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This article describes the personal experiences of a person with Asperger's syndrome who has used various services aimed at improving clients' mental health, both public and private. A number of experiences are described as summarised below.a) Post‐traumatic stress caused by experiences of school bullying, being dismissed from a job, and a period of unemployment resulted in the author's referral to a Christian counselling centre. There, specialised counselling sessions proved very beneficial.b) Difficulties in social skills resulted in the author being referred by his general practitioner to a psychiatric nurse, who in turn referred him to an excellent social skills and assertiveness course run by the Mind mental health charity. Experience of further social skills training is also described.c) Low self‐esteem and recurrent insomnia as a result of poor inter‐personal experiences and lack of career progress relative to peer group led to an extended sequence of counselling sessions with a private Christian counsellor. Guided cognitive therapy with this counsellor resulted in a substantial alleviation of both the low self‐esteem and the insomnia.d) The author also received further counselling, from a different counsellor to acquire assertiveness skills, and the ability to deal with aggressive people.In all, the author's experience of mental health intervention was mainly low‐cost Christian counselling, working through self‐help books, and the occasional social skills course. Very little use was made of medication and none of hospital‐based services.

This paper seeks to elicit the challenges faced by the UAE dates industry in adopting and aligning its business strategy with the use of information system and information technology (IS/IT) within its operations.

The adopted approach is based on the combination of conclusive feedback research technique and action research. The intention is to elicit background information in its initial phase, formulate an interim solution, which will evolve through users' constant feedbacks into a full‐blown desirable system.

Highlights the UAE dates industry existing state of readiness in adopting IS/IT and the extent of optimizing supply‐chain management business practices.

Transforming organization manual operations to achieve efficiency towards strategic effectiveness is a lengthy process. While quantitative and qualitative evidences suggest the adoption of a certain solution, the benefits yield cannot be realized overnight.

This research proposes a paradigm shift in the organization's culture. Adopting supply‐chain principles and implementing a strategy to align both business and use of IS/IT will facilitate an elevation for UAE dates factory to be one of the economy contributing industries.

This research addresses existing states of readiness to implement IS/IT within the UAE dates factory, proposes supply‐chain model customized to UAE dates factory and highlights challenges faced by the factory in implementing the strategic alignment of its business through IS/IT optimization.

This paper investigates the factors affecting individual dispositions toward intentions. Specifically, this study aims to investigate the effects of emotional intelligence, entrepreneurial motivation and creativity on the entrepreneurial intentions of university students in Jordan.

The data were gathered through self-administered questionnaires from a sample of 745 university students in Jordan. The hypotheses were tested using partial least squares (PLS) analysis.

The results indicate a robust relationship between entrepreneurial motivation and creativity and entrepreneurial intention. However, an insignificant relationship was found between emotional intelligence and entrepreneurial intention. The findings of this study reveal that both creativity and emotional intelligence exert a significant and positive indirect effect on entrepreneurial intentions through the mediation of entrepreneurial motivation.

This work suggests that university administrators should consider the significant roles that emotional intelligence, entrepreneurial motivation and creativity play in shaping the entrepreneurial intentions of university students.

While there is limited existing research on this matter within the Middle Eastern context, especially in Jordan, this study aims to address this gap in the Jordanian entrepreneurial literature. As the first of its kind conducted within Jordanian universities, this study contributes significantly to the understanding of entrepreneurial dynamics in the region. Using the Wong and Law Emotional Intelligence Scale, this study evaluates emotional intelligence in Jordan. The results contribute to social psychology literature and suggest actionable government measures, integrated into education systems, to encourage entrepreneurial paths for students and alleviate graduate unemployment.

Parking policy in the United States is dominated by zoning codes with minimum parking requirements stipulated for a variety of uses. Some cities have realized that this approach has not yielded the desired policy outcomes; instead, it may be causing unintended consequences including added auto-travel, dispersed development, congestion, and air pollution that cities now wish to mitigate.

This paper identifies historic and contemporary trends in United States’ parking policy as cities gain additional insight and embrace new priorities.

Three emerging trends in the U.S. context are identified: Rethinking zoning codes that require parking with development; introducing pricing to better manage curb resources thereby cutting down curb-space competition; and looking for urban design solutions to parking access, location and on-site placement which can lead to more efficient mode use decisions.

The chapter provides an analysis of cases showing how cities are now seeking alternative approaches.

After many years of policy intervention focused on the alleviation of parking shortages by requiring additional off-street parking, cities are now seeking alternative approaches.

Cities can learn from each other’s experiences. New paradigms in parking policy will lead to different social outcomes: they could increase the cost of auto use (disadvantaging the poor) but decrease auto dependence (favoring the poor).

The originality of this chapter is in the juxtaposition and analysis of trends that have, heretofore, had little exposure.

Entrepreneurship is one of the significant drivers of economic growth, development and job generation in several countries worldwide. Realizing its significant contribution to the nation’s development, policymakers and educators have also drawn attention to fostering entrepreneurship among the youth. Researchers attempted to comprehend the dynamics and investigate the factors influencing entrepreneurial intention (EI). As is true for other abilities and response tendencies, individual differences exist for EI also. This study aims to explore the relationship of emotional intelligence (EIn) and cognitive flexibility (CF) with EI and mediating effect of entrepreneurial self-efficacy (ESE) in the relationship between CF, EIn and EI.

The cross-sectional survey was conducted to gather responses from 635 individuals aged 17–26 years (M = 19.2, SD = 1.49). The hypotheses were tested using correlation, regression and mediation analysis.

The findings indicated that EIn and CF were significantly and positively related to EI. Furthermore, ESE was found to be a partial mediator between EIn and EI and a full mediator between CF and EI.

Results reflected the critical significance of ESE and implied that EI might be strengthened by intervening in ESE through various sources.

This study adds to the existing literature by incorporating less studied individual factors (EIn and CF) to better understand EI by explaining the mediation mechanism through ESE.

Given the extensive evidence of femvertising's positive effects in Western cultures, this paper aims to investigate how femvertising may influence customers' perceptions and brand-related outcomes in a patriarchal context such as Pakistan.

Qualitative methodology was employed in this study, which was based on in-depth interviews involving 17 consumers (including both male and females). Thematic analysis was used to analyse the data.

Results indicated that male and female consumers revealed varied and sometimes contradictory perspectives on the perception, understanding and behaviour towards femvertised adverts, which are governed by patriarchal gendered norms.

This study contributes to the body of knowledge by exploring the consumer perception towards femvertising in a patriarchal context, where gender disparity is evident. It also draws attention to the underlying cultural elements contributing towards the formation of those perceptions.

The study aims to identify and recommend to the Marist International University College (MIUC) technologies that enhance knowledge management, with a particular focus on collaborative and distributed learning.

Nine senior full-time academic staff members were purposively selected for the study. The study employed a qualitative research design that involved the use of Google forms to conduct an online survey to collect data from the target population, and it achieved a 100% response rate. Using content analysis, data were analysed, interpreted and presented in a mini-dissertation.

This research paper presents the findings relating to the innovative use of technologies to enhance collaborative and distributive learning. The findings confirm the existence of informal knowledge management practices at the MIUC and recommend technologies established through a review of the literature to expedite these practices.

The proposed technologies are thought to be useful in enhancing collaborative and distributed learning in academic institutions as technologies act as enablers in knowledge management within academia.

As technologies continue to emerge, there is a chance for universities to hit a stalemate in terms of identifying appropriate technologies to enable knowledge management. This paper contributes by identifying not only KM practices at the university under study but also specific multimedia, social media, media sharing and brainstorming technologies from the literature that would be ideal in enhancing collaborative and distributed learning.

Interlocking directorates are a common phenomenon across several markets around the world. Yet, the institutional environment and the role of corporate elites in forming board networks promote some developing markets as a unique setting to understand the corporate boards network structure. This study aims to first explore the board directors’ network of all publicly listed companies in Kuwait. This paper then evaluates the effects of exogenous factors and endogenous network structural processes on the likelihood of board interlock.

This study analyzes the interlocks network structures of 167 listed companies in 13 different market sectors in Kuwait relying on hand-collected directors’ data and using four measures of network centrality: betweenness, degree, closeness and eigenvector. The authors predict board interlocks using exponential random graph models (ERGM) and firm-level information from the Bloomberg database.

This study observes that both the firms and directors’ networks consist of 55 components, with the largest component containing about half of the total number of firms/directors. The firm’s network consists of one giant component of 85 firms, including all but one bank. This study shows the importance of endogenous network variables, such as the number of edges, centralization and triangles on the estimation of the factors that promote the board interlocks. Highly centralized firms are less likely to interlock with other firms, while two firms that are interlocked with a common third firm are more likely to interlock.

This paper is the first to analyze in-depth the structure of the directors network of companies in Kuwait. This study illustrates the complex map of interfirm and directors social networks in Kuwait. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is among the first to exploit ERGM in the context of board interlocks to account for potential cross-dependencies and emergent network structures. Managers can identify the director interlock with other firms in the network and take advantage of the connection as a source of external knowledge and influence.