Smart Growth for St. James is a highly competitive team negotiation with extraordinary integrative potential. St. James (a fictional city) has experienced a growth pattern of sprawl at the expense of its urban core. Recent efforts to revitalize the urban core have met with some success, but various interests groups throughout the area are calling for a more comprehensive approach to St. James future development that best answers the question: “How can we create compact and efficient growth patterns that are responsive to the needs of people at all income levels and also help maintain our region‟s quality of life and economic competitiveness?” This exercise provides highly adversarial and contentious roles for the participants and challenges them to undertake thorough planning, balance competing political interests, deal with difficult people, engage in conflict resolution, resist satisficing, engage in problem solving, and find creative solutions to meet the parties‟ interests. The debrief provides an excellent opportunity to discuss leadership issues, ethical considerations, the management of a negotiation team, and the psychology of working together in a team. Moreover, the classic developer community versus environmentalist dynamic at play in this simulation enjoys substantial real world validation and application. It has been successfully utilized in undergraduate, graduate, and executive level training courses dealing with negotiation, conflict diagnosis and dispute resolution, and teams and leadership.

This paper presents part of an in-depth theoretical and practical analysis of the influence of Arab Islamic culture on employees‟ effectiveness in Jordanian commercial banks. It considers two of the Islamic values: Intention (Neyyah) and Justice Trust (Amana) from the employees‟ perspective. The impact of religion on management practices and its role in human behaviour within work organizations has been largely ignored (Ababneh and Abramenko, 2016). This work seeks to fill part of this gap by considering its influence on organizational performance in general and employee‟s effectiveness in particular. In a country such as the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, religion plays an important role in everyday life, being supported by Government. Interest is in the prevalent behaviour at work and beyond. The question is „what‟ is significantly influenced by a high degree of commitment to religious practices? This paper explores the relationship between the dominant religion and management practices in paying particular attention to Arab Islamic culture and employees‟ effectiveness. This is an important sector to study, as it plays a key role in supporting societies and is arguably the most important service sector affecting the Jordanian economy. Data was analysed from managers, assistant managers, divisional heads, branch heads and other employees from five commercial banks in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan with a sample size of 174. Multiple regression analysis and other statistical tests were utilised to test research hypotheses. The empirical results of the research show there is no statistically significant effect to Intention (Neyyah) and Justice Trust (Amana) on HR performance in the commercial banks in Jordan.

The inflows of Foreign Direct Investment are very often perceived as a vehicle of economic growth. Hence, various countries worldwide are striving to attract more Foreign Direct Investment. Even the Sub Saharan African countries have been playing a very active part in this race. However, as opposed to other parts of the world, the SSA countries have not been very successful at attracting large amounts of FDI. Hence, the main objective of this study is to analyse the different determinants of FDI in SSA while laying particular emphasis on the corporate income tax rate it is an instrument that is widely used by SSA countries to draw FDI inflows. A regression is conducted on 22 countries in the SSA region for the period 2004-2015. Results from the analysis show that the market size, trade openness and political stability have a positive significant impact in attracting inwards FDI to SSA, with trade openness being the most prominent one. On the other hand, infrastructure has a significant inverse relationship with the level of FDI inflows. As far as the exchange rate and the tax rates are concerned, it is found that they have no statistically significant impact on FDI inflows to SSA.

As educational technologies continue to expand, American higher education has witnessed radical transformation to provide students a more integrated and multi-dimensional educational experience. This convergence of technology and student expectations of Generation Z has led to redefined learning and teaching models. While hitting the sweet spot of technology and learning expectations may need more data and research, the balance can be optimized in blended learning classrooms. The paper will present a case study that incorporates active learning classroom teaching and technology and explore the advantages and challenges they present to both students and faculty. Results from the case study indicate that the grade point average increased, and students were satisfied with the blended learning experience although challenges persisted for both students and faculty. A practical framework to reimagine the role of technology in higher education to create a student-centered ecosystem that empowers learning experiences are presented along with recommendations on how faculty and institutions could be embracing technology to enhance student outcomes.

Financial well-being can be elusive. When individuals lack financial knowledge, socialization, and personal characteristics such as self-discipline and thoroughness, they may not be able to make informed financial decisions later in life. Since children’s savings have long lasting effects on college entrance and graduation rates, this paper looked specifically at the relationship between parents’ savings values and whether they opened a savings account for their child. Covariates including individual characteristics of the parents and household characteristics were examined to see if they were significantly related to whether or not a child’s savings account was opened. Implications of the findings with respect to early intervention work with parents are discussed as are recommendations for future research with low-income families.