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Despite favourable agro-ecological conditions and being the largest international mango producer, India still struggles to build competence in sustainable mango production and post-harvest. The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the literature on innovation capacity development, and to explore aspects of innovation systems ideas in the analysis of mango production and marketing by small-scale farmers in the South Indian state of Andhra Pradesh.

This paper uses case study research methods to an analysis of the sector ' s recent history combined with an empirical account of systems thinking on integrating technology supply chains and commodity supply chains.

Findings suggest that the case of mango production and post-harvest in the Krishna district is a dismal one and the remedial actions to strengthen mango innovation systems in the district relate to aspects of capacity development to promote upward spiral of learning and innovation, and involve multistakeholder processes to integrate the supply chains of technologyand commodity.

This paper, with its aim to contribute to the literature on innovation capacity development, brings together conventionally distinct bodies of literature on strengthening innovation systems and developing stakeholder capacity. The value of this paper lies on how it addresses technology supply and commodity supply issues in the analysis of competence challenges to strengthening mango innovation systems performance.

This study aims to examine the association between related party transactions and firm value. The study also investigates the impact of several determinants of this relationship as moderating variables.

The paper uses multiple regression models. In the period from 2018 to 2021, a total of 134 non-financial companies listed on the Saudi Stock Exchange were included in the sample, which consisted of 451 firm-year observations.

This paper finds that related party transactions have a significant negative impact on firm value. Moreover, the negative impact of related party transactions on firm value is increased in the presence of changes in the certain presence of certain moderating variables, such as firm size, leverage and return on assets (ROA). The results of the sensitivity analysis concur with the findings of the basic analysis. There is little evidence in the literature regarding related party transactions and their association with the moderating variables considered in this study.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, there have been no studies conducted in Saudi Arabia to date that examine the effect of firm size, leverage and ROA on the association between firm value and related party transactions. Consequently, this paper contributes to the limited literature by expanding the existing research and analyzing the impact of firm size, leverage and ROA on the association between related party transactions and firm value.

This study aims to examine whether corporate social responsibility (CSR) of Islamic banking is delivering financial returns or otherwise enhancing the cost.

The methodology of this study includes the content-analysis approach with aid of the CSR disclosure index, and it deploys the partial least squares regression to examine the CSR-financial performance relationship. Regarding CSR disclosure and financial measures, this study takes the data from the annual reports of Islamic banking of Pakistan, from the year 2003 to 2017.

The results of this study indicate that there is a significant positive relationship exists between CSR and financial performance of Islamic banks, consistent with the instrumental-stakeholder theory. These results imply that Islamic banks, which ensure that CSR is practiced extensively, and aim to positively affect their stakeholders, perform well. Hence, the CSR engagement by Islamic banks yields instrumental returns rather it is a cost.

Islamic banks of Pakistan must work on a better CSR policy, it would enhance the reputation of Islamic banks, on the other hand, it would also increase their capabilities to cope with future reputation damage and negative news, thus it would protect and secure the financial results. In addition to these, investors of Islamic banks must also look at the social and ethical engagements of Islamic banks of Pakistan, while making investment decisions.

In general, there is a dearth of research in the domain of CSR-financial performance regarding Islamic banking. This is one of the studies which contributes to this area.

This paper begins with a challenge to explore the scope and dimensions of corporate social responsibility (CSR) in Islamic banking and design a CSR disclosure index, which may gauge the level of CSR disclosure in Islamic banking.

It adopts a two-fold approach to develop the CSR disclosure index for Islamic banking, such as “identification” and “prioritization.” In the ambit of identification, it relies on the existing literature related to CSR and Islamic banking. However, it undertakes analytical hierarchy process (AHP) method for prioritization through the sample of 104 experts related to Islamic banking of Pakistan.

It concludes the CSR index for Islamic banking contains five dimensions, including 79 items across 20 sub-dimensions. The results of AHP indicate that the CSR dimensions are important for Shariah governance, employee, community, customer and environment. Moreover, within dimensions, the most important sub-dimensions are Shariah compliance, customer service and quality, green investing/banking, customer relationship, training and development and poverty alleviation.

The CSR disclosure index of this study has important implications for academicians, such as it paves the ways for further investigations and practical usage of index to gauge the level CSR disclosure of Islamic banking. Moreover, it delineates the spectrum of responsibilities for managers of Islamic banking under the domain of CSR.

The proposed CSR disclosure index is comprehensive and stresses on the social responsibility of Islamic banking toward stakeholders. In nutshell, this study offers what is expected from the practitioners of Islamic banking in the domain of social responsibility.

This research aims to investigate the direct and indirect (via creative self-efficacy [CSE] and thriving) effects of regulatory focus (RF) on employee intrapreneurship (EI) in Pakistan’s small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).

A time-lagged (six weeks apart) design is used to collect data through self-administered questionnaires. The researchers retrieved 492 usable responses from frontline employees working in SMEs.

The results showed the positive direct and indirect (via CSE and thriving) effects of promotion focus on EI. As expected, the results showed negative direct and indirect effects of prevention focus on intrapreneurship. The follow-up analysis revealed the mediating effect of CSE is stronger for the promotion focus and intrapreneurship, and the mediating effect of thriving is stronger for prevention focus and intrapreneurship.

This study reveals the importance of RF facets as important predictors of EI. The study highlights the importance of intrapreneurship in emerging economies, but expecting such behavior from every employee is a fallacy. Thus, decision-makers in organizations can nurture prevention-focused employees to engage in intrapreneurship.

This is a pioneer study to include RF (promotion focus and prevention focus) in an emerging country – Pakistan – to reveal its significance in EI. It establishes CSE and thriving as mediating mechanisms between RF and EI for the first time to offer new insights into theory and practice.

This study aims at investigating the indirect effect of soft skills on career engagement through the role of psychological capital (PsyCap) in different age groups. The social cognitive theory (SCT) and job demands-resource model (JD-R) were employed to explain the effect of perceived skill mastery on PsyCap and career engagement.

The data were collected from 707 high school students, 150 university students and 165 employees using a three-wave data collection technique. This study measured soft skills, PsyCap and career engagement at different age groups (i.e. high school students, university students and employees). The data were analysed using a moderated-mediation technique.

The results showed that soft skills positively influenced PsyCap and eventually increased career engagement in all age groups. However, the effect was stronger for students (both in high school and university) than employees in the workplaces. Unlike most students, employees related soft skills to performance. Regardless of the effect on performance, students would be more likely than employees to perceive soft skill mastery as a source of efficacy.

First, the education system should direct more attention to developing students' non-cognitive skills. Second, people should understand that their career advancement continues in the workplace context. Organizations can foster employees' soft skills by providing more opportunities to develop new skills.

This study sheds light on the importance of soft skills beyond academic and workplace performance. This study is among the few empirical investigations that reveal career engagement factors across different career development stages.

COVID-19 has occurred in more than 150 countries and causes a huge impact on the health of many people. The main purpose of this work is, COVID-19 has occurred in more than 150 countries and causes a huge impact on the health of many people. The COVID-19 diagnosis is required to detect at the beginning stage and special attention should be given to them. The fastest way to detect the COVID-19 infected patients is detecting through radiology and radiography images. The few early studies describe the particular abnormalities of the infected patients in the chest radiograms. Even though some of the challenges occur in concluding the viral infection traces in X-ray images, the convolutional neural network (CNN) can determine the patterns of data between the normal and infected X-rays that increase the detection rate. Therefore, the researchers are focusing on developing a deep learning-based detection model.

The main intention of this proposal is to develop the enhanced lung segmentation and classification of diagnosing the COVID-19. The main processes of the proposed model are image pre-processing, lung segmentation and deep classification. Initially, the image enhancement is performed by contrast enhancement and filtering approaches. Once the image is pre-processed, the optimal lung segmentation is done by the adaptive fuzzy-based region growing (AFRG) technique, in which the constant function for fusion is optimized by the modified deer hunting optimization algorithm (M-DHOA). Further, a well-performing deep learning algorithm termed adaptive CNN (A-CNN) is adopted for performing the classification, in which the hidden neurons are tuned by the proposed DHOA to enhance the detection accuracy. The simulation results illustrate that the proposed model has more possibilities to increase the COVID-19 testing methods on the publicly available data sets.

From the experimental analysis, the accuracy of the proposed M-DHOA–CNN was 5.84%, 5.23%, 6.25% and 8.33% superior to recurrent neural network, neural networks, support vector machine and K-nearest neighbor, respectively. Thus, the segmentation and classification performance of the developed COVID-19 diagnosis by AFRG and A-CNN has outperformed the existing techniques.

This paper adopts the latest optimization algorithm called M-DHOA to improve the performance of lung segmentation and classification in COVID-19 diagnosis using adaptive K-means with region growing fusion and A-CNN. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first work that uses M-DHOA for improved segmentation and classification steps for increasing the convergence rate of diagnosis.

Green practices are essential for sustainability. However, it is challenging due to the socioeconomic and environmental concerns. Similarly, after the induced SDG-12 and SDG-13 by United Nations, the pressure groups forced manufacturers to consider sustainability. Therefore, this research aims to examine the sustainability through multifaceted green functions in manufacturing is examined.

Data were collected from 293 supply chain professionals of manufacturers from a developing economy. Hypotheses were tested through a quantitative method using partial least squares-structural equation modeling with the help of SmartPLS version 4 to validate the measurement model.

The findings revealed that all six direct hypotheses were supported. However, out of four hypotheses of mediation, one was not supported. Besides, a sequential mediation of green supply chain environmental cooperation and green human resource management was supported. The findings illustrated that green supply chain practices positively influence all used variables.

This research provides practical insight to practitioners to implement green practices in their supply chain networks for social, economic and environmental sustainability and compliance with SDG-12 and SDG-13. The sustainability was validated in a higher-order construct (HOC) (formative), including sequential mediation in the model with the support of resource dependency theory. Therefore, this study adds substantial literature to the existing body of knowledge.

This research provides an interdisciplinary framework by adding knowledge to the Resource Dependency Theory to address Sustainable Development Goals-12 (SDGs) and SDG-13. Likewise, this research provides an extension towards the body of knowledge on the issue, which can be used in future research and critical examinations for cleaner and sustainable production. So far, in Pakistan, no research has looked at the function of these integrated variables in the manufacturing industry with a diligent focus on sustainability as it was validated in a higher-order construct (formative) with one sequential mediation, which makes this research unique.

This paper aims to investigate the level of compliance with, and disclosure of, corporate governance best practice recommendations and the firm- and country-level factors that can explain discernible differences in the level of compliance with, and disclosure of, corporate governance best practice recommendations in a number of Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) countries.

The authors use the widely used content analysis technique to examine the level of compliance with, and disclosure of, corporate governance best practice recommendations in a sample of listed corporations in MENA countries. In addition, the authors use the ordinary least square multiple regression analysis technique to examine the firm- and country-level antecedents of the level of compliance with, and disclosure of, corporate governance best practice recommendations. The findings are generally robust to different types of firm- and country-level factors, alternative measures and potential endogeneity problems.

The findings of this study are two-fold. First, the level of voluntary compliance with, and disclosure of, corporate governance best practice recommendations among MENA listed corporations is low and differs substantially across firms. Second, the evidence suggests that firm- and country-level factors, including religiosity, national governance quality and macroeconomic factors, have a positive and significant impact on voluntary compliance with, and disclosure of, corporate governance best practice recommendations.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this paper is the first to examine both the potential firm- and country-level factors affecting voluntary compliance with, and disclosure of, corporate governance best practice recommendations among MENA listed corporations from a neo-institutional theoretical perspective. The results of our study provide regulators and policymakers with the impetus to encourage greater efforts towards pursuing reforms that seek to improve national governance quality, economic environment and positive religious practices.

Despite the rather adequate physical and human resources available to Iranian state-owned enterprises (SOEs), they have proved not only unproductive and unprofitable but also corrupt in cases due to their corporate governance (CG) systems. This study aims to identify the most important challenges faced within designing, implementing and operating such systems in Iranian SOEs.

A judgmental sampling technique was adopted for the purposes of the present qualitative study to select a heterogeneous group of interviewees in terms of experience and expert knowledge in CG and SOEs. Using 28 semi-structured interviews and the thematic analysis methodology within an exploratory approach, the themes/challenges were extracted from the data thus collected that were subsequently analyzed and explicated.

The 16 challenges derived from the data set were subsequently classified into the four categories of “general assembly deficiencies”, “contextual issues of ownership”, “board deficiencies” and “external managerial constraints”.

This study aims to provide insights into policy-making systems at both national and international levels to gain a better understanding of the contextual factors that could be exploited toward developing and/or reforming CG codes. To improve SOEs, this study also suggests four main solutions to the CG challenges faced within Iran and similar centralized economic planning systems.

The literature on the topic indicates that while a few theoretical and empirical studies have been conducted on CG of SOEs, no study has ever been conducted on similar Iranian cases. The present study provides ample empirical evidence from the CG systems in a state-controlled and centralized economic system to offer new insights into the comparative CG, especially in a developing country like Iran, where the government is the major player in the economy.