The Emergence of Leader-Society Value Congruence: A Cross-Cultural Perspective

Previous research on cross-cultural leadership has focused on the outcomes associated with leadership factors consistent with national cultural values without exploring how leaders’ individual cultural orientations become congruent with the societal culture in different national settings. The purpose of this paper is to provide a deeper understanding of how leader-society value congruence is produced and how the degree of such congruency varies across cultures. This paper conceptually clarifies the mechanisms that mediate the influence of cultural context on leader-society value congruence; suggests that the effects of societal context are only distal antecedents of producing congruence between leaders’ individual and societal level cultural values; and concludes that their effects are manifest via their impact on self-construal and communication patterns

Mother’s Health-seeking Behaviour and Childhood Mortality in Pakistan

The paper examines the Mother’s Health-seeking Behaviour and Childhood Mortality in Pakistan. This is based on the 1990-91 Pakistan Demographic and Health Survey (PDHS), a nationally representative survey covering all four provinces of the country. It was found that neonatal, infant, and child mortality rate is the highest among children of mothers aged less than 20 years. Infant and Child mortality rate is likewise higher among first and higher order births than among births of second or third order. It has further found that mortality declines as the length of the birth interval increases. The results reveal that the education of mother has significant effect on the neonatal, infant and child survival, as mother’s education increases the chances of survival of neonatal, infant and child also increases. Health care factors such as antenatal care, place of delivery, assistance at delivery and immunisation also influenced neonatal, infant and child mortality. The paper suggests that for the improvement of the health conditions of children in Pakistan, first, it is necessary that the educational status of the population in general, and of mothers in particular, should be improved, and second, the health services should be accessible and available for the promotion of health care practices.

Trust in Transformational Leadership: Do Followers’ Perceptions of Leader Femininity, Masculinity, and Androgyny Matter?

This paper takes an authenticity perspective to examine whether followers’ perceptions of a leader’s feminine, masculine, or androgynous characteristics influence the relationship between transformational leadership and followers’ perceived trust in the leader. The research was quantitative in approach. A cross-sectional survey design was used to collect data from employees from different public and private sector organizations in Pakistan. The findings show that the relationship between transformational leadership and trust is weaker when followers perceive leaders to be high on masculine and androgynous attributes. Leaders’ femininity was found to have a positive effect in the relationship of transformational leadership with trust in the leader. The paper suggests practical implications and directions for future research

Conceptual formation and explanation in IFRS-based financial accounting research

This article provides a comprehensive review of the conceptual formation and explanation within International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS)-based financial accounting research. The mandatory adoption of IFRS by the European Union (EU) on 1 January 2005 resulted in an increase in the number of scientific articles explaining the effect of mandating IFRS on capital markets within the EU. Independently, these studies offer interesting insights; however, there have been few attempts to offer a critical analysis of the current state of the field in terms of conceptual formation and the role of theories in explanation. This paper provides a richer understanding of the scientific basis of the empirical research within this emerging field. We identify and critically assess a sample of eight relevant scholarly articles. Our findings suggest that the concepts in these articles appear to be borrowed from the mainstream accounting and finance literature and used in the form of variables. These concepts primarily play a deductive role. The nature of explanation appears to be mechanistic. We offer a discussion of our review’s findings and suggest some implications for future research.publishedVersio

A methodology for contextual recommendation using artificial neural networks

“A thesis submitted to the University of Bedfordshire, in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy”.Recommender systems are an advanced form of software applications, more specifically decision-support systems, that efficiently assist the users in finding items of their interest. Recommender systems have been applied to many domains from music to e-commerce, movies to software services delivery and tourism to news by exploiting available information to predict and provide recommendations to end user. The suggestions generated by recommender systems tend to narrow down the list of items which a user may overlook due to the huge variety of similar items or users’ lack of experience in the particular domain of interest. While the performance of traditional recommender systems, which rely on relatively simpler information such as content and users’ filters, is widely accepted, their predictive capability perfomrs poorly when local context of the user and situated actions have significant role in the final decision. Therefore, acceptance and incorporation of context of the user as a significant feature and development of recommender systems utilising the premise becomes an active area of research requiring further investigation of the underlying algorithms and methodology. This thesis focuses on categorisation of contextual and non-contextual features within the domain of context-aware recommender system and their respective evaluation. Further, application of the Multilayer Perceptron Model (MLP) for generating predictions and ratings from the contextual and non-contextual features for contextual recommendations is presented with support from relevant literature and empirical evaluation. An evaluation of specifically employing artificial neural networks (ANNs) in the proposed methodology is also presented. The work emphasizes on both algorithms and methodology with three points of consideration:\ud contextual features and ratings of particular items/movies are exploited in several representations to improve the accuracy of recommendation process using artificial neural networks (ANNs), context features are combined with user-features to further improve the accuracy of a context-aware recommender system and lastly, a combination of the item/movie features are investigated within the recommendation process. The proposed approach is evaluated on the LDOS-CoMoDa dataset and the results are compared with state-of-the-art approaches from relevant published literature

Macroeconomic Determinants of Economic Growth in Pakistan

The main purpose of this paper has been to examine the effects of some of the key macroeconomic variables on Pakistan’s economic growth. Multiple regression framework is used to separate out the effects of key macroeconomic factors on growth over the period 1959-60 to 1996-97. The quantitative evidence shows that primary education to be an important prerequisite for accelerating growth. Similarly, increasing the stock of physical capital would help to contribute to growth. The empirical results also suggest that openness of Pakistan’s economy promotes economic growth. Alternatively, the budget deficit is negatively related to both output growth variables. The external debt is also negatively related to growth, suggesting that relying on domestic resources is the best alternative to finance growth. However, the results presented in this study reinforce the importance of sensible long-run growth-oriented policies to obtain sustainable growth.

Pakistan’s Agricultural Development since Independence: Intertemporal Trends and Explanations

The main objective of this paper has been to review Pakistan’s historical experience in agricultural development in terms of growth, income distribution, and rural poverty. While the long-term growth rates between 1949-50 and 1994-95 were satisfactory, the variations around the average have been rather too large over the various decades. Beginning with a stagnating sector of the 1950s, agriculture witnessed record growth rates during the Sixties. This was followed by the lowest growth rates of the early Seventies, and acceleration in the second half of the Seventies. The experience since 1979-80 has been mixed, but the growth rates have been rather low through the Eighties and the Nineties. The trends in income distribution and poverty varied directly in relation to the agricultural growth rates, especially when they were in excess of the threshold level of 4.5–5.0 percent per annum. In general, a growth rate of 5.0 percent or higher has induced positive changes in income distribution and poverty. In view of this positive association, the pursuit of a high growth policy in agriculture should guide Pakistan’s future development strategy. The efficiency of resource use, a greater dependence on modern technologies, and a minimisation of government intervention in the market mechanism are the essential pillars of the high growth strategy.