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This study aims to devise policies in implementing cash waqf system of Baitul Maal wat Tamwil (BMT) in Indonesia, enabling the BMT to optimize its commercial and social activities to better achieve outreach, sustainability and welfare impact.

This study uses the strategic assumption surfacing and testing (SAST) method, with three groups of knowledgeable respondents, including expert, BMT practitioner and regulator to formulate important and certain policies.

The results show that four types of policies are required to improve cash waqf system of BMT, including 12 internal strategic policies, 15 internal operational policies, 15 external strategic policies and 9 external operational policies, which were found to be within a “certain planning region.” All of these policies have been agreed significantly by each group of respondents, as well as by all respondents combined. The most important-certain policies include Shiddiq, Amanah and professional Nazir, inculcate Islamic values to BMT employees and members, standard operating procedure and standard operating management of cash waqf management, technical assistance for Nazir to manage cash waqf and IT systems for BMT-cash waqf administration.

The qualitative method used has its limitations, which could be improved by incorporating other methods. Moreover, the case and respondents are all Indonesian, so that the results are possibly only applicable to BMTs in Indonesia.

BMTs could adopt these policies in implementing their cash waqf management optimally.

The management of cash waqf by BMT could help improve the social activities of the Baitul Maal directly from social cash waqf and indirectly from productive cash waqf.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study using SAST method to determine policies needed by the BMT to upgrade its cash waqf management producing more social programs for the society.

The consequences of human social irresponsibility urge socially responsible reactions. The authors expose the consequences of socially irresponsible behaviour and state possible requisitely holistic tools to eliminate organisations’ dangerous and socially irresponsible behaviour. This paper aims to examine how the viable system model (the VSM) used as a diagnostic tool can help organisations support socially responsible behaviour.

Given the variety of systems methodologies, the authors selected the VSM as a key methodological tool of Organizational Cybernetics. A case-study approach is used to demonstrate the power of the VSM as a diagnostic tool.

Humans need to replace recklessness and selfishness by faster re-orientation towards a socially responsible society. By following the cybernetic circle of the preparation and implementation of the management process and practising social responsibility via the VSM, organisations can conduct socially responsible business operations for a socially responsible society. Respecting the pluralist nature of social responsibility and a limited framework of the VSM, the VSM analysis needs to be supported by interpretive systems approaches, such as Strategic Assumptions Surfacing and Testing (SAST).

The presented study’s limitation is the case study of a selected organisation from Europe. The discussion could be relevant to each organisation, which is observed as a viable system. The insights gained with this case study can be broadened by empirical research involving diverse organisations from various countries.

Research results indicate socially irresponsible behaviours of the researched organisation and possible ways of overcoming them. The cybernetic circle of the preparation and implementation of socially responsible management processes through the VSM offers a possible path towards more social responsibility in organisations. Moreover, the VSM should be used in combination with interpretive systems approaches, such as SAST.

The generality of the VSM indicates that decision-makers could use the VSM for diagnosing socially irresponsible behaviour in organisations and for redesigning organisations to help develop a more socially responsible society.

The paper contributes to a cybernetic framework and methodological support to social responsibility. This study could serve as an essential starting point for organisations wishing to take further steps towards social responsibility.

Takeovers play a critical role as an external corporate governance mechanism to ensure investor protection. There is a long-standing debate on whether the convergence of corporate governance to global standards can enable emerging economies to ensure investor protection. This paper aims to analyse the evolution of the takeover code, namely, Securities Exchange Board of India’s Substantial Acquisition of Shares and Takeovers (2011) in India from the lens of investor protection. It then compares the takeover provisions in India, the USA, the UK, Singapore and Australia to examine the extent of convergence and its implications for investor protection.

Using a cross-national comparative analysis of takeover mechanisms in common law countries, the study analyses the extent and relevance of convergence in form. The focus of the comparison is on regulations governing offer size, offer price, creeping acquisition and initial trigger limit for the mandatory open offer.

The findings suggest that certain provisions such as the initial trigger threshold for the mandatory offer and the offer prices of the Indian takeover code are converging with the standards in common law countries. However, the offer price determination based on market prices may not reflect true market value in an inefficient market like India. Other provisions such as creeping acquisition and offer size are not only diverging from the international standards but are also inconsistent with the key objective of investor protections of the Indian regulator.

Indian takeover regulation needs to converge to higher global standards to ensure adherence to improved investor protection. This needs to be done for the initial trigger limit for mandatory bid and offer prices, after accounting for the differences in institutional structure. The Indian regulators need to revisit provisions on the initial trigger, creeping acquisition to converge to the broader principle of investor protection.

This technical paper provides a comprehensive depiction of takeover mechanisms in an emerging economy context as a means of investor protection. Further using a comparative lens, it analyses the relevance of convergence of takeover laws. Thus, advances the theoretical knowledge of limited extant work on external corporate governance mechanism in an emerging economy context.

Consider the plight of the contemporary manager: the forces affecting corporate planning today stem from a wide variety of external sources—public interest groups, changing customer demands, foreign nations, government agencies, and many more. Consequently, the problems that managers and planners must solve are increasingly complex. They are, in addition, ill‐structured and have many highly interrelated dimensions, each of which expresses a wide range of differing values, beliefs and knowledge. Compared with well structured problems—proving geometric theorems or solving Sunday supplement puzzles are examples—ill‐structured problems have no sure fire solutions. One can't tell whether the planning methods used and the solutions obtained fit the problem best or not.

I was most interested in reading the article on “Creating the Managers' Plan Book” by Messrs. Mason, Mitroff and Barabba, in the July 1980 issue of the Planning Review.

Scholars are increasingly acknowledging the importance of conversations in the management of complex projects. Defining dialectics as “the art of purposeful conversation”, this paper aims to rationalise the somewhat disorganised field of dialectics by developing a categoreal scheme.

The authors refer to the current state of research into the conversational aspects of complex projects, and examine the historical development of, and philosophical and scholarly commentary on, the dialectical method.

The categories the authors propose are the Socratic, Conversational, Fichtean and Peircean. They differ in relation to the subject matter of the dialectic; their vulnerability to environmental influences; the degree of structure they require for optimal performance; and the situations in which they might most profitably be applied.

A single categoreal scheme is rarely the last word, and the authors invite other scholars to explore the field in a similar way.

The scheme proposed here is intended to enhance the project manager's approach to conversations, by referring to the specific virtues and limitations of each of the categories.

The informed use of dialectics may help to ameliorate the significant damage done to organisations and economies around the world by failed and underperforming projects.

The authors present the first categorisation of the field, with the aim of equipping the practitioner to think about dialectical approaches in a more systematic way.

The purpose of this paper is to highlight the potential of cyber-testing techniques in assessing the effectiveness of cyber-security controls and obtaining audit evidence.

The paper starts with an identification of the applicable cyber-testing techniques and evaluates their applicability to generally accepted assurance schemes and cyber-security guidelines.

Cyber-testing techniques are providing insight in the effectiveness of the actual implementation of cyber-security controls, which may significantly deviate from the conceptual designs of these controls. Furthermore, cyber-testing techniques could provide concise input for cyber-risk management and improvement recommendations.

The presented cyber-testing techniques could complement traditional process-oriented assurance techniques with specialized technical analyses of real-world implementations that focus on the adversaries’ viewpoint.

Respecting the growing importance of interdependence of knowledge, values and social responsibility, the purpose of this paper is to introduce the concept of knowledge-cum-values management and to show how some soft systems approaches can support interdependence of knowledge and human values resulting in socially responsible innovative behavior, hence in success.

The selected soft systems approaches are used to double-check the usefulness of the requisitely holistic approach to knowledge-cum-values management and innovation. The applied methodology for qualitative analysis is the Dialectical Systems Theory.

One-sidedness, unlike the requisite holism, causes oversights and hence disables innovations as a new users’ benefit. Requisitely holistic knowledge-cum-values management prevents one-sidedness and therefore many oversights; hence it is a valuable driver of innovation. It is supported by social responsibility (exposing the systemic behavior by suggesting interdependence and holistic approach to one’s responsibility for one’s influences on society). By including values and by enabling consideration of interdependence of human values and knowledge, some soft systems approaches support innovative behavior with social responsibility.

Research is limited to theoretical findings resulting from authors’ previous empirical studies. The novel concept “knowledge-cum-values” erases the human dangerous one-sidedness resulting from the irrational rationalistic division of the two. Social responsibility supports informal use of some soft systems theories and diminishes this danger.

The practical application of the selected soft systems approaches and social responsibility offers great possibilities for managers to improve the holism of their innovation processes, driven by knowledge-cum-values management. Fewer oversights are possible and lead to fewer mistakes and more success in the invention-innovation-diffusion processes. No human is rational or emotional only, either as a creator or as a consumer, but this fact is disregarded in the management literature.

Social responsibility shall be considered as an important novel soft-system approach and part of organizational innovative behavior aimed to replace the one-sided approaches prevailing so far and causing crises: the overseen attributes do not cease, but they still impact life and are out of control.

The contribution introduces the new, still insufficiently researched concept of knowledge-cum-values management; it highlights new ways of attaining the requisitely holistic knowledge-cum-values management that enhances enterprise’s innovation capacity by requisite holism, supported by social responsibility.

This paper argues that in a well-organised school with strong leadership and vision coupled with a concerted effort to improve the teaching performance of each teacher, student achievement can be enhanced. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that while macro-effect sizes such as “whole of school” metrics are useful for school leaders in their professional development roles, there are important micro-conditions that can be uncovered in a more detailed analysis of student achievement data.

Evidence of student achievement in a variety of standardised and non-standardised assessment tasks was subjected to examination in a post hoc, case study design. The assessment tasks were the South Australian Spelling Test Waddington Reading Test, a school-wide diagnostic writing task, teacher running records and National Assessment Program for Literacy and Numeracy. Performance in selected classrooms was compared on these tests utilising a variety of parametric quantitative statistics.

School-based reform initiatives require external criteria on which to base decision making. Without such criteria based on data and the capacity to interpret it, interactions in the school culture have unanticipated consequences that have the potential to neutralise school improvement strategies. Further, findings suggest that fewer but sharper and quicker data collection tools are more valuable in such teacher decision making, but these require expertise to produce and interpret them.

This paper provides insights from one school, but the reported data are embedded in a sustained five year school reform programme.

This paper documents a whole school organisational reform model devised by a school head and leadership team to improve student academic performance. The paper offers a process for developing a data-based school reform strategy for professional development to enhance both student achievement and school outcomes.

The paper outlines a model for school reform that is focused on all students increasing their academic outcomes. By emphasising collaborative teacher work based on research-justified teaching approaches, the model shows that social inequalities can be reversed.

The paper outlines a whole of school reform model focused through a combination of distributed leadership, data-driven decision making, within a context of a coaching, mentoring and feedback regime for teachers. Together this model is an application of theoretical ideas to school reform.

Geographic information systems (GIS) are increasingly being used for effective accessibility to spatial data. A GIS comprises much more than the mere storage of data: spatial data of the earth is being manipulated to create new information, perform complex spatial analyses, and generate maps and reports. An automated GIS system consists of an integrated digital database containing information about geographic features (points, lines and areas); the hardware, software and people used in the analysis of the features (geographic coordinate data); and a description of features (attribute data). It also provides the ability to query, manipulate and analyse the data. However, certain problems exist in the way access is gained to geographic data. Currently geographic data sets (e.g. maps) are scattered across South Africa and the world, with no standardised method of accessing them. Data needed by a specific GIS system must be ‘ordered’ or downloaded from a remote site. No centralised index to existing geographic data exists. The results from a specific GIS analysis are not necessarily directly available to others. When downloading and thus duplicating a set of complex data from an external site, with the purpose of further manipulation, the copy gradually becomes less current when compared to the original data set. In this paper it is argued that most of these problems can be addressed effectively by making GIS data and information available via the Internet's World Wide Web. By creating hypertext links between different GIS sites, data sets could be shared between sites: a type of online atlas system with a task‐oriented user interface geared towards map creation and fact extraction could be developed. A number of experimental interfaces between GIS application software and the Web have already been developed: these and other approaches are discussed.