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This research aims to ascertain the various operational maturity challenges faced by the online food ordering and delivery enterprises (OFODE), their nature and their interactive relationships. In particular, this paper aims to (a) identify the most relevant operational maturity challenges faced by the OFODE during the COVID-19 lockdown in Oman, (b) explore and establish any likely structural relationship among these challenges and (c) put them into logical clusters.

Experts helped to reduce the 18 initially identified maturity challenges to 13 most pressing ones. Mutual relationships, dominance of interactions and their classifications were explored using fuzzy interpretive structural modeling (FISM) and fuzzy MICMAC analysis.

The study of situation-specific operational maturity challenges convinced the authors to propose a distinct FISM model that depicts the relationship among these challenges. Keeping commissions and fees reasonable emerges as the challenge which all other challenges seemingly culminate into. One of the most important situation-specific challenges (i.e. customer confidence about infection free delivery) emerges as a linkage challenge which aggravates as well as is aggravated by certain challenges.

Besides enriching literature, the proposed model has implications for practitioners particularly when the similar lethal waves are experienced anywhere. The number of respondents, subjective approach, specific context as well as the geographical area coverage are the key limitations.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first known scientific effort which attempts to model the operational maturity challenges faced by the OFODE during COVID-19 lockdown period. The authors used the FISM modeling approach to forge these interrelated challenges into a structural model.

This study endeavours to (a) develop a comprehensive interpretive structural modelling (ISM) toolkit containing sufficient details about the suitability and procedural aspects of each ISM approach and offer points of reference for budding researchers, (b) highlight the compatibility of ISM approaches with other qualitative and quantitative approaches, and (c) chalk-out an agenda for future research.

This study is based on an extensive review of 74 studies where researchers have used one or more ISM approaches. These studies span across the different industry sectors.

There exists a huge void in terms of the methodological synthesis of ISM approaches. ISM approaches are frequently used in sync with other qualitative and quantitative approaches. Furthermore, it highlights the need of improving the robustness of the proposed ISM models by sharing the critical details of research process.

Being a review-based work, it could not illustrate the discussed ISM approaches with real data. However, it offers a research agenda for the prospective researchers.

The prerequisites, pitfalls, suitability and the procedural aspects of various ISM approaches contained in this toolkit are equally useful for the academicians as well as practitioners.

In the absence of a synthesized framework, this study contributes a comprehensive ISM toolkit which will help the researchers to choose a suitable ISM approach in a given case.

The continual onset of natural and manmade disasters propels the humanitarian supply chain (HSC) efforts (by organizations, groups and individuals) to always be on a stand-by mode with more and more sustainable solutions. Despite all the sincere and coordinated efforts from all the humanitarian agents and bodies, the likely sustainable outputs are hampered by certain barriers (impediments) which exist at different levels of the HSCs. A better understanding of such barriers and their mutual relationship is deemed helpful in improving the outcomes of humanitarian efforts. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to explore, refine, establish and classify these barriers which thwart the sustainable efforts of the HSCs individually as well as collectively.

An extensive literature review is conducted to identify these barriers which were followed by soliciting the experts’ inputs to update, refine and retain the contextually relevant ones. The opinions about the nine identified and refined barriers are taken from eight experts based in the Northern India who are having at least five years of experience in humanitarian operations. Fuzzy interpretive structural modeling (FISM) is used to examine and establish a hierarchical relationship among these barriers, whereas fuzzy Matrice d’impacts croisés multiplication appliquée á un classment analysis is carried out to further classify these barriers into dependent, autonomous, linkage and dependent barriers.

The analysis led to the formation of a FISM model where the operational challenges affecting the performance occupy the topmost position in the hierarchy. The results reveal that inconsistent motives, coordination and communication and operational challenges affecting the performance are the dependent, poor strategic planning, capacity-related challenges and poor performance measurement system are the autonomous, and financial challenges, locational challenges and lack of proper awareness are the independent barriers.

The focus of the researchers was to study and examine these barriers to sustainable HSCs with special reference to the epidemics and pandemics (especially COVID-19), and it sheds light particularly arising during and post disaster phases.

The structural model contributed by this study is expected to be meaningful for practitioners besides enriching the body of literature. In the context of pandemics, it distinguishes itself from the other available frameworks.

As this research has been carried out in the context of the novel COVID-19, the framework is expected to assist policymakers in comprehending the issues impeding the sustainability of noble humanitarian efforts. Thus, ultimately it is expected to contribute to the ultimate cause of society at large.

This research endeavor distinguishes itself from the other accessible published resources in terms of the specific context, the methodological approach and the nature of respondents. This paper concludes with the practical implications and directions for future research.

The purpose of this study is to analyse the effects of Covid-19 on the supply chain management and to provide an agenda for future research in this context.

By using the SCOPUS database, a total of 191 articles of 1,323 research articles were selected for further analysis. Bibliometric analysis and science mapping were performed which included author influence, affiliation statistics, keywords, citations, co-citation and co-word analysis.

Five clusters were identified in the context of supply chain management under Covid-19: managing disruptions in global food supply chains (SCs), using Industry 4.0 technologies for sustainable SCs, collaboration across the supply network for contingency situations, coping with disease outbreaks in personal and professional lives and countering the ripple effect of pandemics. These clusters are potential areas for future research.

Literature is still rare about SC practices amid the Covid-19 crisis. Therefore, this study attempts to provide insights and fill the current gaps on this field.

Based on the stimulus-organism-response (SOR) framework, this study aims to investigate the effect of social media marketing (SMM) activities on consumers’ purchase intention (PI), as well as to test the mediation effect of consumer-based brand equity (CBBE) and consumer inspiration (INS) between the relationship of SMM and PI. Further, this study has also proposed and validated SMM as a reflective–formative higher-order construct (R-F-HOC) with its five first-order dimensions: customization, entertainment, interaction, trendiness and word of mouth (WoM).

Using a non-probability purposive sampling method, a structured questionnaire survey using Google forms was used to collect data from a sample of 236 UAE consumers. Subsequently, the data was analyzed with a hybrid method that combined partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) and artificial neural network (ANN) analysis.

The findings suggest that SMM has a direct effect on CBBE, INS and PI. Both proposed mediation effects are statistically significant, and there is a partial complementary mediation effect of CBBE and INS between SMM and PI. This study validated the operationalization of SMM as R-F-HOC. Further, the results of the ANN analysis validate the results of the PLS-SEM, suggesting that SMM is the strongest predictor of PI followed by CBBE and INS.

In terms of theoretical significance, this study has advanced our understanding of the process by which the influence of SMM is transferred to PI via CBBE and INS. This study has also made a significant contribution by validating SMM as a R-F-HOC. In terms of practical implications, this study suggests that SMM should be best assessed as a R-F-HOC construct with five dimensions: customization, entertainment, interaction, trendiness and WoM. This study has also demonstrated the importance of CBBE and INS in transmitting the effect of SMM on PI to marketers.

This study contributes to the digital advertising literature by filling a knowledge gap about the mediation effect of CBBE and INS between SMM and PI via the SOR framework. SMM’s multidimensionality as a R-F-HOC has also been established.

This paper aims to provide useful insights into educational under‐achievement among Palestinian Arab citizens of Israel (PAI), investigating the perceptions of local educational administrators (LEAs) towards the education system and its modus vivendi, to uncover difficulties and suggest directions to improve the processes and achievements of the PAI education system.

Qualitative interviews were conducted with 16 stakeholders in local education (mayors, education department managers; school principals and parents’ representatives) in four Arab local governments in Israel to elucidate attitudes toward education.

The small random sample cannot claim to be representative however worrying problems were revealed: deficient resources in comparison to the Jewish education system; an ineffective political culture in local government; inferior status and problematic functioning of Arab education department heads and lack of inclusion of professionals and parents in decision‐making. These factors negatively impact the education system and its products.

The paper suggests local government should determine appropriate local policy, positioning education as a high priority with efficient education departments, more professional staff, and suitable education programs. Additionally state government should provide equal resources for the Arab education system, to lever Arab education in Israel.

This paper aims to propose an approach for hate speech detection against politicians in Arabic community on social media (e.g. Youtube). In the literature, similar works have been presented for other languages such as English. However, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, not much work has been conducted in the Arabic language.

This approach uses both classical algorithms of classification and deep learning algorithms. For the classical algorithms, the authors use Gaussian NB (GNB), Logistic Regression (LR), Random Forest (RF), SGD Classifier (SGD) and Linear SVC (LSVC). For the deep learning classification, four different algorithms (convolutional neural network (CNN), multilayer perceptron (MLP), long- or short-term memory (LSTM) and bi-directional long- or short-term memory (Bi-LSTM) are applied. For extracting features, the authors use both Word2vec and FastText with their two implementations, namely, Skip Gram (SG) and Continuous Bag of Word (CBOW).

Simulation results demonstrate the best performance of LSVC, BiLSTM and MLP achieving an accuracy up to 91%, when it is associated to SG model. The results are also shown that the classification that has been done on balanced corpus are more accurate than those done on unbalanced corpus.

The principal originality of this paper is to construct a new hate speech corpus (Arabic_fr_en) which was annotated by three different annotators. This corpus contains the three languages used by Arabic people being Arabic, French and English. For Arabic, the corpus contains both script Arabic and Arabizi (i.e. Arabic words written with Latin letters). Another originality is to rely on both shallow and deep leaning classification by using different model for extraction features such as Word2vec and FastText with their two implementation SG and CBOW.

The purpose of this paper is to expand previous theories of motivation and religious ethics by examining the moderation effect of Islamic work ethic (IWE) on the relationship between perception of politics (POP) and job satisfaction, and turnover intention and negligent behavior (NB).

The sample consisted of 260 workers employed in various sectors in an Asian country. Multiple linear regression analyses were used to test the main effect of the five hypotheses. In addition, moderated models are used to identify factors (IWE) that may change the relationship between independent and dependent variables.

Results revealed that POP was negatively related to job satisfaction, and positively related to turnover intention and NB. IWE was positively related to job satisfaction, and negatively related to turnover intention (confirming previous research findings), and NB (a contribution of the current study). Furthermore, when the moderator variable of IWE was introduced to the relationship between POP and job outcomes, the influence and direction of the POP were altered (a major contribution of this study). In other words, the moderator variable strengthened job satisfaction and reduced both turnover intention and NB of organizational workers.

When the moderator variable of IWE was introduced to the relationship between the POP and job outcomes, the influence and direction of the POP were altered (a major contribution of this study).

The purpose of the study is to identify cybersecurity threats that hinder the adoption of digital banking and provide sustainable strategies to combat cybersecurity risks in the banking industry.

Systematic literature review guidelines were used to conduct a quantitative synthesis of empirical evidence regarding the impact of cybersecurity threats and risks on the adoption of digital banking.

A total of 84 studies were initially examined, and after applying the selection and eligibility criteria for this systematic review, 58 studies were included. These selected articles consistently identified identity theft, malware attacks, phishing and vishing as significant cybersecurity threats that hinder the adoption of digital banking.

With the country’s banking sector being new in this area, this study contributes to the scant literature on cyber security, which is mostly in need due to the myriad breaches that the industry has already suffered thus far.

The objective of this research is to evaluate the influence of mineral additions on the mechanical performances of polymer concrete. This study aims to propose a novel approach formulation of polymer concrete based on reduction in the quantity of the binder and disposal of large quantities of industrial by-products and household waste such as the marble, the brick and silica fume whose valuation in polymer concrete could be an interesting ecological and economical alternative. The incorporation of a rate of 10% brick powder affects the distribution of pores inside polymer concrete, that is, the pore diameters become thinner and decrease and the porosity becomes evenly distributed. The recycled mineral brick powder addition in polymer concrete mix improved the mechanical properties.

This polymer concrete was prepared by using polyester resin and two different types of sand, following a new formulation based on an empirical method. Furthermore, the optimal binder percentage was of 20% resin and a mixture of 52% dune sand and 48% quarry sand according to the Abrams method. To achieve our objective, five rates (from 2% to 10%) of brick powder, marble powder and silica fume were examined. Afterwards, its mechanical characteristics were evaluated via a three-point flexural with compressive resistance. The findings indicated that the addition of brick, marble and silica fume to polymer concrete increases the flexural strength with 21.84%, 12.76% and 9.07%, respectively.

Concerning the compressive strength, the best resistance is that of polymer concretes based on brick powder, and this economic formulation of polymer concrete serves the optimal cost/resistance ratio criteria. It allows an improvement in the mechanical resistance of concrete are obtained by adding brick powder that exceed that of the reference concrete.

In the past few decades, there has been several contribution concerning the subject of the reduction of the binder quantity in polymer concretes and adding the industrial and household wastes. However, previous studies revolving around the same area disregarded the effect of the brick powder, which appears scientifically of great importance for enriching the literature.