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The use of Twitter by political parties and politicians has been well studied in developed countries. However, there is a lack of empirical work, which has examined the use of Twitter in developing countries. This study aims to explore the information-sharing patterns of Pakistani politicians through Twitter accounts during the pre-election campaign of 2018.

Data of three weeks of the official party accounts and the politicians running for prime minister were analysed. The mixed-methods approach has been used to analyse quantitative and qualitative data retrieved through Twitonomy.

It was found that the most active Twitter account belonged to the winning party. The prominent Twitter account functions were a call to vote, promotional Tweets, promises and Tweeting about party developments. The present study provides evidence that there is a difference between the Tweeting behaviour of established and emerging parties. The emerging party heavily posted about changing traditional norms/culture/practices.

The study contributed to existing knowledge and has practical implications for politicians, citizens and social media planners.

The present study was designed carefully and based on empirical research. The study is unique in its nature to fill the research and knowledge gap by adding a variety of Twitter functions used by politicians.

Halal logistics play a crucial role in maintaining a product’s “halal integrity” from farm to fork. These logistics operations are exposed to risks during transportation, storage and handling, that negatively affect the halal supply chain’s operational efficiency and integrity. Therefore, the main purpose of this research is to propose a risk assessment framework for halal logistics.

Initially, the risks associated with halal logistics are identified through an extensive literature review, and then the significant ones are validated with the expert’s input. After that, an appropriate multicriteria decision-making method named best worst method (BWM) is used to prioritise the identified risks. Finally, the robustness of the obtained ranking is assessed with sensitivity analysis.

This research identifies 26 halal logistics risks and then categorises these risks into 6 significant dimensions and proposes a framework. The result obtained from the BWM analysis shows that organisational, transportation and design risks are the primary risks present in halal logistics. Among the halal logistics risks, partnership risk, risk of contamination during transportation and risks of unskilled workers are the top three halal logistics risks that need to be addressed on a priority basis for maintaining halal integrity. Furthermore, this study also suggests some valuable suggestions for mitigating these risks that the logistics providers could use.

The proposed framework is helpful for the assessment of risks associated with halal logistics. The prioritisation of the identified risks supports the managers in formulating mitigation strategies that might reduce the effect of these associated risks in logistics operations.

This study focusses on halal logistics, and to the best of authors’ knowledge, this may be the first attempt to systematically examine the risks related to halal logistics.

Big Data can be utilised for efficient use of resources and to provide better services to the resident in order to enhance the delivery of urban services and create sustainable build environment. However, the adoption of Big Data faces many challenges at the implementation level. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to identify the challenges towards the efficient application of Big Data in smart cities development and analyse the inter-relationships.

The 14 Big Data challenges are identified through the literature review and validated with the expert’s feedback. After that the inter-relationships among the identified challenges are developed using an integrated approach of fuzzy Interpretive Structural Modelling (fuzzy-ISM) and fuzzy Decision-Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory (fuzzy-DEMATEL).

Evaluation of interrelationships among the challenges suggests that diverse population in smart cities and lack of infrastructure are the significant challenges that impede the integration of Big Data in the development of smart cities.

This study will enable practitioners, policy planners involved in smart city projects in tackling the challenges in an optimised manner for the hindrance free and accelerated development of smart cities.

This research is an initial effort to develop an interpretive structural model of Big Data challenges for smart cities development which gives a clearer picture of how the identified challenges interact with each other.

The complex network structure causes several disruptions in the supply chain that make risk management essential for supply chain management including halal supply chain (HSM). During risk management, several challenges are associated with the risk assessment phase, such as incomplete and uncertain information about the system. To cater this, the authors propose a risk assessment framework that addresses the issues of uncertainty using neutrosophic theory and demonstrated the applicability of the proposed framework through the case of halal supply chain management (HSCM).

The proposed framework is using the capabilities of the neutrosophic number which can handle uncertain, vague and incomplete information. Initially, the risk related to the HSC is identified through a literature review and expert’s input. Further, the probability and impact of each HSM-related risk are assessed using experts’ input through linguistic terms. These linguistic values are transformed into single-value trapezoidal neutrosophic numbers (SVTNNs). Finally, the severity of each HSM-related risk is determined through the multiplication of the probability and impact of each risk and prioritised the risks based on their severity.

A comprehensive risk assessment framework is developed that could be used under uncertainty. Initially, 16 risks are identified related to the HSM. Further, the identified risks are prioritised using the severity of the risks. The high-priority risk is “raw material status”, “raw material wholesomeness” and “origin of raw material” while “information integrity” and “people integrity” are low-priority risks.

HSM risk can be effectively assessed through the proposed framework. The proposed framework applied neutrosophic numbers to represent real-life situations, and it could be used for other supply chains as well.

The proposed method is effectively addressing the issue of linguistic subjectivity, inconsistent information and uncertainty in the expert’s opinion. A case study of the HSC is adopted to illustrate the efficiency and applicability of the proposed risk framework.

Circular supply chain management (CSCM) has the potential to compensate for the drawbacks of the linear supply chain model. Therefore, the objective of this study is to identify and prioritise the significant enablers related to the effective management of the circular supply chain (CSC).

The significant enablers of CSCM are identified through a two-step process of literature review and grey-Delphi approach. Further, an integrated grey-based Technique for Order of Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) is applied to prioritise these enablers.

This study proposes a grey-based framework to identify and evaluate the enablers associated with CSCM. A total of 12 significant CSCM enablers are finalised per the proposed framework. The findings suggest that the top three enablers are "long-term planning", "development of CE culture" and "alignment of CE goals with strategic objectives". These enablers require the attention of the top management and supply chain partner on priority.

This study identifies 12 enablers through the literature review, so there is a possibility to overlook some significant enablers. However, the expert's input is used to finalise and analyse the enablers, which can be biased towards their working level.

This study proposes a grey-based framework to identify and analyse the CSC enablers rarely investigated in the contemporary literature. The paper is strong in methodological contributions and gives practitioners and researchers a better framework for CSCM.

Women entrepreneurship is the fundamental carter of economic development. This study aims to identify the dynamics that encourage entrepreneurial attitudes among women in MENA countries. More precisely, it required to scrutinize the role of the government, role models, the entrepreneurial training and women’s demographic characteristics in encouraging women to embrace entrepreneurship.

This study is based on primary data, where data were gathered from a sample of 300 women from MENA countries through a self-administered questionnaire and were subjected to one-way ANOVA tests. Different statistical tools were used to draw some valued conclusions from the gathered data. The study reveals that women entrepreneurs acknowledge the role played by the government, entrepreneurship training, role models and demographic variables in encouraging them to embrace entrepreneurship.

The government and the entrepreneurial training were found to be the greatest variables encouraging women to embrace entrepreneurship. Nevertheless, the low overall mean exhibited that most women do not believe that these bodies have played their role satisfactorily. Whereas the ANOVA results reveal that age and work experience were not important dynamics behind encouraging women to embrace entrepreneurship.

Data were collected from a sample of 300 women entrepreneurs with a simple random sampling technique from the following MENA countries: Oman, Qatar, Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates. It is too difficult to approach the women respondents and then collect data from them especially in MENA countries; hence the sample is small and limited.

However, such studies are still in the minority, and, with few exceptions, most have been published in the niche. The study finds imperative for policymakers to go beyond measures that aim to address the challenges that individual women entrepreneurs face and to study the institutional framework affecting women entrepreneurship in relationship to motivations and resources. Additional care is desired to compel the environment and context to eliminate barriers to women entrepreneurship at source. The government should play a significant role in encouraging women to embrace entrepreneurship, especially in times of economic slowdown. World-wide, women are under-represented among the population of entrepreneurs, and they tend to have different motivations and intentions. The first, and most obvious, implication highlights governments need to create special funds for unlocking the potential by enhancing their levels of entrepreneurship skills using the traditional instruments such as training. The government should come up with new and specific training programmes, providing support for growth-oriented women entrepreneurs with dedicated business incubator and business accelerator programmes.

Entrepreneurs are strongly influenced by role models and social context. It is therefore important to promote women entrepreneurs as role models and ensure that the education system is gender-neutral and does not discourage women from going into different fields. Finally, more targeted actions can be taken to ensure that family policies, social policies and tax policies do not discriminate against entrepreneurship by women.

The author believes that only few entrepreneurship researchers are interested in feminist epistemology, disappointingly the more advanced understanding of feminism witnessed in sociology and the political science literature is not reflected in the field of entrepreneurship. Hence, there is a need for investigate the dynamics like government role, entrepreneurial training, role models and demographic characteristics, to have a fuller understanding of how they affect, to ensure a more accurate assessment of the outcomes for the development of women entrepreneurs in MENA countries. This study is an attempt to investigate the dynamics such as government role, entrepreneurial training, role models and demographic characteristics that encourage women to embrace entrepreneurship in MENA countries.

The study hypothesized that the impact of board diversity on financial distress (FD) is not direct but rather mediated by the firm’s corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities. Consequently, the purpose of this study is to examine the impact of CSR as a mediator in the board diversity–FD relationship.

The study examined six board diversity dimensions – age, gender, nationality, education and tenure in 81 nonfinancial Pakistan Stock Exchange (PSX)-listed firms from 2010 to 2021. The CSR engagement of the sample firms is evaluated using a multidimensional financial approach and the likelihood of FD is computed using Altman’s Z-score. The system-generalized method of moments estimator is used to meet the study objectives. In addition, several tests are run to determine the robustness of the study’s findings.

Based on the procedure for mediation analysis outlined by Baron and Kenny (1986), the authors found that CSR is significantly inversely associated with the likelihood of FD. Second, board diversity variables age, gender and national diversity were positively associated with CSR. Third, board age, gender and national diversity are significantly inversely related to FD. Finally, it was found that there is partial mediation between board age diversity and FD, whereas full mediation is shown between board age diversity and FD and between board nationality diversity and FD.

This study provides practical insights into PSX’s board diversity for companies, regulators and policymakers.

This research studies the connection between board diversity and FD. In addition, the current study extended the analysis by testing for the first time the mediating role of CSR in the diversity–distress relationship, particularly in the context of an emerging economy.

Assurance of Halal integrity up to the consumption point requires a supply chain approach. Credence quality attributes of Halal products make adoption and management of Halal practices along the whole supply chain a challenging task. This paper aims to explore and evaluate the barriers in the management of the Halal supply chain.

This paper reviews the contemporary literature regarding Halal and management of Halal supply chain and subsequently identifies significant barriers towards managing the Halal supply chain. Further, these barriers are examined quantitatively using Best Worst Method.

This study has established significant barriers to Halal supply chain management. Moreover, prioritisation of barriers gives a hierarchy to mitigate these significant barriers. The analysis suggests that reduced demand for Halal products is the highly weighted barrier. Improper laws to regulate the Halal industry and lack of policy framework are hindering the effective management of the Halal supply chain.

This study explored a limited number of barriers; it may be possible that some barriers might not have captured. Further, the identified barriers are generic and validated in the context of multicultural societies. Expert opinion has been used to obtain the weight of barriers which may be biased.

To the best of author’s knowledge, no study has categorically explored and presented a holistic framework to mitigate barriers of managing Halal practices in the supply chain.

Improving health outcomes requires a robust health-care service model that delivers cost-efficient services and increase customer patronage. The purpose of this study is to examine how service quality and convenience influence perceived value, satisfaction and customer patronage of health insurance policyholders. Based on contemporary research, this study further investigates the moderating role of trust, inertia, insurer type and word-of-mouth (WOM) on relationship between satisfaction and customer patronage.

This study conceptualized the dimensions of SERVQUAL and SERVCON as drivers of perceived value leading to satisfaction and finally customer patronage in presence of four moderators. To test the hypotheses, data from 500 consumers who had a running health insurance policy was collected and analyzed using partial least square path modeling.

The results of this study showed service quality and convenience dimensions significantly affected perceived value. Perceived value strongly influenced satisfaction and customer patronage intentions. Satisfaction had a significant positive effect on patronage. WOM and trust moderated the satisfaction–patronage relationship for recommendation intention but not repurchase intention. The moderators had an indirect bearing on customer patronage.

Such an engagement ecosystem can be considered to be a revolution, as it will change the way businesses are conducted and how stakeholders interact with one another.

This study adapts and integrates the SERVQUAL and SERVCON models to health insurance domain. Second, this study conceptualizes a modified view of post-benefit convenience relevant for health insurance as policy renewal intention rather than returns/exchanges. This addresses a gap in the SERVCON scale's applicability to insurance services. This study also makes a novel attempt of examining implication of WOM and trust in health insurance domain.

Halal integrity assurance is the primary objective of Halal supply chain management. Several halal-related risks are present that have the potential to breach halal integrity. Therefore, this study aims to develop the framework for the assessment of halal-related risk from a supply chain perspective.

Risk related to halal is identified through the combined approach of the systematic literature review and experts’ input. Further, these risks are assessed using the integrated approach of intuitionistic fuzzy number (IFN) and D-number based on their severity score. This integrated approach can handle fuzziness, inconsistency and incomplete information that are present in the expert’s input.

Eighteen significant risks related to halal are identified and grouped into four categories. These risks are further prioritised based on their severity score and classified as “high priority risk” or “low priority risks”. The findings of the study suggests that raw material status, processing methods, the wholesomeness of raw materials and common facilities for halal and non-halal products are more severe risks.

This study only focusses on halal-related risks and does not capture the other types of risks occurring in the supply chain. Risks related to halal supply chain management are not considered in this study. Prioritisation of the risks is based on the expert’s input which can be biased to the experts' background.

The proposed risk assessment framework is beneficial for risk managers to assess the halal related risks and develop their mitigation strategies accordingly. Furthermore, the prioritisation of the risks also assists managers in the optimal utilisation of resources to mitigate high-priority risks.

This study provides significant risks related to halal integrity, therefore helping in a better understanding of the halal supply chain. To the best of the authors' knowledge, this is the first comprehensive study for developing a risk assessment model for the halal supply chain.