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The concept of information security culture, which recently gained increased attention, aims to comprehensively grasp socio-cultural mechanisms that have an impact on organizational security. Different measurement instruments have been developed to measure and assess information security culture using survey-based tools. However, the content, breadth and face validity of these scales vary greatly. This study aims to identify and provide an overview of the scales that are used to measure information security culture and to evaluate the rigor of reported scale development and validation procedures.

Papers that introduce a new or adapt an existing scale of information security culture were systematically reviewed to evaluate scales of information security culture. A standard search strategy was applied to identify 19 relevant scales, which were evaluated based on the framework of 16 criteria pertaining to the rigor of reported operationalization and the reported validity and reliability of the identified scales.

The results show that the rigor with which scales of information security culture are validated varies greatly and that none of the scales meet all the evaluation criteria. Moreover, most of the studies provide somewhat limited evidence of the validation of scales, indicating room for further improvement. Particularly, critical issues seem to be the lack of evidence regarding discriminant and criterion validity and incomplete documentation of the operationalization process.

Researchers focusing on the human factor in information security need to reach a certain level of agreement on the essential elements of the concept of information security culture. Future studies need to build on existing scales, address their limitations and gain further evidence regarding the validity of scales of information security culture. Further research should also investigate the quality of definitions and make expert assessments of the content fit between concepts and items.

Organizations that aim to assess the level of information security culture among employees can use the results of this systematic review to support the selection of an adequate measurement scale. However, caution is needed for scales that provide limited evidence of validation.

This is the first study that offers a critical evaluation of existing scales of information security culture. The results have decision-making value for researchers who intend to conduct survey-based examinations of information security culture.

While every firm is striving to embrace digital transformation (DT) to form new differentiating business capabilities, there are dark sides to such initiatives, and it is essential to acknowledge, identify and address them. The purpose of this paper is to identify and emperically demonstrate the impact of such darksides of DT. While a firm's DT effort may have many dark sides, the authors identify data breaches as the most critical one and focus on proving their impact since it can inflict significant damage to the firm.

Through the lens of paradox theory, the authors argue that the DT efforts of a firm will lead to increased risk and severity of data breaches. The authors developed a one-of-a-kind longitudinal data set by combining data from multiple sources, including 3604 brands over a 10-year period, and employed a DT performance scorecard to evaluate a firm's DT effort across four key digital selling touchpoints: site, mobile, digital marketing and social media.

The findings of this study show that a firm's DT efforts pertaining to its mobile and digital marketing platforms significantly increase the likelihood and severity of a data breach event indicating that these two channels are most vulnerable and need heightened attention from firms. Furthermore, the findings suggest that the negative repercussions of some DT initiatives may be minimized as the firm becomes more innovative. The findings can help firms re-strategize their DT efforts by promoting security and also encouraging a balanced communication strategy.

This research is one of the first to identify, recognize and empirically illustrate the downsides of a DT effort that is otherwise thought to provide only benefits.

The purpose of this scoping review is to analyse comparative studies on social-policy measures implemented during the COVID-19 pandemic in Global North welfare states. The authors also consider the potential influence of the regimes on the responses.

The authors conducted a scoping review of six databases including peer-reviewed comparative studies. In an iterative process with exact inclusion criteria, the authors screened 699 titles/abstracts/articles and found 16 comparative research articles to be included in the review and analysis. The review summarises the main themes of the comparative articles and the articles' typical features.

The results show that social-policy measures were directed specifically at working-age people to minimise income loss and to save jobs. The pandemic also increased care-related responsibilities, necessitating the expansion of current policies and the implementation of new instruments. Despite the differences in responses between universalistic and residual welfare states, the influence of welfare regimes on COVID-19 social-policy measures remains unclear. The emergency responses in the different regimes varied widely in terms of coverage.

The results of this review provide a basis on which to conduct future studies, identify new research topics and knowledge gaps and inspire new research questions and hypotheses. Given the accumulation of scientific knowledge in the area of social-policy measures, the need for systematic reviews will grow in the future.

The authors identified three main themes: changes in employment protection, changes in care-related income protection and the potential influence of welfare-state regimes on COVID-19-related measures.

Aiding employment is an important poverty reduction strategy in many countries’ social welfare systems, as this strategy can help empower the recipients with a better living standard, development and social inclusion. The purpose of this paper is to identify the most significant individual and systematic variables for the employment status of low-income groups in urban China.

The data of this study are drawn from “Social Policy Support System for Poverty-stricken Families in Urban and Rural China 2015” report. The Ministry of Civil Affairs of the People’s Republic of China appointed and funded the Institute of Social Science Survey (ISSS) at Peking University to deliver the related project and organize a research team to write the report. Multiple binary logistic regression analysis is adopted to identify both individual and systematic factors that affect the employment status among low-income groups in urban China.

According to the results of the binary logistic regression model, individual factors, including: gender; householder status; education; and self-rated health status, play a significant role in determining the employment status of low-income groups in urban China. Clearly, the impacts of individual factors are more influential to marginal families than to families entitled to receive Basic Living Allowance. In contrast, compared with marginal families, systematic factors are more influential to families entitled to receive Basic Living Allowance.

This study highlights the importance of precise poverty reduction strategy and the issue of “welfare dependence” among low-income groups in urban China. Policy recommendations derived from the findings are hence given, including: the promotion of family-friendly policies; the introduction of a smart healthcare system; the establishment of a Basic Living Allowance adjustment mechanism; and the provision of related social services.

This study aims to investigate the relationship between the spread of extremist thoughts and the weak economic and social factors surrounding it. There are higher chances of better understanding of this relationship on Egypt’s borders more than its center. Achieving development and stability leads to creating a preventive environment to extremist thoughts existence and spread, in addition to preventing its transformation into terrorism.

The study depends on an analytical methodology to examine the validity of the research hypothesis through two basic steps. The first step depends on describing the geographical, demographical, economic, social, political and security aspects of North Sinai. The second step is a prospective approach to build a strategy that helps in achieving development and accordingly a comprehensive confront for the opportunities of extremist thought spreading in North Sinai.

The study concludes that Egypt is well aware of the dimensions of encountering extremist thoughts and has adopted a comprehensive approach in achieving this. It has already started the paces of this confrontation in general, with some specificity in North Sinai Governorate that observed lately increased activities by extremists and terrorist groups. The proposed strategy is a set of policies that can help the country achieve its goals against extremism and terrorism.

The study covers a time frame that starts from 2014, which is considered the beginning of a new phase for the Egyptian state. The study relies on the field of strategic studies and it focuses on North Sinai Governorate.

The study has a scientific importance because it presents a proposal for a comprehensive strategy to encounter extremist thoughts, which adds value to the literature of the study of extremism. The current study makes its contributions in some directions, such as reviewing the contents of this extremist thought or the juristic comment on it, the impacts of the spread of extremist thoughts, the role of the official media in disseminating extremist thoughts or standing up to it. In terms of application, the study presents a proposal with many policies in various fields to counter extremist ideology. These proposals are implementable in North Sinai Governorate as well as other frontier governorates.

Employment-related measures play a significant part in preventive and mitigative social policies. The importance of these actions is especially emphasised in times of crisis. This paper provides empirical insights into employment-related measures implemented in a sample of OECD countries as a response to the COVID-19 crisis in 2020. Furthermore, it addresses the continuity of the measures by July 2022.

The research applies and further develops a capability approach in the COVID-19 context to provide a theoretically informed empirical understanding of the implemented employment related measures.

The results indicate that countries expanded the coverage of previous preventive and mitigative employment measures horizontally and vertically while also introducing new schemes to protect workers. The main conclusions suggest that most employment-related measures (65.5%) were preventive aiming at saving jobs and broadening peoples capabilities with bridging measures during the crisis. The employment measures served first as an emergency aid. However, most measures were recalibrated and changed incrementally toward 2022.

The data consisted major employment-related measures and changes in social policies the studied countries. The authors focussed the examination on governmental-level measures. Thus, sub-national or sector-specific responses, for example tripartite agreements in certain employment sectors or social transfers in certain areas, were excluded.

The way in which welfare states reacted to employment problems during the COVID-19 pandemic may have an impact on how governments approach social policies in the future. The capability approach exhibits a pronounced strength by facilitating the establishment of sustainable trajectories for social policy and welfare services.

The capability approach embracing the preactive and proactive role of social policies lends a unique perspective on public policies.

Older adults who are or have been incarcerated constitute a growing population in the USA. The complex health needs of this group are often inadequately addressed during incarceration and equally so when transitioning back to the community. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the literature on challenges older adults (age 50 and over) face in maintaining health and accessing social services to support health after an incarceration and to outline recommendations to address the most urgent of these needs.

This study conducted a narrative literature review to identify the complex health conditions and health services needs of incarcerated older adults in the USA and outline three primary barriers they face in accessing health care and social services during reentry.

Challenges to healthy reentry of older adults include continuity of health care; housing availability; and access to health insurance, disability and other support. The authors recommend policy changes to improve uniformity of care, development of support networks and increased funding to ensure that older adults reentering communities have access to resources necessary to safeguard their health and safety.

This review presents a broad perspective of the current literature on barriers to healthy reentry for older adults in the USA and offers valuable system, program and policy recommendations to address those barriers.

Mainland Tanzania has seen two decades of significant social policy reforms and transformations in its social and economic structures, whilst the country continues to grapple with persisting gender inequalities. This article examines Tanzania's social policy developments from a gender perspective. The authors analyse the level, reach and quality of social policy delivery to working-age women across the areas of health policy, social protection and employment policy during 2000–2021.

The article draws on qualitative research deploying the scoping review method. The data consist of diverse secondary materials, including academic publications, government policy documents, relevant statistics and other types of “grey” literature.

Tanzania has made significant advancements in the legal frameworks around welfare provision and has instituted increasingly gender-responsive government policy plans. The health and social protection sectors, in particular, have witnessed the introduction of large-scale measures expanding social policy implementation. However, social policy delivery remains two-tiered, with differences in provisions for women in the formal and informal sectors.

Social policy delivery and implementation have increased and diversified in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) during the new millennium, with a growing integration of gender-specific policy objectives. However, limited social policy scholarship has focused on the gendered effects of broader social policy models in SSA. The article remedies the concomitant knowledge gaps by examining various social policies and their impacts on working-age women in Mainland Tanzania. The authors also engage with the theoretical welfare regime literature and present an analytical framework for gender-sensitive assessment of emerging social policy models in the Global South.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the relation between estate transformations produced during the governments of the Citizen Revolution (CR) in Ecuador (2007-2017) and welfare regime transformations.

The CR’s project registers an array of specificities that make it a relevant case study to understand it. Among them, it articulated the transformation of the development model with a comprehensive state reform: emphasized both the modernization of the state and the productive structure, and the creation of the basic pillars of a welfare state. The ambitious project materialized in an ambivalent manner, revealing accomplishments and limitations.

The recovery of resources for the state, the efficient organization of resources, decentralization and deconcentration processes, public administration transformations and policy de-corporatization processes accompanied and even propelled important achievements in the social sphere in terms of decommodification, stratification, commodification and defamiliarization. Ecuador’s starting point, as a small and impoverished country with pubic and communal goods and services dismantled through neoliberal reforms, was quite precarious. But, progress was made. Beyond the identified limitations, its accomplishments must be highlighted because they are novel in comparison to other progressive government experiences, especially in the context of Central Andean countries.

This article vindicates the need to link state transformation processes to welfare regime transformations, as well as the academic literature that informs both fields. The description of what took place in Ecuador in the field of social welfare during the ten years of the CR continues to confirm the theoretical potential of the concept of welfare regime with the necessary translations and appropriations that allow for the analysis of countries in the region. It enables an approach to a more theoretically and methodologically elusive object that is at the same time tremendously potent in analytical terms and in its contributions to social transformations. An object that alludes to areas gravely affected during neoliberal hegemony, linked to public institutionality, state capacity and state autonomy. This is why everything that affects the state and the management of public goods and services must be incorporated into the analysis.

This study evaluates the impact of government social protection interventions on households’ welfare in South Africa.

The study uses survey data comprising 393 observations and the multinomial logistic regression technique to analyse the effect of government interventions on households’ welfare. For robustness purposes, a negative binomial regression model is also estimated whose results corroborate the main results from the multinomial regression model.

The study’s findings show that government economic interventions through social protection significantly reduce the likelihood of a decrease in household income or consumption. COVID-19 grant/social relief of distress grant, unemployment insurance, tax relief and job protection and creation are all significant in sustaining household income and consumption.

The findings have policy implications for social development. Specifically, the findings support the use of government social protection as a safety net for low-income groups in South Africa.

The study presents preliminary evidence on the effectiveness of several measures used to ameliorate the COVID-19-induced recession within the South African context.