The current study investigates whether tournament incentives motivate chief executive officer to be socially responsible. Furthermore, it explores the role of sub-national institutional contingencies [i.e., state-owned enterprises vs. non-SOEs, foreign-owned entities vs. non-FOEs, cross-listed vs. non-cross-listed, developed region] in CEO tournament incentives and the corporate social responsibility performance relationship. Data were collected from all A-shared companies listed in the stock exchanges of China from 2014 to 2019. The study uses the baseline methodology of ordinary least squares and cluster OLS regression. (...) Moreover, firm-fixed effects regression, two-stage least squares regression, and propensity score matching deal with the endogeneity problem and check the robustness of the results. The results provide reliable evidence that tournament incentives motivate CEOs to be more socially responsible. On the other hand, sub-national institutional contingencies positively affect the association between CEO tournament incentives and CSRP. The findings have important implications for companies and regulators who wish to enhance CSP by providing incentives to top managers. (shrink)

The current study proposes a novel conceptual model in which Islamic work ethics has a mediating role in the relationship between servant leadership and employees’ life satisfaction within Pakistan’s banking sector. The model draws on the theory of leader-member exchange. Data from a sample of 240 were evaluated using structural equation modeling using SmartPLS 3.2.7 software. The findings indicate that servant leadership significantly impacts employees’ life satisfaction. Furthermore, Islamic work ethics mediated this effect. This study introduces ground-breaking bank inputs by (...) creating a new integrated model based on LMX theory. While the impact of several dimensions of Islamic work ethics on employees’ life satisfaction has been widely investigated, the present study is the first to explore the roles of servant leadership and Islamic work ethics in leveraging bank employees’ life satisfaction. The results suggest that bank managers should enact servant leadership in their business and serve their employees ethically to improve their life satisfaction. Additionally, this study provides key theoretical contributions to the literature on Islamic banking. (shrink)

The hybridization of two or more energy sources into a single power station is one of the widely discussed solutions to address the demand and supply havoc generated by renewable production, heating power, and cooling power) and its energy storage issues. Hybrid energy sources work based on the complementary existence of renewable sources. The combined cooling, heating, and power is one of the significant systems and shows a profit from its low environmental impact, high energy efficiency, low economic investment, and (...) sustainability in the industry. This paper presents an economic model of a microgrid system containing the CCHP system and energy storage considering the energy coupling and conversion characteristics, the effective characteristics of each microsource, and energy storage unit is proposed. The random forest regression model was optimized by the gravitational search algorithm. The test results show that the GSA-RFR model improves prediction accuracy and reduces the generalization error. The detail of the MG network and the energy storage architecture connected to the other renewable energy sources is discussed. The mathematical formulation of energy coupling and energy flow of the MG network including wind turbines, photovoltaic, CCHP system, fuel cell, and energy storage devices are presented. The testing system has been analysed under load peak cutting and valley filling of energy utilization index, energy utilization rate, the heat pump, the natural gas consumption of the microgas turbine, and the energy storage unit. The energy efficiency costs were observed as 88.2% and 86.9% with heat pump and energy storage operation comparing with GSA-RFR-based operation costs as 93.2% and 93% in summer and winter season, respectively. The simulation results extended the rationality and economy of the proposed model. (shrink)

Background and ObjectivesThe purpose of this study was to draw the attention toward the implications of COVID-19 and the related restrictions imposed worldwide especially in Pakistan. The primary objective was to highlight the levels of psychological distress, anxiety, family violence, suicidality, and well-being due to COVID-19 and the secondary objective was to associate it to social demographic factors.Materials and MethodsIt is designed as a cross-sectional study by employing an online questionnaire in the English language and obtaining responses using a snowball (...) sampling technique. We used three validated measures including Kessler Psychological Distress Scale, Generalized Anxiety Disorder index and World Health Organization Well-Being Index.ResultsA sample of 420 participants was recruited from across Pakistan, with most participants were females, students and belonging to Punjab. Nearly one-fourth of the participants scored above the minimum value set for moderate or high psychological distress. There was a higher prevalence of distress among females and resident of province Punjab. The majority of individuals reported that they were living with their family and more than half were neutral regarding their satisfaction with their living conditions. 40.5% believed that the lockdown has had a negative impact on their mental health. 31.4% have reported that they themselves have experienced abuse from a family member. 48.6% scored high on the GAD-7 scale and low wellbeing score was found among 80.2%. Students were found to be more vulnerable to mental illness and anxiety.ConclusionWith the lockdown restrictions, psychosocial distress has become prevalent in Pakistan. (shrink)

In modern day technology, the level of knowledge is increasing day by day. This increase is in terms of volume, velocity, and variety. Understanding of such knowledge is a dire need of an individual to extract meaningful insight from it. With the advancement in computer and image-based technologies, visualization becomes one of the most significant platforms to extract, interpret, and communicate information. In data modelling, visualization is the process of extracting knowledge to reveal the detail data structure and process of (...) data. The proposed study aim is to know about the user knowledge, data modelling, and visualization by handling through the fuzzy logic-based approach. The experimental setup is validated through the data user modelling dataset available in the UCI web repository. The results show that the model is effective and efficient in situations where uncertainty and complexity arise. (shrink)

Internet of Things is expanding and evolves into all aspects of the society. Research and developments in the field of IoT have shown the possibility of producing huge volume of data and computation among different devices of the IoT. The data collected from IoT devices are transferred to a central server which can further be retrieved and accessed by the service providers for analyzing, processing, and using. Industrial Internet of Health Things is the expansion of the Internet of Health Things (...) which plays an important role in observing, consulting, monitoring, and treatment process of remote exchange data processes. The linkage of computation and interoperability are supported through various intelligent sensors, controllers, and actuators. The role of parallel computing for efficient and Intelligent Industrial Internet of Health Things is obvious to analyze and process different healthcare situations. A detailed overview of this existing literature is needed through which the research community will provide new solutions for efficient healthcare with the help of IoT based on parallel computing. Therefore, the current study presents a detailed overview of the existing literature for facilitating IIoHT. (shrink)

Behavioral Finance is an evolving field that studies how psychological factors affect decision making under uncertainty. This study seeks to find the influence of certain identified behavioral financial biases on the decision-making process of investors in developing countries. This research examines the moderating effect of Information asymmetry on the two most important and commonly used cognitive biases, namely Anchoring bias and Optimism bias and decision making and investigates whether Risk perception mediates the relationship between them or not. Quantitative research has (...) been conducted using a structured questionnaire for data collection. After completing the pilot study, a questionnaire was designed and sent to investors via online channels. Data has been collected from 317 real estate investors. Mediation analysis has been performed using model 4 and moderation analysis by applying model 15 of Process Macros for the interaction effect. The study investigated that both cognitive biases have a significant positive effect on investors’ decisions and Risk perception also significantly mediates the relationship between them. Consistency with other studies suggests that Information asymmetry has a significant moderating effect. The proposed conceptual model provides insight into how investors’ decisions are influenced by behavioral biases in the real estate sector and enhances the understanding of cognitive biases in the real estate sector. This study is recommended for real estate investors and policymakers of emerging and developed countries. The current study is the first of its kind, focusing on cognitive biases on investment decisions with mediating role of Risk perception and the moderating effect of Information asymmetry. (shrink)

Internet-enabled technologies have provided a way for people to communicate and collaborate with each other. The collaboration and communication made crowdsourcing an efficient and effective activity. Crowdsourcing is a modern paradigm that employs cheap labors for accomplishing different types of tasks. The task is usually posted online as an open call, and members of the crowd self-select a task to be carried out. Crowdsourcing involves initiators or crowdsourcers, the crowd, crowdsourcing task, the process, and the crowdsourcing platform where requesters offer (...) various tasks and crowd workers complete these tasks. As the crowdsourcing is carried out in the online environment, it gives rise to certain challenges. The major problem is the selection of crowd that is becoming a challenging issue with the growth in crowdsourcing popularity. Crowd selection has been significantly investigated in crowdsourcing processes. Nonetheless, it has observed that the selection is based only on a single feature of the crowd worker which was not sufficient for appropriate crowd selection. For addressing the problem of crowd selection, a novel “ant colony optimization-based crowd selection method” is presented in this paper that selects a crowd worker based on multicriteria features. By utilizing the proposed model, the efficiency and effectiveness of crowdsourcing activity will be increased. (shrink)

Handwritten text recognition is considered as the most challenging task for the research community due to slight change in different characters’ shape in handwritten documents. The unavailability of a standard dataset makes it vaguer in nature for the researchers to work on. To address these problems, this paper presents an optical character recognition system for the recognition of offline Pashto characters. The problem of the unavailability of a standard handwritten Pashto characters database is addressed by developing a medium-sized database of (...) offline Pashto characters. This database consists of 11352 character images. Enriched feature extraction techniques of histogram of oriented gradients and zoning-based density features are used for feature extraction of carved Pashto characters. K-nearest neighbors is considered as a classification tool for the proposed algorithm based on the proposed feature sets. A resultant accuracy of 80.34% is calculated for the histogram of oriented gradients, while for zoning-based density features, 76.42% is achieved using 10-fold cross validation. (shrink)

Scientists cannot devise theories, construct models, propose explanations, make predictions, or even carry out observations, without first classifying their subject matter. The goal of scientific taxonomy is to come up with classification schemes that conform to nature's own. Another way of putting this is that science aims to devise categories that correspond to 'natural kinds.' The interest in ascertaining the real kinds of things in nature is as old as philosophy itself, but it takes on a different guise when one (...) adopts a naturalist stance in philosophy, that is when one looks closely at scientific practice and takes it as a guide for identifying natural kinds and investigating their general features. This Element surveys existing philosophical accounts of natural kinds, defends a naturalist alternative, and applies it to case studies in a diverse set of sciences. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core. (shrink)

In this paper I offer a unified causal account of natural kinds. Using as a starting point the widely held view that natural kind terms or predicates are projectible, I argue that the ontological bases of their projectibility are the causal properties and relations associated with the natural kinds themselves. Natural kinds are not just concatenations of properties but ordered hierarchies of properties, whose instances are related to one another as causes and effects in recurrent causal processes. The resulting account (...) of natural kinds as clusters of core causal properties that give rise to clusters of derivative properties enables us to distinguish genuine natural kinds from non-natural kinds. For instance, it enables us to say why some of the purely conventional categories derived from the social domain do not correspond to natural kinds, though other social categories may. (shrink)

Since the establishment of International Relations as an academic discipline in 1918, it has undergone great transformations. The end of World War-II with devastated nuclear technology brought forth national security perspectives impacting the study of IR and giving birth to strategic and security studies as specialized sub-disciplines. Presently the discipline of IR has very distinct and specialized sub-disciplines such as Strategic Studies, Security Studies, Peace and Conflict Resolution and Area Studies. In Pakistan, the first institute dealing with international affairs was (...) established in 1947 and the first teaching department at Karachi University was formed in 1958. However, it suffered due to general apathy by the governments and public alike. In 1970s, Pakistan’s security matrix compelled to create Area Study Centers and Strategic Studies departments. Later, in early 2000s, electronic media played an important role in popularizing these disciplines. Lately, the HEC has established a Consortium of Social Sciences Universities in Pakistan to elevate the status of Social Sciences and launched various scholarship schemes to meet the challenge of qualified human resource. However, there is a need to establish an Academy of Social Sciences and a National Society of International Relations to promote these disciplines on strong financial and institutional footings. (shrink)

Machine generated contents note: * FICHTE AND IQBAL 1-21 -- * SCHOPENHAUER AND IQBAL 23-34 -- * NIETZSCHE AND IQBAL 35-87 -- * WILLIAM JAMES AND IQBAL 89-122 -- * BERGSON AND IQBAL 123-173 -- * MCTAGGART AND IQBAL 175-198 -- * BIBLIOGRAPHY 199-211.

Includes an introd. of 49 p. by S. G. Abbas.

Virtue signaling serves to express moral and ethical values publicly, showcasing commitment to social and sustainable ideals. This research, conducted with non-WEIRD samples to mitigate the prevalent WEIRD bias (i.e., the tendency to solely rely on samples from Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic societies), examines whether the scarcely studied virtue-signaling construct mediates the influence of consumers’ attachment anxiety (vs. avoidance) on their green purchase behavior and prosocial responses. Drawing on attachment theory and the emerging virtue-signaling literature, the current work (...) reports the results from three studies (_N_ total = 898) in which consumers’ attachment patterns were not only measured, as in most prior related research, but also manipulated. Study 1 confirmed the unique ability of measured attachment anxiety, but not attachment avoidance, to predict consumers’ green purchase behavior and prosocial tendencies, with virtue signaling mediating these links. Study 2 manipulated participants’ attachment patterns, finding further support for the mediating role of virtue signaling between attachment anxiety (vs. avoidance) and these dependent variables. Study 3 provided a more nuanced account for our virtue-signaling conceptualization by documenting that self-oriented, but not other-oriented, virtue signaling mediated the link between attachment anxiety and both our key outcomes in public contexts. From a managerial viewpoint, these findings indicate that anxiously attached consumers constitute a potentially lucrative segment for companies seeking to expand their market share of sustainable and ethically produced products. (shrink)

The notion of 'natural kinds' has been central to contemporary discussions of metaphysics and philosophy of science. Although explicitly articulated by nineteenth-century philosophers like Mill, Whewell and Venn, it has a much older history dating back to Plato and Aristotle. In recent years, essentialism has been the dominant account of natural kinds among philosophers, but the essentialist view has encountered resistance, especially among naturalist metaphysicians and philosophers of science. Informed by detailed examination of classification in the natural and social sciences, (...) this book argues against essentialism and for a naturalist account of natural kinds. By looking at case studies drawn from diverse scientific disciplines, from fluid mechanics to virology and polymer science to psychiatry, the author argues that natural kinds are nodes in causal networks. On the basis of this account, he maintains that there can be natural kinds in the social sciences as well as the natural sciences. (shrink)

Mankind is faced with a number of serious problems that demand an effective solution. The prevalence of injustice and the frequency of financial crises are two of the most serious of these problems. Consisting of an in-depth introduction along with a selection of eight of Muhammad Umer Chapra's essays--four on Islamic economics and four on Islamic finance--this timely book raises the question of what can be done to not only minimize the frequency and severity of the financial crises, but also (...) make the financial system more equitable. The author considers the origins of Islamic economics and outlines its development and underlying principles. He compares the approach taken to ethics and economics in Islam with that taken in the West, considering whether lessons can be applied to the global financial architecture in order to mitigate against financial crises. The book also examines the case against interest and looks at both innovation in Islamic finance, as well as challenges facing the industry. Written by a leading authority in the field, this book will be a stimulating resource for students and researchers in Islamic economics and finance, as well as providing valuable insight to all of those with an interest in financial systems and their interaction with society. (shrink)

Saba Mahmood’s anthropological work studies the gain in skills, agency and capacity building by the women’s dawa movement in Egypt. These women increase their virtue toward the goal of piety by following dominant, often patriarchal norms. Mahmood argues that “teleological feminism” ignores this gain in agency because this kind of feminism only focuses on opposition or resistance to these norms. In this paper I defend Mahmood’s “anti-teleological” feminist work from criticisms that her project valorizes oppression and has no vision for (...) a nonoppressive feminist future. I argue the future envisioned by teleological feminists gets caught in “the Hegelian” trap of replicating past oppression in their feminist future. I find in Mahmood’s work the tools to escape this trap. I argue, rather than a movement of overcoming oppression, Mahmood’s work suggests an immanent and creative movement that emphasizes difference for a truly new future. I turn to a Bergsonian metaphor and argue that this movement can be seen as akin to the movement of biological evolution. I conclude using the work of Eve Sedgwick that the Egyptian women that Mahmood studies are being read in a “paranoid” fashion and demonstrate using Leila Ahmed a better “reparative” reading of these women. (shrink)

Nūr Muḥammad is one of the teachings in Sufism that studies the beginning of the creation of the universe. The Sufis discussed Nūr Muḥammad through God's tajallī (manifestation), and they believed that only Insan Kamil (Perfect Humans) possessed the perfection of His tajallī. This Sufi theory can be comprehended through the dhawqi approach. This research will deal with Nūr Muḥammad's theory of Sufism through the perspective of Tijaniyah Tarekat. The data for this study was obtained through library research utilizing a (...) documentary technique. The collected data will be analyzed using the descriptive analysis method. This study finds that the Tijaniyah Tarekat is a Sufism institution that bases its teachings and practices on the concept of Nūr Muḥammad in the form of ṣalawāt al-fātiḥ and ṣalawāt jawharah al-kamāl. This Tarekat's elucidation of Nūr Muḥammad is also built on and consistent with the explication of authoritative Sufis in Islam's intellectual and spiritual tradition. (shrink)

The Universal Periodic Review (UPR), established in 2006, has been hailed as an innovative mechanism of the United Nations’ Human Rights Council. The peer review mechanism assesses the human rights records of all UN Member States and provides recommendations to further the global promotion and protection of human rights. This article provides an analysis of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia’s third UPR in 2018 with a specific focus on the State’s use of capital punishment. It explores the challenges faced by (...) the UPR and issues recommendations to foster meaningful discourse, in the international community, to protect the right to life and engender change at the domestic level. (shrink)

This study examines the connections among cultural tourism, spirituality, and associated factors among religious tourists in Saudi Arabia. It focuses on how cultural tourism impacts spiritual fulfilment, considering visitors' intentions to visit religious sites, while also factoring in cultural competence and trust in tourism brands as moderators. This study involved 244 participants, who were administered self-report surveys during their visits to religious sites and cultural attractions in Saudi Arabia. Data analysis employed Stata-SEM software, utilizing structural equation modelling (SEM) to assess (...) the hypothesized relationships among the variables. The results indicate noteworthy positive associations between cultural tourism and the spiritual experiences of tourists, with mediating effects observed through their intentions to visit religious sites. Additionally, the study identified that cultural competence and trust in tourism brands exerted a moderating influence on the relationship between cultural tourism and spiritual experiences. This research contributes to the advancement of knowledge and practical applications in the realms of spirituality and cultural tourism. It substantiates the proposition that cultural tourism has the potential to influence the spiritual dimensions of visitors. The results underscore the significance of incorporating cultural and spiritual components in tourism marketing and destination management strategies. Moreover, they provide insights for destination stakeholders seeking to enhance cultural tourism initiatives, not only in Saudi Arabia but also in other contexts. (shrink)

Bringing culture and personality in a combination with emotions requires bringing three different theories together. In this paper, we discuss an approach for combining Hofstede’s cultural dimensions, BIG five personality parameters and PSI theory of emotions to come up with an emergent affective character model.

This paper attempts to reconsider the nature and function of the ‘spiritual’ dimension in literary texts and in literary study in the context of the present state of the discipline of literary studies. The present era is often defined as a ‘post-secular’ era, one in which themes of spirituality and mysticism are increasingly noticeable in literary works. The paper argues that to maintain its relevance to contemporary writers and readers, literary criticism has to address these themes in a concrete and (...) effective way. The paper recommends a comparative approach to the discussion of spirituality and mysticism in contemporary literature and literary criticism. In order to carry effective analytical potential, this approach, the paper emphasizes, has to be developed from specific spiritual traditions. The paper first discusses the disciplinary crisis literary studies have always been exposed to since their inception as a discipline of study in academic institutes. It then reviews the current state of the discipline and describes how the discipline came to be dominated by scientific and social approaches. Finally, it suggests the reinstitutionof the ‘spiritual’ element in literary study as a way out from the state of crisis in the discipline of literary studies. The paper thus attempts to strengthen the disciplinary identify of literary studies while exploring interdisciplinary aspects of the study literature. (shrink)