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The five-decade-long Chinese colonialization of Tibet has led to a refugee flow. No longer confined to the Tibetan Plateau, Tibetans are scattered over the world, placing deep roots in host nations, in cities stretching from Oslo to New York City. Faced with new ideas, cultures and ways of life, diasporic Tibetans confront the same challenges as countless refugees before them. The purpose of this study is to investigate the efforts of Tibetan New Yorkers to preserve their language and culture. To what extent should they integrate themselves into host countries? What mechanisms could they use to hold onto their native heritage without isolating themselves in a foreign environment? How should they construct new diasporic identities and reconcile such efforts with their ongoing political struggles?

This paper draws on documentary sources and interviews to examine the ways in which diasporic Tibetans understood and portrayed the conventional categories of language, cultural heritage and religion, especially with respect to the Tibetan Government-in-exile in India, and in which they maintained and reinvented their linguistic and cultural heritage in the cosmopolitan environment of New York City.

There is a gradual process of identity formation among Tibetan New Yorkers. While exiled Tibetans are asserting their agency to reinvent a new sense of belonging to America, they still hold onto the regional identity of their family households. Meanwhile, the US-born younger generations strengthen their ties with the larger Tibetan diaspora through community events, socio-cultural activism and electronic media.

Despite the small sample size, this study presents the first investigation of the Tibetan New Yorkers, and it provides an insider’s perspective on the efforts to preserve their native heritage in a globalized environment.

This study is a useful case study of the Tibetan diasporas in comparison with other Chinese diasporas in the West and beyond.

This study is the first scholarly investigation of the sociocultural experiences of Tibetan New Yorkers.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate public online consumer complaint responses from three different perspectives: the complainer, the company and third party consumers. Consumer complaint behaviour and management has been studied in various streams of literature, yet the subsequent processes triggered by a company complaint response have not been studied so far. In particular, this paper seeks to divert from examining complaint participants in isolation by recognising interrelated communication effects of complaint dialogue and public media.

Looking at credibility perceptions as a theoretical construct for measuring the utility of a complaint as well as attitude‐orientation as an evaluative moderator, the paper highlights the ambiguity of meaning transfer in an online complaint forum.

It is hypothesised that credibility and congruence in attitude orientation positively enhance complaint utility perceptions and strongly bias complaint dialogue evaluations.

The paper highlights that expected relevant results for online complaint managers and marketers alike are the inclusion of post‐complaint communication into corporate image and relationship management as well as using credibility perceptions as a benchmark for online customer satisfaction and potential positive electronic word‐of‐mouth.

The aim of this paper is to explore issues of cultural identity of the people of Baltistan and any challenges they face in the nation state of Pakistan.

The paper uses a postcolonial lens to offer a review and synthesis of issues of cultural identity of the Balti people of Pakistan.

The review demonstrates how the historical and socio‐political context is intertwined with the Balti people's cultural identity which remains hybrid as well as contextual in its construction. It reveals that while the state of Pakistan has been able to assert its control over the Balti people and the region of Baltistan predominantly through military means, the critical issues of cultural pluralism and the basic human rights of the Balti people have remained generally ignored throughout the 63 years since partition.

The contentions offered in this paper need to be refined through in‐depth empirical studies. Future scholars may wish to examine the class and cultural politics at work in the emerging renaissance movement in Baltistan. Scholars may also examine how the lack of economic development and investment in Baltistan may be forcing the Balti people to resign (at least some elements of) their cultural identity to seek employment in urban areas of Pakistan.

The paper brings to the fore issues of cultural identity of the people of Baltistan, which have – to a large extent – remained ignored by Pakistan as well as internationally.

Most local governance assessment tools are entirely or partially based on stakeholders’ surveys, focus groups and benchmarks of different local governments in the world. These tools remain a subjective way of local governance evaluation. To measure the performance of local good-governance using an unbiased assessment technique, the authors have developed a framework to help automate the design process of a data warehouse (DW), which provides local and central decision-makers with factual, measurable and accurate local government data to help assess the performance of local government. The purpose of this paper is to propose the extraction of the DW schema based on a mixed approach that adopts both i* framework for requirements-based representation and domain ontologies for data source representation, to extract the multi-dimensional (MD) elements. The data was collected from various sources and information systems (ISs) deployed in different municipalities.

The authors present a framework for the design and implementation of a DW for local good-governance assessment. The extraction of facts and dimensions of the DW’s MD schema is done using a hybrid approach, where the extraction of requirement-based DW schema and source-based DW schema are done in parallel followed by the reconciliation of the obtained schemas to obtain the good-governance assessment DW final design.

The authors developed a novel framework to design and implement a DW for local good-governance assessment. The framework enables the extraction of the DW MD schema by using domain ontologies to help capture semantic artifacts and minimize misconceptions and misunderstandings between different stakeholders. The introduction and use of domain ontologies during the design process serves the generalization and automation purpose of the framework.

The presently conducted research faced two main limitations as follows: the first is the full automation of the design process of the DW and the second, and most important, is access to local government data as it remains limited because of the lack of digitally stored data in municipalities, especially in developing countries in addition to the difficulty of accessing the data because of regulatory aspects and bureaucracy.

The local government environment is among the public administrations most subject to change-adverse cultures and where the authors can face high levels of resistance and significant difficulties during the implementation of decision support systems, despite the commitment/engagement of decision-makers. Access to data sources stored by different ISs might be challenging. While approaching the municipalities for data access, it was done in the framework of a research project within one of the most notorious universities in the country, which gave more credibility and trust to the research team. There is also a need for further testing of the framework to reveal its scalability and performance characteristics.

Compared to other local government assessment ad hoc tools that are partially or entirely based on subjectively collected data, the framework provides a basis for automated design of a comprehensive local government DW using e-government domain ontologies for data source representation coupled with the goal, rationale and business process diagrams for user requirements representations, thus enabling the extraction of the final DW MD schema.

This chapter presents a preliminary discussion of potential impacts of climate change on nomadic pastoralists on the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau (QTP). Both climate model projections and observations suggest that (1) the QTP is becoming warmer and (2) precipitation is increasing. Evidence also suggests that (3) glaciers on the QTP are declining and (4) the permafrost is degrading. Nevertheless, little is known as to how climate change will affect nomadic pastoralists although environmental variability is likely to increase, which may again exacerbate production risks. Pastoral risk management strategies, such as mobility, may thus increase in importance. It is, however, difficult to translate changes in important climate measures like precipitation and temperature to effects on pastoralists and livestock since they mainly affect livestock indirectly via their effect on vegetation productivity. Consequently, to increase our understanding of climate change-related effects on pastoral adaptations, satellite-based measures directly linked to both vegetation characteristics and climatic variables should be utilized in future studies rather than, for example, overall changes in precipitation and temperature. Finally, official policies that constantly introduce reforms that reduce pastoral flexibility represent a far more significant threat for nomadic pastoralists on the QTP than climate change because they may result in the wholesale extinction of the pastoral culture.