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This study investigates the motivation among customers to be more loyal to online food delivery applications (OFDA) services even after the COVID-19 epidemic by using perceived service quality aspects in Sri Lanka. The data were gathered by physically distributing a self-administrated questionnaire to clients in Sri Lanka who continue to use OFDA services on platform to customer (P2C) service delivery platforms to buy food despite the COVID-19 outbreak. Multiple regression is employed to analyse 287 effective observations, and the data revealed the significant positive effect of interaction, environment, outcome, and food qualities on customer loyalty to OFDA services. In fact, there is no impact from the delivery quality on customer loyalty to OFDA services due to outsourced food delivery. The findings suggest regular improvements in attributes such as interaction, environment, outcome, and food qualities in this hyper-competitive business environment. Further, this study sets substantial facts for the interested parties to establish an exemplary delivery system and other technological advancements to have a sustainable competitive advantage and solid customer base in the long run.

Introduction: Amidst Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity (VUCA), turbulence is a vital component of an entrepreneurial landscape. VUCA world has set a new dynamic in the business environment and organisation’s settings. In such an environment, it is pertinent for entrepreneurs to exhibit creativity, innovative service behaviour, and performance.

Purpose: The study investigates whether creativity, innovative service behaviour, and performance of entrepreneurs are fostered through employee engagement practices in a highly volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous environment.

Methodology: The methodology involves a systematic review and meta-synthesis. By identifying the major topics, a systematic literature review helped critically analyse and synthesise the literature.

Findings: According to the study, corporate entrepreneurial factors like (management reinforcement, reward/reinforcement, job autonomy/discretion, time attainability, and organisational boundaries) entrepreneurial potential, entrepreneurial orientation, human capital, self-efficacy beliefs lead to employee engagement, which, in turn, fosters creativity, innovative service behaviour, and performance among entrepreneurs in the VUCA world.

This chapter examines how information and communication technology (ICT) initiatives affect customers’ everyday routines with an emphasis on how electronic word of mouth (eWOM) affects their purchasing decisions and determines if eWOM might serve as a useful trust factor when making purchasing decisions. This chapter is based on both primary and secondary data and examines how eWOM affects customers’ buying decisions in this era of increasing social media platform usage. One hundred individuals from various regions of Karachi provided the primary data, collected through an online survey. Secondary data are also employed, such as details from business websites, scientific papers, and other related publications of businesses. In Karachi’s developing digital market, it was discovered that eWOM via social media used to have a substantial impact on consumers’ shopping habits. The effectiveness of social media content depends greatly on how appropriate it is for the intended audience. Social media marketing doesn’t quite simply aim to improve consumers’ impressions or directly advertise things. It also entails maintaining and fostering relationships between businesses and prospective customers. According to the research, consumers’ recommendations and ratings of goods and services made on social media, whether through eWOM or another channel, influenced their decisions to buy. Customers consider social media to be trustworthy when making decisions about what to buy. Customers are currently adopting social media as opposed to more conventional means to learn about new products. Most customers believe that eWOM from social media greatly affected their shopping choices, according to the results of the study.

Our present quest for sustainable cities requires a holistic understanding of city construction and people’s well-being. Feminist scholars have shown that urban space does not attend to women’s needs. This study focuses on women’s everyday life in Athens, Greece in late-1980s. This is a unique spatio-temporal point since it is located at the edge of several prevailing dichotomies – geopolitical, cultural and temporal. It examines how women use, experience and reconstitute public spaces in the city and aims to understand both how public spaces – with their material and social dimensions – restrict women’s lives, and how women reappropriate and (re)constitute urban space. It is based on in-depth interviews with women from three areas of Greater Athens, with different social class profiles. It focuses on neighborhood as a physical space, women’s social networks in the neighborhood and women’s mobility. The main findings include that the nexus of gender and class is inscribed in public spaces so that these restrict women and their right to the city; the organization of public spaces ignores women’s reproductive responsibilities; women participate in the public sphere, but gender hierarchies have not been eliminated; while local social networks are fundamental for women in their efforts to reappropriate public spaces. It concludes that the transition to sustainable – enjoyable – inclusive cities will benefit from incorporating women’s experiences and needs; adopting a socio-spatial perspective that focuses on everyday life; a focus on social reproduction too; and an explicit aim to eliminate gender hierarchies (rather than inclusion).

This article discusses the methodological implications of a recent study on Luxembourg's offshore financial center. Insight from actor-network theory was essential in undertaking its ethnographic research with elites from the country's state and financial institutions. My intention in documenting this approach is to provide a template for ethnographers studying other localized contexts of global politico-economic significance, in which elite actors usually seek to curtail the enquiries of investigators. With this actor-network from Luxembourg as an example, I demonstrate how elite and difficult-to-access milieus can be entered via “networking” coupled with outreach via interviews and email correspondence. As I show, by initiating various modalities of entry into the context in question, ethnographers can establish themselves within an actor-network for the purposes of conducting interviews and participant observation with elite interlocutors.

Introduction: This study investigates the COVID-19 pandemic’s effects on the sustainability of the supply chain. It investigates how modern supply networks and procedures were equipped for such a catastrophe, and the pandemic’s effects on the environment, highlighting the significance of studying resilience and sustainability concurrently.

Purpose: The study acknowledges the importance of environmental sustainability for businesses and the need to examine trends in organisational, customer, policy, and distribution networks.

Need for the Study: The COVID-19 pandemic has significantly impacted supply chains. This study aims to provide insight into the long-term repercussions of the crisis and the importance of incorporating environmental considerations.

Methodology: The study uses a mixed-methods approach to evaluate the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on supply networks and environmental sustainability indices. Data from industry reports, governmental publications, polls, and qualitative research techniques have been gathered.

Findings: The results of this study advance our understanding of how to preserve supply chains in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. It highlights the need for enhanced resilience and sustainability measures, expose the flaws and weaknesses of contemporary supply networks, and uncover developing patterns and tactics in customer behaviour, policy frameworks, distribution networks, and supply chain management.

Practical Implications: The COVID-19 pandemic has provided businesses, decision makers, and researchers with guidance on handling its potential and challenges – increasing the supply chain’s resistance to future interruptions, incorporating environmentally friendly practises, developing policies to support resilient and sustainable supply chains, adapting to changing consumer tastes, increasing effectiveness, and minimising the environmental impact of distribution networks.

Peer work would previously have been associated with having a lived experience of mental health conditions and working with people in a relatable way to model that context. However, peer support work has since embraced a wider composition from the generic context, seeing that ethnic minorities face many health, social and psychological challenges, especially those deemed Refugees/Asylum Seekers (International Protection Applicants) on their journey to resettlement in host countries. The Health Service Executive's Social Inclusion office plays a crucial role in responding to the health needs of service users from underserved communities. The health and care needs of people from diverse ethnic, cultural and religious communities fall within the remit of the Health Service Executive Social Inclusion office nationally. The context for peer work in ethnic minority communities is that it is a pilot programme evaluated and endorsed as a national programme by the National Intercultural Health Group. It is evidence-based and aligned with national strategy/policy, with training options available to peer support workers. In the Southeast region of Ireland, communities vulnerable to health inequality targeted by the Social Inclusion team would range from Roma to Refugees and International Protection Applicants – formally known as Asylum Seekers. This chapter will focus on these ethnic populations and how peer support work is delivered in these contexts.

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.