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The World Wide Web has become an essential platform for a news publication, and it has become one of the primary sources of information dissemination in the past few years. Electronic media, i.e., television channels, magazines and newspapers, have started publishing news online. This online information is prompt to be disappeared because of short life-span and imperative to be archived for the long-term and future generations. This paper presents a content-based similarity measure based on the headings of the news articles for linking digital news stories published in various newspapers during the preservation process that helps to ensure future accessibility.

To evaluate the accuracy and assess the effectiveness and worth of the proposed measure for linking news articles in Digital News Story Archive (DNSA), we adopted both, system-centric and user-centric (human judgment) evaluation over different datasets of news articles.

The proposed similarity measure is evaluated using different sizes of datasets, and the results are compared by both user-centric technique, i.e., expert judgment and system-centric techniques, i.e., cosine similarity measure, extended Jaccard measure and common ratio measure for stories (CRMS). The comparison helps to get a broader impact and can be helpful for generalization of the measure for different categories of news articles. Multiple experiments have conducted the findings of which showed that the measure presented viable results for national and international news, while best results for linking sports news articles during preservation based on headings.

The DNSA preserves a huge number of news articles from multiple news sources and to link with a vast collection, which encourages to introduce an efficient linking mechanism with few terms to manipulate. The CRMS is modified to deal with the headings of news articles as a part of the digital news stories preservation framework and comprehensively analysed.

The present study aims to identify and evaluate the socioeconomic barriers to effective COVID-19 pandemic transmission control in Pakistan.

The study identifies multiple socio-economic barriers through an extensive literature review. The preliminary analysis unveiled 15 socio-economic barriers. Nine experts were contacted to collect data and finalize the most prominent barriers to COVID-19 transmission control using the DELPHI method. The Decision-Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory (DEMATEL) method was used to process and interpret the data collected and a cause–effect relationship was established among the barriers.

The finalized barriers to effective COVID-19 pandemic transmission control were evaluated using DEMATEL which grouped criteria into two grouped criteria – cause and effect. The DEMATEL analysis shows that poor safety culture, lack of strategy and goal setting, lack of resources, late realization and recognition of the pandemic problem and lack of expertise and capacity in disaster and risk management fall into the cause group. These factors are critical as they directly affect the remaining barriers identified in the study.

Despite the collective global efforts, the national economies have been struggling to completely control COVID-19 transmission control. Pakistan’s economy has been facing the third wave of the pandemic. It is mandatory to identify the barriers and evaluate them to develop a comprehensive strategy ensuring that there would be no fourth wave. The study identifies and evaluates the barriers to COVID-19 transmission control in Pakistan using the integrated DELPHI-DEMATEL framework. The findings would help the government, experts and strategists to develop a comprehensive disaster and risk management strategy.

The COVID-19 pandemic is having an unprecedented impact on schools and schoolchildren across the globe. There is still a dearth of studies that investigate this recent phenomenon in a developing country context, and this is true of Pakistan. Much of the population in Pakistan resides in rural settings and a lack of technology and of online provision of teaching for more than one year must have had huge negative impacts on students’ learning. The school dropout rate was already high in rural settings (Geven & Hasan, 2020) and, with school closures, this will likely have increased further, and cause some schoolchildren to lose interest in going back to school. However, no current data appear to exist to corroborate this. Due to the lack of available current quantitative and qualitative data, this study seeks to explore the impact of COVID-19 on schoolchildren’s education in Pakistan by examining recently published related studies. This study employs a literature review technique that gathers data to ascertain the potential overall impact on schoolchildren during the pandemic. The findings reveal that there remains a lack of detailed studies on this important topic and that urgent attention is needed from researchers to assess the scale of the impact. In addition, the review found that many children from rural communities had little to no school engagement due to technology poverty and their families being unable to support home-schooling, either due to family and/or work constraints or a lack of prior education and/or skills. Themes that emerged were that families, especially mothers, struggled to balance both caring and home-schooling duties, pupils from private schools had a better experience than those from public school backgrounds, and many of these reported that online provisions helped students develop new skills. This study may help to improve the understanding of the impact on the lost learning of schoolchildren during the pandemic by guiding practitioners as well as policymakers.

Entrepreneurial orientation is among the vital factors that contribute to performance, especially for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). However, the empirical studies provide mixed results and call for new studies to examine this relationship. Therefore, this study aims to determine the entrepreneurial orientation's (EO) direct and indirect impact (via entrepreneurial competencies) on firm performance. Additionally, the moderating role of environmental dynamism is also tested in entrepreneurial competencies and firm performance relationships.

The data (N = 332) were collected from managerial rank employees, using a self-administered questionnaire, working in different SMEs in Pakistan. In addition, structural equation modeling (SEM) was executed using SmartPLS 3.2.

The study's results demonstrate that EO positively influences entrepreneurial competencies and firm performance, and entrepreneurial competencies also mediate the relationship between EO and performance. Additionally, environmental dynamism strengthens the positive relationship between entrepreneurial competencies and performance.

This study identifies that entrepreneurial competency is the missing link between EO and firm performance, due to which the relationship between them is indecisive. This study also contributes to the contingency perspective by explaining the role of environmental dynamism as a boundary condition in strengthening the relationship between entrepreneurial competencies and SMEs' performance in an emerging economy.

The purpose of this paper is to conceptualize halal marketing from the marketing strategy perspective, particularly segmentation, targeting and positioning (STP).

A literature review is carried out for the study. Building on the STP framework, an attempt is made to conceptualize halal marketing from the marketing strategy perspective and provide its implications.

The findings suggest that halal marketing has emerged and is used as a segmentation strategy. Furthermore, halal marketing can be more effectively used as a positioning strategy.

The paper presents the opportunity to use halal marketing by combining the Islamic principles for halal with the marketing positioning strategy. In this way, halal marketing can also be used to attract consumers from other religious segments.

The paper presents a marketing strategy perspective of segmentation and targeting. Furthermore, the paper proposes an approach for using halal as a positioning strategy.

The purpose of this study is to integrate and synthesize the Islamic marketing literature, understand the phenomenon and related concepts and provide suggestions for future research.

The study uses an integrative review method that emphasizes summarizing and synthesizing the previous literature related to a phenomenon.

The findings indicate the emergence of five major themes, namely, Islamic marketing and its perspectives, activities in Islamic marketing, opportunities, controversies and challenges in Islamic marketing, Islamic principles and determinants of consumers’ behavior and awareness toward Islamic products. Each of the major themes consists of sub-themes discussed in detail in the results and discussion sections.

Like other studies, this integrative literature review has some limitations. These include the methodology undertaken, the lack of explanation of inter-relationship among themes and lack of Islamic theory-based review. These limitations lead to future research directions.

Marketing managers need a thorough understanding of the Islamic standards and need to develop strategies. Further, there are inter-differences among Muslims, which need to be thoroughly understood by managers. Moreover, marketers can effectively use advertising in creating awareness and increasing demand of halal products.

This study provides an integrative review of the literature and synthesizes the Islamic marketing literature, which has not been done before.

In view of organizational inertia, with the occurrence of a major event, though resource rigidity minimizes, however simultaneously, it increases process rigidity, which creates difficulties in motivating managers and dealing with the agency problem. Therefore, keeping in mind the high demand created by the China–Pakistan Economic Corridor and Naya Pakistan Housing Scheme in the cement sector of Pakistan, the purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of corporate governance (CG) on the cost of equity (COE) in the cement sector, to deal with the problems surging during and after the completion of these projects and highlight further opportunities for the cement sector of Pakistan.

CG is a qualitative concept therefore, eight proxies have been used to measure it along with the two control variables. This study uses balance panel data of six years from 2012 to 2017, collected from 18 companies of the cement sector of Pakistan. Descriptive statistics have been used to describe the data, correlation matrix to see the nature of the relationship, and Pooled OLS as the estimation technique, while to analyze the data a statistical package 13 has been used. To measure the COE, the Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) has been used.

Regression results suggest that block ownership, insider ownership and the board size are insignificant, while CEO tenure is negatively and significantly associated with the COE. Non-executive directors, independence and CEO duality are insignificant; however, diversity is positively and significantly associated with the COE. Moreover, the mean value of the COE is 8.22 percent for the cement sector, while the coefficient of determination of the model under study is 74 percent.

This paper is based on the data from the cement sector of Pakistan only. Therefore, this is the reason that these results cannot be generalized on the whole economy of Pakistan.

This study helps in finding out the COE value specific to the cement sector, which will help this sector to evaluate the capital budgeting decision more precisely and accurately than before. Moreover, the association of diversity as positive, while independence as negative with the COE highlights a room for improvement in the implementation of CG codes by SECP. This study also helps to mitigate the impact of inertia, the after-effects of high demand, and managing the agency problem in the cement sector.

This is the first study using CG data collected just after the revised promulgation of CG codes in 2012, along with a wide range of eight proxies measuring CG and its impact on the COE in the cement sector.

The purpose of this paper is to empirically investigate the impact of board financial expertise on the shareholding of foreign institutional investors in an emerging equity market of China and to explore whether ownership concentration moderates the relationship between board financial expertise and foreign institutional investment.

To test the hypothesized relationships, this study uses panel data regression models, i.e. static (fixed effect and random effect) and dynamic (two-step generalized methods of moments) models. Further, to control the possible endogeniety issue, this study uses two instrumental variables, namely, board size and industry average financial expertise of board to proxy board financial expertise. This study covers a period from 2006 to 2015 for 169 listed Chinese firms.

The results revealed that foreign institutional investors positively perceived board financial expertise and holds more shareholdings with the increasing level of financial experts at boards of directors. Moreover, ownership concentration positively moderated this relationship. It means that in highly concentrated firms, the board financial expertise conveys a stronger signal to foreign institutional investors that firms can manage financial resources rationally by controlling negative effects of ownership concentration. Further, the robustness model also confirmed the relationship between board financial expertise and foreign institutional shareholdings.

To the best of authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to investigate board-level financial expertise as a determinant of foreign institutional ownership. Further, no previous study has used ownership concentration as a contextual variable on the relationship between board financial expertise and foreign institutional investment.

This study aims to explore sustainable development and business success (BS) through decision-making (DM) in Pakistan’s circular economy.

This is a co-relational study in which the researchers used cross-sectional data collected from the managers of Pakistan’s manufacturing industries. Accordingly, the authors based this study’s findings on 373 valid samples.

This study’s structural equation modeling results reveal that DM has a positive and significant effect on sustainable development, which comprises competitiveness, business performance enhancement, flexibility, customer satisfaction and technology development. Moreover, DM positively and significantly affects BS.

This study’s findings support sustainable development, strengthen the socioeconomic conditions and bring about the industries’ well-being through DM. In addition, these findings demonstrate the need for the circular economy to tackle industrial challenges and simultaneously open up economic and environmental growth opportunities for society.

This study offers the original contribution from a circular economy perspective; there needs to be more empirical evidence among managers of manufacturing industries. Besides, this study provides DM’s role in achieving sustainable development in the presence of BS, which has disappeared in an integrated way, particularly in a circular context.

Leadership literature has identified that the servant leadership style can reduce employee negative work outcomes, even in challenging work environments like the health-care sector as nurses play an important role in the performance of a hospital. That is why, the efficiency and effectiveness of the nurses are believed to be directly linked to improved health benefits to the public. So, this study aims to investigate the inter-relationship between servant leadership, organizational justice and workplace deviance of nurses in public sector hospitals.

A self-administrated questionnaire using a drop-and-collect method was used for collecting the data from nurses working in the public sector hospitals of Pakistan using a convenient sampling technique. In total, 370 questionnaires were distributed among the nursing staff, of which 201 completed and usable questionnaires were returned and used for data analysis. Further, the partial least squares structural equation modeling approach is used in this study using SmartPLS version 3 software to test the hypothesized model and determine the direct and indirect effects.

Results showed a negative relationship between servant leadership and workplace deviance, positive relationship between servant leadership and organizational justice, negative relationship between organizational justice and workplace deviance and that organizational justice mediates in the relationship between servant leadership and workplace deviance.

This study provides valuable recommendations and practical implications to address the nurses’ deviant workplace behaviors in the public sector hospitals of Pakistan.

This study is novel as it shows the significance of servant leadership behavior which has the ability to positively influence organizational justice perception leading to less likelihood of the emergence of nurses’ deviant workplace behavior, specifically in the context of public sector hospitals of Pakistan.