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The purpose of this paper is to explore the question “Why is Shariah Governance Framework (SGF) important for Islamic banks?”

A semi-structured face-to-face personal interview is used to accomplish the research objectives. This study has collected data from the concerned bodies related to Shariah Governance (SG) from the central bank and Islamic banks of Bangladesh.

This study states SG as a process of confirming Shariah compliance in the overall functions of the Islamic banks, while Shariah denotes some rules, regulations, guidelines, objectives and directions to enhance accurate functions and activities, which are solely based on Shariah principles. SGF is important for Islamic banks to implement Shariah principles, confirm Shariah compliance and monitor the functions of the banks. Besides, it is needed for a well, efficient, effective, profitable business and higher performance and, finally, to eliminate the confusion among the management, executives, conventional bankers and banks.

This study significantly contributes to the national and global regulatory bodies by providing evidence that why do Islamic banks and financial institutions require a sound SGF. It is recommended that there should be a sound and robust SGF to protect and fulfill the interest, expectations and demands of different stakeholders, which can easily draw their attention, intention and interest.

This is the first research that extends the literature of Islamic banking and SG by highlighting the importance of SGF. This study claims that to be a complete Islamic bank as well as protecting the unique identity from the general banks and corporate governance system, SG manual is required.

The purpose of this paper is to explain why Singapore is a success story today despite the fact that its prospects for survival were dim when it became independent in August 1965.

This paper describes the changes in Singapore’s policy context from 1959 to 2016, analyses the five factors responsible for its success and concludes with advice for policy makers interested in implementing Singapore-style reforms to solve similar problems in their countries.

Singapore’s success can be attributed to these five factors: the pragmatic leadership of the late Lee Kuan Yew and his successors; an effective public bureaucracy; effective control of corruption; reliance on the “best and brightest” citizens through investment in education and competitive compensation; and learning from other countries.

This paper will be useful to those scholars and policy makers interested in learning from Singapore’s success in solving its problems.

Outside the US and Europe, to establish a good government requires more than Western-style democracy. Adopting universal suffrage fully from the Western model is no longer a panacea to reach the ultimate goal of good governance in the East, i.e., to keep promoting socio-economic renovation can be noted as a prerequisite to have further meaningful political advancement in an Asian polity. The purpose of this paper is to explain how to establish a good but authoritarian government in the East.

Given the good of comparative historical analysis, Lee Kuan Yew in Singapore and Deng Xiaoping in China are selected as both cases for “method of agreement.” Further including “argument based on the contrary” to form a context for macro-historical analysis, this paper outlines two characteristics of the duo’s authoritarian leadership, namely, Ideologies and Policy-making; and Political Modernization, and hence provides a more balanced reevaluation of their governance.

Apart from noting how these two Asian giants more or less contributed to their good but authoritarian governments for long in the twentieth century, such a word of authoritarianism to the duo was quite positive to help legitimize their governance, which was far different from many negative views of the Western world.

As theories put forward by Western academics could not entirely justify modernization among Asian societies in the twentieth century, this paper attempts to answer one question: Does the meaning of authoritarianism remain unchanged in the discourse of the East and the West?

This study aims to focus on building a conceptual closed-loop vaccine supply chain (CLVSC) to decrease vaccine wastage and counterfeit/fake vaccines.

Through a focused literature review, the framework for the CLVSC is described, and the system dynamics (SD) research methodology is used to build a causal loop diagram (CLD) of the proposed model.

In the battle against COVID-19, waste management systems have become overwhelmed, which has created negative environmental and extremely hazardous societal impacts. A key contributing factor is unused vaccine doses, shown as a source for counterfeit/fake vaccines. The findings identify a CLVSC design and transshipment operations to decrease vaccine wastage and the potential for vaccine theft.

This study contributes to establishing a pandemic-specific VSC structure. The proposed model informs the current COVID-19 pandemic as well as potential future pandemics.

A large part of the negative impact of counterfeit/fake vaccines is on human well-being, and this can be avoided with proper CLVSC.

This study develops a novel overarching SD CLD by integrating the epidemic model of disease transmission, VSC and closed-loop structure. This study enhances the policymakers’ understanding of the importance of vaccine waste collection, proper handling and threats to the public, which are born through illicit activities that rely on stolen vaccine doses.

More complexity, less freedom, distrust and a lack of information seem to pose threats to the success of partner relationships in accounting firms, as approximately 70% of business partnerships fail globally, undermining SDG 17. The low competitive intensity in this industry seems not to help the current situation. Yet, the existing strategic alliance (SA) literature have been somewhat sluggish in adequately addressing how partnership attributes (PAs) affect partnership success (PS) and how brand competition (BC) impacts this relationship. In response, this conceptual work addresses the impact of PAs on PS in accounting firms. It further explores the BC conditions under which the PAs–PS connection may be intensified.

Incorporating theories and empirics on six distinct topics, this study presents a conceptual model and ten hypotheses that are worth testing in future research.

This research finds that PAs will be favourably linked to PS, and this favourable association will be positively moderated by BC such that the PAs–PS connection will be more pronounced if BC within the accounting industry is high than low.

Further research is needed to empirically test the suppositions made. Also, they could extend the proposed framework to cover other moderators like technological turbulence, market dynamism and government regulation.

Practical lessons for governments, shareholders, chief executive officers, consultants and other industry players, particularly those who are interested in the success of accounting partnership firms, are deliberated.

This study demonstrates how PAs and BC interact to foster PS. It also provides a baseline information for upcoming researchers to investigate other external factors under which the PAs–PS connection may be improved.

Digital advertising enables retailers to rely on large volumes of data on consumers and even leverage artificial intelligence (AI) to target consumers online with personalised and context-aware advertisements. One recent example of such advertisements is programmatic advertising (PA), which is facilitated by automatic bidding systems. Given that retailers are expected to increase their use of PA in the future, further insights on the pros and cons of PA are required. This paper aims to enhance the understanding of the implications of PA use for retailers.

A theoretical overview is conducted that compares PA to traditional advertising, with an empirical investigation into consumer attitudes towards PA (an online survey of 189 consumers using an experimental design) and a research agenda.

Consumer attitudes towards PA are positively related to attitudes towards the retailer. Further, perceived ad relevance is positively related to attitudes towards PA, which is moderated by (1) consumer perceptions of risks related to sharing their data with retailers online and (2) consumer perceptions of AI's positive potential. Surprisingly, the disclosed use of AI for PA does not significantly influence consumer attitudes towards PA.

This paper contributes to the literature on technology-enabled services by empirically demonstrating that ad relevance drives consumer attitudes towards PA. This paper further examines two contingencies: risk beliefs related to data (i.e. the source of PA) and perceptions of AI (i.e. the somewhat nebulous technology associated with PA) as beneficial. A research agenda illuminates central topics to guide future research on PA in retailing.

Several researchers in the construction industry have mentioned that quality of tender documents is declining without tangibly assessing quality. Similarly, in practice, no standardised instrument exists to assess tender document quality. Therefore, the aim of this paper was to develop a framework to assess the quality of tender documents produced by built environment professionals in the construction industry. A framework was chosen to address the gaps in theory and practice as it provides a flexible but structured mechanism to assess tender document quality.

The research methodology contained three stages, namely: multi-investigator triangulation, a workshop with infrastructure experts and framework development and validation. A consolidated list of key quality indicators was developed following the literature review and multi-investigator triangulation. The indicators were discussed with ten experts in the South African construction industry, who were responsible for validating and providing insight on whether additional indicators were required. This informed development of the framework.

This paper proposes a framework to assess tender document quality by evaluating six key quality indicators namely: accuracy, clarity, completeness, standardisation, relevance and certainty.

The framework is limited to the assessment of tender document quality in the construction industry and is suited to the “Design by Employer” contracting strategy. From an academic perspective, this paper provides researchers with a framework to measure and benchmark quality of tender documents in future studies.

This framework can be used by clients to continuously assess and benchmark quality of tender documents produced by professionals.

A comprehensive and standardised approach to assess tender document quality was not available in the construction literature or the construction industry. Therefore, this paper addressed this gap in knowledge, by providing consumers (clients and contractors) of tender documents and researchers a mechanism to assess quality.

Congruent with the world-wide call to combat global warming concerns within the context of advancements in smart technology, artificial intelligence, robotics, algorithms (STARA), and digitalisation, organisational leaders are being pressured to ensure that talented employees are effectively managed (nurtured and retained) to curb the potential risk of staff turnover. By managing such talent(s), organisations may be able to not only retain them, but consequently foster environmental sustainability too. Equally, recent debates encourage the need for teams to work digitally and interdependently on set tasks, and for leaders to cultivate competencies fundamental to STARA, as this may further help reduce staff turnover intention and catalyse green initiatives. However, it is unclear how such turnover intention may be impacted by these actions. This paper therefore, seeks to investigate the predictive roles of green hard and soft talent management (TM), leader STARA competence (LSC) and digital task interdependence (DTI) on turnover intention.

The authors used a cross-sectional data collection technique to obtain 372 useable samples from 49 manufacturing organisations in Nigeria.

Findings indicate that green hard and soft TM and LSC positively predict turnover intention. While LSC amplifies the negative influence of green soft TM on turnover intention, LSC and DTI dampen the positive influence of green hard TM on turnover intention.

Our study offers novel insights into how emerging concepts like LSC, DTI, and green hard and soft TM simultaneously act to predict turnover intention.

The efficiency of each of an organization’s individual workers determines its effectiveness. The study aims to explore the relationship between human resource management (HRM) practices and organizational effectiveness with employee performance as a mediating variable.

Data were collected from 800 police officers in the Greater Accra and Tema regions. The data were supported by the hypothesized relationship. Construct reliability and validity was established through confirmatory factor analysis. The proposed model and hypotheses were evaluated using structural equation modeling.

The results show that career planning and employee performance were significantly related. Self-managed teams and employee performance were shown to be nonsignificantly related. Similarly, performance management and employee performance were shown to be nonsignificantly related. Employee performance significantly influenced organizational effectiveness. The results further indicate that employee performance mediates the relationship between HRM practices and organizational effectiveness.

The generalizability of the findings will be constrained due to the research’s police service focus and cross-sectional data.

The study’s findings will serve as valuable pointers for the police administration in the adoption, design and implementation of well-articulated and proactive HRM practices to improve the abilities, skills, knowledge and motivation of officer’s to inordinately enhance the effectiveness of the service.

By evidencing empirically that employee performance mediates the relationship between HRM practice and organizational effectiveness, the study extends the literature.

The anticipated benefits of connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs) include safety and mobility enhancement. Small headways between successive vehicles, on one hand, can cause increased capacity and throughput and thereby improve overall mobility. On the other hand, small headways can cause vehicle occupant discomfort and unsafety. Therefore, in a CAV environment, it is important to determine appropriate headways that offer a good balance between mobility and user safety/comfort.

In addressing this research question, this study carried out a pilot experiment using a driving simulator equipped with a Level-3 automated driving system, to measure the threshold headways. The Method of Constant Stimuli (MCS) procedure was modified to enable the estimation of two comfort thresholds. The participants (drivers) were placed in three categories (“Cautious,” “Neutral” and “Confident”) and 250 driving tests were carried out for each category. Probit analysis was then used to estimate the threshold headways that differentiate drivers' discomfort and their intention to re-engage the driving tasks.

The results indicate that “Cautious” drivers tend to be more sensitive to the decrease in headways, and therefore exhibit greater propensity to deactivate the automated driving mode under a longer headway relative to other driver groups. Also, there seems to exist no driver discomfort when the CAV maintains headway up to 5%–9% shorter than the headways they typically adopt. Further reduction in headways tends to cause discomfort to drivers and trigger take over control maneuver.

In future studies, the number of observations could be increased further.

The study findings can help guide specification of user-friendly headways specified in the algorithms used for CAV control, by vehicle manufacturers and technology companies. By measuring and learning from a human driver's perception, AV manufacturers can produce personalized AVs to suit the user's preferences regarding headway. Also, the identified headway thresholds could be applied by practitioners and researchers to update highway lane capacities and passenger-car-equivalents in the autonomous mobility era.

The study represents a pioneering effort and preliminary pilot driving simulator experiment to assess the tradeoffs between comfortable headways versus mobility-enhancing headways in an automated driving environment.