How Ethical is Islamic Banking in the Light of the Objectives of Islamic Law?

Islamic banking is based on moral foundations that make it distinct from conventional banking. Some argue that because of its foundation in Islam, Islamic banking may represent a more morally appealing alternative. Yet, evidence shows that this is not the case. Indeed, the current practice of Islamic banking has not been able to achieve its goals which are based on Islam's moral values: to enhance justice, equitability, and social well‐being. This essay examines the extent to which Islamic banking is ethical and concludes that the practice of the industry does not seem to be de facto ethical from the Islamic perspective of ethical values. It only consists in trading the same instruments of conventional banks without genuinely enforcing Islam's ethical vision. The practice of Islamic banking misrepresents Islam and does not contribute to solving social problems. The interaction between maqasid al‐shari?a (objectives of Islamic law) and qiyās (deductive analogy) provides a supplementary tool for interpreting the failure of the prior in terms of the practical misuse of the latter by Islamic banks. This essay provides an interpretive approach to the current debate about why Islamic banking has failed and suggests ways to move cautiously in the future.     

Reducing Consumers’ Perceived Risk through Banking Service Quality Cues in Taiwan

This study not only elucidates how service quality cues and perceived risk are related, but also explores the internal composition of this relationship. Financial and psychological risks found to be affected mainly by reliability and empathy of service quality, whereas functional and social risks are influenced by tangibles cues of service quality. Finally, exactly how demographic variables affect the relationship between service quality and perceived risk is considered, and the family life cycle notably modulates this relationship. People in various stages may perceive different levels of service quality, according to their age, which is a variable in the family life cycle.     

Ethical leadership and organizational citizenship behaviours: the moderating role of organizational identification

This study examines whether the relationship between ethical leadership and organizational citizenship behaviours (OCBs) is contingent on organizational identification. Drawing on substitutes for leadership theory, the study proposes that the relationship between ethical leadership and OCBs will be attenuated when employees strongly identify with their organization. Using a sample of Egyptian banking sector employees, this proposition was tested with hierarchal linear modelling (HLM). The results revealed that the positive relationship between ethical leadership and OCBs was stronger for those lower in organizational identification than for those higher in identification. Overall, the findings of the study shed new light on the conditions through which ethical leadership enhances OCBs.     

Ethics in banking,corporate maturity and faith

It is difficult to understate the impact of the 2008 Global Financial Crisis on entire economies, local communities, families and individuals. The Crisis, and what has followed, provides a window into the behaviour of large corporations and the assumptions underpinning corporate life more generally. This raises issues for the Christian Church and for all faiths seeking a more collective view of our common good and a shared journey. This article evaluates the extent to which anything has been learned since 2008, both within financial services and more widely, and presents ways in which a focus on faith, ethics, culture and community outcomes can be brought to the fore and embedded in businesses and organisations to achieve a longer-term maturity.     

Towards a Global Human Embryonic Stem Cell Bank

An increasingly unbridgeable gap exists between the supply and demand of transplantable organs. Human embryonic stem cell technology could solve the organ shortage problem by restoring diseased or damaged tissue across a range of common conditions. However, such technology faces several largely ignored immunological challenges in delivering cell lines to large populations. We address some of these challenges and argue in favor of encouraging contribution or intentional creation of embryos from which widely immunocompatible stem cell lines could be derived. Further, we argue that current immunological constraints in tissue transplantation demand the creation of a global stem cell bank, which may hold particular promise for minority populations and other sub-groups currently marginalized from organ procurement and allocation systems. Finally, we conclude by offering a number of practical and ethically oriented recommendations for constructing a human embryonic stem cell bank that we hope will help solve the ongoing organ shortage problem.     

Ethical Issues in Tissue Banking for Research: The Prospects and Pitfalls of Setting International Standards

Bauer, Taub, and Parsi's review of an international sample of standards on informed consent, confidentiality, commercialization, and quality of research in tissue banking reveals that no clear national or international consensus exists for these issues. The authors' response to the lack of uniformity in the meaning, scope, and ethical significance of the policies they examined is to call for the creation of uniform ethical guidelines. This raises questions about whether harmonization should consist of voluntary international standards or international regulations that include an official oversight mechanism and sanctions for noncompliance, and about who should participate in the harmonization process. Moreover, the normative assumptions and political dynamics that shape global policymaking need to be addressed. This commentary explores the policy implications and normative questions raised by the idea of international ethical guidelines for the use of biotechnologies and biotechnological resources such as stored samples of human tissue.     

Luther's Challenge: The Power of Greed in Our Common Home

When faced with growing poverty, corrupt business practices, and the power of banking houses and lobbyists, Luther drew on his theological anthropology in order to discern the devastating power of greed in human relationships. And yet, as he admitted, greed was and is a clever master of human ambition, accepted by leaders in church, commerce, and government. His teaching on the power of greed was in continuity with the Christian tradition and yet broke new ground in his recognition that this vice possesses a social, institutional nature.     

职务评价的方差分析法在制定职务等级中的应用

职务评价的方差分析法的技术核心是通过方差分析确定职务可比价值各成分的权重。此方法的有效性和实用性已在协助国有企业内部分配改革的制定工资标准中得到验证,并显示其普遍性的方法论意义：职务评价值是职务价值的线性映射：凡涉及职务价值差异的问题都可用此方法解决。本研究应用方差分析法为国有金融系统行员制改革中制定统一的职务等级标准提供技术支持和科学依据。评价程序中,职务分析、职务分类、计算职务评价值等前三个步骤与制定工资标准的作法相同。然后,推算各类职务评价值的变异范围（以９５％置信区间代表）,再将各类职务按管理层次合并为大类。最后,寻求一个合理划分各管理层次大类变异范围的约数,划分整个评价值变异范围。对某银行系统４５２种职务的８４１个样本评价的结果,所确定的职务等级数、各职务大类的等级跨度、位次,都符合该银行系统的人事管理经验及改革设想     

Representations of Sharia in Three Global Cities: Sydney,New York and Geneva 2008–2013

Drawing on methodologies used to analyse the negative portrayals of new religious movements in the press, this article analyses the way Sharia has been reported in key newspapers in Sydney, New York and Geneva from 2008 to 2013. It differentiates between perceptions of Islamic law as practised in these global cities, as well as in other countries, and examines the different levels of perception. The article also investigates portrayals and perceptions of ‘good’ Sharia (as in Islamic banking) as opposed to ‘bad’ Sharia (as in family and criminal law). It discovers that Sydney’s newspapers are more sympathetic than those in New York and Geneva towards Sharia-compliant finances. It then argues that the move towards a more Muslim consumer market in the media is not a homogenous process among Western global cities.     

After Novelty: The Mundane Practices of Ensuring a Safe and Stable Supply of Bone

New medical technologies to a great extent use material from human bodies as therapeutic tools. Social science studies of such ‘tools’ have tended to focus on technologies associated with novelty and drama. This paper, in contrast, concerns an old, well-entrenched and ostensibly undramatic technology, bone transfers, that has only recently gained public attention. The history of bone transplants is intertwined with a desire for a safe and stable supply of bone. This desire has a number of rarely debated social implications of relevance to transplant medicine in general: the gradual industrialization of procurement; the institutional production of the view of the body as a dividable resource; the emergence of a notion of scarcity; of body parts as waste; of death as a productive moment in which body parts acquire potential exchange value; and of tensions between an ethics of respect for donors and an ethics of efficient procurement. Historical analysis combined with a contemporary phenomenological approach suggests that the ‘newness’ typically associated with usage of human biological material is not related to transplant technologies as a medical discipline as such, but rather to changes in its social organization and features of the everyday experience of living with the transplant technologies.