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The paper aims to address the question, “What is the impact of web-based video via webcams on virtual team trust and effectiveness?” Change and evolution in team perceptions over time are described. The result is the creation of a theoretical model describing the effect of webcams on virtual team development.

A qualitative phenomenological heuristic case study was used to explore the individual expectations and experiences of the team members over a six-week period. To strengthen reliability and validity, two qualitative methods, content analysis and constant comparative analysis — a means of grounded theory, were used to both test the historic basis of the existing literature on trust and effectiveness in virtual teams and to explore how the use of webcams influenced the work, interactions and effectiveness of a virtual team. Both qualitative methods involved different pairs of researchers using inter-rater coefficients to address coding reliability and validity. Results from the two methods were then compared and contrasted.

The resulting model highlights the importance of ongoing, formal differentiated training on new technology. This research also suggests careful management of technology change and its deployment to enhance outcomes of various organization forms.

Given the nature of the qualitative study, the findings are not generalizable, but may illumine the understanding of webcams and technology adaptation in similar virtual teams.

The resulting model highlights the importance of ongoing, formal differentiated training on new technology. This research also suggests careful management of technology change and its deployment to enhance outcomes of various organization forms. The study incorporates Technology Acceptance Theory and applications of the Kirton Adaptation-Innovation Inventory.

With the increase in bandwidth on the Internet, technologies such as webcams have become more viable for use in virtual teams.

The aim of this chapter is to show how new players in an emerging market, through their multinationals, have strategized and operationalised their international interests. This international context consists of various stakeholders: states, civil society organisations, multinationals, local communities and institutions which define and regulate the power relations. This study highlights how CNPCIC, a Chinese multinational owned by the state, designs and implements its proclaimed ‘win-win’ cooperation strategy with its host country and the local community for an oil extraction project – called the Rônier Project – in southern Chad.

The analysis is based on a case study approach, especially concerning the town of Koudalwa, the oil-producing area in southern Chad. The author conducted qualitative research to collect the data, using ethnographic strategies consisting of field research, interviews with stakeholders.

Negative externalities as consequences of practices from CNPCIC underlie environmental degradation, socio-economic conflicts and governance problems, despite the existence of an alleged regulatory framework, the role of which is to avert the ‘resource curse’.

Organisations of local and international civil society oscillate between the logic of cooperation, alliance and confrontation with their main stakeholders, CNPCIC and the government.

The ‘win-win’ cooperation advocated by China is implemented in the form of commercial cooperation with full mercantilism where CNPCIC benefits from oil, the Chadian state benefits from oil revenue in the form of royalties and other stakeholders, such as the local communities, only benefit from a fraction of the revenues. The chapter concludes that, within this oil project, CNPCIC developed a corporate diplomacy stance within which, according to the circumstances, predation, philanthropy and strategic alliance are valued at the expense of corporate responsibility despite civil society advocacy for a responsible extraction.

Some stakeholders of the project declined the invitation to participate in the research. This may have influenced its findings.

The value of this chapter resides in the use of various theories (corporate diplomacy, stakeholder theory, resource curse) to explain the practices and interests of stakeholders within an oil project at different scales, both local and international.

In this chapter, the authors examine trust and social networks among entrepreneurs operating in a developing market context. At the centre of this study, trust emerges from the interplay of a range of cultural-specific factors, each of which describes how social relations shape economic action. Using case studies of exporting Nigerian small and medium sized enterprises, the authors document how exporting arrangements are enforced across West African markets. Interview data reveal how entrepreneurs take advantage of indigenous trust-based relationships to enforce exporting agreements. It is clear that exporting activities are shaped by trust and networks of kinship and market associations that permeate the West African region. This chapter facilitates a better understanding of trust and the range of indigenous relationships that underpin exporting activities in Nigeria and particularly across West Africa.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the relationship between the sub-dimensions of political skill and transformational leadership, arguing that in a Chinese sample, social astuteness, networking ability, and interpersonal influence will have a stronger impact than apparent sincerity. Additionally, transformational leadership is argued to mediate the relationship between leader political skill and subordinate job performance.

This study used a dyadic, cross-sectional design where all data were collected at a single point in time and supervisors were matched to their followers.

The results support that transformational leadership mediates the relationship between leader political skill and follower performance. Additionally, social astuteness was positively related to leader charisma, individualized consideration, and intellectual stimulation; whereas, interpersonal influence was related to leader charisma and intellectual stimulation. Apparent sincerity was not related to perceptions of transformational leadership.

The findings imply that the authors might be able to design more customized training to reduce the costs of leadership development programs. Specially, in China, focus should be paid to increasing social astuteness and interpersonal influence only.

This study is one of the few to examine the relationship between the sub-dimensions of political skill and transformational leadership. This is especially noteworthy in the context of the Chinese sample employed, as most political skill research has been done in western contexts.

This paper aims to explore the impact of the joint operation of affordability policies and whether their impact is meaningful relative to the size of the affordability crisis. Its purpose is to construct the features of a comprehensive policy package linked to a measurable outcome: solving the affordability crisis in Auckland. This study investigates the scale and nature of an affordability package that responds to three research and policy questions: What should the rate of annual growth of affordable housing be to solve the affordability crisis? Consequently, how long would it take to solve it? And how much would that policy package cost?

In this paper, the authors argue that the disjoint operation of affordability policies is one of the reasons why their impacts relative to the size of the affordability crisis has been small or negligible. Furthermore, this study demonstrates that affordability is as much about raising households’ incomes as it is about lowering housing prices. This study uses a modelling-based framework to simulate some of the levers that local and central governments have to affect housing prices and affordability: direct intervention on the supply-side and subsidies. Specifically, this simulates retention-and-targeting (RT) programs and subsidies to raise deposits via shared ownership (SO) schemes.

This study finds that solving the affordability crisis would take a decade if the supply of affordable housing increases by at least 45% annually. With the introduction of RT and SO programs, it could still be solved within a decade, where the required growth rate decreases to 35%. However, for growth rates between 5% and 10%, the policy goal is met in approximately 40 years, and the SO program becomes exceedingly expensive.

Housing affordability is one of the hottest policy issues in New Zealand and the developed world. In the past decade, a number of affordability policies have been introduced with limited success due to their lack of interoperability and siloed efforts. Results in this paper should be interpreted as the boundaries of what is feasible and realistic in the realm of affordability policies. Therefore, its contribution relies on investigating the multiple effects if the financial, administrative and political barriers to RT and SO programs could be overcome. Its scope is a blueprint for the design of policies in other cities where unaffordability has become extreme.

In the digital economy, what are the strategies of multinationals from developed countries and emerging markets? How do regulations in the home country affect their growth? Recent digital multinationals in diverse national and institutional contexts raise questions that require new approaches in international business (IB) studies. This chapter examines two leading firms in the global e-commerce industry: Amazon and Alibaba. We compare their digital capabilities and physical asset-building strategies over the past two decades and we connect the Internet governance environment in the United States and China with their business models and internationalization patterns. We argue that despite the platform and global nature of Amazon’s and Alibaba’s activities, the recent moves of governments across the world to regulate Internet governance poses an important challenge for digital multinationals. This research features a comparative analysis of two prominent digital multinationals and identifies a promising area for future IB strategy studies.

The purpose of this paper is to quantify and qualify the commercials in the Super Bowl.

This study is a content analysis of the placement of popular music in Super Bowl advertisements over a ten-year period (2005-2014).

More than a quarter of the commercials analyzed contained popular music. Although the use of popular music in commercials vacillated from year to year, popular music was most often observed in the product category of beverages; the music treatment most often used was original vocals; and song lyrics were most often relevant to the narrative of the commercial, rather than the brand.

This study extends the growing body of Super Bowl advertising research to popular music in commercials and provides a benchmark for all future research in this area.

This paper aims to understand the role resources-for-infrastructure (R4I) swaps play in internationalisation strategies, thereby contributing to a modern theory of the multinational enterprises (MNEs) based on experiences of rising power firms. Since 2004, the Chinese Government; state-owned policy banks; and oil, mining and construction corporations have used a relatively unique form of internationalisation through complex, large-scale R4I swaps in Africa.

This paper uses a resource bundling perspective and political economy lens to analyse complex entry decisions and success, as well as the failure of R4I swaps. The paper is based on a comparative analysis of published case studies of R4I swaps in seven African countries complemented by field research by the first author.

The findings show that, under very specific circumstances, R4I swaps can be considered as a successful internationalisation strategy. R4I swaps enable Chinese MNEs to build and maintain relationships with non-market elites that control access to natural resources and infrastructure contracts.

The sample of cases, although representing all relevant R4I-swaps, is too small to come for more quantitative conclusions on success/failure factors.

R4I swaps are a very unlikely model for Western MNEs, as they lack the necessary country-specific competitive advantages and institutional mechanisms.

To the authors’ knowledge, this is the first comprehensive study of all relevant Chinese R4I swaps in Africa and contains original data from fieldwork in Ghana and D.R. Congo.

Experiencing stigma after abortion may decelerate the accumulation of human capital. Despite the importance of studying the relationship between religiosity and abortion stigma, the topic is understudied, especially in Islamic contexts. Abortion was legalized in Iran in 2005. Under the new law, far more cases are allowed for abortion. This change provided an opportunity to explore the interplay of abortion stigma, legalization and religiosity in Iran.

Using regression analysis based on 291 completed questionnaires from two cities in Iran, this study analyzes the relation between abortion stigma level and religiosity in Iran, controlling for contextual and individual variables. The time trend is also identified. The authors use different manifestations of abortion stigma as dependent variables.

The authors found that abortion stigma and its two manifestations decreased after the new law, suggesting that its legalization might have caused abortion stigma to decrease gradually. Another finding of this study is that the correlations between abortion stigma (internalized stigma) and individual religiosity level are meaningful and positive; religious people feel higher levels of abortion stigma.

The study supports the idea that effective health regulations (in the specific case of abortion) would result in less cost/risk of social issues like stigma. Policymakers in religious societies must pay more attention to the specific case of abortion stigma since it is very important for the mental health of women who think of abortion and/or select it.

Drawing on institutional theory and knowledge spillover, the study aims to examine whether there is a causality relationship between macroeconomic factors and research productivity.

The study uses fixed-effects (FE) panel regression analysis, utilizing 1,614 country–year observations and 541,732 citable publications between 1996 and 2017, to explore the relationship between macroeconomic factors, research and development (R&D) expenditure and research productivity in economics and finance.

The results highlight a two-way relationship between R&D expenditure and economic development and research productivity. However, research productivity has no relationship with foreign direct investment (FDI), trade and financial development. In terms of remaining macroeconomic factors, financial development, trade and FDI have insignificant associations with research productivity in both directions of causality. In line with institutional theory, the findings support the notion that economically more developed countries and countries dedicating greater R&D funds have more potential to support research activities. On the other hand, in line with knowledge spillover, the research output of nations contributes to the economic development and expansion of R&D budgets. The results are robust to alternative methodology, endogeneity concerns, additional control variables, alternative sampling and alternative research productivity proxy.

The study suggests practical implications for nations to formulate macro-policies and a better research environment for academicians and to establish links between academic research and macroeconomic factors.

First, as there is limited research focusing on the bidirectional causality between the macroeconomic environment and academic research activity, the study adds to the understanding of the causality relationship between these two constructs. Second, it examines the bidirectional relationship between macroeconomic factors and research output at a global scale, while prior studies mostly focus on a single country, or a certain region or continent. Further, it is one of the few attempts particularly focusing on economics and finance research's bidirectional relation with the macroeconomic environment.