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The purpose of this paper is to contribute to knowledge about workplace diversity and equality in an under-researched country. Focusing on the south-eastern European transition economy of Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), it elaborates on the country’s legislation, public debate and previous research in the field.

The paper draws on a synopsis of the legislative framework, existing literature, public media and personal communications with human resource (HR) practitioners.

There is only limited research on diversity and equality in BiH. Ethnicity and gender are the most common grounds for discrimination. Although a solid body of legislation addressing anti-discrimination and equality issues exists, implementation is insufficient. The public debate tends to reinforce inter-ethnic conflicts and a negative atmosphere regarding sexual minority rights.

Due to the general lack of research on diversity and equality in BiH, the findings presented in this paper only can serve as a first approximation of the topic. Further academic research on concrete business practices and perspectives of HR managers is needed.

Firms not only need to increase compliance with anti-discrimination law, but they should also focus more on the benefits a multi-ethnic society can offer.

This is the first paper in the management literature that provides comprehensive insight into workplace diversity and equality in BiH.

This study focuses on HR practices that foster employee engagement during Covid-19. Companies in transition economies are particularly vulnerable to crisis and downsizing and other recessionary practices are frequently used.

Drawing on the model of caring human resource management, we utilise interviews with human resource representatives of 10 banks in the transition economy of Bosnia and Herzegovina. We analyse the banks at two different times to demonstrate how and why companies adapt their HR practices.

Our findings show a changing mindset in the deployment of highly context-specific HR practices. Strengthening company culture through a sense of community and communication ensure stability and continuity in work. Rather than layoffs, flexible work has become standard.

By highlighting the interplay between HR practices and employee engagement, we contribute to the discussion on engagement in exceptional circumstances and challenging settings and demonstrate how caring responsibilities “migrate” into HR practices in the professional context of a transition economy.

We propose a context-specific “protective caring approach” to foster employee engagement during crises.

Using a Bourdieuian perspective, the purpose of this paper is to analyse how highly skilled migrants (HSMs) from transition economies develop their careers by accumulating and using career capital upon migration.

An interpretative approach was chosen to depict the career patterns of 18 HSMs from Southeast Europe. Semi-structured interviews were used to gather data about their career experiences in Western Europe and their home countries.

Findings reveal four different career patterns that show how individuals develop their careers and adjust to the work environment by accumulating and using career capital. Building up country-specific work-related social contacts and gaining work experience in local companies were found to represent key elements in their adjustment process. Additionally, the findings show that organisational support facilitates the processes of individual adjustment.

This paper emphasises that individuals do not always have to assimilate to the work environment of the host country but can also bargain over the value of their career capital in their adjustment process. Contrasting with previous literature this perspective presents a novelty.

Focusing on an international trainee- and internship programme, this paper aims to propose a new framework that links organisational strategies regarding ethnic diversity with career competencies of the programme participants.

The paper adopts a case study design. It examines the interplay of the perspectives of the organisation, which is an Austrian bank, and of the programme participants, who are university graduates from South-Eastern Europe. It draws on the typology of diversity strategies by Ortlieb and Sieben (2013) and the categorisation of individual career competencies by DeFillippi and Arthur (1994).

The bank benefits from the programme participants’ competencies with regard to South-Eastern Europe and increased legitimacy gained from the public. Programme participants acquire many knowing-how, knowing-why and knowing-whom competencies, especially if the bank pursues a so-called learning strategy towards ethnic diversity. On the other hand, individual knowing-how competency supports an organisation’s antidiscrimination strategy, whereas knowing-why and knowing-whom competencies benefit the organisational learning strategy.

Although the paper builds on a single case study and the ability to generalise is limited, the findings imply that future human resource development concepts should jointly consider the perspectives of both organisations and individuals.

Owing to their high strategic relevance, organisations should look into the competencies of skilled migrants and evaluate the critical resources they offer. Both organisational learning and an organisation’s strategic development are key concerns. The proposed framework helps to effectively design trainee- and internship programmes and simultaneously anticipate organisational and individual consequences thereof at an early stage.

The proposed framework concerning the interplay between organisational and individual perspectives as well as the regional focus on South-Eastern Europe present novelties.

The purpose of this paper is to highlight challenges to the transfer of technologies which are caused by the internationalization of companies and the need to outsource production in a globalized business environment. Aside from typical methods of transfer by means of documents or equipment, technology is mainly brought forward by human resources, which in a transboundary context implies the interaction between cultures. However, a connection between culture and technology has, for a long time, been underestimated by practitioners and researchers and a fortiori necessitates the development of competences to facilitate collaboration in a more and more multicultural working environment.

Data were retrieved from a semi‐structured questionnaire used in ten in‐depth interviews and exploited by discourse analysis. The survey questionnaire was the main instrument to support data collection in the interviews with at least one respective executive involved in cross‐border technology transfer in the Japanese sample companies.

Contradicting the assumptions in Western literature, this study reveals that not only countries correlating on collectivism and masculinity but also more feminine countries can be considered as successful technology transfer partners. It is also substantiated that cultural closeness between countries does not imperatively result in frictionless technology transfer when analyzed from a cultural point of view.

Survey results from a small‐sized exploratory study on Japanese companies and their experience in technology transfer processes within Asia provide information that will help managers to better understand the challenges in cross‐cultural transfer situations and to create a more effective transfer framework.

This paper focuses on the combination of technology transfer processes and the need for cross‐cultural competence and hence fulfils an identified need to link technology transfer to culture.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the question how context-specific diversity management (DM) is and whether it is transferable by organisations.

The authors explore context specificity and transferability of DM with the example of an Austrian company in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Based on the relational framework for the transfer of DM practices the authors empirically examine differences between headquarters and subsidiaries.

The empirical analysis reveals challenges for the transferability of DM and thus different approaches in the analysed company. The authors do not identify a significant transfer of DM practices. The findings are in line with the relational framework and suggest that headquarters must be treated separately from foreign subsidiaries, which theoretical models should take into account.

Future studies would benefit from a more holistic design not only based on the managements’ perceptions. A comparison with the situation in other companies in transition economies would further increase generalisability.

The authors underscore the need for diversity as a strategic approach to management. Organisations benefit from considering context specificity and should be aware that DM practices in headquarters must not be transferable to subsidiaries. Although theoretical models are useful to identify diversity motives and strategies, their application in practice needs consideration of the context.

The paper tackles the issue of context specificity and considers motives and strategies for DM. The case study sheds light on the link between headquarters’ diversity strategy and practice in a subsidiary and contributes to deficient research for transition economies.

Purpose: After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Belarus began to develop a national policy on reproductive health, influenced by late Soviet policy, market relations, and international actors. The central question of this research is how the issues of reproduction and woman’s health are reconsidered in post-Soviet Belarus, in light of the influence of various social and political factors.

Methodology/approach: This chapter critically examines discourses of legal regulations of reproduction and how they promote certain understandings of national security and traditional values through reproduction. In particular, the study is based on the discourse-analysis of the official legislative documents on reproduction in Belarus between 1991 and 2015.

Findings: The transformation of the post-Soviet social protection system, reproductive health care, family policy, as well as specific configuration of public discourse legitimize one model (unified and homogenized normative body that is heterosexual, fertile, healthy, prosperous) and exclude others (non-normative bodies that are non-heterosexual, infertile, unhealthy, poor, and thus precarious for the nation) in favor of the interests of biopolitical governance, nation-building, and neoliberal ideology. Moreover, legal documents legalize new principles of social stratification and produce new ideas about responsible parenthood.

Social implications: Although there is some scholarship on reproduction in Belarus, a thorough analysis of the public discourse and the legal regulations of reproduction has yet to be conducted. Contributing to the debate about post-Soviet reproductive politics, this chapter explores the influence of the biopolitical dialogue and the panic around depopulation on social policies. In particular, this chapter offers more critical perspective toward the economic and social dynamics in Belarus, taking into account the variety of processes and configurations of discourses that influence official policy.

The purpose of this paper is to further restore diversity and equality to its national contexts by presenting new and so far less visible perspectives from under-researched countries.

This special issue consists of five articles representing four countries and one country-cluster: Bangladesh, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Ethiopia, Korea and the English-speaking Caribbean. Three of the contributions are focused on gender diversity, while the remaining two are more general descriptions of diversity challenges and policies in the respective countries (namely, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and the English-speaking Caribbean).

In addition to providing an overview of this issue’s articles, this paper highlights developments and current themes in country-specific equality and diversity scholarship. In particular, drawing on the special issue’s five papers, and building on the main threads that weave the special issue together, the authors show both the relevance of (some) western theories while also pointing to the need for reformulation of others.

The authors conclude with a call to further explore under-researched contexts and especially to develop locally relevant, culture-sensitive theoretical frameworks.

How do smaller and less developed countries experience equality and diversity concepts? How are their approaches different from those experienced in already researched countries, or, on the contrary, what commonalities can be found found among them? How do theoretical frameworks originated in the West apply (or not) in these less studied countries? Are new, locally grounded frameworks needed to better capture the developments at play? Such are questions addressed by the contributions to this special issue.

The nascent behavioral supply management (BSM) research stream has raised the level of attention given to deviations from the standard assumptions of the rational paradigm in economics. The adaptation of cognitive heuristics, which add vulnerability to judgment and decision making, creates a pressing need to identify and develop mitigation strategies to debias decision making in the supply chain management environment. The purpose of this paper is to investigate debiasing measures, corresponding contextual variables in the supplier selection process, and their implications for financial decision effectiveness.

The authors used a large‐scale empirical survey among 306 buyers to investigate the relationships among individual and organizational contextual factors, debiasing measures in the supplier selection decision, and the financial effectiveness of the supplier selection decision.

It was found that organizational and individual contextual factors have differing effects on the use of debiasing approaches in the supplier selection decision. Further, the debiasing tactics can have a positive (in the case of supplier selection task decomposing) or a negative (in the case of an interactional challenging of the supplier selection) impact on the financial effectiveness of the supplier selection decision. These findings suggest that supply managers must better understand the contextual factors that influence the supplier selection decision, and carefully choose the correct debiasing tactics when selecting suppliers.

This paper relaxes the economic assumption of rational actors and addresses the need to identify and use debiasing tactics in supply chain management contexts. The research also complements the broader‐based behavioral decision‐making literature, which has often relied upon experimental methodologies that use undergraduate or MBA students, by employing a survey‐based approach with supply managers as key informants.

The purpose of this paper is to develop the numerical simulated methodology for sloshing motion of fluid inside a two dimension rectangular tank, and parametric studies were performed for three parameters – excitation frequency, excitation amplitude, and liquid depth.

A numerically simulated methodology by using the cell‐centered pressure‐based SIMPLE scheme and level set method for the sloshing motion of fluid in a rectangular tank has been developed. The convection term in the Navier‐Stokes equations and the equations used in the level set method were treated by the second‐order upwind scheme. The temporal derivative terms were solved by the three‐level second order scheme. The diffusion term in the Navier‐Stokes equations alone was solved by the central‐difference scheme. All algebraic equations were solved by the point Gauss‐Seidel method. A fully implicit scheme to treat the level set distancing equation, written as the advection equation, was developed. In addition, the level set distancing equation was solved by the iterative procedure to determine the variation of free surface.

For given excitation amplitude together with a liquid depth, the free surface displacement increases when the excitation frequency is less than the resonance frequency of tank. However, the free surface displacement decreases when the excitation is greater than the resonant frequency of the tank. It is noted that the maximum free surface displacement is generated under the circumstance for which the excitation frequency approaches the resonant frequency. The excitation amplitude and the excitation frequency have a substantial effect on the impact pressure on the wall of the tank being investigated.

The sloshing motion of fluid in a rectangular tank has been studied by researchers and scholars using many numerical methods; however, literature employing the level set method to study the sloshing motion of fluid is limited. In this study, the cell‐centered pressure‐based SIMPLE scheme and level set method can be employed to predict the sloshing motion. The numerical methodology can help the engineer to predict sloshing motion of fluid.