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This paper focuses on social innovation dynamics in extreme contexts where institutional volatility is deeply rooted and enduring. In other words, the authors focus their discussion on the challenges that social innovators are facing in their endeavor of solving wicked social problems within an extreme institutional environment. This research is guided by the following question: How does an extreme institutional environment influence social innovation processes?

This qualitative research builds on the unique case of the Palestinian non-governmental organization (NGO) sector, a rarely studied context in organizational studies. The authors combine archival sources with 24 semi-structured interviews with Palestinian NGOs.

The authors theorize three barriers that hinder social innovation in such contexts: institutional trap, effectiveness trap and sustainability trap. The authors also theorize five mechanisms through which these barriers influence each other dynamically: mingling, surviving, undermining, binding and reinforcing. Taken together, these barriers and mechanisms shed light on social innovation processes taking place within extreme institutional environments.

The main limitation of this study is the methodological design, based on an extreme single case-study which, on a bunch of features, is quite unique in the world. The authors argue that the results are all the same transferable to other relatively similar contexts.

By theorizing the institutional barriers to social innovation in an extreme institutional context, the research thus sheds light on how social innovation could be sustained and stimulated in Palestine and other contexts that face similar institutional challenges.

From an engaged scholarship perspective, studying Palestine cannot be more relevant than today considering the turmoil in which Palestinians are. The research thus provides a deeper understanding of organizational and institutional dynamics with crucial social repercussions.

The social innovation literature has overemphasized success stories to the detriment of the struggles that hinder social innovations in extreme institutional environments. By focusing on the barriers that social innovators experience in these contexts, the authors provide novel empirical insight. Furthermore, this study enriches the understanding of the institutional dynamics of social innovations by proposing a process model that elucidates how an extreme institutional context can influence social innovations.

This paper aims to study the impact of micro-level socio-economic, demographic and geographical factors on the likelihood of self-employment entry of young adults in Palestine and filling a gap in the analysis of determinants of self-employment for young adults in Palestine.

The research design is based on a multinomial logistic (MNL) model and on the testing of seven hypotheses deriving from the review of the theoretical and empirical literature, using a micro-level longitudinal data set from the Palestinian Labour Force Surveys (PLFS) between 2009 and 2016. In the analysis, the dependent variable (employment status) is a discrete variable that takes four unordered and independent outcomes: wage employee, self-employed, employer and unpaid family member.

This study has strong evidence that the likelihood of self-employment increases with age. However, results are inconsistent with the well-known curvilinear relationship between age and self-employment. Regarding the role of gender, results show that young men are more likely to become self-employed than young women. Results indicate that there is a significant and negative impact of an increasing level of education on self-employment entry for both youth and the whole population. On the opposite, training after graduation increases the likelihood of self-employment entry for youth with high education level. Besides, this paper finds that young workers living in urban areas have more likelihood to enter self-employment than those in rural areas and young workers in Gaza have more likelihood to enter self-employment than their counterparts in West Bank.

First, in both West Bank and Gaza, young women are less inclined to actively engage in self-employment, which confirms structural inequalities between men and women. Therefore, this study calls for social protection programmes and for national programmes that would promote and develop women’s self-employment. Second, because this paper finds that youth self-employment is more an opportunity-driven phenomenon than a necessity-driven one, this study calls for programmes that provide youth with small business grants and training on entrepreneurship and business models.

Insights are valuable as both government institutions and universities and entrepreneurial startups can benefit from knowing which factors contribute to the self-employment likelihood of youth in Palestine and use the policy recommendations to develop capacity-building programmes to provide the youth and women with skills and competencies which enable them to turn to self-employment.

This paper examines the level and structure of the wage inequality between nonrefugee and refugee workers in Palestine and the extent to which such wage gap reflects any marginalization and discrimination against refugees. It also investigates how the disparities in distribution to individual worker characteristics contribute to the wage inequality in Palestine.

The authors use both Oaxaca and Blinder (OB) (Oaxaca, 1973 and Blinder, 1973) and Fortin et al. (2011) unconditional quantile decomposition approaches to measure the size of the wage gap along with the wage distribution and to decompose the wage differences into productivity (i.e. explained or the composition effects) and wage structure effects (i.e. unexplained or discrimination effects).

Results indicate that most of the wage gap between refugees and nonrefugees is attributed to the wage structure effect (possibly explained by discrimination) against refugees in the Palestinian labor market. The wage gap between refugees and nonrefugees is not uniform throughout the wage distribution and supports the “sticky floor effect.”

This work introduces important policy implications for the policymakers in the Palestinian labor market. It reveals the economic and social factors, individual worker characteristics as well as labor market characteristics contribute to the wage inequality in Palestine.

This research reveals a crucial social challenge in the Palestinian society, represented by the wage discrimination against refugees in Palestine. This is despite the denial of such discrimination from official bodies, local institutions and many other policymakers. It also captures gender inequality between men and women.

This is the first empirical work in Palestine that contends with a very sensitive issue in the Palestinian society, that is, the discrimination against refugees in the Palestinian labor market. Most of the existing studies have approached this issue from a humanitarian view in order to show the deterioration of social and economic situations in the refugee camps.

Global lockdowns and restrictions linked to the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic have affected food environments and consumption patterns. Conflict-affected countries are disproportionately affected from economic and food security perspectives. In this regard, the Palestinian territories (namely West Bank and Gaza Strip), which face a number of issues such as Israeli military and economic control, overcrowded cities and refugee camps (especially in Gaza Strip), rising poverty and food insecurity, are an especially interesting case study. Accordingly, the purpose of this paper is to analyze the effects of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic on the selection and intake of foods and drinks, as well as consumer behavior and attitude toward food in the Palestinian territories.

The paper draws upon an online survey in the Palestinian territories administered in Arabic through the Survey Monkey platform from September 15 to October 10, 2020, with 322 adults. The survey findings were analyzed using descriptive statistics and several nonparametric tests. Particularly, the U-Mann Whitney test was used in dichotomous, categorical independent variables (e.g. gender), while the Kruskal–Wallis test was run to analyze multi-choice responses (e.g. occupation).

The results reveal that food attitudes and consumer behavior towards food have been widely affected. First, they reveal that Palestinians try to have healthier diets but ate more between meals (e.g. snacks). Second, the pandemic transformed respondents' shopping behavior and induced panic buying, negatively affecting food affordability due to increased prices of some foods (e.g. fruits and vegetables). Some food behaviors were shaped by negative psychological determinants (e.g. depression and anxiety). The pandemic effects are moderated by different sociodemographics (age, education and income). COVID-19 negatively affected food security but also opened a “window of opportunity” to trigger the transition towards more sustainable diets.

The paper results show that the eventual effects of COVID-19 will most likely vary from country to country, based not only on the epidemiological circumstances but also, among other factors, on the baseline socioeconomic situation and shock resilience. The findings contribute to the clarification and critical analysis of the impacts of COVID-19 on food behaviors in the Palestinian territories, which would have several policy implications.

In the modern manufacturing environment, it is imperative to apply the manufacturing concepts of lean, agile, resilient and green, collectively known as LARG manufacturing, to achieve excellence in which lean manufacturing eliminates wastes; agile manufacturing makes processes fast, efficient and flexible; resilient paradigm deals with countering the uncertainty while green manufacturing improves environmental performance. The objective of this study is to develop an integration framework that synergizes LARG manufacturing with Industry 4.0.

Through a literature review, the authors have explored the possibility of collaboration between constituents of lean, agile, resilient and green manufacturing with the facets of Industry 4.0.

The authors have developed a comprehensive integration framework that has been divided into 11 phases and 31 steps in which the various Industry 4.0 facets have supplemented the lean, agile, resilient and green paradigms.

This investigation and adoption of technologically intensive automation shall provide clarity to practitioners regarding the synergy of LARG manufacturing & Industry 4.0, so that fast and efficient manufacturing processes can be achieved.

The framework provides detailed insight towards implementation of LARG practices in a manufacturing organization in coalescence with Industry 4.0 practices.