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Stirred by scant regard for market phases in portfolio performance assessments, the current paper investigates the active versus passive investment strategies under the bull and bear market conditions in emerging markets focusing on South Africa as a case study.

Methodologically, the measures of Jensen's alpha and Treynor index are applied to the monthly returns of 20 funds from January 2010 to June 2022.

The results are enlightening; though they contradict developed market evidence, they are consistent with emerging market trends. The findings show that actively managed funds outperform the market benchmark and passive investing style under bear and normal market conditions. Passive investment strategy outperforms both market benchmark and actively investing style under bull market conditions.

In the face of improved market efficiency, increased liquidity and recent technological impact, the findings of this study have practical application. The study outcomes should inform and update global investors, especially asset managers interested in emerging markets; however, the limitations of the study should also be considered.

While limited studies consider market conditions when comparing and contrasting the performance of passive versus active investing, such consideration is lacking in emerging markets. The current study corrects this literature imbalance.

Obstetric violence is the mistreatment of women in the setting of obstetric care, which includes preconception, medically assisted reproduction, pregnancy, childbirth and postpartum. Obstetric violence follows and perpetuates the devaluation and subjugation of women in patriarchal societies, where socio-cultural conceptions contribute to a view of the female body as faulty and deviating from the male prototype. These shape the perception that female reproductive processes require technological corrections. The medicalisation of reproductive processes and the mechanisation of a normal life event, with the threat of death and other life-changing consequences, disempower women and objectify the body and its functions.

The entrance of women into the workforce and the specialised fields, feminising care professions, failed to shift this paradigm. Female health workers are trained in the procedures instituted by dominant patriarchal structures, expressing values encoded in the professional culture and the institutions where they work. As women conform to the models they are exposed to during their training, perpetuating corporate hierarchies and practices, they act as agents and perpetrators of obstetric violence. Thus, obstetric violence also constitutes a specific type of violence against women at the hands of other women.

The purpose of this paper is to mainly investigate what factors drive growth for independent hotel firms on an island.

Two steps were followed. First, to identify hotels demonstrated significant growth; 92 independent hotels in North Cyprus were analyzed via a self-report questionnaire. Second, key growth factors were examined in five hotels showing the growth over years among the independent hotels via in-depth, semi-structured interviews, focus group interviews, and observations.

The study findings revealed 16 important growth factors for hotels, including active risk taking, education, family history, networks of contacts, other business interests, family investing friends, key employee partners, customer concentration, autonomy, innovativeness, proactiveness, competitive aggressiveness, location, desire to succeed, age of founders, and state support where are strong, weak, and interrelated relationships among these factors. These findings allow factors to be categorized into new groups, namely, strategic and tactical factors. The research findings unveil new factors referred to as “political conflict – pursuing different strategy and opportunities,” importance of second generations affect and entrepreneur’s metacognitive strategies, “informal networking.”

More research should also be undertaken for entrepreneurs or managers who formulate and implement strategies to enter new markets or to tackle turbulent and/or unstable environments.

This study reveals that one factor on its own cannot influence the growth of hotels. Rather, successful growth depends on the entrepreneur’s ability to combine all factors in harmony.

Given that there is limited empirical evidence on the growth of independent hotels on islands, this study made an important attempt to contribute to the entrepreneurship literature in the hospitality management and family business fields via micro-level approaches concerning the factors influencing hotels’ growth on an island. This is one of the first studies presenting and discussing empirical findings on growth factors for small hotels on an island, and brings a new perspective by grouping factors as strategic and tactical factors.