Search results

The unique dynamics of family firms (FFs) shape the management of financial crises. Religious and secular reasons, as a defining characteristic of this type of firm, provide a reference system for key management decisions. This paper aims to explore the under-researched topic of differences in FFs' crisis management between religious and secular family decision-makers (FDMs), considering secularization in developed countries.

The paper draws on a qualitative-empirical study of 14 large FFs from the DACH region (Germany, Austria and Switzerland), through both a media analysis and semi-structured interviews with FDMs who have significant influence on key management decisions.

Despite secularization, religion continues to influence managerial decisions such as crisis management in the DACH region. The findings show that crisis management differs across religious and secular FDMs, demonstrating the substantial impact of religious and secular reasons on operational and financial measures. Thus, religious and secular reasons may partially explain the complex and ambivalent crisis management of FFs. This indicates that religion shapes FF's key management decisions in the increasingly secularized DACH region. Religious FDMs are accountable to both the firm and to God, which fosters their own personal and financial resources during crisis management.

This paper contributes to the existing literature by exploring the impact of religion and secularization within developed countries. Further, it offers deeper insights into FF's crisis management and is one of the first studies to assess the impact of religion and secularization on operational and financial measures. This research derives five propositions for further research and discusses a broad range of original implications for theory and practice.

Empirical research on the relationship between financial inclusion and economic growth has neglected the influence of religion or secularism. This study aims to investigate the effect of financial inclusion on economic growth in religious and secular countries.

The financial inclusion indicators are the number of automated teller machines (ATMs)per 100,000 adults and the number of bank branches per 100,000 adults. These two indicators are the accessibility dimension of financial inclusion based on physical points of service. The two-stage least square (2SLS) regression method was used to analyze the effect of financial inclusion on real gross domestic product (GDP) per capita growth and real GDP growth in religious and secular countries.

Bank branch contraction significantly increases economic growth in secular countries. Bank branch expansion combined with greater internet usage increases economic growth in secular countries while high ATM supply combined with greater internet usage decreases economic growth in secular countries. This study also finds that bank branch expansion, in the midst of a widening poverty gap, significantly increases economic growth in religious countries, implying that financial inclusion through bank branch expansion is effective in promoting economic growth in poor religious countries. It was also found that internet usage is a strong determinant of economic growth in secular countries.

Few studies in the literature examined the effect of financial inclusion on economic growth. But the literature has not examined how financial inclusion affects economic growth in religious and secular countries.

Islamic schools in Western secular societies are evolving in response to collective concerns over marginalization of Muslim children and communities and to increasing demands for high-quality education in the faith tradition. These schools are at the center of public debate over how they fit within secular societies. This paper aims to take a pedagogic look at the literature in the field of Islamic Education Studies.

Engaging in a collaborative thematic analytic review of this literature, in an educational hermeneutic approach, two novel themes are discerned as features of Muslim learners’ diverse educational landscapes.

The first theme, Dual Consciousness recognizes that young Muslims live parallel lives, moving between secular and faith-based schools and communities, and suggesting potential in developing cognitive flexibility across epistemic horizons. The second theme, Educational Transferables is a coalescence of abilities that young Muslims develop within sites of Islamic education, which may enhance their engagement in secular schools and societies.

In highlighting possibilities for young people’s educational well-being in both secular and Islamic schools, with significant pedagogical implications for both, the themes featured in this paper suggest that Muslim learners’ complex educational experiences make varied contributions to heterogeneous societies.

Despite ongoing forces of marginalization, expressions of Islamic education have benefits for young Muslims negotiating complex sociocultural and educational worlds. In highlighting possibilities for young people’s educational well-being in both secular and Islamic schools, with significant pedagogical implications for both, these themes suggest that Muslim educators can nurture in young people the ability for complex, conceptual integration in contribution to heterogeneous societies.

This study aimed to investigate the relationship between spirituality, including religious spirituality (i.e. supernatural beliefs) and secular spirituality (i.e. social beliefs), and mental health among police trainees.

Participants in this study were police trainees of a police academy. An online survey was conducted to measure spirituality and mental health among these police trainees. The association between spirituality and mental health was analyzed using hierarchical linear regression and hierarchical logistic regression with demographic variables (i.e. gender and age) controlled for.

The results revealed that the police trainees with stronger secular spirituality tended to have better general mental health. Higher levels of secular spirituality were significantly associated with lower levels of mental illness risk and suicidal ideation. By contrast, religious spirituality was not significantly related to police trainees' mental health.

The present study is the first to empirically investigate the relationship between spirituality and mental health among police trainees. The findings may be enlightening for future research on the mental health of police officers and trainees, and provide novel perspectives and pragmatic implications for the development of spirituality-based prevention strategies and intervention programs for enhancing the mental health and well-being of the police.

The purpose of this study is to investigate how two types of drivers, namely, executive compensation and market competition, can affect hospital quality in the USA. Recently, patients, insurers and regulators have increasingly focused on hospital quality. Understanding the interplay of incentives in this industry is important because in 2019, hospital treatment contributed $1.161bn to health-care costs in the USA. This study answers the call for more studies in the so-called “mixed” industry, where ownership differences can affect organizational objectives and operating constraints.

This study explores the roles of hospital executive compensation and industry competition as determinants of health-care quality. Specifically, the study probes the heterogeneity in the factors that influence quality across hospital types in the USA.

Using California hospital data from 2006 through 2020, the findings show that the effects of compensation and competition on hospital quality differ by ownership type. Executive compensation is positively associated with quality in for-profit hospitals but is not associated with that of nonprofit hospitals, suggesting for-profit hospitals are more likely to use higher levels of compensation to attract managers with higher ability, whereas the utility function for nonprofit managers may be multidimensional. Within the nonprofit hospital group, competition is more positively associated with quality for religious nonprofits relative to secular nonprofits, suggesting that competition provides more monitoring for religious hospitals.

Taken together, the findings provide evidence that the drivers of quality vary across hospitals in ways consistent with differences in constraints and objectives across ownership types. The findings are important for regulators seeking to incentivize higher quality. For example, Medicare in the USA has incorporated quality measures into its new hospital reimbursement scheme (value-based purchasing) to incentivize quality. This study proposes that regulators should consider differences across ownership types when evaluating the best ways to incentivize hospital quality.

This paper aims at from the perspective of the social exchange theory (SET) gaining an understanding of how promotion of halal concept in Sweden is perceived by Swedish hoteliers.

A mixed-methods approach has been used consisting of 62 completed surveys with closed-ended and open-ended questions, follow-up comments and five in-depth interviews with hoteliers in the mid-Sweden region. Content analysis has been employed.

Three categories of meanings are the main findings: general perception, safeguarding Swedish secular values and financially unjustifiable have been discovered. Most of the respondents have been sceptical towards halal and Muslim-friendly hotel concepts due to financial and cultural challenges these two concepts have for the Swedish tourism and hotel industries. Based on the SET, this entails more costs than benefits and is especially at odds with Swedish-rooted secular values.

This study provides practical implications and increased knowledge for tourism stakeholders including hotels in Sweden.

This is one of the very few studies on halal tourism in Scandinavia and the first Scandinavian study on hoteliers' attitudes towards halal tourism.

Labor market studies show that job applicants are naturally inclined to embellish or omit information on their resumes, to gain advantage over other applicants. Religiosity can reveal much about an individual's sense of right and wrong and it has importance as a social force with a foundational role in ethical development. The study’s objective is to clarify the relationship between personal religiosity and the intentional deceitful presentation of information on resumes, as well as the judgment of situations with ethical content.

The study is comprised of Jewish adult participants that submitted a resume in search of a job in the past 30 weeks in Israel. The questionnaire included questions regarding resume fraud, tolerance towards unethical and illegal behaviors and demographic and occupational questions.

The authors' results indicate that religious status may be a predictor of resume deception. Religious applicants reported more rigorous moral ethics, manifested by less tolerant attitudes toward unethical and illegal behaviors in comparison to seculars, which in turn, were associated with decreased tendency to deceive on resumes.

For many countries, and especially emerging markets, the Covid pandemic negatively affected the economy and creating sufficient employment may be a challenge. A better understanding of the personal factors associated with problematic job searching behaviors is relevant.

Despite the recognized importance of religion as a social force with a foundational role in ethical development, there is a lack of research on the impact of religiosity on ethical decisions in the labor market. The authors propose explanations for the results based on the theory of planned behavior and perceptions of normative beliefs.

In the extant literature, the concepts of charity and philanthropy have been differentiated based on the belief that charity stems from religious motivations and philanthropy is often secular in origin. Accordingly, this paper aims to investigate whether there is a distinction between managerial practices regarding the given concepts as emphasized in the conceptual discussions.

To see the managerial practices, the authors determined bazaars, community fundraising events organized by nonprofit organizations (NPOs), as the research field. Then, this study followed the general systematic of qualitative research. Accordingly, the authors conducted 44 interviews with experienced bazaar organizers from 10 NPOs in total. Furthermore, four days of participant observation with field notes were made in each bazaar, which lasted from 7 to 10 days. This study also used archival data as a secondary data source and then analyzed all data with a content analysis technique.

This study found that the field practices mainly do not support the distinction drawn over the conceptual discussions. Both concepts are nouns describing the act of giving and helping the needy. They are actively performed based on different motives (religion-based and secular).

The relevant distinction is limited to the conceptual discussions and has not been supported by the findings obtained from the field. Also, most of the studies on helping were carried out in the Western context. Studies conducted outside these cultures are quite limited. The value of the current study lies in the fact that it was conducted in a cultural context different from the Western cultures and paves the pathway for future research.

This study employs Stein Rokkan's methodological approach to analyse state formation in the Greater Middle East. It develops a conceptual framework distinguishing colonial, populist and democratic pacts, suitable for analysis of state formation and nation-building through to the present period. The framework relies on historical institutionalism. The methodology, however, is Rokkan's. The initial conceptual analysis also specifies differences between European and the Middle Eastern state formation processes. It is followed by a brief and selective discussion of historical preconditions. Next, the method of plotting singular cases into conceptual-typological maps is applied to 20 cases in the Greater Middle East (including Afghanistan, Iran and Turkey). For reasons of space, the empirical analysis is limited to the colonial period (1870s to the end of World War 1). Three typologies are combined into one conceptual-typological map of this period. The vertical left-hand axis provides a composite typology that clarifies cultural-territorial preconditions. The horizontal axis specifies transformations of the region's agrarian class structures since the mid-19th century reforms. The right-hand vertical axis provides a four-layered typology of processes of external intervention. A final section presents selected comparative case reconstructions. To the authors' knowledge, this is the first time such a Rokkan-style conceptual-typological map has been constructed for a non-European region.

Political Science in the United States has focused too much on variable-oriented, quantitative methods and thus lost its ability to ask “big questions.” Stein Rokkan (d. 1979) was an eminent comparativist who asked big questions and provided such qualitative tools as conceptual maps, grids, and clustered comparisons. Ibn Khaldun (d. 1406), arguably the first social scientist, also asked big questions and provided a universal explanation about the dialectical relationship between nomads and sedentary people. This article analyzes to what extent Ibn Khaldun's concepts of asabiyya and sedentary culture help understand the rise and fall of the Muslim civilization. It also explores my alternative, class-based perspective in Islam, Authoritarianism, and Underdevelopment. Moreover, the article explores how Rokkan's analysis of cultural, geographical, economic, and religio-political variations within Western European states can provide insights to the examination of such variations in the Muslim world.