The purpose of this study was to investigate the mediating role of total quality management (TQM) between entrepreneurial orientation (EO) and SME export performance in the manufacturing sector of Pakistan. This study was originated from the fact that only a few studies have examined on how the firm’s intangible resources and capabilities such as EO and TQM drive SMEs’ export performance. Some questionnaires in Likert scale were used to collect the data and 364 usable responses were received from the owner/managers of exporting SMEs. Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM) was used for the data analysis. The findings reveal significant relationship between EO and TQM with SME export performance. Furthermore, this study found the complementary mediating role of TQM between EO and SME export performance of manufacturing sector of Pakistan. This study has implications for owner/managers of SMEs. The results offer a better understanding regarding EO and TQM implementation to SMEs owner / managers. Thus, owner/managers of SMEs can take better decisions for the implementation of TQM practices. Furthermore, to the best of researcher’s knowledge, this study is the first work, which examines Pakistan`s SMEs export performance in association with the TQM as the mediating factor between EO and SME export performance.

This paper has been retracted.

Organizational commitment plays an essential role on the success of service businesses as well as municipalities. One of the primary challenges on such firms is to face with rumors and silence, properly. In fact, organizational rumors and silence are two important issues which influence on employees’ organizational commitment. This paper studies the relationship between organizational silence and commitment by controlling organizational rumors. The study designs a questionnaire and distributes it among some employees who worked for a municipality firm in Iran. The results indicate that organizational silence had a negative relationship with organizational commitment by controlling organizational rumors. Likewise, without controlling organizational rumors, the impact of organizational silence or organizational commitment was increased, negatively. Also, the re-search indicates that there was a strong significant relationship between organizational silence and organizational rumors and organizational silence could improve organizational rumors, significantly.

Flexible Manufacturing System (FMS) is a compound system containing essentials like workplac-es, computerized storing and recovery systems, and material control devices such as automatons and automated guided vehicles (AGVs). In this paper, an attempt is made to study concurrently the machine and vehicle planning features in an FMS for minimization of the makespan. Planning is concerned with the distribution of partial resources to tasks over time and it is a resolution making procedure. It associates the processes, time, cost and overall purposes of the company. In this work, Nawaz-Enscore-Ham (NEH) heuristic algorithm is implemented to solve the scheduling problems in FMS. Eighty two problems and their existing solutions with different approaches are examined. The preliminary results indicate that the NEH heuristic algorithm provides better solu-tions with less computational time.

This research is conducted for evaluating the impact levels of determinants affecting the differences of financial statements of FDI firms under Vietnamese Accounting (VA) and International Ac-counting (IAS/IFRS). Data were collected by conducting survey of FDI firms and audit firms for the period from 2015 to 2017. Based on the quantitative data, multiple regression was employed for showing the influence levels of determinants on the variable of differences of financial reports. The results show that seven determinants had positive relationships with the differences of financial statements prepared by FDI under Vietnamese accounting and IAS/IFRS. Based on the findings, some recommendations are given for reducing fee of conversion of financial statements from Vietnamese accounting to international accounting, increasing the comparability of financial statements and improving information quality of financial statements.

It is a commonly visible scenario in todays’ market, especially in small and medium sized enterpris-es (SMEs), where the focus is on quantity rather than quality. This paper explains the common high rejection problem of a SME and how the productivity levels were enhanced after the successful implementation of Six-Sigma DMAIC methodology. Once the project completion industry was able to acquire many tangible and intangible benefits, this paper offers a systematic step by step illustration of DMAIC methodology to help the other firms start similar productivity improvement initiatives.

With the rapid increase of energy demand, it is becoming increasingly important to obtain accurate energy demand forecasts. To incorporate long time causal relationships, autoregressive with exoge-nous regression components models have received increasing attention from many researchers in this field. These are linear models applied through hybrid methodology of time series and econo-metrics, however, some recent studies find evidences that nonlinear models outperform over linear ones in long term peak demand forecasting. This paper proposed a nonlinear Auto Regressive Integrated Moving Average with Exogenous Inputs (N-ARIMAX) model to forecast sectoral peak demand using a case study of Iran. The results indicate that significant improvements in forecasting accuracy are obtained with the proposed models compared to the existing models.

This paper attempts to predict financial distress companies in the manufacturing and non-manufacturing sectors in Malaysia using financial distress companies as the dependent variable and financial ratios and macroeconomic variables as the independent variables. Logit Analysis was used as the analysis procedure because ratios do not have to be normal if it is used. It is also suitable when the dependent variable is binary in nature. Furthermore, it can also provide the probability of a company being financially distressed. This study found that the independent variables that can be used to predict financial distress companies in the manufacturing sector in Malaysia were total assets turnover ratio, current ratio, net income to total assets ratio and money supply (M2). However, the independent variables that can be used to predict financial distress companies in the non-manufacturing sector in Malaysia were debt ratio, working capital ratio, net income to total assets ratio and money supply (M2). This study provides the prediction models of financial distress com-panies in the manufacturing and non-manufacturing sectors in Malaysia using financial ratios and macroeconomic variables as its independent variables.

This paper discusses the organizational and methodological foundations and methods exploited to forecast, analyze and scale down threats and risks in the sphere of economic security, to solve the adaptation problems, to implement and to evaluate of the potency of protective measures. The object of the conducted research is associated with various economic activities of the commercial enterprises affiliated in Rostov region. A suggested model of the formation and functioning of adaptive engineering tools for managing economic security in the form of derivative balance of the enterprise resources and the sources of their formation will allow the proprietors, executive board and mana-gerial staff to obtain necessary information within the requested context regarding the enterprise vital economic interests. In addition, the paper pays attention to the methodological aspects of accounting description and estimation of the iterative achievements to meet the desired adaptation results, implemented within the framework of the described iterative algorithm aimed at ensuring strategic prediction.

The term virtual organization is used to describe the organizations that are united with other organizations to benefit from the relative advantages of other organizations. These organizations are established based on different patterns to use information technology for building quick, cheap, and easy communications. Virtual organizations use effective and useful strategies to keep up with the rapid and fundamental changes in the new world. Information Technology (IT) is a facilitator that has made it possible to create virtual organizations. In these organizations, indicators such as the level of collaboration with partners, the rate of the implementation of IT and other issues such as how to work together based on mutual trust, how to choose partners and how to resolve disputes with partners are used to form the virtual teams to help determine the viability of the organizations. The virtual organization, as a fact, is the result of technological advancements and creativity in organizing firms to face with the turbulent environment and features of the post-industrial age. In today's world of business, virtual organizations are trying to benefit from knowledge-based employees, who have high flexibility and significant efficiency to respond to the needs of a turbulent market and to create significant competitive advantage. In order to benefit from such organizations, their managerial issues should be identified and organized in a good manner. This study examines the relationship between the degree of organization's virtualization and the organizational ability (employees). The study designs a questionnaire and distributes it among some experts and, using Pearson correlation test, examines the hypotheses of the survey. The results indicate that there was a significant difference between the degree of virtualization of organization and organizational ability.

Evaluation of the national entrepreneurship ecosystem is one of the most important measures that most countries are committed to. This study evaluates the entrepreneurship ecosystem of the coun-tries in accordance with the Global Entrepreneurship index (GEI) and based on the metafrontier Malmquist approach. The metafrontier Malmquist method helps to find the pattern of change for each country, to perform analyses dynamically, to identify the effects of technical and technology changes among the total changes (Malmquist), and to consider the region and level of the countries in analyses (metafrontier). The data Global Entrepreneurship index for 132 countries from 2016 to 2017 are derived from the reports of the Global Entrepreneurship and Development Institute. Results show that the productivity of the entrepreneurship ecosystem generally increased, but the deeper analysis indicates that this improvement was due to the technology improvement, not the technical efficiency improvement. Meanwhile, the North America region has had the best technical performance in the development of entrepreneurship ecosystem, and other areas, especially Latin America, and The Caribbean and South Asia have experienced a decline in technical efficiency. It was also found that East Asia, and Pacific, Middle East and North Africa and North America maintained a technology gap in the area of entrepreneurship ecosystems, and Latin America and The Caribbean and South Asia regions had the potential to develop technological standards. By analyzing the metafrontier, simple analysis of the entrepreneurship ecosystem performance was replaced with the deep analysis, and a more comprehensive view was achieved in this area.