Purpose: Microfinance institutions (MFI) must adapt to rapidly changing market conditions, including stringent regulations and diverse customer demands, necessitating a high absorptive capacity. This research elucidates how organizational culture promotes knowledge sharing, thereby enhancing an organization’s ability to absorb and utilize new knowledge, with particular attention to the moderating role of MFI size.Design/methodology/approach: Data were collected from 450 randomly selected employees of MFIs in Pakistan. Hypotheses were tested using structural equation modeling in WarpPLS 8.0.Findings: The findings show that knowledge sharing mediates the relationship between organizational culture and absorptive capacity. The impact is more pronounced in larger MFIs, while smaller MFIs exhibit greater agility in adapting to new knowledge.Practical implications: MFIs, particularly in dynamic markets like Pakistan, should enhance their absorptive capacity by fostering an organizational culture that promotes knowledge sharing. While larger MFIs benefit from structured knowledge-sharing practices, they should address potential bureaucratic impediments to maintain agility.Social implications: By improving absorptive capacity, MFIs can better innovate and tailor their services to underserved communities, contributing to financial inclusion and poverty alleviation in Pakistan. This research provides insights for policymakers and practitioners on fostering sustainable development through strategic organizational practices in MFIs.Originality/value: The findings offer a practical framework linking theoretical concepts from the resource-based and knowledge-based views to real-world applications, particularly in developing economies. It emphasizes the crucial role of organizational culture in enabling MFIs to adapt and thrive in challenging environments.

In today’s competitive environment, organizations, in addition to trying to improve their production conditions, have a special focus on their supply chain components. Cooperation between supply chain members always reduces unforeseen costs and speeds up the response to customer demand. In the new situation, according to the category of return products and their reprocessing, supply chains have found a closed-loop structure. In this research, the aim was to design a closed-loop supply chain in competitive conditions. For this purpose, the key decisions of this chain included locating retail centers, adjusting the inventory of chain members, and selling prices of final products, optimally determined. For this purpose, a nonlinear integer mathematical model is presented. One of the most important innovations of this research was considering the variable value for return products. Then, in order to solve the proposed model, a whale optimization algorithm was developed. Numerical results from the sample examples showed that the whale algorithm had a very good performance in terms of response quality and speed-of-action in finding the optimal solution to this problem.

Massive growth of technology based e-learning systems is enabling student access to academic content from higher education institutions around the world. This study explores the antecedents of behavioral intention of students to use e-learning systems in university education to supplement classroom learning. A quantitative approach involving a structural equation model is adopted and research data collected from 358 undergraduate students is used for analysis. The study framework is based upon the technology acceptance model (TAM) and three external factors are proposed to influence the behavioral intention of students to use e-learning. Frequently used external factors in previous researches like computer experience and anxiety were not used and alternate factors were explored. Results show that self-efficacy, enjoyment and results demonstrability have a significant positive influence on perceived usefulness and on perceived ease of use of the e-learning system. The study contributes to understanding such contributory factors from the viewpoint of a student by suggesting that these factors hold well in the Pakistani academia culture where sufficient relevant empirical evidence did not exist due to lack of prior studies.

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to establish the mediating role of students’ engagement to their classes, for the conventional relationship between teachers’ efforts and students’ development, for a better understanding of the instruction-based classroom learning. Design/methodology/approach: The investigation is made using a mult-istage-stratified-systematic sample of 500 students from business and engineering schools with an almost equal representation of both the genders and the type of schools’ ownership. A structural equation modeling is used for this mediation analysis. Findings: The mediating role of students’ engagement is identically established both for business and engineering schools and for both genders. However, in public sector universities, this mediation is insignificant. Research limitations/implications: The investigation is limited only to business and engineering schools, and this limitation may conceal some factor(s) more important for other schools. Further, the investigation is reading data from Lahore, a metropolitan, which may hide some factor(s) some appropriate for smaller cities. Originality/value: The data are gathered, analyzed and discussed through the lens of the socio-cultural theory, allowing for a comprehensive understanding to emerge for students’ engagement to their classes.