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Esbjerg is located in the Wadden Sea region and is a regional centre with approximately 72,000 inhabitants. Commercially, the city has recently ranked first amongst major Danish cities in the creation of jobs. However, in Denmark, it is mainly other cities that attract younger students, and Esbjerg has some of the same structural problems due to outmigration as Danish rural areas in general. It is, therefore, important for Esbjerg to be able to attract international students so that businesses and institutions in the region can recruit skilled employees. In this book chapter, the authors aim to reanalyse data from 10 semi-structured interviews with international students at higher education institutions in Esbjerg conducted in 2016. The authors position their empirical findings within the literature on international student integration to investigate the obstacles to international student integration into study, business and leisure life in Esbjerg and potential solutions given Esbjerg’s peripheral location. The chapter, thus, aims to improve the understanding of cultural, work-related and everyday life challenges that are present in university town environments where international students study, mainly from the perspective of students.

The Personal Responsibility Work Opportunity and Reconciliation Act of 1996, better known as Welfare Reform, implemented, in addition to many other features, a 60-month lifetime limit for welfare receipt. Research to date primarily documents individual-level barriers, characteristics, and outcomes of those who time out. Very little scholarly work considers experiences of mothering or carework after timing out. In this chapter, I ask, what kinds of carework strategies are used by women who have met their lifetime limits to welfare? What do the ways mothers talk about these strategies tell us about the discursive forces they are resisting and/or engaging? Using in-depth interviews at two points in time with women who have timed out of welfare (n = 32 and 23), this analysis shows how mothers’ strategies and the ways they discuss them reveal covert material and symbolic resistance to key discourses – negative assumptions about welfare mothers and a culture of work enforcement – and the conditions shaping their lives (Hollander & Einwohner, 2004). Mothers use carework strategies very similar to those identified in many other studies (e.g., London, Scott, Edin, & Hunter, 2004; Morgen, Acker, & Weigt, 2010; Scott, Edin, London, & Mazelis, 2001), but they provide us with an understanding of carework in a new context. The three groups of strategies explored here – structuring employment and non-employment, protecting children, and securing resources – reveal raced, classed, and gendered labor in which women engage to care for children in circumstances marked by limited employment opportunities and limited state support. The policy implications of mothers’ strategies are also discussed.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the transformative potential of a school-based model in India that makes middle class students active stakeholders in the well-being of underprivileged children.

Employing a qualitative case study method, data were collected through a survey – containing close-ended and open-ended questions – that was administered to all students in grades 6 through 10.

Overall, the data suggest that socialization with underprivileged children had a profound impact on the views of middle class children about social inequalities and their own agency in addressing them. While younger children observed more manifest differences between them and the poor children they engaged; the older children articulated those differences in terms of inequalities of opportunity and violations of rights.

The research was based on a single school where the intervention was conceived and implement by its visionary leader. It would be important to examine the robustness of the model in a broader sample of schools.

The study demonstrates that with purposive strategies and intentional organizational culture, schools for privileged can promote social inclusion of all children.

This paper makes the counter-intuitive case – analytically and empirically – that for social policies designed for poor children to be a force for social transformation, they should be purposively conceived in conjunction with the educational and developmental imperatives of children from more privileged backgrounds.

This paper aims to understand how the residents have utilized domestic spaces and furniture during three months' lockdown time for the Covid-19 virus spread measures and to explore how domestic living practices were adjusted which had been the daily urban activities previously.

The research method is a qualitative interpretivist philosophical approach with a quantitative data collection. Short questionnaires were conducted via e-mails with attached links via SurveyMonkey. The sample was the group of people who had been in active urban life before the pandemic and had been actively working at the office spaces.

Separate learning/working spaces were urged at home, at least for the set intervals in the daytime. Production in the kitchen also acted as an interactive production and entertainment. Balconies and terraces were re-discovered and acted as “urban-substitute open spaces”. The living room became the new venue for domestic interaction especially during working-learning breaks, for watching movies, personal care or reading sessions. Computers, tablets and smartphones became the urban activity base due to online meeting applications for social reasons, online shopping, working and learning. The separation of domains at home became essential.

The study only focuses domestic uses of white-collar workers; during the lock-down period, Covid-19 pandemic. Sampling constraints are the employees who were active urban life before the pandemic and working at the office space. Sharing the house at least with one other roommate, sibling or spouse with or without children. Individuals who had not been working outside the home before the pandemic, people aged over 65, retired, permanent home workers, housewives, freelancers and other such demographic structures are excluded from the study.

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the first wave lockdown began between early March–June 2020, and millions of people were confined to the dwellings. “Staying home” stood for working-learning-shopping-interacting online, more production in the kitchen, using the living room as a domestic multi-functional venue, spending time on the terraces and balconies as domestic open spaces. The active living in the urban context dramatically shifted to “at-home living”.

The study only focuses on the three months' interval in which strict rules for staying home were enforced in Istanbul, Turkey. Schemas, charts and tables are generated concerning the input. The study challenges the making meaning via praxis of “to dwell” and urban living. Nevertheless, the main questions of housing such as production, social aspects, shared spaces, interaction are re-configured and the substitute urban space is created at home.

The COVID-19 pandemic and its related economic meltdown and social unrest severely challenged most countries, their societies, economies, organizations, and individual citizens. Focusing on both more and less successful country-specific initiatives to fight the pandemic and its multitude of related consequences, this chapter explores implications for leadership and effective action at the individual, organizational, and societal levels. As international management scholars and consultants, the authors document actions taken and their wide-ranging consequences in a diverse set of countries, including countries that have been more or less successful in fighting the pandemic, are geographically larger and smaller, are located in each region of the world, are economically advanced and economically developing, and that chose unique strategies versus strategies more similar to those of their neighbors. Cultural influences on leadership, strategy, and outcomes are described for 19 countries. Informed by a cross-cultural lens, the authors explore such urgent questions as: What is most important for leaders, scholars, and organizations to learn from critical, life-threatening, society-encompassing crises and grand challenges? How do leaders build and maintain trust? What types of communication are most effective at various stages of a crisis? How can we accelerate learning processes globally? How does cultural resilience emerge within rapidly changing environments of fear, shifting cultural norms, and profound challenges to core identity and meaning? This chapter invites readers and authors alike to learn from each other and to begin to discover novel and more successful approaches to tackling grand challenges. It is not definitive; we are all still learning.

The Coronavirus pandemic in South Africa resulted in negative effects with high infection rates, health care shortages, increases in death rates, plus a collapsing economy. There was an urgent need for precautionary health promotional campaigns to educate populations about the virus. However, with South Africa’s diverse population cultural beliefs, socio-cultural aspects needed to be catered for. Health literacy also had to be considered for effective positive behaviour change patterns to occur. Social barriers such as misinformation, stigma, myths, anxiety and prejudice resulted into infodemics emerging in the population. Media representation about the pandemic needed to ensure truthful and authentic information reached target audiences. Specific examples related to religious beliefs (the Chief Justice Mogeng Mogeng) and cultural remedies (Madagascar’s artemisia or “green gold”) are included in this chapter, to elaborate examples of such cases in South Africa, with no audience engagement analysed. Two health promotional campaigns, Count Me In and We will beat this are analysed via a qualitative multimodal analysis. Behaviour change communication theories are included to triangulate and validate the findings. Findings indicated that health campaigns need to cater for socio-cultural diversities and be audience specific in order for adequate behaviour change to occur, via clear health messages.

Attitudes and beliefs towards marriage and family held by Chinese and American college students were compared in this study. The primary dimensions included whether to marry, age to marry, number of desired children, age to have children, perceptions of divorce, willingness to cohabit, openness to blended marriages, and gender roles within marriage. If a global convergence of cultures is occurring, then similarities should be found throughout the views of all respondents towards the institution of marriage. Dissimilarities in views could be interpreted as evidence of the entrenchment and uniqueness of culture, an outcome advanced by those who question cultural homogenisation. Hundreds of college students in several large universities in China and one regional university in the United States were surveyed at convenience. The Chinese students were found to prefer marrying and to plan having children a year later in age compared to the Americans. They also desired having nearly one fewer total number of children on average compared to the Americans. Surprisingly, the Chinese were more agreeable with divorce. The Americans were more likely to support gender equality within marriage and to accept blended types of marriage. Both groups equally approved of the overall idea of couples cohabiting if they plan on marrying. However, the Americans were far more willing to say that they themselves would cohabit. Visions of the benefits of married life were similar across countries. Overall, far more significant differences were found than no differences. The results suggest that elements of marriage norms in the world’s largest economies are somewhat constrained by social forces in their ability to completely converge.

The purpose of the paper is to examine how much difference in income can be explained by familial culture that persists in different societies.

We employ a two-step methodology to evaluate the impact of familial culture on income across countries. In the first step, we construct the macro measures of familial culture from micro survey data. In the second step, the growth model is estimated.

First-step micro regression results show that family is more important to female, richer, highly educated, unemployed and married individuals. Male, poorer, less educated and unemployed individuals are more likely to respect and love parents unconditionally. The same group is also more likely to think that parents must do the best for their kids. Finally, the macro results show that the strength of national familial ties explains significant differences in income across countries.

We show that countries with weak family ties are richer than those with strong family ties. These results are useful for policymakers who design public policies that accommodate the type of familial culture that persists in their society.

We construct the macro measures of familial culture from the micro survey data. The paper adds to the literature on the effect of culture on income at the macro level.

Purpose – While existing literature on work–family schemas has focused on white middle-class mothers, we examine how race, class, and gender shape black middle-class mothers’ work and family life.Design/methodology/approach – Drawing upon 31 in-depth, semi-structured interviews with mothers (and their husbands), this chapter utilizes an intersectional approach to explore distinct cultural schemas for work and family.Findings – We document two schemas that define conceivable and desirable roles for black motherhood, work, and family. Some black middle-class mothers interpreted work and family roles as contradictory following the schema of family devotion (Blair-Loy, 2003). However, most mothers interpreted work and family as complementary role-identities, following a schema we call work–family integration. They enacted dual roles of mother and worker, integrating them into a meaningful, multi-dimensional view of black womanhood.Research limitations/implications – The findings emphasize the need for a more intersectional approach to research on work and family. Given existing literature documenting racial variation in work–family conflict, it also suggests that this may be explained by racial variation in cultural schemas. However, because our sample was limited to black middle-class, heterosexual couples with children, we were unable to make comparisons or generalizations to other groups. We recommend future research that draws comparisons across race, class, sexuality, gender, and/or family structure.Originality/value – This chapter introduces a new cultural schema, work–family integration; provides empirical research on an underexplored group, black middle-class families; and adds further nuance to cultural theories of work and family.