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Architecture influences people and the environment from the past, present and the future. Nevertheless architecture and design quality is viewed as subjective, and benchmarks to achieve consensus are necessary for design or evaluation of buildings. This paper establishes architectural design criteria for design quality of multi-storey housing buildings. A set of the criteria was established with literature review, an operational definition and survey on qualified persons or architects in the professional practice of architecture. The literature reviews identified seven concepts for architecture and design quality, and the operational definition translated this architectural design quality to measurable and observable cases and variables. The survey collected these variable data from a purposive sample of 95 respondents, and these data were examined by statistical analysis. The results of the descriptive statistics, inferential t-tests (p ≤ 0.05) and positive hypothesis testing verified that respondents in general agreed to these seven design concepts as architectural design criteria for design quality. These results established the first ever set of seven architectural design criteria which were ranked in descending order of significance as function, socio-culture, site context, cost, aesthetic of art, sustainability, and Feng Shui. These architectural design criteria can be applied to the design or evaluation of multi-storey housing buildings for the good of people and the environment.

The purpose of this study is to focus on women small and medium enterprises (WSMEs) financed by Kenya Women Finance Trust (KWFT) for poverty alleviation in Kakamega District‐Kenya.

The study utilized cross‐sectional data from KWFT and follow‐up field survey data of women beneficiaries of KWFT credit. Multi‐stage stratified sampling technique was adopted to identify 90 women entrepreneurs of the total population of 300. Primary data were gathered using structured and non‐structured questionnaires, interview schedules and focus group discussions. The study adopts both qualitative and quantitative data analysis.

KWFT micro credit has had a positive impact upon women entrepreneurs on income savings, asset creation and their general social welfare. However, the KWFT's fight against poverty is constrained by socio‐culture and other institutional policy issues such as: right to own property, right to education, own land, manage and inherit property, conduct business, among others.

Women have shown that they are strong entrepreneurs, borrowers and change agents through WSMEs. Government of Kenya should urgently adopt a gender policy to address socio‐culture issues constraining WSMEs. Further, KWFT should avoid cumbersome loan procedures but rather provide quick and convenient access to credit for women entrepreneurs, simple product offerings, with some flexibility to boost fight against poverty.

Linking women entrepreneurship in the context of overall fight against poverty in Western Region in Kenya through KWFT; provide opportunity to add knowledge to current literature critical for academia and women entrepreneurship policy in Kenya in particular, as well as Sub‐Saharan African region.

The paper aims to elucidate the potential of a socio-cultural approach to social marketing. Drawing on a practice-theoretical understanding of change, the paper discusses how a socio-cultural approach can inform social marketing and enhance the possibilities of the field to address complex, multifaceted issues that require changes beyond the individual.

While the paper is conceptual in nature, it uses an illustrative example of food waste as the basis for an investigation of what a socio-cultural approach, rooted in practice-theoretical understanding of change, means for social marketing.

The paper is conceptual in nature but highlights new opportunities for social marketing connected to a socio-cultural approach foregrounding practice changes. The paper introduces potential roles that social marketers can adopt to initiate and support practice changes in the context of food waste.

The paper emphasises the importance of focussing on the socio-culture and practices connected to the issue in question, both when scoping for insight and when developing the ways to address it.

By integrating a practice-theoretical understanding of change, social marketing and food waste literature, the paper offers novel insights about the potential of adopting a socio-cultural approach to social marketing. The paper discusses a socio-cultural approach to social marketing in context, emphasising the roles social marketers can play in practice changes.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate challenges of building entrepreneurial ecosystems in peripheral places. The entrepreneurial ecosystem concept is developing a rising popularity among both academics and policymakers in recent years where much of the attention has been put in major urban cities. However, on the way to achieve balanced growth and equity, peripheral places should not be neglected. Thus, this paper links literature on ecosystem with peripheral region studies in creating a conceptual framework of developing entrepreneurial ecosystems in peripheral places.

The paper first reviews literature on entrepreneurial ecosystems and challenges that peripheral places facing in particular. Then, taking into consideration of literature from both fields, a conceptual framework is developed. In order to better illustrate the framework, a case study on Guildford’s digital gaming industry is reviewed based on secondary data.

Though facing various challenges such as smallness, remoteness and lack of resources, peripheral places can take advantage of the digital technology and build an entrepreneurial ecosystem of its own kind through holistic collaborative approach to tackle issues around finance, talents, socio-culture environment, infrastructure, markets and policy.

The paper is among the first to focus on developing a holistic conceptual framework in building entrepreneurial ecosystems in peripheral areas. It can lead to a range of further research topics and contribute to develop viable practices particularly for policymakers.

This study assesses the level of user importance to the building components of the Great Mosque of Mataram Kotagede Yogyakarta. The building components are the excellence and reliability of the mosque as a cultural and religious heritage in Indonesia.

This research uses the qualitative and quantitative method. The qualitative method was conducted with contextual and conceptual studies on the comparative history of the Great Mosque of Mataram Kotagede. The quantitative method collected respondent perceptions using questionnaire.

The results generate ten building components that the highest important component is the aesthetics appearance of the building, while the least important component is the tomb area. Other components consist of the ornaments and building elements, outdoor circulation, indoor circulation, landscapes and parks, the wall surrounding the mosque and its area, mosque furniture, ablution facilities and lavatories, and access from the mosque area to surrounding areas.

The conservation maintains the sustainability of the physical and non-physical aspects of the mosque building. The physical aspects include aesthetics and reliability of building, while the non-physical aspects consist of historical values, heritage, symbols, socio-culture, local wisdom and religious tolerance.

The philosophy of Grameen (rural) banking system was invented by a maverick economist (Dr Yunus) in a tiny village of Bangladesh in 1976, with the aim to eliminate poverty and improve the socio‐economic condition of the rural poor. The bank provides loans to poor people who are unable to provide collateral and indoctrinated in Grameen social values, known as the “sixteen decisions”. Grameen borrowers also vow to observe the bank’s “four basic principles”, and they are the owners (92 per cent) of the bank. Grameen bank began its operations by giving a small amount of money ($30) to 40 people. Today, it employs 14,000 staff and has disbursed more than $1 billion dollars of loan among two million rural people in Bangladesh of which 95 per cent are women, and the rate of its loan repayment is 98 per cent. The Grameen is functioning not only in Bangladesh but also in 50 countries across Asia, Europe, Africa, Oceania, and in the USA. Moving onto the implementation of Grameen‐type micro‐credit systems in Europe, or elsewhere, the differences in socio‐culture, economics and politics (between Bangladesh and the region concerned) should be considered. Thus, this paper is an attempt to investigate the prospects of the implementation of Grameen/micro‐credit banking system in European socio‐economic and cultural contexts.

Women entrepreneurship has been growing and contributing significantly to economic activities, and it may also reduce unemployment, especially in developing countries. Many women entrepreneurs have begun to experience problems, including within their socio-cultural environment, in the beginning of or when they run their businesses. Among those developing countries, Indonesia has been recognized as having diverse ethnic groups, traditions, religions and languages. The purpose of this paper is to analyse how the socio-cultural environment affects women entrepreneurs in Indonesia.

This study aims at exploring the impact of the socio-cultural environment on entrepreneurial behavior, including the involvement of women in entrepreneurial activities in Indonesia as a multicultural country. A theoretical framework is empirically tested to identify the impact of the socio-culture environment on behavior and on women entrepreneurial activity through an integrated analysis.

A quantitative method with a causal descriptive approach is used in this study. The data are analyzed by using a descriptive statistics with the structural equation modeling technique. This study is intended to focus on women entrepreneurs in micro, small and medium enterprises in Bandung, Indonesia. A total of 210 women entrepreneurs have participated in this study. Practical implications include useful information for women entrepreneurs to overcome the impact of the socio-cultural environment in their entrepreneurial activities, and suggest insights for future research.

The development of women entrepreneurship in emerging economies may continuously face challenges, particularly in countries with multicultural attributes.

In a pandemic framework (COVID-19), this chapter explores the impact of the global economy and socio-cultures concerning three axes: recreational, tourism, and hospitality. Although we slowly see an economic revival, it is well known that this sector of study is very susceptible to being affected by the context of nations. Following restrictions and measures taken by governments around the world to reduce the number of cases of coronavirus infections, many nations closed their borders, affecting international travel and by 2020 tourism had been reduced to the near cessation of operations due to the imminent fear of this poorly studied disease, and the service sector was negatively affected. It should be added that, according to the World Tourism Organization's projections, a decrease of between 20 and 30% is forecast for 2020 compared to the previous year.

Indigenous knowledge is an essential element for unveiling the evolutionary journey of socio-culture phenomena. One of the key challenges in foresight exercises is to incorporate social-culture issues such as culture, lifestyle and behavior (referred as indigenous knowledge) into the study. However, the statistical trends of those factors tend to be either not available or limited unlike the population or economic related factors. The purpose of this study is to present the use of valuable data from indigenous knowledge to enhance the foresight exercise through the better understanding of social dynamics and changes.

The fragmented form of indigenous knowledge is analyzed and converted into a structured data format and then interpreted to unveil the evolutionary journey of socio-cultural phenomena. This study applies a scenario development method to visualize the results of foresight by comparing before and after the integration of indigenous knowledge. Finally, an assessment was conducted to reflect the value enhancement resulting from the integration of indigenous knowledge into the foresight process.

With the proposed approach, the foresight study on the future development of Thai food was demonstrated. The findings of this study show that the use of indigenous knowledge on eating behavior, cooking style and food flavor helps improve the alternative scenarios for the future development of Thai foods.

Indigenous knowledge can be applied to develop plausible scenarios and future images in foresight exercises. However, by nature, indigenous knowledge is not well-structured and, therefore, needs to be analyzed and turned into structured data so that it can be interpreted before integrating into the foresight process.

This study is one of few studies addressing the opportunities for integrating indigenous knowledge into foresight process. Indigenous knowledge can unveil the evolution of socio-cultural changes to improve the results of foresight study, especially the cases where statistical data and trends may not be sufficient to foresee future development.

The authors' study aims to examine to what extent managerial religiosity does influence human resource (HR) managers' attitudes towards women as managers (ATWM), and whether such posi(nega)tive attitudes can facilitate or impede the adoption of supportive HR practices (SHRP).

This study empirically examines a theoretical model by employing partial least squares-based structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM) using quantitative survey data from 182 HR managers in Bangladesh.

The authors' findings reveal that individual religiosity may adversely affect HR managers' attitudes towards recognising women as managers, and such stereotyped attitudes, in turn, may attenuate the adoption of supportive HR practices in organisations operating particularly in highly religious socio-culture environments.

The findings of the authors based on self-report, cross-sectional survey data collected from HR managers/equivalent working in the Bangladeshi organisations may unlikely to predict the ATWM held by the top leaders in organisations and other employees in similar socio-cultural settings.

The authors' findings suggest that religiosity cannot be ignored in management development and recruitment processes for HR managers, particularly in a society characterised by relatively weaker formal institutions and people with a higher degree of religiosity.

To the best of the authors' knowledge, this study is the first attempt explicating how top management's religiosity interacts with the attitudes towards the acceptance of women as managers and how such attitudes can influence the adoption of supportive HR practices.