Editorial

Citation

Pounder, J. and Gallagher, K. (2012), "Editorial", Education, Business and Society: Contemporary Middle Eastern Issues, Vol. 5 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/ebs.2012.34905aaa.001

Editorial

Article Type: Editorial From: Education, Business and Society: Contemporary Middle Eastern Issues, Volume 5, Issue 1

The interesting question of the interplay between moral and religious values and the intention to purchase counterfeit products is examined by Riquelme and Abbas from the Kuwait-Maastricht Business School, together with Rios from the Australian College of Kuwait. They investigate the factors that influence consumers’ attitudes toward the purchase of counterfeit goods, by asking over four hundred residents of the Gulf state of Kuwait about their intention to purchase such products so as to understand the relationship between factors such as social norms, social status and ethical consciousness, and the relative roles of value consciousness, risk, and perception of store trustworthiness.

Meanwhile, Al Barwani and Al Ani from Sultan Qaboos University in Oman join with Amzat from UCSI University in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to create a model of effective teaching for Omani schools. In order to investigate state school students’ perceptions of effective teaching, they conducted a large-scale and far-ranging survey of over 2,500 students from all regions in Oman, and their listing alone of those regions underscores the comprehensive insight into public education in the country provided in this paper. The importance of effective community relationships emerges strongly from this study, indicating that to be seen as effective by students, teachers in Oman need to engage with societal and community issues.

Moving into the on-line field, Tara Henari and Joel Indrupati, of the University of Bahrain discusses the value of social networking for Middle Eastern entrepreneurs. Their major finding is that social networking is an inexpensive and straightforward method of advertising and provides entrepreneurs with an enhanced market reach. Given the popularity of on-line social networking, this seems to be a low risk approach to marketing products. In the future, on-line social networking seems poised to become a major method of raising potential customers’ awareness of new products.

Syed Bashir of the Higher Colleges of Technology in Dubai explores the extent to which, in a culturally diverse society such as the UAE, organizations employing expatriates can improve expatriate retention by providing them with support aimed at facilitating their cross-cultural adjustment. His findings indicate that there is a positive relationship between organizational support and expatriates’ cross cultural adjustment that includes work, general and interaction adjustment. His findings should be of considerable value to UAE Human Resource Managers looking to attract and retain suitably qualified expatriate employees.

The final paper in this edition of the journal is by Ahmed A. Mohamed of the German University in Cairo, Sayed El Khouly of Ain Shams University in Cairo and Mohamad Saad of Cairo University. The paper examines the reliability and factor structure of the Arabic translation of the Emotional Intelligence Scale (EIS-41-A) that is a popular trait based intelligence test for Arabic countries. Such an examination is important for the social sciences where measurement of apparent intangibles is often carried out. It is also important because the concept of Emotional Intelligence was originally developed in the West and it is important to review the applicability of such instruments to a non-Western context. The findings of this study, although conducted with a limited sample in the case of some countries, provide an initial indication that the scale does have acceptable reliability and does demonstrate the same factor structure of the original scale.

We, your editors, do hope you enjoy this edition of EBS.

James Pounder, Kay Gallagher