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In this paper we explore potential barriers for commodification of academic research in emerging countries.

We carried out an exploratory study employing a mixed-method sequential exploratory design. Initially, qualitative interviews were performed to identify cognitive, structural, and ideological barriers associated with commodification. Subsequently, we administered a survey at three universities in Kazakhstan to gather quantitative data. The quantitative insights served to complement our qualitative findings and facilitate the interpretation of the observed patterns within the broader population.

We found that a too rapid shift toward commercialization exacerbated concerns among faculty members and created obstacles to commodification. The obstacles identified through inductive clustering of themes from exploratory qualitative interviews were grouped into three intentionally broad categories: cognitive, structural, and ideological barriers. We argue that in emerging economies, the path to commodifying academic research should start with developing local infrastructure to address identified structural, cognitive, and ideological barriers. This, in turn, will lead to more successful commercialization and redefine the role of academics in society.

Our study has several limitations related to its empirical scope. We concentrated solely on one country, Kazakhstan. For future research, it is crucial to broaden the investigation to include more studies from the Central Asia region and other emerging economies. We believe that while there may be some minor institutional differences, the findings are generalizable to all post-socialist countries. However, incorporating a diverse range of institutions, particularly those with foreign ownership or private capital, would enhance the comprehensiveness of the findings. Furthermore, collecting a more extensive and balanced sample of responses from industry partners, academics, and students would have provided more valuable insights. By including a broader representation of stakeholders, we could have gained a more nuanced understanding of the complexities surrounding commodification in higher education. Given the exploratory nature of this study, it is essential to regard the findings as a source of inspiration rather than empirical confirmation.

Our research has practical implications for managing universities in emerging markets, as well as important policy implications, both for international actors and local governmental bodies.

Our findings carry implications for policymakers. The focus that international institutions place on the matter of commodification and commercialization of knowledge is a positive step. Challenges emerge when this matter is approached with a narrow perspective. Drawing on the empirical context of the Republic of Kazakhstan, a country often overlooked in the literature on emerging markets, we find evidence that knowledge has indeed transformed into a commodity. The rapid shift toward commercialization, driven by substantial institutional pressures, may have occurred too precipitously in this particular context. In light of these findings, we advocate for a more balanced and contextually nuanced discourse concerning both the commodification and commercialization of knowledge.

This study represents one of the few endeavors into exploring commodification within the context of emerging economies. In recent decades, universities have faced substantial pressures to commodify academic research. While there has been a significant volume of research discussing and documenting the success of commodification in developed country universities, those in emerging economies have faced similar pressures without achieving comparable success. This paper delves into the reasons why.

In this chapter, I uncover the jail diaries of a revolutionary woman of the 20th century Pakistan, Akhtar Baloch. Although feminism in Pakistan has oscillated between liberal and postcolonial camps, through reading Akhtar's diaries, compiled as Prison Narratives (2017), I center Akhtar's own struggles for Sindh, along with the resistance of the women she met in the prison convicted for the murders of their husbands, to better theorize Marxist Feminism in Pakistan that overturns the structures that commodify women through love and revolution. My article will show the commodification of women's bodies; the “sale” of women through marriage as the goal of this commodification; the lovelessness and alienation women experience in commodified marriages; the unexpected fall in love with someone whom it is subversive for the commodified wife to love; the subversion of this unexpected event that leads to the attempted resolution of this tension through murder; the separation of the lovers through the incarceration of the woman by the capitalist-patriarchal state; and finally, the unexpected outcome (albeit the most common one) that the male lover abandons his female lover once she's jailed, but the defiantly brave female lover finds platonic love in jail through close female friendships with other women who are similarly brave in both love and in revolution. Through this exposition, I show that Akhtar's diaries provide a way for us to build on Marxist Feminist theory through a theory of love and revolution from a Sindhi feminist perspective.

This paper argues that accent modification acts as a mechanism that (re)produces workplace accentism, which is a set of ideologies and practices positioning some English accents as inherently superior/inferior to others in the context of work and careers.

This conceptual paper draws on existing literature mainly from critical sociolinguistic and labor studies to support its central argument.

Through acting as a skill, a technology and a commodified service, accent modification naturalizes linguistic hierarchies, which are racist, classist and colonial constructions, and reinforces the structural status quo in different contexts.

In order to move away from accent modification as a means to enhance oral communication at work, organizational attempts at fostering mutual intelligibility and undoing the role of accent in workplace communication are necessary.

Contrary to research that presents accentism as a purely interpersonal issue, the paper explores how accentism is institutionalized and is connected to linguistic profiling.

The purpose of this exploratory study is to identify the antecedents of brand hate in respect to luxury brand gamification marketing activities.

Five gamified product placements characterized by the ad hoc design of luxury co-branded virtual and/or physical products were selected for the research study. Content analysis was used to identify patterns and classify negative comments shared online into categories.

A content analysis of the negative comments (n. 2,321) related to the perception toward gamification of luxury fashion in videogames revealed the following seven domains: monetization of the game; promotion of inappropriate behavior; unethical placement; games commodified by brands; predatory monetization; perceived incongruence; poor product performance.

The exploratory research study revealed how the perception of gamification activities trigger negative emotions toward luxury fashion brands. It was significant that many of these emotions fall within the antecedents of brand hate.

Luxury companies and game developers need to be aware and manage the antecedents of brand hate in respect to luxury brand gamification activities in videogames. Moreover, luxury brands need to consider customers’ influencing behavior via online word-of-mouth and the potential to impact attitudes and behaviors of other consumers toward brands.

The ethics of gamification within a marketing context have largely escaped inquiry. The study provides evidence that luxury brands need to align the fundamentals of luxury brand management in the digital world of gaming.

Personal branding is a strategic tool of marketing and communication to define success in organisations. While it constitutes a conscious attempt to commodify self and audit self, it must be intentionally managed to obtain its optimum results. This study aims to illustrate how personal branding may also pose unintentional and unconscious strategic tool for women academics in academia to help them get wider visibility and increase their chances of getting into leadership positions.

We employed a case study approach and convenience sampling to select our unit of analysis. Three universities in both public and private universities in the eastern regions of Indonesia were purposefully selected, and interviews were held with 30 female leaders occupying and occupied middle and lower leadership hierarchies.

Our research shows that, despite their unintentional, unplanned and poorly designed personal branding, women have been able to advance to their current leadership positions by building their own rooms for practising their own preferred leadership values to get them visible and heard. This way is performed through a gendered networking, previous leadership experience and bureaucratic requirements. The consequence of such a practice may limit the range of visibility to getting noticed as worthy individuals for senior leadership roles. This might be one reason why women are scarcely found in senior leadership positions.

We propose that natural strategies of constructing, narrating and marketing or communicating personal branding in academia through authentic actions can also be helpful for the success of women to get to leadership roles in a smaller and ambient environment.

The purpose of this study is to address the relevance of archaeological heritage in the context of supply chains for the tourism industry. It does so by providing converging ideas on the usefulness of individual sites, not in their strict scientific or latent value but as an enhancer for optimizing cultural production in a wider scenario of aggregate demand.

While examples from the United Arab Emirates (UAE) illustrate this reasoning, the underlying principles have a widespread application and point to a need for defragmenting and realigning tangible heritage as a key production factor. Methods used consist of an inductive approach, based on secondary sources and semi-structured interviews.

Results indicate that, while archaeological resources remain central to the promotion of cultural tourism in the UAE, suppliers face challenges when incorporating particular sites into consumer-friendly packages.

The study contributes to the identification of common risks and opportunities for archaeological resource management in the development of UAE tourism products.

This represents an original angle, given the focus on the specific regional, cooperative added value of archaeological resources and the need for optimizing them in a functional supply chain.

Like pro-bono service of law and other professional practices, micro-credentialing has become the quasi-charity project of the rapidly commodifying higher education (HE) sector. Produced with minimum waste and expense, qualifications through micro-credentialing economises time spent and optimises efforts. As a result, these bite-size educational offerings are becoming abundant and attractive to both learners and providers. While learners learn on the job or in the job market, providers get an opportunity to package knowledge and skills. Among a plethora of courses with potential overlapping and mismatched competencies, however, a clear pathway to target a career through pastures of micro-credentialing is yet to emerge. If not, it may result in another system of skill poverty and thus alienate the essential autonomy of credential seekers. Autonomy or self-tailoring your own package of micro-credentials (MC) without a proper wayfinding system could be overwhelming, sometimes even counterproductive, if competency management is based on a one-size-fits-all model. Via a local case, this chapter reviews current MC available to capacitate a career using Construction Management (CM) as a point of departure. It aims to develop a wayfinding framework or user-friendly menu for those wanting to craft a career via a micro-credentialing ecosystem. Broadly, it investigates navigating various MC offerings equivalent to undergraduate qualifications needed to become a CM professional recognised by accreditation bodies. In the process, it systematically discourses multiple ontologies of micro-credentialing in links, lapses, overlaps, and intersections among competencies to untangle complexities and optimise opportunities. It was hoped that learners could target a career instead of matching a job profile in the micro-credentialing universe.

The family is one of the foundations of society; its significance for societal redistribution in modern societies, though, remains particularly unclear. A major reason for this is that theoretical approaches to societal redistribution have not adequately included family either in social philosophy or in welfare state theory. As a consequence, also empirical analyses of differences and developments in societal redistribution have not included family or only in as far as family is affected by other redistributive principles. This paper contributes to filling this theoretical gap.

This paper theorises family as a redistributive principle. With reference to the major theoretical concepts of redistribution, it identifies the relevant dimensions of family in societal redistribution and develops a typology of its inclusion in societal redistribution.

Approaches to redistribution are shaped by distinct concepts of equal or unequal exchange, the relevant actors they identify and by different understandings of the economy. These distinctions are central to understanding the position of family in societal redistribution. With reference to the major theoretical concepts of redistribution, this paper identifies the relevant dimensions of family in societal redistribution and develops a typology of its inclusion in societal redistribution. Further investigations might draw on this typology and detect the theoretical foundations of its conceptualisations and its similarities to and deviations from the developed types.

This paper provides a theoretical groundwork for theoretical and empirical investigations of societal redistribution and for better comprehending its international variation. It aims to initiate a fundamental rethinking of the usual understanding of societal redistribution that widely ignores family as a redistributive principle of its own.

Internationalisation and academic mobility have long been integral parts, although serving different purposes in the higher education industry. Internationalisation has played a crucial role in facilitating academic exchange, knowledge sharing, research partnerships and collaborative innovation. However, the rise of neoliberalism has introduced the market forces of global capitalism that have significantly impacted higher education worldwide – invading the sector with neoliberal market values. This chapter aims to explore the impact of neoliberalism on the internationalisation of higher education in Africa, with a specific focus on trends in international student mobility. The chapter argues that the influence of neoliberalism on international mobility extends beyond market dynamics, encompassing discussions on hegemony within international knowledge systems, where African countries and institutions often find themselves marginalised. The study relies on published materials and publicly available statistical data from both governmental and non-governmental organisations. By examining the interplay between neoliberalism and the process of internationalisation in higher education, this chapter sheds light on the intricate and multifaceted aspects of both concepts, as well as their practical implications for international student mobility. Moreover, the chapter reflects on the implications of neoliberal entanglements for the prospects of internationalisation in African higher education.

Souvenirs have been repeatedly studied as both a subject and as a variable for other tourism-related phenomena, but research into this issue is fragmented. The purpose of this study is twofold: first, to analyze souvenir in tourism to provide a comprehensive state-of-the-art review. Second, this paper contributes to identifying the directions for future search through reviewing existing literature. This study is one of the first papers to offer a systematic overview of the key themes in tourism souvenir research. In addition to the key themes, this paper also offers insights into future souvenir research.