The state of HRM in the Middle East:Challenges and future research agenda

Based on a robust structured literature analysis, this paper highlights the key developments in the field of human resource management (HRM) in the Middle East. Utilizing the institutional perspective, the analysis contributes to the literature on HRM in the Middle East by focusing on four key themes. First, it highlights the topical need to analyze the context-specific nature of HRM in the region. Second, via the adoption of a systematic review, it highlights state of development in HRM in the research analysis set-up. Third, the analysis also helps to reveal the challenges facing the HRM function in the Middle East. Fourth, it presents an agenda for future research in the form of research directions. While doing the above, it revisits the notions of “universalistic” and “best practice” HRM (convergence) versus “best-fit” or context distinctive (divergence) and also alternate models/diffusion of HRM (crossvergence) in the Middle Eastern context. The analysis, based on the framework of cross-national HRM comparisons, helps to make both theoretical and practical implications

Place, Space and Memory in the Old Jewish East End of London: an Archaeological Biography of Sandys Row Synagogue, Spitalfields and its Wider Context

Sandys Row (London E1) is the only functioning Ashkenazi (Eastern European Jewish) Synagogue in Spitalfields and the oldest still functioning Ashkenazi synagogue in London. Located in an area, which from the mid­late nineteenth century until WWII was the centre of London’s Jewish population, it is one of the last surviving witnesses to a once vibrant and dynamic heritage that has now virtually disappeared. This area has been the first port of call for refugees for centuries, starting with French Protestant Huguenots in the eighteenth century, then Jews fleeing economic hardship and pogroms in Eastern Europe in the nineteenth century followed by Bangladeshi Muslims in the twentieth century. Using a broadly archaeological analysis based very closely on the sort of practice widely used in church archaeology, the authors argue that much can be inferred about wider social and cultural patterns from a study of architectural space at Sandys Row and its associated material culture. This is the first such archaeological study undertaken of a synagogue in Britain and offers a new perspective on wider issues regarding the archaeological definition of religious practice and religious material culture

A SAT-based hybrid solver for optimal control of hybrid systems

Combinatorial optimization over continuous and integer variables was proposed recently as a useful tool for solving complex optimal control problems for linear hybrid dynamical systems formulated in discrete-time. Current approaches are based on mixed-integer linear or quadratic programming (MIP), which provides the solution after solving a sequence of relaxed standard linear (or quadratic) programs (LP, QP). An MIP formulation has the drawback of requiring conversion of the discrete/logic part of the hybrid problem into mixed-integer inequalities. Although this operation can be done automatically, most of the original discrete structure of the problem is lost during the conversion. Moreover, the efficiency of the MIP solver mainly relies upon the tightness of the continuous LP/QP relaxations. In this paper we attempt to overcome such difficulties by combining MIP and techniques for solving constraint satisfaction problems into a “hybrid” solver, taking advantage of SAT solvers for dealing efficiently with satisfiability of logic constraints. We detail how to model the hybrid dynamics so that the optimal control problem can be solved by the hybrid MIP+SAT solver, and show that the achieved performance is superior to the one achieved by commercial MIP solvers