Social capital of business organizations: modern trends

Due to increasing competition in the private hospital sector in Saudi Arabia, the organizations need to adopt the new ways to foster the brand loyalty and repeated visits. In this context, content marketing may have pleasant effects on a business in terms of customer engagement, trust and loyalty. The present research attempts to investigate the multi-dimensional relationships among content marketing, loyalty, trust and customer engagement in the private hospital sector using primary data collected through a questionnaire from 400 randomly selected respondents. A simple random sampling technique is utilized to select the patients or their family members visiting the private hospital to have their perception regarding hypothesized variables. The findings indicate that content marketing has a positive impact on the factors like customer engagement, trust and loyalty. In comparison, content marketing is found more effective in persuading the loyalty of the customers in comparison of trust and loyalty. Further, the customers’ trust towards a brand has a strong positive relationship with the loyalty. Moreover, the positive effect of customer engagement on the trust has also been found. Based on the results, this study suggests that the private healthcare institutions should adopt a multi-channel content marketing approach to exploit its maximum benefit. Multiple social media platforms and popular healthcare blog sites should be chosen for an effective content marketing advertisement.

The virtual nature of digital money is fueling the conflict between usability, functionality and trust in the digital form. Institutional trust drivers should move forward in understanding the nature of confidence in digital money. Do central banks digital money (CBDC – central bank digital currency) and private cryptocurrencies demonstrate the same or different trust patterns? The paper used the general regression method to discover the relationship between trust in different forms of digital money and selected variables that may generate this trust. Simple empirical tests were sufficient to find the fundamental importance of age as a confidence driver relevant to CBDC and cryptocurrencies. It is found that traditional factors associated with the inflation history and quality of monetary order (central banks independence and rule of law) do not play a role in the case of CBDC, but are important in the case of cryptocurrencies. Structural features (like FinTech development or social trust) that should support trust in digital money are not found to be important. Societies with larger fraction of younger generations demonstrate higher confidence in centralized and decentralized forms of digital money. This challenges the traditional approach to money and calls into question the future role of monetary stability institutions in the digital age. Digitalization is perceived as an improvement in welfare only when fiat money institutions become fragile. The efficiency and credibility of central banks are not a bonus to confidence in CBDC. This is a challenge for the institutional design of the future digital-based monetary order.

During the first quarter of 2020, COVID-19 spread worldwide, claiming lives of thousands of people every day. This marked the beginning of all emergency and business continuity plans around the world. This study attempts to study people’s awareness of CSR practices among business firms in Dubai and investigate people’s evaluation of these CSR practices during the COVID-19 pandemic. The study employs a quantitative research method and mainly uses questionnaires for data collection. 199 respondents are selected from different business firms in Dubai. Expert interviews are also conducted for triangulation purposes. It involves the Dubai community with various backgrounds and status. This study shows that a large scheme of the Dubai community has a decent level of expertise in sustainability and corporate social responsibility. It also shows that firms that have implemented CSR before the crisis will mostly be better suited to play a supportive role for government and society during the crisis.

Acknowledgment
Research grant provided by the Fundamental Research Grant Scheme [FRGS/1/2017/SS01/UUM/02/23] under Ministry of Higher Education, Malaysia, and University Utara Malaysia (SO Code: 13806) is gratefully acknowledged.