Background: Innovation in education is essential for fostering improved learning outcomes, operation efficiency and school excellence. Many challenges persist due to due to gaps in leadership strategies, limited stakeholder engagement, and inadequate professional development opportunities. This study explores the role of school principals in promoting a culture of innovation in private schools in Abu Dhabi, UAE. Methods: A quantitative research design was employed, utilizing an electronic questionnaire to examine how school leaders drive innovation. The study explores the correlation between a culture of innovation and five key elements: school leadership performance, relationships with students and parents, school activities and programs, the overall school environment, and principals’ demographic factors. An innovation assessment tool measured the level of innovation across selected schools. Results: By identifying key school performance weaknesses, this study aims to provide insights that can help school principals enhance their leadership practices and cultivate a thriving culture of innovation within their institutions. Conclusions: The findings contribute to understanding teachers’ and staff members’ propensity to innovate under effective school leadership.

Purpose: With the rapid diffusion of the metaverse into all aspects of businesses and the education industry, scholars have predominantly focused on examining its projected benefits and harms, yet have overlooked to empirically explore its unpredictable nature, which offers an exciting realm of unexplored challenges and opportunities.Design/methodology/approach: This research adopts a qualitative research design in the form of 24 interviews from a single EdTech to investigate the possibility of unexpected developments resulting from the integration of the metaverse into its solutions.Findings: Three noteworthy observations have emerged from the analysis: technological obsolescence, resource allocation imbalance, and monoculturalism.Originality/value: This research pioneers an empirical exploration of the latent outcomes stemming from metaverse adoption within EdTechs, while also introducing a novel theoretical framework termed “meta-governance,” which extends the Edu-Metaverse ecosystem.

This paper uses data from 61 countries to document the relationship between country-level social capital and corporate social responsibility (CSR) during the period between 2007 and 2023. We find that firms headquartered in countries with higher levels of social capital exhibit higher CSR engagement than firms headquartered in countries with lower levels of social capital. This association remains robust across a wide range of estimation approaches and sensitivity checks. Additional analyses explore the mechanisms through which social capital affects CSR by disentangling its underlying dimensions. Finally, we show that the economic value of CSR (as measured through its association with Tobin’s Q, sales growth, stock return volatility, and financial distress risk) varies with the level of social capital, with CSR playing a more prominent value-enhancing role in low-social-capital settings.

This paper examines the relationship between social capital and trade credit among private firms headquartered in 111 developing economies. The paper shows that firms headquartered in countries with higher levels of social capital receive more trade credit from their suppliers and extend more trade credit to their customers than firms headquartered in countries with lower social capital. The findings remain robust after controlling for a wide range of firm-level and country-level characteristics. Additional analyses show that the relationship between social capital and trade credit is more pronounced in countries with strong institutional environments. The results further indicate that specific dimensions of social capital, particularly interpersonal trust and social tolerance, are positively associated with both supplier-provided and firm-provided trade credit. Overall, the findings highlight the importance of informal institutional environments in facilitating relational financing among private firms operating in developing economies.