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Freeways in Australia play a significant role in connecting distant communities, shifting freight and strengthening the country’s economy. To meet the growing needs of present and future generations, delivering a socially sustainable road infrastructure that creates generational benefits is essential. However, the existing literature reveals the lack of comprehensive indicators to assess the social sustainability performance of freeway projects. Therefore, this paper aims to identify a critical set of system-specific indicators to evaluate the life cycle social footprint of Australian freeways.

This study conducted 31 interview questionnaire surveys with actively engaged stakeholders involved in various freeway projects around Australia. The data collected was analysed using fuzzy set theory and other statistical approaches.

The study identified 42 critical indicators for assessing the social sustainability performance throughout the life cycle of freeways in the Australian context. For example, stakeholder involvement, reduction of casualty rate due to road accidents, fair remuneration to project workforce and improved accessibility to required services.

The context-specific opinions extracted from the industry experts and the comprehensive set of critical indicators identified would ensure that all the vital aspects of social sustainability are considered throughout the life cycle of Australian freeways in the future, assisting the decision-makers in enhancing the project’s social sustainability performance.

The linguistic explanations associated with the ratings given by the industry experts provide greater insight into the context of the life cycle social sustainability assessment of Australian freeways exclusively.

The purpose of this study is to gain knowledge about Muslim consumer’s perceptions toward advertising practices.

The approach taken was qualitative methodology, using phenomenological method. The qualitative data through semi-structured interviews have been collected from 20 Muslim consumers, 9 participants were women and 11 were men. The interviews lasted between 45 and 60 min. Furthermore, documentation technique was used to cast further insight into the advertising practices and to corroborate other forms of evidence.

From Muslim consumer perceptions, this qualitative research has generated factors that may be considered in advertising practices. These factors consist of social values (family, tradition and culture), Islamic ethics and rules and regulations. In addition, several practices regarding advertising production were extracted to guide marketers when targeting Muslim consumers.

The generalizability of the findings was limited because of convenience sampling and the small sample size.

This study contributes to the knowledge in the field by exploring factors and practices that should be considered in advertising practices when targeting Muslim consumers.

Brand mere recognition is the fundamental step in brand awareness and the first hurdle that any brand needs to achieve before brand equity can come into the picture. Thus, consumers’ ability to recognize a brand through its symbol or logo is very crucial and despite its significance, it is considered the lowest order in brand equity assessment but it reveals the initial clue on how well the brand is performing in the market. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to test how well consumers are able to identify the right Halal Malaysia brand (HMB) using Halal semiotic cues.

This study is an exploratory, based on a mixed method approach using qualitative and quasi-experimental design using the implicit association test (IAT) as the instrument. A total of 23 Malay Muslim consumers were involved in the first stage of the study carried out using a semi-structured interview. The second stage of this study was carried out using quasi-experimental design where IAT was used as an instrument. A total of 66 respondents participated in both states of the experiment and the response time was recorded and analysed using D-measure and descriptive.

Findings from qualitative investigation indicate that most of the respondents failed in the mere recognition test. The findings are further supported using IAT where a hesitation in response when facing the current HMB logo has provided a clear indication of lack of mere recognition for this brand. Unfortunately, the proliferation of other Halal logos that have flooded the market, comprising both recognized and unrecognized logos by Jabatan Kemajuan Islam Malaysia (JAKIM), which often adopted a similar logo design strategy, only add to the confusion. Clearly, the findings on HMB logo mere recognition also revealed that there are some problems during the transition from the old JAKIM Halal logo to the current logo, where the information related to the new logo has failed to reached targeted audiences.

Despite there are a lot of studies focussing on the positive impact of Halal Malaysia logo on Muslim consumers purchase decision, however there are few publications that suggest otherwise. Thus, this study will investigate the extend of this problem.

The main issue is whether customers prefer convenience over Shariah compliance or the opposite when they decide their Islamic banking needs. The purpose of this paper is to explore why customers adopt Islamic banking products and services: Shariah compliance or convenience?

Using convenience sampling, 310 respondents’ data were collected through online survey. For testing the fit and hypotheses of the proposed model, AMOS 25 software and Smart-PLS 4.0 software have been used.

Attitude, Islamic value and convenience have significant determinants of Islamic banking products and services. Shariah compliance has no direct or indirect influence on neither intention nor actual behaviour to adopt Islamic banking services. Furthermore, gender has no such differential effect on the adoption.

Managers and marketers of Islamic banks may benefit from the findings of this study, which demonstrate fresh insights regarding the factors which help in strategy formulations to promote Islamic banking services.

The growth of Islamic banks, branches and windows is remarkable in both Muslim-majority and Muslim-minority countries in the world. This paper postulates the behavioural finance studies in Islamic banking and finance research stream by extending the theory of planned behaviour of Ajzen (1985) as all the three new constructs (Islamic value, convenienc and Shariah compliance) are statistically fit for further studies. However, only Islamic value and convenience are the two significant factors which drive customers to take decision in the proposed model. This study gives insights to the bankers and authority about the consumer behaviour.

This research study is conducted to thoroughly investigate the users' expectations for excellent library service quality (LSQ) from college libraries. It will also identify whether there is any difference in the desired library service quality among different type of users, gender and academic discipline.

A survey method was used, and the data were collected from 998 respondents, which included faculty members, masters, bachelor's and intermediate students. In order to conduct the study, LibQUAL + instrument were adapted.

The results demonstrated that the users expected a higher level of services from the college libraries of Pakistan. The highest desired expectation of the users were related to “library as a place (LP)” dimension, while the lowest expectation was with regards to the “information control (IC)” dimension. The results indicated a significant difference among the various types of users and academic disciplines regarding their expectations with library services.

The appointment of college librarians against nearly 500 vacant posts would significantly improve the LSQ in these libraries. The result of the study would indeed be useful for the college administration, librarians the Government of the Punjab and the Punjab Higher Education Commission (HEC) for future planning, improvement of services and allocation of resources.

This study is the first in-depth effort into investigating the LSQ of the college libraries of the Punjab, Pakistan. This study will be helpful to understand the LSQ from developing countries’ perspective.

The purpose of this chapter is to review the risks Islamic financial institutions face in an emerging market context, including risk sharing in Islamic financing and Shari’ah (Islamic law) compliance risk. We explore current risk management practices and establish the link between risk management and the financial performance of banks and the efficiency and effectiveness of financial sectors in emerging markets. Because of their distinctive risk profile, Islamic finance institutions face challenges in risk management. We show that Islamic banking is riskier in emerging markets because of the presence of immature money markets, limitations in the availability of lender of last resort facilities, and deficiencies in market infrastructure. There is also no evidence that Islamic banks have developed effective solutions for managing the risks conventional banks face as well as their own unique risks. We suggest that the countries that do this best are those that prioritize the structure of risk management knowledge and capabilities in a single financial regulator.

Despite the significant potential of Malaysia and Indonesia as emerging Southeast Asian retail markets, their nuanced differences in relation to global retailers have not been fully analyzed. Drawing the institutional theory, this study analyzed the institutional environments of Malaysian and Indonesian markets contrasting their similarities and differences in formal (i.e. explicit, regulatory) and informal (i.e. tacit normative and cultural-cognitive) institutions.

The analysis of this exploratory is based on a large number of publicly available sources, including research papers, government documents and reports. The paper triangulated the validity of the data with multiple sources, including scholars, business professionals and government officers at the chamber of commerce in the countries.

Although the two countries adjacently located in Southeast Asia share Islam as a major religion and the Bahasa language, there are significant differences in their formal institutions related to the retail environment, such as openness to foreign investment and retail infrastructure. Based on the analyses, this study provided recommendations for global retail companies targeting or planning to enter the Malaysian and Indonesian markets.

This paper was an original application of institutional theory to Malaysia and Indonesia and analyzed the two emerging economies where institutions vary and are less visible to many multinational companies.

The study aims to examine the underexplored agenda in organizational citizenship behaviors (OCBs) through the collectivistic 50-and-older customers' lens when encountering medical-care services by applying stimulus-organism-response (S-O-R) theory.

The authors propose an integrative causal model derived from employees OCBs perceived by the collectivistic 50-and-older outpatients in Korean medical-care organizations and test the causal relationships using structural equation modeling (SEM).

The three dimensions of OCBs are external stimuli to the synergistic relationship of both cognitive and affective organisms for enhancing the organization's external outcomes. The customers' organismic processes mediate the relationships between OCBs and the resultant outcomes. Customer satisfaction plays a pivotal role in determining customers' future behavior when converting the business relationship to friendship.

The proposed integrated model provides an overall mechanism of the collectivistic customer decision process in the medical-care service setting. The integrated model helps to understand better how customers proceed mental and emotional states with the encountered services and how frontline employees offer extra-roles beyond in-roles to their customers in touching points to maintain superior organizational performance.

The authors respond to the underexplored agenda in the OCB research discipline. The study is one of the few studies to examine the effect of OCBs from collectivistic customers' perspectives and apply a consumer behavior theory to explain a service organizational performance in an integrative causal model.

Bangladesh’s urban poor face numerous obstacles, especially during times of disastrous natural events. The effects of global warming will pose new threats for them as frequencies and magnitudes of natural hazards are likely to increase. Thus, current and formerly successful coping and adaptation strategies will be challenged in the future. The urban poor need to be informed and empowered so that they can develop their own strategies in response to the expected local effects of climate change. Our research aims at grassroot workshops as a means of communication with slum dwellers in Dhaka which not only convey possible climate change impact on livelihoods but also create relevance for the individuals and options for action. More than 20 workshops including men, women, and children have been conducted and analysed. The final workshop design incorporates a mix of participatory and input-oriented elements in order to overcome the problem of psychological distance.

This study investigates the tax evasion practices in a lower-middle income economy in South Asia, with specific reference to Bangladesh (which is the only economy within South Asia that had consistent 6% and above gross domestic product (GDP) growth from 2011 to 2013). This study adopted mixed methodology (documentary analyses and a focus group interviews with 20 participants) to reach the overall objective of the research. Using Hofstede et al.’s (2010) cultural theory, the contribution of the study is that the cultural dimension itself cannot correspond to the causes of tax evasion, the other institutional factors (e.g., political connectedness in both private and public sectors, multinational companies (MNC)’s role and corruption, and a lack of public sector accountability and enforcement) are needed to complement the causes of tax evasion. The second major contribution is that Hofstede’s last two dimensions (i.e., short-term and restraint society) can correspond to the preliminary four dimensions (i.e., uncertainty avoidance (UA), masculinity, power distance (PD), and individualism). A restraint society such as Bangladesh is short-term oriented and has established corruption norms and secretive culture. There is also a perception by corporate business that the tax system as unfair and this has major consequences for the poor and the level of trust between the tax authorities and the taxpayers. This study also questions Hofstede’s model application in other developing economies with military and democracy political regimes. The major policy implications include Income Tax Ordinance, the reform of tax administration and enforcement. The novelty of this study rests in the fact that the findings may well inform local and international policymakers (e.g., World Bank, International Monetary Fund (IMF), Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), and the Asian Development Bank (ADB)) regarding how to tackle tax evasion practices in lower-middle income economies like Bangladesh. Further, it fills a gap in the literature exploring tax evasion in a lower-middle income economy – in this case, Bangladesh.