba was able to show that one of Copernicus's Muslim contemporaries — Kliafri — was a “brilliant astronomer, whose ability to work with the mathematics of his time is unsurpassed, including that of Copernicus,” and that he could use mathematics much more fluently, and much more competently, than Copernicus could do.

The components of the ecosystems differ from one ecosystem to another. The purpose of this paper is to identify the components of entrepreneurial ecosystem and investigate its role in entrepreneurship development in the Sudanese manufacturing sector.

The current study is explanatory in nature and designed to be cross-sectional, using a quantitative approach. Questionnaires were used to collect data from a stratified sample, ten industrial subsectors drawn from the total population of the study. It includes 106 manufacturing firms, all located in Khartoum State. Data are analyzed with help of exploratory factor analysis and multiple regression model. .

Among the major findings is that the relationship between the entrepreneurial ecosystem and entrepreneurship development was found to be significant in six factors, namely: finance, government policy, human capital, infrastructure, research and development and innovation and regulatory framework, whereas it was insignificant in three factors, namely; culture, market and support services. These former factors explain 65.8% of the variation in entrepreneurship development.

The cross-sectional nature of the study entails that its conclusions be limited to relevant parties.

In conclusion, a broad process to develop entrepreneurship ecosystem initiatives is proposed alongside the crucial roles that governments and other stakeholders should play.

This paper provides the most influential factors in the entrepreneurial ecosystem in Sudan. The study will be among the first studies that focuses on evaluating the existing entrepreneurial ecosystem in Sudan, given that relatively little systematic efforts have been devoted to examine the relationship between ecosystem and entrepreneurship development in Sudan.

This paper aims to investigate the effects of service quality and perceived price (monetary and behavioural price) on the revisit intention of patients to hospitals, as well as the mediating role of perceived price on the relationship between service quality and revisit intention.

This paper distributes questionnaires to outpatients in three major cities in Malaysia, namely, Penang, Melaka and Johor. Patients who were in the foyer, dispensary area and waiting area were intercepted where their responses were sought. The responses obtained from 400 patients were analysed using the structural equation modelling technique. Besides analysing the path coefficients, this study has examined the common method variance, bias and indirect effects of the relationships.

The results suggest that patients pay more attention to certain values in their search for the best health-care service and subsequently move on to new values. Pricing is an effective strategy to promote favourable behavioural intentions amongst patients. Better service quality is reflected in the reasonableness of monetary costs incurred by patients in acquiring health-care services. Patients who received poor services will be more likely to compare such services to the medical costs incurred to ascertain the worthiness of the amount paid. In addition, service quality also influences how patients perceive spending their time and efforts (waiting for nurses and physicians, as well as queueing in hospitals) as worthy and vice-versa. Their revisit intention will also be affected by the extent of which they invest their time, energy and efforts to search for relevant information.

The hospitals which desire to charge additional fees should enhance their service quality to reflect price equity. This is imperative in view of the pricing structure which can be relatively complex in subsequent follow-up treatments that may affect the decision of patients on the sources of health-care services.

Given the inevitable increase in medical fees, the perceived price can be a key determinant to the overall judgement patients had in terms of the health-care services received and the time and efforts sacrificed. However, the importance of monetary price and the behavioural price is still relatively unstudied, particularly their influence on revisit intention in the health-care setting.

Taking a career capital approach, this paper addresses the issue of “pipeline block” frequently experienced by women seeking career advancement. Focusing on the Arab Middle East (AME) region, the authors take a contextually relevant multi-level approach to examine these issues.

The study uses a qualitative, interview-based approach, drawing on data obtained from women leaders from the AME region. Drawing on Bourdieu's capital-field-habitus framework, we explore how women in the AME developed career capital in particular organisational fields.

The findings show the importance of human and social capital, as well as the influence of habitus for women's career advancement in specific fields. The study also highlights the unique contribution of cultural capital in helping women to navigate organisational fields where it is necessary to both challenge, and conform to, traditional norms.

Limitations of the study include assumptions of homogeneity across countries of the AME, whereas differences are known to exist. Future research should consider these contextual differences, and also include a study of women who were not successful in gaining career advancement.

The study’s multi-level approach highlights practical implications for women, organisations and society. For organisations, the authors propose some context-relevant coaching strategies that can help women to attain leadership positions.

The study’s multi-level approach highlights practical implications for women, organisations,and society. Focusing on organisations, the authors propose some context-relevant coaching strategies that can help women to attain advancement in their careers.

The study demonstrates originality in the findings by showing how women overcome the pipeline block in relation to their career advancement. The use of the Bourdieusian framework, an in-depth qualitative approach, and the AME context also add to the study's originality.

The problem of design changes in the construction industry is common worldwide, and the Jordanian market is no exception. The purpose of this paper is to identify the factors causing design changes in construction projects in Jordan in both the public and private sectors. Furthermore, this research will examine the effect of these factors on project's performance during the construction phase.

This research commences by identifying the factors causing design changes in construction projects worldwide through an intensive literature review. The identified factors were then filtered to those applicable to the Jordanian construction market based on the results obtained from a questionnaire survey and real case construction projects. In total, 252 professionals from the Jordanian construction industry and 10 completed and/or ongoing construction projects in different parts of Jordan were compared.

The results find that the top major factors affecting design changes are owner's requirements; design errors and omissions and value engineering. The research also studies and documents the impacts of design changes on project cost, schedule and quality.

The results obtained from this research will assist the construction professionals representing owners, consultants and contractors in applying control measures to minimize the occurrence of the identified factors causing design changes and to mitigate their sever impacts on projects in terms of cost, schedule and quality.

The purpose of this paper is to identify and investigate the awareness level of non-Muslim consumers to purchasing halal food products. Research on the non-Muslim consumers’ awareness towards purchasing halal food products is poorly understood so far in South Africa.

An exploratory case study was adopted to explore new points of views about a particular issue, which is unknown, or not much known about it, to formulate ideas or propositions. Semi-structured interviews were the major primary data collection method. Four non-Muslim consumers from different settings purposively were selected. Thematic data analysis procedures were used.

The study found that non-Muslim consumers in Cape Town have a positive awareness of halal food, including its benefits and the production processes involved in producing it. The study also concluded that halal is not merely a commercial name using as a trademark in the global market. However, halal has several dimensions; primarily, for non-Muslim consumers, it is a mark of health and hygiene. With regard to psychological aspect, halal is considered as a sign of trust, comfortable and safe. It gives consumers a peace of mind when they consume food products that carry the halal label.

Limitations in the study should be acknowledged. The main limitation of the study is that a small sample size was selected for this study. Another limitation is that the study was only conducted in the city of Cape Town.

This is the first qualitative study of its kind that presents an empirical evidence about the awareness of the non-Muslim consumers towards purchasing halal food products in South Africa, in general, and in Cape Town, in particular.

This paper aims to offer a review of the concept of wasta, as a form of social capital in Arab societies. Furthermore, this paper seeks to elucidate the main implications of the use of wasta among human resource management (HRM) practices on the workplace environment and the overall performance of institutions.

The authors embraced a qualitative approach in this paper. A total of 27 semi-structured interviews were conducted with HR officials from different levels in a number of Jordanian public organizations.

The results obtained indicate that wasta has negative consequences on the overall performance of organizations, through the influence it exerts on employee motivation, morale and job satisfaction, frustration, workplace diversity, turnover, brain drain, as well as its effect on the image and reputation of the individuals and organizations alike.

In this paper, the authors attempted to illustrate the concept of wasta as a form of social capital and to analyze its links with the features of the Jordanian culture through two of Hofstede’s dimensions. Furthermore, this paper is based both on the available literature and on data obtained through the semi-structured interviews. The findings through this process not only corroborate what we already know in the literature but they also generate an understanding of the hidden mechanisms that link the different implications of wasta together, creating the actual known consequences of this practice.

Many scholars of business ethics have emphasised for new research theories and methods that make a substantial contribution to improving business ethical practices and standards globally. This study aims to explore the impact of workplace spirituality and its four dimensions-meaningful at work, transcendence, mindfulness and compassion over the nepotism-favouritism in ASEAN Region. This study also contributes to literature by investigating role of gender over the association of workplace spirituality, and its dimensions with nepotism-favouritism.

Data was collected through self-administered questionnaires from employees of the service sector working in Singapore, Malaysia and Myanmar. SPSS and SmartPLS software were used for data analysis.

The findings of this study suggest that there is significant negative impact of workplace spirituality on the nepotism-favouritism. Four dimensions-meaningful at work, transcendence, mindfulness and compassion has significantly negative influence on nepotism/favouritism. With change of gender, impact of workplace spirituality and its three dimensions-meaningful at work, compassion and transcendence exhibit varying influence on the nepotism-favouritism, which indicates presence of moderating effect. This study concludes with no moderating impact of gender over the association of mindfulness and nepotism-favouritism.

This study presents empirical evidence from ASEAN region, which is useful for practitioners to abolish corruption in the context of nepotism-favouritism.

The aim of this study is to explore employees’ perceptions of the role of human resources (HR) departments in Jordanian organisations and the reasons behind these perceptions.

Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 23 employees who work at different organisations in various industrial sectors in Jordan.

Employees perceive HR roles as: providing transactional services (traditional); working as business partners to facilitate other departments’ roles (limited). Perceptions of HR professionals and the role of HR departments were generally negative, due to: societal-cultural norms and stereotypes of HR departments and HR professionals; the role of Wasta (a localised form of favouritism) in affecting HR practices; employees’ personal experiences with HR departments and HR professionals at their workplace; and the non-availability of human resources management (HRM) degrees in Jordan.

Limited research has explored varying perceptions about HR departments and their impacts on business contexts in emerging markets, including Jordan. This research is unique as it identifies the reasons behind common misconceptions of HR roles in Jordanian organisations. It extends beyond existing literature by integrating employees’ perceptions of the role of the HR departments to understand the consequences for HR practices’ operational effectiveness. It also pioneers consideration of societal culture in shaping these perceptions, which helps us build theories for future testing and generalisation purposes in other contexts with cultural commonalities. This study also highlights the current state of HRM development in Jordan, which helps in setting the agenda for future research in the country and the Middle East and North Africa region.