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To explore how leadership behavior in Thailand relates to humanistic leadership through indigenous and cross-cultural lenses.

Analogically based and semi-structured interviews were used. The primary focus was on factors associated with expatriate success in leading Thais in a Thai context. As such, the main sample included 24 expatriates. Two local Thai leaders were also interviewed. Qualitative interviews were analyzed inductively using NVivo.

Five interrelated themes emerged from the data: guiding, bridging, emotionally supporting, socializing and indirectly communicating. These themes relate to Asian holistic thinking, Thai culture and humanistic management. Evidence for humanistic leadership was found, albeit in culture-specific ways.

Researchers may benefit from studying local, indigenous leadership practices and determining if and how they fit etic concepts such as humanistic leadership. Limitations of this study include a small sample from only one country.

To be successful, leaders should engage in humanistic leadership practices that fit the Thai context. Human resource departments may wish to focus their talent recruitment, selection and development on these behaviors.

This paper adds to the nascent literature on humanistic leadership by providing an indigenous as well as cross-cultural lens to understanding humanistic leadership in the context of Thailand.

Drawing on sociological theories of Giddens, Bourdieu and Goffman, the purpose of this paper is to explore how different relationships are characterized between actors in interaction and determine whether social theories of practice resonate as being practical to managers.

In the empirical investigations, the authors employ the Delphi method whereby the authors “elevate” six highly experienced marketing practitioners in Dubai and Bangkok, each in different industries and from different cultural backgrounds, to designated “expert” positions in exploring the practical relevance of the practice-based theories of Bourdieu, the dramaturgy of Goffman and the structuration theory of Giddens in understanding practical experiences of managing in business-to-business networks.

The results show that aspects of these theories are consistent with practitioners’ experiences in many ways but the theories themselves do not appear to resonate with the modernist practical consciousness of the participants as being particularly pragmatic or practically useful except as resources they could selectively borrow from as bricoleurs of changing action.

Social practice theories appear rather too abstract and complex to practical actors. It is therefore paradoxical that social practice theories do not appear as sufficiently “handy” or “ready to hand” in Heidegger’s (1962) terms; being in need of translation into practical usefulness. It would appear that social practice theories can be a useful analytical vehicle for the academic analyst but cannot resonate with the modernist consciousness of the practical actor.

This paper aims to explore the topic of embodiment as a gap in meaning-making within the literature on business relationships in IMP and business marketing academic discourse. Referring to the theories of embodiment, the authors question the dominant worldview of Cartesian dualism which marginalizes the influence of the body in meaning-making and explore relevant implications of an embodiment agenda for research and practice. The aim is to demonstrate that embodiment has a vitally important influence in the construction of meanings.

The paper provides a review of theoretical and empirical literature on embodied cognition and theories of embodiment to construct a cooking metaphor as an analogical vehicle for exploring meanings within business relationships.

The authors use a cooking metaphor to explore how meaning is created in human interaction. Body and mind blended together produce meaning through the catalyst of discourse and semiotics. Cognition is described as a mixture of rational and non-rational processes involving blended elements of embodied perceptions and psychological ideas stirred and heated in a semiotic “sauce” of discourse (language, communication, information, power/knowledge).

The contribution of the paper is in proposing that both body and mind influence the creation of meanings in business relationships blended through the mediation of language and discourse. The authors aim to advance a “practice” and “linguistic” turn in the business marketing discourse by proposing that embodied, discursive and cognitive processes are more effectively conceived as blended influences.

The purpose of this paper is to present the proposition that culture in international management has been dominated by a “Western dualism to measuring culture” (Caprar et al., 2015, p. 1024), which has resulted in severe problems and persistent limitations. The suggestion is that cultural research can be more productively conceived as a paradox involving a duality between two contrasting yet co-determined spheres or domains.

The paper provides an outline of culture as a paradox and an outline of a research approach to address the dualities of culture.

A cultural duality is described, which involves a paradoxical “yin-yang” relationship between two contrasting yet mutually constituted aspects of the collective mind. One domain, which involves conscious cognitive elements has dominated research characterized by positivism and empirical cross-cultural explorations of phenomenological cultural values. The second, more recondite domain, involves unconscious and embodied cultural phenomena, which are more tacit and hidden in indirect expression through communicative interaction, exchanges of symbolic representations and embodied behaviour in context.

A methodological duality of qualitative and quantitative mixing in order to provide a bi-focal understanding of both tacit and explicit aspects of culture is proposed as a research agenda.

The suggestion is that these cultural shadows have been relatively neglected thus far in cross-cultural management research. This means that in order to better comprehend culture as paradox, an equalization of approaches sensitive to both sides of the duality is prescient. In pursuit of this idea, a complementary qualitative analysis directed at more nebulous cultural phenomena is proposed in order to provide a balanced analysis of culture as paradox.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the interactive processes linking lived embodied experiences, language and cognition (body-talk-mind) and their implications for organizational change.

The authors use an “embodied realism” approach to examine how people feel/perceive/act (embodied experiences), how they make sense of their experiences (cognition) and how they use language and communication to “talk sense” into their social reality. To exemplify the framework, the authors use a cooking metaphor. In this metaphor, language is the “sauce”, the catalyst, which blends raw, embodied, “lived” experience with consequent rationalizations (“cooking up”) of experience. To demonstrate the approach, the authors employ the study of a Chinese multinational subsidiary in Bangkok, Thailand, where participants were encouraged to build embodied models and tell their stories through them.

The authors found that participants used embodied metaphors in a number of ways (positive and negative connotations) in different contexts (single or multicultural groups) for different purposes. Participants could be said to be “cooking up” realities according to the situated context. The methodology stimulated an uncovering of ineffable, tacit or sensitive issues that were problematic or potentially problematic within the organization.

The authors bring back the importance of lived embodied experiences, language and cognition into IB research. The authors suggest that embodied metaphors capture descriptions of reality that stimulate reflexivity, uncover suppressed organizational problems and promote the contestation of received wisdoms when organizational change is pressing and urgent. The authors see the approach as offering the potential to give voice to embodied cultures throughout the world and thereby make IB research more practically relevant.