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Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to identify attributes of knowledge management (KM) for large and small manufacturing companies in United Arab Emirates (UAE) and to propose a process to evaluate the competitive priorities of these companies. Design/methodology/approach – This research is designed by composing multi criteria decision making of KM attributes in order to identify competitive priorities of large and small manufacturing companies to achieve better customer focus. To deal with this complexity of multi criteria decision-making process, Analytical Hierarchical Process (AHP) method has been used in this research. Findings – Results show that large manufacturing companies are putting more emphasis on “Know-Why” knowledge attribute in all four competitive priorities for achieving customer focus. While, small size manufacturing companies put higher weight on “Know-What” knowledge attribute by focussing on two competitive priorities (flexibility and quality). Research limitations/implications – Results are derived from a limited number of empirical data only in one country, therefore these cannot be generalized. Future research with larger samples of small and large manufacturing firms from other countries is needed. Practical implications – To be competitive, manufacturing companies must reshuffle their production strategies to allow them to play a role in global knowledge-intensive market. Therefore, they must incorporate knowledge attributes as a way to achieve higher levels of performance. Originality/value – This study is among the first and most exhaustive ones carried out in the small and large size firms operating in the manufacturing sector of UAE. It provides a systematic approach to identify the operational competencies and knowledge attributes being followed by large and small manufacturing companies.

This study attempts to empirically investigate the marketing practices of the small- and medium-sized hotels in the United Arab Emirates, which has not been extensively researched in the context of the accommodation sector in Arab region. Findings from the survey and semi-structured interviews with owners–operators of small- and medium-sized hotels revealed that, to remain competitive in the hotel businesses, small- and medium-sized hotels owners–operators undertaken various marketing practices in terms of positioning, product, price setting, and promotional strategies. The research reported in this paper seeks to make a contribution to the understanding of marketing strategies in small- and medium-sized hotels specifically and, more generally, to the area of small- and medium-sized enterprises or entrepreneurial marketing.

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Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine the underlying dimensional structure of project management practices to identify key factors that underpin the successful completion of projects. Design/methodology/approach It employs exploratory factor analyses to investigate the interrelationships of the survey items synthesized from the literature by retaining and reorganizing the important information from the original data while redundant information is removed. Findings The nine theoretical constructs comprising 64 items were coalesced onto five latent constructs comprising 50 items while explaining 50.914 percent of the total variance. The extracted five constructs that describe the best project management practices have been labelled risk management, organizational culture, stakeholder approach, management approach, and project leadership. Practical implications The study results benefit both practitioners and the academic community as five broad categories of best project management practices are identified and their interdependencies are established. Project management professionals can use the latent factors as the critical factors for project success, whereas the research community can use the authors’ results to build higher order structural models and to test hypotheses by linking the latent variables with project performance measures. Originality/value The study contributes to the discourse on project management by identifying critical practices that contribute to the successful completion of projects.