Authoritative Position of Investor and Scope of Liability in Modarabah Contract: Classical and Contemporary Jurists Perspective

The position of investor is always questioned once capital is handed over to a working partner (Mudarib). The concerns of investor along with series of liabilities cannot be ignored because Modarabah losses are always transferred or born by him/her. The study highlights the authoritative position of Investor and suggests that investor has full access to impose conditions on Mudarib to safeguard his interest as per shariah rulings. The study debates investor’s position to impose geographical restrictions to restrict the scope of trade, trade policy of working partner (Mudarib) and fixation of time.  Besides, the study discourses the concept of limited liability in context of Islamic law where creditors hold right to personal wealth of the debtors.

Impact of Quality Management Practices on Service Competencies: A Study of Third-Party Logistics Service Providers in Pakistan

A lot is written about third party logistics, its evolution and rapid growth especially in western world and few of the Asian countries. Most of the research done on third party logistics is from customers’ perspective regarding their needs, reasons and motives to outsource logistics services and the standard of service what customers are looking for or what they are getting. The flip side of it, is the perspective of logistics service providers which is, mostly confined to national and international surveys and demographic statistics. About a decade back, World Bank started calculating Logistics Performance Index and ranking all internationally trading countries on the basis of their logistics infrastructure and performance. In Pakistan this industry was completely ignored and was rather unknown to academic researchers until the China Pakistan Economic Corridor came into lime light. Even then, it cannot be said that this industry got due attention from academic researchers or even from government regulatory authorities to properly regulate this industry. It is only in the last decade that researchers in Pakistan turned their attention towards this industry to evaluate its capacity, span of services provided, quality of service and the performance of third party logistics service providers. This research is unique in nature, as never before the service competencies of logistics industry in Pakistan were evaluated using internationally recognized quality standards and competency measures. To study the impact of quality management practices on service competencies of third party logistics service providers in Pakistan, this research picked the two most renowned and internationally recognized models: The Malcolm Baldrige National Quality (MBNQ) model for assessing quality management practices and Michigan State University Global Logistics Research Team (MSUGLRT) model for service competencies. The impact of six quality management factors of MBNQA named 1- Leadership, 2- Strategic Planning, 3- Customer Focus, 4- Measurement, Analysis and Knowledge Management, 5- Human Resource Focus and 6- Process Management was studied on the four service competency identified by MSUGLRT named 1- Positioning, 2- Integration, 3- Agility and 4-Measurement. The data on various items for these latent constructs was collected from more than 200 firms and all necessary analyses using AMOS and SPSS packages were done to find out the direction and extent of the impact of quality factors on service competency. Also the effect of Social Capital and Company Strength as moderating variable was observed. The results clearly identified the Strategic Planning and HR Management Focus as the factors highly impacting service competencies of third party logistics service providers in Pakistan. Interestingly, but surprisingly, the role of Leadership and Knowledge Management was minimal. Especially the negative impact of Leadership indicates the area of immediate further attention. The moderating variable also had very significant relation with service competencies but they were unable to significantly affect the individual impact of other quality factors. This study highlights the areas where logistics firms in their individual capacity, the logistics industry as a whole and concerned government bodies must immediately concentrate to be able to extract expected benefits from the China Pakistan Economic Corridor.