Search results

This chapter presents a spiritual or wisdom-based approach to development, its rationale, conceptualization, methods and examples of applications. The politics of being proposes that societies explicitly make the fulfillment (‘being’) of all its members – humans and non-humans – their main goal, which should guide the development and implementation of public policies. It stands in opposition to the current development paradigm focused on economic growth or ‘having’, and rooted in a set of modern western values – individualism, materialism, reductionism, anthropocentrism, etc. By nourishing our relational nature, the politics of being can address the root causes of the meta crisis the world is facing, reconciling human flourishing with sustainability and supporting the cultural evolution that is needed. It proposes a dialogue between wisdom and science, the two main areas of knowledge, to guide its design and implementation. It conceptualizes ‘being’ as the actualization of our truest ‘being’ and our highest ‘being’. This means that societies should provide the right conditions for their human members to express themselves and fulfil their healthy aspirations, as well as to develop human virtues and qualities. Wisdom traditions and spiritual teachings offer relevant insights into the nature of human fulfilment and the process of spiritual evolution that can be applied to societies. They emphasize the cultivation of spiritual values and qualities such as love, peace, happiness, life, mindfulness, mystery and the understanding of interconnectedness. In recent decades, these qualities have become areas of scientific research and been at the core of social change and development initiatives. Together they can serve as the foundations of the politics of being and allow to identify actionable public policy agendas in many sectors mainly based on existing examples.

The study aims to explore ‘motivational climate', which designs the recurring patterns associated with employees' attitudes, behaviour, and feelings. If organizations successfully adopt a motivational climate, such climate influences the performance and behavior of employees to a great extent. Responsible leadership plays a constructive role in injecting a motivational climate in an organization to ensure information flow. In a motivational climate, top management or leaders reward their employees for individual progress, improvement and mastery. Knowledge sharing is supported in a mastery climate because such a climate can reduce the motive of knowledge hiding and instead further help in stimulating creativity.

Study was to scrutinize a moderated-mediation model, a quantitative hypothetic deductive approach to verify the hypotheses of the study. The data were gathered from employees and supervisors of advertising agencies and marketing departments in metropolitan cities of Punjab, Pakistan. Such firms and departments are considered because they offer a great opportunity to relevant variables and their relations. These organizations and departments are the most creativity-seeking domains and involve frequent interactions (for instance, regular meetings) between leaders with their employees and among peers. Data were primarily gathered from managerial employees performing their duties in the areas mentioned above.

Current study reveals that RL has a positive and significant relation with employee creative behaviour. Increasing RL characteristics can ultimately boost employee performance in the creativity domain. Being a responsible leader becomes mandatory for leaders to foster employee creativity to maintain the sustainability of an organization. It is confirmed from the results that responsible leadership articulates the mind thinking of employees, which creates an open environment of information while persuading creative and similar behaviour.

The current research investigates how responsible leadership can efficiently leverage the stakeholder approach in influencing employees through a knowledge-based pathway to boost their creative behaviour. The current study tends to uncover the mediating effect of the basic construct of knowledge management, which is knowledge sharing. Knowledge sharing enables employees to exchange their information while creating mutual understanding, which helps in the smooth flow of knowledge within the organization; this flow enriches employees to think openly in a creative and appreciative environment.

The choice of crops to produce at a location depends to a large degree on the climate. As the climate changes and food demand evolves, farmers may need to produce a different mix of crops. This study assesses how much cropland may be subject to such upheavals at the global scale, and then focuses on China as a case study to examine how spatial heterogeneity informs different contexts for adaptation within a country.

A global agricultural economic model is linked to a cropland allocation algorithm to generate maps of cropland distribution under historical and future conditions. The mix of crops at each location is examined to determine whether it is likely to experience a major shift.

Two-thirds of rainfed cropland and half of irrigated cropland are likely to experience substantial upheaval of some kind.

This analysis helps establish a global context for the local changes that producers might face under future climate and socioeconomic changes. The scale of the challenge means that the agricultural sector needs to prepare for these widespread and diverse upheavals.

The negative influence of gamification on online communities has received little attention in the available literature. The study examines the adverse effects of gamification during engaging in online communities.

Gap-spotting methods were used to develop the research questions, followed by model development using the social exchange and social-network theories. Data were collected from 429 samples. The study applied partial least squares structural equation modeling to test the research hypotheses followed by ANN application.

The study identified five factors related to gamification that have a significant adverse effect on the mental and emotional well-being of the users. Furthermore, the results of PLS-SEM were then compared through an artificial neural network (ANN) analytic process, revealing consistency for the model. This research presents a theoretical contribution by providing critical insights into online gamers' mental and emotional health. It implies that gamification can even bring mental and emotional disturbance. The resulting situation might lead to undesirable social consequences.

The result highlights the managerial and social relevance from the perspective of a developing country. As respondents are becoming more engrossed in online gaming, managers and decision-makers need to take preventive measures to overcome the dark side of online gaming.

The present study shows that the dark side of gamification has some adverse effects on human mental and emotional health. The study's findings can be used to improve gamification strategies while engaging online communities.

Web users rely heavily on online content make decisions without assessing the veracity of the content. The online content comprising text, image, video or audio may be tampered with to influence public opinion. Since the consumers of online information (misinformation) tend to trust the content when the image(s) supplement the text, image manipulation software is increasingly being used to forge the images. To address the crucial problem of image manipulation, this study focusses on developing a deep-learning-based image forgery detection framework.

The proposed deep-learning-based framework aims to detect images forged using copy-move and splicing techniques. The image transformation technique aids the identification of relevant features for the network to train effectively. After that, the pre-trained customized convolutional neural network is used to train on the public benchmark datasets, and the performance is evaluated on the test dataset using various parameters.

The comparative analysis of image transformation techniques and experiments conducted on benchmark datasets from a variety of socio-cultural domains establishes the effectiveness and viability of the proposed framework. These findings affirm the potential applicability of proposed framework in real-time image forgery detection.

This study bears implications for several important aspects of research on image forgery detection. First this research adds to recent discussion on feature extraction and learning for image forgery detection. While prior research on image forgery detection, hand-crafted the features, the proposed solution contributes to stream of literature that automatically learns the features and classify the images. Second, this research contributes to ongoing effort in curtailing the spread of misinformation using images. The extant literature on spread of misinformation has prominently focussed on textual data shared over social media platforms. The study addresses the call for greater emphasis on the development of robust image transformation techniques.

This study carries important practical implications for various domains such as forensic sciences, media and journalism where image data is increasingly being used to make inferences. The integration of image forgery detection tools can be helpful in determining the credibility of the article or post before it is shared over the Internet. The content shared over the Internet by the users has become an important component of news reporting. The framework proposed in this paper can be further extended and trained on more annotated real-world data so as to function as a tool for fact-checkers.

In the current scenario wherein most of the image forgery detection studies attempt to assess whether the image is real or forged in an offline mode, it is crucial to identify any trending or potential forged image as early as possible. By learning from historical data, the proposed framework can aid in early prediction of forged images to detect the newly emerging forged images even before they occur. In summary, the proposed framework has a potential to mitigate physical spreading and psychological impact of forged images on social media.

This study focusses on copy-move and splicing techniques while integrating transfer learning concepts to classify forged images with high accuracy. The synergistic use of hitherto little explored image transformation techniques and customized convolutional neural network helps design a robust image forgery detection framework. Experiments and findings establish that the proposed framework accurately classifies forged images, thus mitigating the negative socio-cultural spread of misinformation.

The present work aimed to present the perception of Tunisian professionals towards companies engaged in social responsibility practices and describe the tax evasion strategies of socially responsible Tunisian companies following the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic (COVID-19) shock.

A survey was sent to 119 Tunisian tax administration auditors. Data analysis methods principal component analysis (PCA) and regression analysis were used. The data were collected through a questionnaire after the general containment of Tunisia from September 2020 to February 2021. These quantitative data were analysed using processing software (STATA).

Professionals of the tax authorities, particularly those in charge of the audit mission, aim for corporate profitability from the perspective of stakeholders that seek to integrate ethics and social responsibility into companies and consider employee morale a top priority. The results show that highly ethical and socially responsible professionals are far from practising aggressive strategies. Thus, an auditor from the tax administration is far from engaging in social responsibility to justify fraudulent acts. During the COVID-19 period, the role of these professionals was to prevent and detect fraud in the tax sector to fight corruption and investigate taxes based on sound regulations.

The results are consistent with optimal taxation theory, which postulates that a tax system should be chosen to maximise a social welfare function subject to a set of constraints. Professionals seek to make taxation much simpler for taxpayers by providing advice and consultation to manage tax obligations. The minimisation of tax or the play of tax values requires expertise in the field to respect legal constraints. Therefore, these professionals play a crucial role in tax collection, as the professionals' advice and suggestions can influence taxpayers' decision-making.

In recent years, academic researchers, policy makers and the public have become increasingly interested in corporate tax evasion behaviour. At the same time, companies are under increasing pressure to integrate CSR into the companies' decision-making processes, which has led to increased academic interest in CSR. Opportunistic tax minimisation reduces state resources and funds needed for government programmes to improve the social welfare of the entire community. This study represents an overriding concern not only for legal and tax authorities and companies, but also for shareholders and stakeholders.

The authors' study contributes to the existing literature by determining the state of play on corporate social responsibility (CSR) practices amongst Tunisian tax authorities' professionals. In Tunisia, an executive of the tax authorities in charge of the verification mission is required to verify the proper application of the accounting and tax legislation in force, follow up on tax control operations on declared taxes and validate the sincerity of the accounts. This study focussed on the tax evasion of companies engaged in social responsibility practices according to the judgements of Tunisian tax authorities' auditors during the global COVID-19 pandemic.

Frequently the universities' Placement Service is based on the student's hard profile at the expense of soft traits. On the other side, the “person–organization fit” axiom suggests firms are looking for profiles with specific soft skills to face the increasing level of environmental turbulence. This research aims to understand if high-resilience students also have high academic achievements and how the three components of resilience (emotional intelligence, positive thinking, planfulness) can have different impact on individual performances.

The research was conducted on students enrolled on different courses of studies and years in an Economics and Law faculty. A questionnaire was administered during the first exam session (ante-Covid) and the second and third exam sessions (post-Covid). This questionnaire consists of 84 questions related to planfulness, emotional intelligence and positive thinking, whose combination can be considered a measure of resilience. In fact, the Principal Component Analysis (PCA) was carried to identify these three new variables (the components) based on the 84 initial ones. Finally, an ordered logit model was implemented to verify whether, and in what direction, planfulness, emotional intelligence, positive thinking and Covid 19 (the independent variables) affected the students' performance (the dependent one).

While planfulness positively affected academic performance, emotional intelligence affected it negatively. The impact of positive thinking and Covid was not significant, and thus what emerged from the preliminary analysis of the grades is not confirmed.

This is a case study of a university experience that is paying great care in preparing students to satisfy the firms' work demands. To confirm and refine results the sample will be expanded to other faculties and other life/soft skills will be investigated.

This soft trait approach—that studies how various measures of soft skills are related to course grades—has a two-fold significance by crafting universities' placement activities and facilitating firms' onboarding.

This is a case study of a university experience; a university that is paying great attention to preparing students ready to satisfy the firms' work demands but also citizens capable of supporting the growth of their nation and society in general.

The research can be considered a first step towards the inclusion of the formal evaluation of the students' life skills in their academic path, creating a link with their achievements.