Editorial

Citation

Gallagher, K. and Pounder, J. (2012), "Editorial", Education, Business and Society: Contemporary Middle Eastern Issues, Vol. 5 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/ebs.2012.34905caa.001

Editorial

Article Type: Editorial From: Education, Business and Society: Contemporary Middle Eastern Issues, Volume 5, Issue 3

Noting that gender divisions are especially acute in the Arab world, Sikdar of Wollongong University in Dubai and Mitra of the Indian Institute of Management in Kerala in India together explore how gender stereotypes impact leadership role choices amongst employees in mid-level managerial positions in business organizations in the cosmopolitan setting of Dubai. When they surveyed participants about their perceptions of leadership characteristics, they found that respondents tend to characterise leadership as predominantly male. The authors suggest that women need to exhibit relatively higher proportions of male stereotype characteristics in order to be promoted to leadership position in organizations. They also suggest that high male-gender identification may influence women’s intention to seek leadership roles.

Meanwhile, Kabir and Rahman of Sultan Qaboos University in Muscat have calculated future population projections for the state of Oman. They predict a decline in fertility rates due to rapid socio-economic development and the increased empowerment of women, resulting in a delay in marriage and the spacing of child bearing through contraception. However, due to the large proportion of young people in Oman – 40 percent of the population is under the age of 15 – the population will continue to grow despite declining fertility rates. For the future, they predict that as the proportion of older people grows and family size declines, the family support system may not be adequate to care for the elderly, as younger people migrate to urban areas for education and work, and as the nuclear family displaces the traditional extended family structure of the past.

Female entrepreneurship is increasingly recognized as an important factor for economic growth and development in the Middle East, yet the number of female entrepreneurs in the region is lower than in other locations such as East Asia, Latin America, the Caribbean, Europe, and Central Asia. Surveying the terrain of female entrepreneurship in the Middle East, Hattab from the British University in Cairo analyses data from the 2009 Global Entrepreneurship Monitor in order to examine the state of female entrepreneurship across the region. She shows that the region is by no means homogenous in this, as in other regards, with wide variation in levels of female entrepreneurship from country to country.

From private entrepreneurship to quality in organization, and from an analysis of the entire region to an examination of one particular establishment in a specific location – Riyadh in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia – researchers Alhwairini and Foley examine the factors that contribute to excellence in the workplace. Focusing on the case of a not-for-profit organization in the Saudi capital, their study finds the need for greater alignment between the aspirations of a total quality management approach and the actuality of practice.

Again on the subject of business and organizations, Ramezan notes that traditional approaches to the measurement of profitability and productivity have failed to take sufficient account of one particular aspect of productivity which has become critical in the modern economy, namely knowledge. Accordingly, his paper seeks to make an initial attempt to define the concept of knowledge productivity and to explore the complex dynamics of how learning and intellectual capital lead to incremental and radical innovation.

Continuing in the world of business, de Waal and Sultan lament the dearth of studies on high performing organizations in the Middle East. Accordingly, the authors have developed a high performing organization framework which he applies to the Palestinian Polytechnic University in order to initially gauge the framework’s applicability to a Middle Eastern context. The results indicate that there is certainly potential for the framework in a Middle Eastern context.

Kay Gallagher, James Pounder