This text offers comprehensive coverage of the design and use of qualitative methods in leadership research. The book equips leadership researchers at all levels with the knowledge to make informed choices of research strategies. The second edition features 50% new research and includes new developments in qualitative research methods.

Communication permeates our lives at all levels : academic, professional and personal. This book focuses on the vital importance of communication in these three overlapping spheres. This revised edition includes new material on the fast-moving fields of electronic and organisational communication to ensure students have access to current material.

Modern medicine has reached a point where the patient is not treated as a biopsychosocial-spiritual being but rather is seen as a virtual identity consisting of laboratory findings and images. More focus is placed on relieving the symptoms instead of curing the disease. Mostly, patients are turned into lifetime medication-dependent individuals. New medicines are needed to overcome the side effects, complications, resistance, and intolerance caused by pharmacological and interventional therapies. In hopes of drug-free and painless alternative treatments with fewer complications, there has been a trend to revisit traditional methods that have been dismissed by modern medicine. Traditional medicine has to be reevaluated with modern scientific methods to complement and integrate with evidence-based modern medicine.

Written in easy-to-understand language, this important text provides a systematic and commonsense approach to developing instruments for data collection and analysis. This book can be used by both those who are developing instruments for the first time and those who want to hone their skills, including students, agency personnel, program managers, and researchers. This book provides a thorough presentation of instrument construction, from conception to development and pre-testing of items, formatting the instrument, administration, and, finally, data management and presentation of the findings. Throughout the book, the authors emphasize how to create an instrument that will produce trustworthy and accurate data. To that end they have included guidelines for reviewing and revising the questionnaire to enhance validity and reliability. They also show how to work effectively with stakeholders such as instruments designers, decision-makers, agency personnel, clients, and raters or respondents.

Metacognition skills have been proven to have a positive relationship with learning. The strength of metacognition relies heavily on self-efficacy where a student understands his/her learning style, and the ability to use information gathered and align it with his/her learning style. In addition, knowing what you know and how you know it as a student plays a huge role in knowing what you do not know and linking it with what is close or relevant to it, that you know. It is about having skills and knowledge that empowers you to be an independent learner. Literature on classroom practices show a number of short-comings in diverse areas such as poor teacher knowledge, overcrowded classrooms, and lack of resources for learning. An independent student will strive under such an environment by studying independently, searching for resources, and finding multimodal ways of learning. It is also important to note that naturally, human beings are curious and want to learn in order to conquer their world. Hence, Piaget's work of intellectual autonomy cannot be ignored when exploring metacognition. If learning experiences were ideal and developmental, they would be no need to nurture metacognition. Unfortunately, the education systems remove students' curiosity by bringing fake environments into learning that impede creation and imagination. This book emphasises the power of metacognition at different levels of learning. It can be seen as a parallel intervention approach, with expanded knowledge on how to extend existing skills for young children, which is a pre-intervention. Authors in this book bring diverse viewpoints from diverse fields on how to nurture metacognition, thus giving the reader an opportunity to borrow strategies from other fields. This contribution is a mixture of empirical contributions and opinion pieces informed by review of literature.

Over the last two decades "poverty" has moved centrestage as an issue within the social sciences. This volume, edited by one of Europe's foremost sociologists, aims to assess the debates surrounding poverty and the responses to it, exploring the ways in which the various socio-political systems and welfarist regimes are being radically transformed. The essays examine how such change is effected by failing welfare programmes and enervating social structures such as family and community which once would have provided mechanisms of social stability. The first part of the book provides reflections on urban poverty; the second part discusses the widely debated idea of an "underclass" and its meanings in Europe and in the USA, and the final part draws on concrete empirical analyses to examine the patterns of poverty thoughout Western Europe. This volume will be of first-rate importance to all serious students of politics, sociology, geography, public policy, youth and community studies, social policy and American studies.

The current dynamics of world economy show remarkable changes in the socio-economics of credit provision and entrepreneurship. If the emergence of the sharing economy is fostering innovative models of collaborative agency, networking and venture business, economic actors are also looking for a more sustainable development, able to foster profitability as well as community welfare. This book investigates Islamic social finance as a paramount example of this economy under change, where the balance between economic efficiency and social impact is contributing to the transformation of the market from an exchange- to a community-oriented institution. The collected essays analyse the social dimension of entrepreneurship from an Islamic perspective, highlighting the extent to which the rationales of "sharing," distribution and cooperation, affect the conceptualization of the market in Islam as a place of "shared prosperity." Moving from the conceptual "roots" of this paradigm to its operative "branches," the contributing authors also connect the most recent trends in the financial market to Shari‘ah-based strategies for community welfare, hence exploring the applications of Islamic social finance from the sharing economy, FinTech and crowdfunding to microcredit, waqf, zakat, sukuk and green investments. An illuminating reference for researchers, practitioners and policy-makers dealing with the challenges of a global market where not only is diversity being perceived as a value to be fostered, but also as an important opportunity for a more inclusive economy for everybody.

Sukuk are the crest of a new wave of innovation in Islamic finance. The full potential of sukuk range of securities is far from realised. Find out how the market has and continues to develop to open new investor and issuer universes.